torme

I'd say that having anyone pledge to donate anything is something to be immensely enthusiastic about.

I have the exact opposite experience actually in FF 4b7, and though I'm not running some crazy awesome machine, its still a decent box. The page basically crashes the browser.

Well, I assume though that there other platforms (like Wii) aren't running silverlight. This could be an incorrect assumption, but it at least seems that they have the player available in other code bases.

While I get what you're saying, I think an important point here thats been mentioned several times is the fact that the tickets lose all value as result of the buyer backing out.

As a completely unrealistic example, imagine if by some magic, cars that weren't sold exploded. If you had a buyer back out, and as a result, you could never sell that car again, that person would most definitely be put in the "KO book". I think the situation is different, if only slightly.

There should be some understanding from the buyer of the tickets that backing out is potentially costing the seller a lot of money. For this, I can understand the sellers frustration, if only because he might have had several extremely viable offers outside of hers, that are now lost.

That said, I don't agree with his reaction at all. Is it not possible to try and contact the other interested buyers who were out bid?

This is much clearer thank you. From your initial example, I thought you were suggesting to just load 2 large tables into memory at once and iterate through them to find matches.

Also, at the surface, this seems like it would be a good application for using materialized views. I obviously don't know the ins and outs of what the usage here was, but this seems like a case where slowing down the insert would be a good speed sacrifice for retrieval.

I'm not going to even feign being an expert at database optimization, but that seems like it might be a more efficient way to approach it.

Can you explain this some more? You don't really list what you're trying to achieve in your example and I can't think of a case where looping over a large data set in code is better than querying against it.

I agree with this, but I will say that Outlook 2010's search is a vast improvement over the previous versions.

Honest question: How is this different from the actual interview process? All it does is potentially reveal these things earlier, but still prior to a hire. By this logic, couldn't you argue that big companies wouldn't participate in face to face interviews?

Exactly, while they might not be as powerful as others, there are definitely free versions of these floating around that are more than able.

The GIMP to replace PS: http://www.gimp.org/

Inkscape to replace Illustrator: http://inkscape.org/

Both of these are really good tools and you don't have to worry about any licensing constraints. The only piece of the puzzle that I haven't found an F/OSS version of is for animation.

While I agree, with the general consensus here, that the design itself is pretty useless in practice, I think that some of what they've done is kind of intriguing, from a mouse intent perspective.

When I saw the label of a "clickless" interface, I immediately thought I would constantly be dodging popped in elements trying to get at other elements, but this actually happened far less often than I anticipated, mostly because it was designed fairly well for that use case.

I think in general, mouse intent elements, such as pop up menus on hover, are hugely frustrating on 99% of sites. Just now I was trying to close an ad on the bottom of a youtube video, but the resolution pop up kept jumping in the way. Navigation menus are frequently the same way, they pop over other content without you intending it to do so, and then its frustrating getting them out of the way.

Personally, I dont see the benefit of trying to guess what the user is trying to do by where theyre hovering, but a lot of sites do this anyway, and with some disregard to the side effects.

At the very least, this site offers some interesting paradigms for a clickless UI, and illustrates a somewhat thoughtful design around that interaction.

If its a tool for discovery than I still say its not usable.

If I went looking for list of articles, linking CS + Music, this doesn't help me. I'd want to click CS, click music, and then receive a list of articles matching that correlation. Instead I have to hover over each dot, and scrub through years to even see titles for things. Sure, I get the "excitement" of not knowing what I'm looking for, but that is not a usable tool for discovering articles.

I see almost no correlation between bio and psych. In fact, I only see 2 articles that link those 2 topics at all.

Neat? Yes.

Usable? No.

I'm not sure if theres some piece of information thats trying to be portrayed here (other than quantity of dissertations per major) but as a browser, it's pretty useless. It employs mystery meat nav heavily, mostly because you have to hover over a dissertation to view any info about it. Imagine finding a paper you liked, and then going back 15 minutes later to try and find it.

If there is some data thats trying to be shown its not clear to me what it is. Some of the inner circles are in columns which seem to indicate correlation, but I cant figure out if thats accurate or not. For instance, if I click on philosphy, I see a dot in the direction of Food Research, and when I hover over that dot I see a thesis about "Practical reasoning and the varieties of agency".

What is trying to be portrayed here?

I believe the saying goes "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning"

Certainly holds true here, but I think the real value from things like these is beating the task.

This seems to severely punish those who would even attempt to follow the rules. I've had instances where I can't find the answer to a problem and will spend hours hunting it down. If I had a professor give me a problem with that constraint, I'd probably scour a book for hours. What are you other options? Put "I don't know."?

Seems like this just forces everyone to the same result: those who break the rules will and save themselves time, those that try and follow the rules will probably break after hours, and end up googling anyways.

Maybe I'm missing something but this seems totally absurd.

I agree that the examples are nice, but it'd also be awesome if there was some explanation as to what that function did.

Is there an actual quote from him saying it will be the dominant platform? The article seems to be lacking that. In fact, there aren't really any quotes in here that even hint at him damning or praising one platform over the other. It'd be interesting to know what he actually said.

