jpadvo

One of the references seems to have a little more detail, and also some leads for more learning:

http://www.pbs.org/wayfinders/wayfinding2.html

So, what should a early startup be doing with "ip assignment"? We hire people from places like elance and odesk - and a few irl people - is there something we should have been having them sign?

How do you find these devs who star interesting repos?

Edit: after some thought and poking around, one way to find these devs is to just look at the profiles of devs who run projects you use. If they've starred a lot of repos, see if they star things you would be interested in. If so, follow them. Easy.

This is a jQuery plugin that makes it super simple to add random moments of zen from https://api.github.com/zen . We just added it to the navbar of our internal dashboard, and it's nice.

Beautiful design, and with the pricing change it is a great buy. One quick note -- when you click the eye buttons to see details, the old prices still show up.

Yes, it used to be that way.

The reason I publicly posted this is because it is an issue about community standards, not just a personal issue between me and the company.

It's interesting to think about my own motivations -- I wonder if I would have been gentler if their post hadn't been anonymous. If so, should I have been gentler even though their post was anonymous? Anyway, I apologize if this caused unnecessary hurt, I didn't mean to.

I figured they would learn by getting called out like this. And since the post was anonymous, it doesn't really hurt them anyway. Free learning experience.

This would be fantastic if all it had was the instructions to see your own top commands. What a great way to discover opportunities for automation and time saving!

I can't wait for the full results.

Done, thanks Bubs. Can't wait to get ahold of this. :)

Marketplace as a Service? If that's what this is, and it sounds like it, that would be fantastic. For the last year or two we've thought that a marketplace would be a great potential fit for our app, but simply don't have the resources to build and maintain the infrastructure ourselves.

A relative of mine thought she had a gluten intolerance - turned out it was something in enriched white flour. She can eat any kind of wheat product if it's made with home-ground flour.

This is exactly the problem. A good title on Hacker News is itself a valuable piece of content. A good title here will concisely convey the point of an article, so that each of us can decide if we want to check it out.

Often this is directly at odds with the purpose of a "natural title", which is designed by the author to entice and tantalize in order to drag eyeballs to it. Not to communicate, but to manipulate.

If the natural title is also good as a HN title, great. But if not, and if the submitter made a good effort to construct a good HN title, then it should not be changed.

This looks really slick. Probably worth thinking about building some kind of tour, or explanation of how it works. The screenshot is beautiful, but may be insufficient to get people to sign up just to learn more.

The text right below the image says "Firefly is a great way to help our less technically savvy users navigate our product."

They are trying to evoke the kind of user who provides the hardest challenge to support, and who would benefit the most from screen sharing during support.

It might be more clear if they had the text overlaid or above the image, so that the instant you see that filthy beast of a machine you know what they're saying. Instead of the momentary confusion about "what the heck is this thing doing here?"

Who knows. With a/b testing, probably them. :)

Thank you -- I haven't read that story in a long time, and it is a great reminder.

> Life's not a race, but there's no speed limit either.

I love this. I've been learning recently that one of my chief sources of stress is feeling pinched for time. Mainly from feeling like I'm not getting as much done as I need to (I'm a cofounder of a bootstrapped startup). But what I've discovered is that if I relax, and enjoy the feeling of progress as it happens, I can be much more excited about work. And a much happier person.

And, somewhat ironically, extra motivation kicks in and I'm pretty sure I wind up getting more done.

That one line from Kenneth sums up the entire glorious contradiction in a way that makes sense.

> it does still say something important: that the patent system isn't totally breaking innovation.

Rarely is it the case that anything is truly "total". And if the patent system is squashing 25% of innovation in the software industry, or even 10%, that is a big problem.

Also, it is possible to squash certain kinds of innovators - like startups without tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on patent litigation. While massive corporations can get nailed for a billion or two and hardly notice.

A patent-litigious environment is deadly for startups. And startups are crucial innovators.

...which is available here: https://github.com/robashton/HoverBattles

I just downloaded it and am gonna see if I can get it to run...

Edit: to run the game, download the code, and open the folder in your terminal, and run:

> npm install > npm install socket.io > mv config/keys.json.example config/keys.json > node server.js

Then open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8000

I'm a web developer, but am just about to jump into making a multiplayer HTML5 game, just for fun.

But after reading this post, and the one linked at the bottom [1], I'm thinking maybe this is going to be pretty valuable professionally. It should give insight from a completely different vantage point on what it means to write good code. By the way, you really should read that other post, too. It offers some interesting ideas to think about.

[1] http://codeofrob.com/entries/a-relaxed-attitude-towards-the-...

I will do that. Thanks!

I came here ready to seriously hate on you, but now I love what you are doing. :)

Sometimes customers see their credit card bill, decide they don't want the service anymore, and instead of calling our number (printed on the credit card statement) or logging into their account to unsubscribe, they just call the credit card company and ask them to stop payment. It's really frustrating, because we gladly refund money if people aren't happy with our product.

Anyway, the issue is that sometimes the simplest thing for a user to do is call the number on their bill and ask for that charge to go away.

If you could partner with the credit card companies, and get your contact information or url listed on bills, that would be a HUGE win for you, and for startups like us. And if you could somehow save the credit card companies money, or even make them money, it could be a win for them to.

Whatever you decide to do, good luck. And post back again if there's anything startups can do to help you. :)

Interesting. Both what Kyle talks about, and also the fact that I've never thought of not having syntax highlighting before. It's just been a built in assumption.

