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where's a good place to look for smart contract work? | wensing: If you're a Django person, you probably already know about http://www.djangogigs.com. Some of the opportunities there are short term. |
Should I pass on a remotely located co-founder? | icky: First, make sure that your remote cofounder is a human, and definitely not an unfriendly AI. ;) |
Should I pass on a remotely located co-founder? | elad: My co-founder and I started out working from our own separate homes, and we experienced a huge surge in productivity once we moved in to a common office. And I mean HUGE. Phones, IM, email, they're all very nice, but nothing beats face-to-face, sitting in the same room, looking at the same computer screen when necessary.IMO productivity in a team, where the people are working on the same thing (which makes DHH's case irrelevant) goes exponentially down with distance. Measuring the distance in feet vs. miles makes more difference than measuring it in miles vs. thousands of miles. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | ph0rque: Great question... I am somewhat in the same boat you are, but about a year further. One really good website that I found has filled in some gaps for me is http://www.buildingwebapps.com (although I haven't seen the specific issues you've mentioned).EDIT: Now that I think about it, I probably need more fundamental knowledge of algorithms, and computer science in general than the things you mentioned. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | j2d2: It's certainly useful to know how things got to where they are, but it's not always necessary. Even in history circles people debate how important history is if the lessons can be handed down via knowledge of good-practices.If you want to know how good you've got it now, I'd start with building a site that uses entirely static content. After you've got a few pages, make a change that affects all of these pages. You'll see how static pages lead to redundancy and a lesson will be learned.Then setup a cgi based commenting system in either c or perl, which would arguably represent the start of interactive web sites. From here, you'll see that there are things you'd like to store, like a username, and you'll understand how frameworks make following a user easy.Once you've done these two things, add some database support for the comments and a way to search the comments.I'd say, after these three things, you'll have a pretty good understanding of how slick things like rails are and you can go back to being as productive as possible with respect for the problems it's solving. There's definitely more to learn on this topic, but it might border on distraction at this point. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | swombat: In general, you always have to take into account the Law of Leaky Abstractions ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... ).No matter how convenient a new abstraction might make things, it will some day "leak". If you don't know anything about the layer underneath, at that point, you're pretty shafted.Some abstractions are more leaky than others. ActiveRecord is a very leaky abstraction. Make sure you have a solid grounding in database usage, db model design, normalisation, etcAs for the web in general, your stack of abstractions reads something like: ActionController > MVC for web apps > CGI-BIN/Servlets > HTTP > TCP > IP > ...You can probably stop around HTTP or TCP and be ok.I don't think you'll find a single book that covers all that, but maybe someone will have some suggestions.Please note you don't need to become an expert at all this stuff - but you need to have a pretty good idea how it all fits together. |
Scalability and .NET stack | senthil_rajasek: Watch out! when you are using the MS SQL Server Express edition you are limited by its "subscriber only" replication mode.MS SQL Server express cannot be used as a replication master, if you are interested in that type of architecture. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | imgabe: I'm in somewhat the same boat as you, except using python and django. I've found this book to be pretty helpful in terms of a general understanding of web programming:
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | psyklic: You might want to learn PHP first, especially if you're new to programming. Not only is PHP easy to learn, but it is also useful for quickly testing out simpler webpages.By learning PHP, you'll also learn how web programming is traditionally done and the basics of how the web works. Once finished, you'll clearly see how Rails makes certain aspects of web programming easier, even for things like form validation.I recommend a book like "PHP 6 and MySQL 5" which is very easy to read, and definitely type in the examples! http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Dynamic-Web-Sites/dp/0321525.... |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | arebop: Architectural Styles and
