but look at the behavior of the community right now. The highest voted comment on this post is basically a "screw you dude" and all of my responses are downvoted without any reasons given.
Below in comments I stated what I personally would like to see change, but that too is downvoted without explanation.
These reactions are reinforcing my original point: Though many precautions were taken, Hacker News is no more immune to large group behavior than were Digg and Reddit. The community has reached a tipping point.
* more news about Startups, less news about things tangentially related to startups
* less churn on the homepage
* a community made exclusively of people actually building websites
* a limit on accepting new members
* less talk about useless academic subjects
* more "review my new project" submissions
How is it any different for you?
I argue that submitting nothing is better than submitting garbage links. Additionally, I am not bringing the site down by voting up egregious headlines.
I recently took up cooking and if you get serious, it gets expensive, specifically in the following ways:
1) Stocking up - Initially buying spices ($4 each), pots, pans, trays (a decent set will run you $400), a good knife($80) which you will eventually need, other staples ($a bunch)
2) Experimenting - You'll get stuff wrong a lot. You'll ruin food. You'll buy more food. Sometimes it's expensive food like steak.
3) Showing Off - When you figure out you can cook something that is noticeably better than rubber, you'll want to cook for your friends. They will like the food and thank you, but they won't always remember to leave cash behind.
4) No more junk food - Cooking the good stuff makes you appreciate good food, and by appreciate I mean spend more money on.
I find cooking to be a lot like programming. There are tons of options and methodologies and evangelists and opinions, but when it comes down it, the thrill of creating something (even something palatable only to you) is unbeatable.
The number of followers is a really strong objective measure of an account's (or a person's) legitimacy.
How do you know the guy that added you on facebook isn't a spam bot? If he has 600 friends (or whatever is average in your social group), then he's probably legit. If he has 0 friends, he's probably not.
How do you know if the guy that's presenting you a business proposal is trustworthy? Based on the number of references or mutual friends or the breadth of his past experience (higher = better).
How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.
My point is that external opinions of people (or representations of people) are really important. The easiest way to verify this is to look at sheer numbers - "Tom has 20,000 followers. Mike has 1,000 followers. Therefore, I am risking less by following Tom" is sound logic. People don't have time to research every Twitter account they want to follow. Therefore, Follower Count is a really great way to convey legitimacy quickly.
For example, a very serious benefit of having a lowly 'job' is to have a set schedule and be able to make it to every one of your kid's baseball games. The debate is not a clear cut good vs. evil argument so it should not be treated as such.
When collecting email addresses, how many characters do you guys usually allow for? Most google results say "320 characters" is the limit, but I've never met someone with such a preposterously long email address.I did some digging and found that the IETF recommends lines in message headers contain no more than 78 characters. This is to avoid some software from inadvertently truncating or poorly...
I convinced him to try VIM a few months ago. He tried it for a week but didn't find it productive so switched back to zend. I blame myself for not fully explaining the productivity benefits of a properly configured VIM environment, so I'll try again:
Learning VIM requires a huge time commitment (weeks, even months before it is truly second nature). However, after 'getting it', there is less of a barrier between your brain and you code. I have code completion, good syntax highlighting, syntax verification, and keyboard shortcuts to do anything and everything to my text. My IDE is pre-installed on every sever I've ever seen.
I am highly recommending using VIM as an all purpose text editor, and specifically as a PHP IDE. Knowing it is a skill that be used whether you are an author, developer, sysadmin, or any occupation that requires typing.
"Welcome to a preview of the new Muxtape, a minimalist platform for bands to promote their music and listeners to create mixes. We’ve invited 12 of our favorite artists to help test, and in the coming weeks we'll begin allowing bands to sign up themselves for free. Learn more."http://muxtape.com/
I keep the DB schema of my current project open at all times. When I change something in the database, I immediately make the change in SQLEditor (and vice versa). This is a recent change in my workflow, but so far it has reduced errors when moving from our development to live environments and reduced the time needed to look up obscure fields or relationships.
I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is."
http://rawilson.com/prethought.shtml
(Scroll down approximately 1/4 of the page for the entry titled "Schrödinger's Jew")
http://christopherhan.tumblr.com/post/61871360/how-many-vide...
(not my blog, it belongs to Chris Han: http://vimeo.com/2519605)
Do not fill your ice cube trays with hot water thinking it will freeze faster.
The whole idea of FB Connect seems to be getting outside developers to contribute to a closed version of openID.
Great idea / execution.
Do you think there is a market for this? If so, what features would you like to see?
It sounds interesting but is a bit over my head. Thanks!