wizzard

Yes. If we're talking Roman numerals, MM would be 2000, just like XX is 20 -- not 100. This notation makes no sense to me either.

Well, sure, as logical people we know that you can't predict failures and that it's always better to play it by ear. Unknown unknowns and all that.

I have worked at several places where salespeople have sold a feature without even asking if it was POSSIBLE, much less created/deployed/tested. "We just sold [Feature X], we told them it'd be ready by [date pulled out of thin air]."

He also mentions that data was deleted and configuration changes made. If all of these things happened to you in a short amount of time, on multiple machines, what would your conclusions be? Would you just shrug it off as coincidence?

Personally I'm skeptical about the registry search functionality being disabled on a wiped machine -- that could easily be a Windows bug. But the other stuff would certainly get my gears turning.

Anyone who downvotes you hasn't tried to use their forums.

I hadn't seen yesterday's news though so here's a link for anyone else interested: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65338904338/wow-or-from-the-wh...

Awesome, thanks for the info!

I am strongly thinking about encouraging my kids to take a break before college if I think it could be beneficial to them. If they're rocking it in high school and eager to dive into four more years, then maybe I won't bother, but that seems _highly_ unlikely.

Maybe they'll be great students and just need a break, in which case I might suggest a backpacking trip and/or internship. Or maybe they'll be unmotivated students barely scraping by in which case I might send them into The Real World to earn money towards their education (and find out why an education is important).

I've thought a _lot_ about why I didn't do very well in college (beyond the obvious procrastination), and what might have helped, and filing those thoughts away for my own kids.

The only problem is that kids want to be with their friends, and if their friends aren't taking a year off then it might be hard to convince them to break away from the pack.

Also, since I just realized who you are (hey!), is there any info on award categories or working in teams somewhere? Are hackathon projects expected to utilize the Restly SDK/API? If so, is there any chance of getting an API key before the event? (I did sign up for beta access.)

I'm in the southwest, so at least it's not cross-country. And I see it was originally announced October 3rd and I'm just behind the times. I'll see if I can throw together some plans. Glad I found out about it at all!

Wow, I'm interested in this, but only three weeks' notice to plan travel to SF, request time off, etc.? Yikes...

A false dichotomy if ever there was one. Anyone who doesn't think the code is ugly must just be blinded by hero worship?

How about the possibility that a1a is one of the people who just automatically equates "large volume of code" with "spaghetti"? In my experience there is a fair number of HN users (and devs in general) with this knee-jerk perspective.

In my very humble opinion any reasonable person who takes a few minutes to actually read through this code would never call it spaghetti. _Especially_ considering 1) the feature set of PHP at the time the code was leaked, 2) the immense scale of Facebook even at that time.

I'm sure the length of the crunch varies. And in a startup situation having a crunch every 100 days doesn't seem totally unreasonable to me. Also, people's versions of "crunch" differ... one person might picture 60-hour weeks and another might picture JWZ taking catnaps under his desk every 48 hours.

I enjoy it when the problem is in my code. I despise it when the bug is in a third party library or utility. That's usually the last place I look and often the hardest to fix (or have fixed).

And sometimes you find a limitation that can't be overcome and you have to think of a totally new way to do everything. For instance, some API documentation says you can get X but the documentation is outdated and half the data is missing. Back to square one.

Just typing this out is raising my hackles.

Unfamiliar with Smarterer, I went there and tried a sample question: http://imgur.com/puk2Bav

wat

There seems to be a mistake in almost every paragraph...

"How it works?" - either "How does it work?" or "How it works"

"one profile that gives complete picture"

"a resume doesn't do justice with the capabilities of a Job Seeker"

"Signin to find out more"

"Drop us a mail if you want to know anything about us or have queries or feedback. Please feel free to do so."

Lots more awkward English and random capitalization, sentences that would benefit from a comma, etc. Definitely have a native English speaker edit this.