the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm) is a very readable dissertation on Web architecture. It is the definitive source on REST. Architecture of the World Wide Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/) is also worth a visit. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | prakash: Start with these 2 books from Philip Greenspun:- Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing- Internet Application Workbook,http://philip.greenspun.com/books/ |
Scalability and .NET stack | goofygrin: MSFT scalability = multiple app servers load balanced.Here's the typical example: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architectureIn my experience, virtuals/slices do not scale well for app servers in the MSFT stack. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | jraines: Don't skimp on the database design. It can make your life a lot easier if you're model is tight.Learn how to think about your data model as Entities and Attributes and the relationships between them.Then find a tutorial on database normalization and learn it. It's not hard, but it might take 2 or 3 run throughs before it clicks.Learn to be comfortable at the *nix command line if you plan to be hosting your app on a shared host or Virtual Private Server.Most of all; don't get caught up in fads. It's easy to get the impression that you need to learn AJAX, Rails (no wait, Merb!), S3 and EC2, distributed programming, jQuery, ad infinitum, all at once. You don't.Here's some Google terms:"Database normalization""entity relationship diagram""Unix shell commands" |
Scalability and .NET stack | bayareaguy: I've heard Amazon can be used with a .NET app, as long as you are not running SQL Server on the back-end.You need to be more specific since Amazon offers many web services. There may be .NET client applications which use Amazon S3 for storage but as far as I know there is no good solution for running a .NET application on Amazon EC2.If you do find any examples, please post them here. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | jrockway: The key to writing good web apps is to remember that the web part of the web app is just that, a part. It's not the whole application. An ideally-structured web application will be a normal application with a thin layer of glue to make it talk to the web. Usually your framework provides the glue, but it seems that most developers try to make the framework a religion and way of life instead of a glue. This leads to unmaintainable and untestable applications.Anyway, the rule of thumb is... if critical code can't be executed without starting a web server, your app is designed wrong. (I've seen developers that write all their tests in Selenium. This is a huge waste of time; make sure you can test the backend code without making web requests. Only use Selenium to test JavaScript! Even then, Test::More from the JSAN is quicker.)I've given lots of talks about this, if you want more details. Here is a web-specific one:http://www.jrock.us/fp2008/catalyst/start.html(left click to advance the slideshow)Here is a non-web-specific one:
http://www.jrock.us/ppw2007/testmore/testmore.txtIf you want to see it as a slideshow, try this:http://www.jrock.us/ppw2007/testmore/takahashi.xul?data=test...but on my machine, recent versions of firefox seem to not execute takahashi.xul correctly. So just read the text file ;)Anyway, have fun. |
Web Fundamentals for a Newb | ScipioLHR: >> I am attempting to teach myself Rails and have also made a concerted effort to understand Ruby.There's your problem number one - trying to use and excel at Rails without understanding Ruby means that even if you become a moderately proficient Rails user, you won't know what you're doing, and will be unable to process past something you have a cookbook answer for. You can drive a car without understanding how an engine works (and assume that when you press the pedal down, "magic happens" and you accelerate), but to become a great driver you have to understand what makes the car go, and how to react to and optimize your behaviors for that.Ruby is a language that does more than Rails.
Rails is a framework that's written in Ruby.Learn the language first; then you'll know what's actually happening with Rails and what those commands mean. Net result is that you'll be a better Rails user, and you'll be able to use Ruby for many other things and in novel ways.Separately, learn about database normalization and design. For this, start with the mantra "down, not across" - your tables should be much longer than they are wide, even if this means multiple tables. |
Freelance graphic design | ideas101: i hope this helps - good luckhttp://99designs.com/http://www.crowdspring.com/ |
Code Reuse or Just Plain Well-written Code? | schtog: I have found myself that I often reuse functional stuff(I write functions to do stuff and continously add fucntions in different programs that kind of belong together and then I realize I have a library) but I rarely reuse class-oriented stuff.
