pj

Erlang is also the death of a lot of fluff articles of late.

The thing with Paypal is that they aren't quite so flexible and they have high fees, 3 to 4% or more. My only complaint was that they are very pro-consumer, meaning they side with the credit card company when the purchaser of your goods complains, but this is normal. There are charge backs with credit cards too if you do your own processing and payment management.

Paypal is the only payment system I've used. I wish their system was easier to customize.

You may want to check out Amazon FPS, but I haven't used them.

I use paypal. It's quick to setup and has Paypal IPN which is essentially a call back to your system to let it know that the funds have been received or an order has been made. You can also set up free trial periods and things like that. It's quite easy to use.

I rolled my own chat widget for my website in a day. It was super easy using just javascript.

The problem is that twenty somethings don't vote and silver hairs do.

I was watching footage from the town hall meetings around the country for the health care reform and noticed only one person without gray hair there and she was still old.

What does this have to do with twitter? It's really annoying to see these types of services say now you can do this for twitter, just capitalizing on the twitter brand.

Really, you can do this with Jing, which is more feature rich and also easier to use. http://www.jingproject.com

This sounds like Microsoft Passport's vision from years ago...

A mixed economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy

I think anyone who believes that the system America has in place is capitalism has been deceived, so in a way, yes.

very nice. volume selector would be nice.

Look we're all hackers here. We know SQL Injection isn't complicated for us, but it is complicated for the majority of the world. In fact, it's probably an impossible task for 95% of the world, and very very difficult for another 4% on top of that, and even the last 1% would have to experiment a bit to figure out which string to submit to get the information.

I don't think that's true. Hackers need to know CSS too and I am always very surprised at how little most programmers know abotu CSS.

I thought this smashing post was one of the better explanations of CSS selectors that I've seen.

I'm not sure all of us here are hackers and we don't always come here for programming articles. I read hacker news as an alternative to google news or watching tv. For me, it's mostly entertainment that alleviates my boredom with a weighting toward improving my skillset and keeping up to date in my industry.

If there were only code articles or technology articles, it'd get boring and I'd probably come back less often. I probably spend way too much time here really, but I probably click on 75% or more of the articles on the front page. I click on them because they are interesting, not necessarily because they are about programming or technology -- they expand my mind.

I think mind expansion is good for hackers.

I didn't even realize it was a bug. I can't believe it is so old!

:) Thank you. Good link.

Thank you, sounds like a good book!@

There was an article here the other day from some hacker that almost proudly stated that he went through 2 or 3 laptops a year. I thought this was absolutely ridiculous. My laptops last five years or more. What a waste of money.

If you love something, take care of it and it'll last longer and treat you well. We live in a disposable society. I was always taught to take care of things so they would last. You too apparently.

I like a clean screen.

Good article, thank you for sharing.

It seems there are a lot of baby articles, especially contrarian opinions about articles and my wife just sent me this. Thought it may be of interest. A bit shocking when first thinking it, but maybe there's something to it for those raising little hackers of their own.

Please don't use bit.ly links. There's no space limitation here and it will give us all a better idea of where we are about to go.

I love reading about the historical future of technology. Post it and I'll vote it up!

I've never heard things like this. Do you have some sources? Something like that would be a real hit to our social system that fired Larry Summers from Harvard for saying there may be differences in aptitude in the sciences between men and women for biological reasons.

interesting. Either a typo or it's meant to correspond to the print date? Perhaps it hasn't been printed yet.

This is to be expected. I think the explanation is because you have a large memory and a great understanding of the technology. The limits microsoft places on the technology to keep it simple for others to use are actually obstacles for you.

Compare hot keys and menus. Menus are slower and take several layers of navigation. Experts of any kind of software though, learn the hot keys. Novices use the menus.

There are actually a lot of things you can do with Microsoft from the command prompt or power shell. Microsoft systems are quite flexible in this way, similar to *nix. You can do scripting and batch files and all that too. It's just not as popular to hack on microsoft like that.

Please don't use bit.ly links.

No offense to you personally, but your thoughts here are exactly why Linux won't take over the consumer pc market.

People don't want ot learn what's going on under the hood. I cringe at the thought, but they may not have the aptitude to comprehend it even if the did want to learn it.

Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. Linux users are geniuses compared to most computer users and they are very curious. They also know enough about the technology by going through the ranks that they are apologetic about problems that occur. "Oh it's just a bug, here let me restart."

Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously.

I don't think people really give them enough credit for this enormous accomplishment. nix is written for the experts who know how to use the tool correctly. Try building a tool for people who know nothing about the tool or what it can do, the power it has, or how to not make mistakes with it. It's really* hard.

*nix expects its users to know how to use it.

I'll take you up on that if we ever meet. :)