It could be a good idea though. I like the idea of portfolio sites for graphic designers (like http://carbonmade.com/) and this could be something that would fulfill more of a development bent.

I got a new Thinkpad with an SSD at my job last year and it died after 10 months. Luckily I had pushed everything but it was still mighty inconvenient. I just put one in my desktop and will be backing up religiously.

This is just one data point, I know, but I have never (knock on wood) had a hard drive of any kind fail before.

Sorry, but it sounds like you are a troll.

I'd be happy to give details if you don't know (or don't care to see) what I'm talking about. But based on the upvotes to my comment and very similar complaints in other comments to this article, many people agree with me.

Sure, the release process might be easier on Android, but there are other factors involved in app development. Android is becoming a kind of curse word at my current job. Getting a working emulator can be a huge exercise in frustration (like for gMaps v2... forget it). Every and any feature or UI widget can break in unexpected ways on different devices. The tools are very functional but about as unintuitive and finicky as you can get. And I can tell you the documentation is not shorter because it's better.

I have nothing personal against Android, but let's not just skim over the actual DEVELOPMENT process.

A friend of mine got a call from Google and set up a phone interview. They never called. The recruiter called again a few days later and apologized, and set up another phone interview. Once again, no call. The recruiter called again and my friend told them he was no longer interested.

Simple, just prop up your phone and video yourselves having sex. Like a Kinect, it can detect the position of your bodies. And it can analyze the audio to determine if the female orgasmed.

And then the video will be automatically uploaded to the NSA.

Not to mention the Greatest Snow on Earth®.

True, but there are multiple openings available. I guess they're probably already executing in parallel though. When I looked earlier the DBC average was 17 seconds... with browser form fillers you could beat that!

Well, pg gave several examples of "things that don't scale" in his article, and I believe Jason is referring to focusing on individual users, not doing tasks manually. He mentions eschewing automation but he's talking about automation of client interations, not automation of all the software processes.

In terms of software I agree though, clicking pretty boxes is just a different type of automation. I am co-opting the phrase "artisanal high-touch."

Yes, but the services utilize human interaction to solve the captcha and that would almost certainly prevent all the openings from being taken in <1 minute.

Well I don't think he was saying "cut and paste this exact code into your codebase" but rather that it is possible to write safeguards such as this... in this case, perhaps checking whether an account has already been billed this month, or whether there is already a transaction pending, or...

We can't prevent every mistake but we can make sure the same one doesn't happen again.

I believe Monster.com allows you to do this; there is an option to hide your contact info and only allow recruiters to contact you through the site. This is ostensibly to allow you to apply for new jobs without being discovered by your current job. I would imagine many job sites provide this feature.

Just a fun fact, this stopped being true as of June 25, 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Structu...

But since there probably aren't many two-year-olds applying for jobs nowadays the comment is still relevant.

There is always going to be code that takes more than grep and a glance to understand. Sometimes you won't fully grok it until you've stepped through it line by line, even without "tricks" like metaprogramming. And more often than not the "tricks" make it more concise, less prone to bugs, and easier to understand.

It's madness to classify all use of metaprogramming as abuse. Perhaps you need to pour a glass of wine and learn to savor the source code, and to appreciate the power of modern programming languages.

Good to know the guy turned himself in (apparently). This should be the link of note now.

Again, wealth does not equal need. You're assuming all of the desperately stranded people have $200 at the ready for a taxi trip that's normally only $20. And some people will pay whatever price for convenience, because they have plenty of money.

You can't just assume that everyone CAN pay whatever price is set, and just decides not to because they don't need it enough. In this scenario, the poor people die and the rich stay comfortably unaffected while using the resources others are far more desperate for.

The problem is that need doesn't necessarily correlate with wealth; in fact there may be a reverse correlation. The people who need to travel the most can't necessarily afford to spend six times the normal price to do so. For others money is no object when it comes to getting home in time to watch the game.

You're making an assumption that everyone can afford the increased prices and it's just about making a rational decision to "pay up" or not.