Sure sometimes you have a class that can be used in many programs but I dont find it happening that often.Seems logical as well, you reuse your hammers and screwdrivers, not your house. |
Code Reuse or Just Plain Well-written Code? | msg: At my work (C++/Qt) we do a bunch of GUIs for a set of several customer applications that need the same look and feel. So we do end up reusing the team's custom widgets wherever they answer our requirements.I find I often write something as helper functions for a GUI or library, then break it out when someone else needs to call it. It's definitely better from my perspective to leave it sitting in the old class until you come up with something more urgent than scenarios for how someone might use such a library someday.Coding standards are also extremely important to ensure that someone will be able to look at your code and use it without deciding to rewrite it from scratch. |
Freelance graphic design | ScottWhigham: 1) olance.com and elance.com are two of the biggies. I've had mixed success on elance but, when it was a success, it was a good success so I've continued to do business there. Craigslist for locals is possibly a try... |
Do you swear in your code? | noodle: i did in college, and also frequently used "TAMO" in commentsbut then i joined a company that supplies source to customers. |
Do you swear in your code? | Hates_: Swearing in comments is unacceptable IMO. You wouldn't write swear words in internal documents, so why do it in code. It's unprofessional and shows a level of dis-respect for your own code and for the people who might end up maintaining it. Plus, heaven forbid a client happened to see it as well. |
Do you swear in your code? | jeroen: Always assume that what you write is read by others than you intended. That goes for code, documents, emails, and test data. |
Do you swear in your code? | icey: It is a fairly common practice. That being said, it's a bad idea to allow that to stand in your code base. It never adds anything to the clarity of the code, other than the fact that you now know the developer writing it has a bad temper.While you're in there cutting out F-bombs, you should probably do yourself a favor and review the surrounding code. Foul language in comments are almost always put in out of frustration, so you probably have some good targets for code refactoring. |
Do you swear in your code? | gaius: It's OK to do it in C++, if you must. It's very, very stupid to do it in HTML... |
Do you swear in your code? | ajbatac: Apparently a lot of public codes does...http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=fuck... |
Do you swear in your code? | tptacek: Fuck yes it is. |
Do you swear in your code? | kaens: Sometimes, but usually only in code I'm using to wrap my head around a new concept that I'm struggling with. I generally don't swear in code that's going live, or public at all. |
Do you swear in your code? | tjr: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-......may be of interest. But that said, no, I don't. Furthermore, colleagues who frequently use profanity in their everyday speech strike me as rather disrespectful. |
Do you swear in your code? | martythemaniak: I'll occasionally swear in a TODO comment, but all those get done and the comment gets erased. |
Do you swear in your code? | robinhoode: Some people don't quite get the message unless you use swear words. Especially when the message is "this code is used to be compatible with X, and IMO, X is not very good". 'Not very good' doesn't really describe the emotion that it gives you. I'm sure there's probably better ways to criticize another software system, but when you're short on time, sometimes swearing does the trick. Most often I've deleted such comments or re-written it with a more eloquent vocabulary. But in general, I don't think it's forbidden territory. Call it being passionate about your craft :) |
Do you swear in your code? | pavelludiq: I don't have a habit of commenting stuff, so i do it rarely. I don't write allot of unclear code(tanks to python) so i don't have a lot of places to express myself in any other form but good code. I comment only hairy stuff. But i use swear words as a variable names sometimes if im not going to show the code to others, but they are usually not in English. |
Do you swear in your code? | scooter53080: No. Aside from the fact it's unprofessional, it makes you look amateurish if the code ever ends up public. This happened with some YouTube code last year, if I remember correctly, and that is exactly what it made me think. |
Do you swear in your code? | sah: Fuck yes!Just like the pros: http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html |
Do you swear in your code? | root: It is ok as long as only friends read it, "Haha, look, Johnny used a swear-word, he's such a witty guy" they'll say. But there may come a day that someone who doesn't know you reads that comment, without knowing you and your colorful personality and reading it completely out of context her first impression of you will be that you're a cantankerous old fart and she'll hook up with that dumb html-"programmer" instead. |
Do you swear in your code? | brlewis: The only F word I ever see in my company's code base is FIXME. |
Do you swear in your code? | midnightmonster: Do I swear under my breath when code doesn't run how I meant? Often.Do I sometimes put dire warnings or florid descriptions of suckage or even rhyming couplets in my code? Yes.Do I swear in code? No. Swearing is easy and imprecise. If I can't find a more useful way to convey my point, I'm obviously not firing on all cylinders and should take a break.To be fair, nearly everything I work on is one or both of at least moderately interesting or for a good client. If I were working on something obnoxious for a boss I disliked, maybe I would swear. But even then I'd be more inclined to sarcasm. |
