planck

A couch in my living room.

Let me save you some time: Windows users keep buying Windows machines because their last machine was a Windows machine and they already know how to use it. You don't need to write a 1,000 word essay to say that.

Alternative choice: A good-enough Windows machines costs less than half of a low-end Mac.

How many 5-minute elevator rides have you taken? An elevator pitch should take 30 seconds or less.

For all that food, I didn't see anything that I would be excited about eating. Where's the pizza/pasta/sandwiches/food for real (hungry) people?

They're planning on bit.ly using link data to start a news aggregator, and they want to be at the top of bit.ly's charts when it happens.

The language a website is written in is insignificant to its success. Outside of AND and OR, it's all syntax anyway.

Switch to MySQL, and then use this trick. (I kid, I kid.)

A broken search bar, at that. I typed "tell me more" and hit enter, and it resulted in a search for "tell me mo." I tried it again, and it searched for "tell m."

I suppose the reasoning behind this is that you don't need to know anything about Sequoia, they just need to know about you. With this black box of a website, they've succeeded in ensuring the former.

40% of blog posts are probably babble as well - another fad.

What a coward - he racks up $40,000 in personal debt on his corporate account and then puts his family through the agony of mourning his death? Such a disgrace.

In a couple of years, we're going to look back at URL shorteners as a fad as lame as the <blink> tag, animated mailbox GIFs, and logos from FlamingText.com.

Assume all data entered by users is malicious and encode it properly on display. That's really all there is to it.

I read that as "a really nice kitten," and found myself agreeing with you. A house and a nice kitten sound pretty good.

Emurse.com has had Word/PDF/RTF export for years.

Laugh if you want, but his stuff has been reprinted in Business Week/Techcrunch/Valleywag before.

When you're hiring for any normal development position, ability matters more than reputation. If I was interviewing someone for a job that required writing SQL and asked them to write some SQL, and they couldn't, I wouldn't hire them. What is so hard to understand about that?

I'm sure that I could EASILY pick up the skills required to be a gardener, but would you hire me to tend your rose bushes based on that fact? No, and that's what this discussion is about.

"PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test -- they don't use SQL, they use flat files."

Well, then they likely wouldn't be a good fit for the position the OP is hiring for, since it requires using SQL, not flat files.

I think Arrington is vastly overestimating the number of people who will actually buy a CrunchPad. It will cost more than $300, be too big to be portable, but too crippled (no keyboard, no OS, no file storage, etc.) to be anything more than a toy.

Do you have factual support for your first statement?

Newsflash: Twenty-somethings with no ambition will eventually realize that they have no ambition and will get sad. :-(

There, I just saved you 10 minutes of reading the article.

<em> is emphasis within the context of the page. <nsfw> is judgment within the context of the world. One of these judgments can be made reliably by the site owner; one cannot.

Why not just use existing technologies and implement it yourself? It's already been done anyway: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/nsfw-detector/

Easiest way to double your money: fold it in half and put it in your pocket. I guarantee no losses.

Well, I like it. My wife would use it as well. Perhaps they're not targeting the Hacker News demographic?

Because geography matters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMm-OwKy5t4

What's wrong with recognizing the winner of a geography bee? "Rewarding rote memorization" would be handing out prizes for reciting digits of pi, not for answering geography questions.

This is also known as the ZIP compression algorithm.

Is this directed at a specific company, or are you just stating this generally? Some details as to why you believe this might be nice.

Suppose I'm the CEO of a company that makes fighter jets for the military...

The "rockstar coder" nonsense needs to stop. If someone does excellent work, then say that. If they're an ass, then say that. If they're an arrogant ass who does excellent work, then say that - don't call them a "rockstar," thereby glamorizing their condescension just because they're good at their job.

Please submit the destination link, not one generated by a URL shortener. (There's a reason HN shows the domain next to the link title.)