I opened vim and cycled through syntax on, syntax off a few times, and thought about what I think about when I see it. After this short experiment, I think that most of what I use syntax highlighting for is just to add texture to the code. The pattern of indentations and syntax highlighting gives the code shape.

So when I scroll, or scan the code, I've got another a set of visual anchors in addition to the structure given by indentation. It makes me feel more comfortable. Past that, for me, the syntax highlighting is just noise.

Makes me wonder how to increase the feeling of visual structure in the code without introducing visual noise...

Here's one theory and analysis of what might have happened. Some people's emails got out into the public internet, and were indexed. Some of these emails were from Facebook, and included links to resources that require login. These links pre-populated the username field for convenience, or in some cases auto-login the user. Facebook's engineers probably did not anticipate email notifications to users being crawled by Google. Live and learn, eh?

But could Facebook have done something to prevent or minimize the damage caused by these leaked emails?

1. Lets start with the auto-login links, as those are the scariest. Do those links use one-time-use tokens, and do the tokens expire? If either or both of those steps was skipped it makes this leak much more serious, and speaks to negligence or disrespect for user security. If Facebook has both of those security measures in place, though, they did all they realistically could. If somebody lets their private email get indexed by Google (seriously, though, how does that even happen??), that's their own problem.

2. The other class of leaked urls link email addresses to Facebook profiles. This isn't as immediately scary, and for a lot of people it wouldn't even matter. But it is easy to imagine scenarios where this kind of privacy would be important to someone, and this kind of leak would be just as scary as someone being able to log in as them. Frankly, I never would have thought of securing this, and I doubt Facebook did anything to secure it. Going forward, though, it would probably be worth it for them to link auto-username-populating through one-time-use, expiring tokens as well.

So, it looks like Facebook probably got hit with a bizarre edge case privacy / security issue. There are likely things they could do to make their system more resistant to this kind of thing, but at the same time they probably didn't do as badly as this might make them look at first glance.

Again, this is speculation, any confirmation or disconfirmation would be great.

It seems the confusion comes from this part of the article:

> "Google started providing real-time analytics to page managers last September."

This makes it sound like Google has real-time facebook page analytics tools, but that isn't the case. Google started providing real-time analytics for websites using its analytics platform. Not Facebook analytics.

It's always important to remember the difference between a syncing service and a backup service. A syncing service sometimes feels like a backup, because you can use it to recover files if a local device is destroyed or lost. HOWEVER, any service capable of syncing files is equally capable of destroying them.

It's important to have an automated one-way backup system that you can manually restore from. Something like Tarsnap [1] looks like a really good possibility (I haven't used it myself, but it seems solid)

[1] http://www.tarsnap.com/gettingstarted.html

My company uses coffeescript, because it's a curated, highly documented set of improvements to javascript syntax. It's code I can trust, and code that was built by someone a lot better than I am at constructing languages -- so it's a pleasure to use.

I suspect that the biggest contribution sweet.js will make is lowering the barrier enough that more people release things like coffeescript. Curated, documented packages of syntax improvements to javascript. I suspect that will be more common than individuals rolling new syntax for each project.

Let a thousand coffeescripts bloom. :)

This is hilarious, of course, but it also points to some really interesting languages. Turns out that fungeoid is an actual category of fascinating experimental / toy / joke languages. Obviously Piet is not particularly useful in the real world, but thinking about languages like this has got to be good for a programmer's mind.

For example, try thinking about what kinds of things this language would be useful for. Or if a similar visualization for an existing language would be useful. Unlock your mind and let it roam...

In case you didn't click the link in the article [1], here's part of what Wikipedia has to say:

"A funge is an esoteric programming language which models its programs as metric spaces with coordinate systems (often, but not necessarily, Cartesian) and which execute instructions located at points in their program space by moving an instruction pointer (a position vector which indicates the currently executing instruction) through that space."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funge#Funges

Thanks!

No, I don't really have this visceral reaction (or at least not nearly as much) to baby companies, but that is probably because none of their stuff that I've seen feels as starkly personal as this video. Maybe their stuff is 50% to 80% compelling, and thus doesn't make it into uncanny valley territory.

Also, because products more fundamentally require themes of babies / children / parenting, so discordance is limited anyway.

That's an interesting thought about the emotional exchange, I never thought of people in a company as recipients in an emotional exchange with their customers. Fascinating.

<passionate_rant>

Since I learned I was going to be a dad (in 7 months!), I've found these kinds of advertisements increasingly unsettling, in an uncanny-valley kind of way.

I love my tiny one. I've heard the quick little heartbeat. I'm largely responsible for if this little person grows up happy and healthy. The enormity of the ensuing feelings is impossible to express.

Uncanny valley situations arise when a simulation looks almost real, maybe 96% real, but the 4% difference is very unsettling because it just looks _off_. You feel a creeping sensation that something is wrong.

In this video, Google very poignantly portrays a bunch of vibrant people, children and fathers prominently featured. They are picking at the deepest heartstrings I've ever known. At the deepest anxieties and aspirations that it is possible to have in the human experience. It's 96% poignant.

But...they're doing this for what reason again? So they can sell me a $250 piece of electronics and absorb my family into their ecosystem? It's a 4% that makes the entire rest of it feel fake.

Turns out that cognitive dissonance relating to your children, even peripherally, is really uncomfortable. :/

</passionate_rant>