Do you swear in your code? | llimllib: This is as close as I come, a comment from a few days ago:> <%# All acesss to the message bar should go through the message()> function defined above or kittens will be harmed %> |
Do you swear in your code? | jasonlbaptiste: // No fucking clue why the below line is there |
Do you swear in your code? | kurtosis: the only profanities in my code are throw and raise |
Do you swear in your code? | andrewf: You know how some people swear casually, while others would cringe in shame if the apocalypse happened and a curse word passed their mouth?Same for when they're writing code.I don't quite get the shocked reactions.. I can understand thinking swearing is distasteful in certain contexts but would certainly never draw wider conclusions about a person because they swear. Then again, I'm Australian. |
Do you swear in your code? | mkull: abso-fucking-lutely |
Do you swear in your code? | jayroh: I used to ... until about 8 years ago when I response.write'd a large "FUCK YOU" in an asp app that I forgot to take out.A big honkin' "FUCK YOU" that showed up during QA 5 minutes before client showed up for review.Never again. |
Do you swear in your code? | TrevorJ: I work in post-production graphics, and when troubleshooting particularly nasty problems I've been know to name some of my project assets things like "WhattheHelliswrong.mov"I would not recommend doing this, but it definitely made me feel better. |
Do you swear in your code? | kirubakaran: When /fuck doesn't find anything, I know my code is ready for 1.0 |
Do you swear in your code? | sapphirecat: It totally depends on the culture of the company. At my last job, my boss valued 'professionalism' to the point where even sarcasm wasn't tolerated (even though I was right). My current employer doesn't seem to care, but most of the swearing remains verbal instead of going into code.I personally prefer not to swear outright, in code or otherwise, but it's only a preference. |
Do you swear in your code? | zbrock: This is a line from our tag unit tests:
@tag.name = "this is a really long tag name that exceeds the maximum length which is set at 65 characters, that should do it! no wait, we changed it to 128 so now it needs to be significantly longer so I guess I'll just throw some more text into here and maybe a gratuitous 'fuck' for the next time someone greps for the f-bomb" |
Do you swear in your code? | magus_pwnsen: Generally, I don't, and my last job was at a hedge fund. (Sailors, I hear, have a reputation for "cursing like a trader".) I get nervous enough about other people reading my code as it is; no need to make the process (imperceptibly) more volatile. In any case, swear words aren't descriptive enough to make for thoughtful comments... usually. |
Do you swear in your code? | huhtenberg: Only in blocks that work around Vista's bugs. I do a lot of development for a variety of platforms, but Vista is really something special.Seriously.Vista bugs are new, so they are a royal pain in the ass to trace. Microsoft is typically unresponsive at best and in a denial at worst. The most frustrating part is that bugs affect parts that were present in the OS and worked just fine as early as Windows 2000.Just to give an example - installing a driver or a adding a device instance from a service causes a deadlock in the Setup module that can only be resolved by forcefully terminating the calling process. A deadlock.They broke basic stuff and these booby traps are sitting in the OS waiting for a dev to step on them. And you bet I am going to leave a comment regarding the IQ of whoever's responsible after I kill two weeks chasing the results of their sloppy coding around this piece of engineering. |
Do you swear in your code? | PStamatiou: I do the occasional "here be dragons" and that's about it |
Do you swear in your code? | nostrademons: I generally don't (I like my code to be clean), but I frequently swear in commit messages, eg. "No longer fucks up selection in Firefox." |
Do you swear in your code? | st3fan: No. Because it is unprofessional and immature. It adds nothing. |
Please critique my webapp | noodle: the flickr preview functionality thing is a little wonky. probably not buggy, but the way it works is weird, especially if you fly over all of the links with your mouse.since the search functionality is the core of your app, you should focus more on the search box. its a little hidden inside things. put the search functionality inside the central blue bar on the main page, google style. make it clear what the users are supposed to do, and then leave the supplemental register/login stuff where it is. imo, that is.since its tag-centric, perhaps integration with technorati? |
Do you swear in your code? | sah: Some of my favorites that I've written or come across...From the BitTorrent client source, an apt comparison: This function is like a boat made of shit, floating on a river of shit.
From my .emacs file: ;; Fucking RMSmacs (by version 21.3, but after 21.1) doesn't
;; fucking make these fucking variables local where it fucking
;; should, so the c-set-style we're about to do below breaks
;; fucking fill-paragraph for fucking all non-c-like modes by
;; fucking default. Someone desperately needs to die, and I'm
;; pretty sure it's not just me.
This one doesn't include swearing, but is in the same spirit. From the Audiogalaxy server, above a huge chunk of regular-expression-based string munging code: /*
sah's take on all this:
"Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied,
and evil the mind that is held by no head. [...] For it is of old
rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnal clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws;
till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull
scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to
plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores
ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl."