Well, I'll be flying that day, but I would probably opt out without the designated day.

Yeah, exactly, I think this is why it necessitates it being a service and kind of assume that it's not a static database for that reason. If you have a fixed list of questions, it's easy to get answers to those once and never have to do it again. Again, I think its a safe assumption that these are in some way generated on the fly.

FAQ, Testimonials, and Sign Up links at the bottom don't seem to anchor anywhere. Actually, it looks like signup anchors to the pricing section, which is kind of confusing. Similarly, I feel like those links a the bottom should actually bring you to different pages rather than anchoring. It's a little awkward clicking the pricing link with the pricing already in view and having nothing happen. When I click that link I feel like it should bring me more information about pricing then whats already displayed. As a more general rule, I think anchored links are only useful in excessively long pages to ease navigation, such as with a table of contents. I think this page is far too short to necessitate having these type of links.

Edit: Also, I might avoid using email address as the login. It seems that in a business case like this you'll have multiple people accessing the same account, and it might not make sense if a hiring manager quits to continue to have to use her email address to login after the fact.

I'm a little confused about which elements here are true actually. Did he piece together pieces of factual history to create a plausible scenario? And if so, was there ever a flash mob that resulted in a riot which lead to 23 deaths?

Yeah, I think I applied a bit after that, maybe sometime in April of this year. Not taking it too personally, I'm only a few years out of school so I imagine there are some more experienced applicants.

I sat over the shoulder of a co-worker who tried it out when they ran their $100 deal a while back. From what I saw, which was probably close to 9 months ago, it's a pretty impressive tool. Lists off drug reactions, probable diseases, where you father's family was from etc, and provides references to studies that support those characteristics.

I tried applying to them a while back with no dice. They seem like a really cool company to work for and I really like their product. It's disheartening to see their ads for engineers everywhere I go, but maybe I dont qualify as top-notch at this point.

Very neat, I checked out the other stuff you've got on there and it's pretty sweet.

Seems like a lot of people have missed the point that this is just a hack to see if a light box in JUST CSS and HTML could be made. Because theres no JS or actual logic, this demo just leverages the browser to maintain the state. It's a necessary side effect that the back buttons behave this way, and it could be coded to behave differently, but that would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Agreed.

Thinking about it now, I would rather the inverse in a language be true, and have == be used for value comparison, and have a more wordy function for reference comparison. In my experience, I feel that its a much more common usage, and would probably reduce errors caused by programmers choosing the wrong operator. The only downside to this is that you then have to override an operator if you want to change equality comparison, instead of a function.

Totally nitpicking here but != and == should typically only be used when comparing primitive values.

For example, if you have an Integer object (not a primitive int) you should use .equals() and not == for comparison. The == is used for comparing references and not values.

That said, this only illustrates some extra complexity in Java.

I like this a lot. For my current needs, I think this gives the best results of all the tools out there I've tried. I do occasionally get duplicates in the same set of results, but other than that this rocks!

These are all great points, and I really do respect your opinion here.

1) I think that the problem is that you've created a competition, and that as a result, people would vote against each other. You're probably correct that people do typically vote for candidates without self interest, but I think that the problem is you've pitted people against each other. If I've entered a race, I already think that I am the best option, and will take action to help my success. This is almost like the prisoners dilemna, in that voters almost assume that others will act in self interest, and as a result do the same. I think maybe you just have a more optimistic view of how people will act in this case than I do.

2) I don't think we should dismiss people from voting for any reason, or say that a lower voter turnout would be a good thing because it's focusing on the people who actually "care". I think that in some ways giving people party lines is a good thing in some ways because it allows them to vote without necessarily needing to do research into a candidate. If I personally identify myself as a liberal, I don't have to do much research before voting democrat, and in fact, researching candidates is probably only going to strengthen my opinion of them both. I'm by no means saying this is an ideal situation, and it is certainly one of the main problems with a partied system. But I think if you make voting something thats only available to those with enough time to research it then I think you run the risk of misrepresenting an extremely large portion of the country, ending up with something chosen by an "elite" and I almost feel that this is a worse option than having people vote from their gut.

3) I think this is way off base. I can think of some pretty outstanding members of our society who choose a path for ethical and moral reasons outside of financial gain. Teachers are a great example. They are educated citizens working for the benefit of society, but some of them sure as hell don't make 40k. Should we exclude people like this because they chose a path that didn't give them the most money? Having a high paying job doesn't necessarily mean that you're educated, or a frugal person for that matter.

As I hinted at above, I guess I don't mind the party line voting. I don't mind the labeling it provides because, as I said, I think it encourages voter turnout. If you're given two candidates, and you have to choose between them, without labeling them as liberal or democrat, is a person significantly more likely to choose a different candidate than they would have with the label? If hypothetically Sarah Palin ran against Obama, and we didn't label them as democrat and republican, would voters choose a different candidate than if we had?

Again, I really do appreciate your response, and I'm sorry if I seem combative, I just like the debate.

Right, and you've essentially just described the party system that's in place already. We hold primary elections for this same reason. Parties provide a way for like minded people to agree on a candidate.