-The Necronomicon |
Please critique my webapp | paulsb: I quite like it. I would restrict the pop-up/preview images to appear only when the user hovers over the link and not when they are in-line with the link - it gets pretty annoying very quickly. |
Please critique my webapp | ajbatac: You could hide the tags by default and only show them when it's needed. They're quite annoying. |
Please critique my webapp | boredguy8: That little "free" image is ostentatious, obnoxious, and silly. |
Please critique my webapp | r7000: I would put the "separate multiple tags by spaces" right beside or under the search box rather than having to click the little life preserver.Or why not leave the message out altogether and unclutter the interface. If the user enters commas you can just convert them to spaces on the fly. |
Please critique my webapp | aston: There's an escaping issue: if I type '\', the search box comes back with '\\'.edit: similar issue with the single quote (') |
Please critique my webapp | epi0Bauqu: Too slow.Also, I get the tag cloud thing, but there are just too many to process. There has to be a better UI in there somewhere--something like displaying the now biggest ones first and then asking for more. |
Do you swear in your code? | SteveC: No, but I make up for it when speaking normally. |
Please critique my webapp | inovica: I like it. Couple of comments:1) search seems slow to me. What are you using for indexing?2) Limit the results and display larger tags toward the top - search is about displaying the most relevant |
Please critique my webapp | apgwoz: I searched for "photography," but I was given a tag cloud of things. Why did I not just get results for "Photography"? Did I just miss them?EDIT: Yes, I did. They appeared WAYYY down below. Please move the tag cloud under the more important results.... or let the user refine the search with a smaller (maybe it could expand on click) "refine search tag cloud" |
Please critique my webapp | LPTS: I am not really interested in tagging, so I will limit myself to design.In addition to the other comments, I think the inconsistency between sometimes using capital letters at the start of sentences and sometimes not is grating. It seems unintentionalThe blue bar about halfway down my screen is ugly and not in the right proportion. Go read about golden ratios and ancient temple designs and fix it. Better yet, hire someone who understands that stuff. It's a kinda subtle thing thats the difference between the gateway store and the apple store.The entire front page should fit in one browser window without scrolling, and the list of supported services should be near the bottom, not top. Your users don't care about other cool start ups. Get rid of that clutter, and put the supported services on the bottom. Then, get rid of tags used to be all over, now they are all here. It's redundant with where tags meet. Are they here to use your app or read your second rate copy?You should not have Search, register, and login as three things on a list to do. You are search. Collapse the other two into login, register, and get it out of the way. Wufoo does it right, if I remember. You could collapse add apps and comments in the three column part at the bottom, and put something more compelling.I think it looks like what you are trying to do is a little bit cool and potentially useful to some people but that design and the words on you page bothers me a lot. It's subtle stuff but it adds up to give me a headache. You owe me an aspirin. I don't think the person who made that page is the same one who should fix it. |
Please critique my webapp | mileszs: I would suggest moving the tag cloud below the results. After searching, the first thing I want to do is see the results. The second thing I _may_ want to do is refine my search. In fact, put it under the pagination links. Also, only showing the top X related/refining tags, and providing a distinct link to 'Show more tags', or something like that, would improve the experience as well, in my opinion.I would also like to ignore certain services in my search. This functionality may be available to registered users -- I didn't register (sorry!).Cool idea, though. Would be interesting to see it also search Twitter's unofficial tags (denoted by octothorpes -- '#'). |
Do you swear in your code? | grimoire: For those of you who swear in your code base, I ask you this: is it ok in your company to swear in a meeting? The code you write isn't just for you, it is for everyone on the team, including people you haven't met yet. Is that what you really want to communicate to others? |
Please critique my webapp | elad: Very nice and useful idea. I may actually come back and use it (which happens very rarely with new apps nowadays).Problems:Way too slow. Spend more on hosting :(The "meat" is in the flickr, youtube etc. search results below. The tag cloud should appear blow it IMO. Also, limit its size, and let users enlarge, sort it etc.How about letting me filter results to just some of the sites you're crawling? |
Please critique my webapp | axod: You really need to sanitize that input. It's really simple to inject arbitrary html into your page... best case it messes up the output and just looks bad. Worst case it exposes something etc etcNot to mention things like this:http://taggl.net/search/?tag=--%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert(0)%3C%2Fscript%3E%3C!--http://taggl.net/search/?tag=%2F%22It doesn't look like you're santizing at all, so someone could have fun with your backend/sql/etc etc |
Please critique my webapp | maxklein: Frankly, I don't have the problem you're trying to solve. And I'm not even sure what problem you're trying to solve is. I do know I never woke up thinking - damn, my tags are acting up again. |
Please critique my webapp | vikas5678: the tag cloud is ok if its on the right hand side of the screen, and the results displayed in the remaining part of the screen.
And like others already said, its pretty slow. |
Please critique my webapp | noelchurchill: Say what taggl is on the first page rather than "click here to find out what taggle does". That's my two cents. |
What is your HN day like? | kynikos: Usually check my email in the morning, then visit HN main page and browse through stuff while I consume my morning coffee. I'll check out the New section periodically throughout the day. Usually don't vote on any comments unless I said "word" aloud to myself after reading them. |
Do you swear in your code? | keefe: I swear in code like I swear in life, only rarely and with great motivation. If I am going through code and see an "F bomb" I know I did something seriously wrong in that bit of code that I didn't have time to fix. |
Please critique my webapp | adammichaelc: What's the problem that you're solving? |
Please critique my webapp | auston: My guess is it's so slow because he is pinging the web services realtime for results.See if you can index them and cache them.Also:1. Make the tag cloud have a max of 10-15 tags and have a show more link, make sure the beginning of the results are above the fold.2. Mix up your results better, and have a sort by feature (sort by flickr, youtube, w/e)3. Vimeo support would be awesome, digg & mixx support as well, oh and why not add technorati.4. If you could add Yelp + Maps support I would probably use this to look up cool things to do in any given city. |
Do you swear in your code? | tlrobinson: Back in the day when the source code to portions of Windows (2000?) was leaked, the first thing many people did was grep for swear words. It turns out there were quite a few.Just Google "windows source swear words" or something. |
Please critique my webapp | tx: There is a weird font issue with Opera on Linux with your site: all fonts are not anti-aliased... |
Please critique my webapp | arthurk: Looking at the source code:- minimize CSS & JS (especially the 124kb prototype.js file). You are using 257kb ONLY for javascript.- gzip- Why load each company logo on the top separate? put them all in one image file and save HTTP requests- Unicode error in line 6: "copyright � 2007 J2Solutions" therefore not valid XHTML |
Please critique my webapp | Mistone: right off the bat, where tags meet did not make sense to me, i get the concept but that sentence needs to be clearer.then i did a search for "hoodie" and was returned a whole list of tags, I didn't know what to do next. Then I scrolled down and saw the public tags from all the social sites, and clicked around a bit. I think these are the most relevant results. Then the second tag cloud could appear. Also it needs to highlight or emphasize the relevant tags, staring at a huge cloud of world is not intuitive and forces me to figure out what do do next. The concept has legs and could be very useful, U/I needs work to make it easy and useful. |
Please critique my webapp | amrithk: I like the preview feature (when you scroll on a link and it displays the media)I would work on communicating your idea to the user. What is this website about? What problem are you trying to solve (like others have said)? I wasn't entirely sure until after 4-5 minutes. Many people will probably spend less time trying to figure stuff out.Finally, from a design perspective, the website looks kind of bare. Splash it with complementary, warm colors (instead of having white space and standard formats for hyperlinks all around). Users will be more inclined to explore the rest of the site that way. |
Do you swear in your code? | underscore: I do swear in code occasionally. If the cheap laugh is enough to make me realize that I need to step away from the computer and think about what is making me want to swear at it (stopping me from writing desperation code that breaks stuff and will get deleted later), then it is worthwhile, I think. |
Do you swear in your code? | idigthought: i generally don't swear in code that the rest of the company will use.more than anything else, i swear at the code. |
What is your HN day like? | bayareaguy: These days I read YC with Opera on OSX. My build scripts have open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com
at the top and open -a Opera build.out
at the end. |
Please critique my webapp | jeroen: Thanks for all the comments. I will respond to more of them tomorrow. For now, I'm calling it a day. |
Do you swear in your code? | jrockway: I have nothing against it, but I don't do it. The source code is not my blog; if I want to rant about something, I write an article about it.Comments are for quick explanations of things that aren't obvious. Documentation is for explanation of the obvious. Blogs are for ranting. |
Please critique my webapp | grag: For me, the ability to quickly search all my tagged stuff from all the services I use is the most compelling part.Consider just focusing on that. Have a short video that shows exactly how it works on the left. And on the right have a box that allow users to input their credentials, rss feeds, whatever you need, for all their web service and then begin searching all those services with a searchbox that auto-completes as they type. Allow them to do all that WITHOUT having to register. Store a cookie that connects that user to all the info they just inputted which is in your DB. Then tell them to register to save that info. Why require them to register first? If they like your service, and put all that time into adding their info, they will register. |
Please critique my webapp | riso: Since searching for tags is what the site is all about make the search box much bigger and put in in the blue section. The size and contrast will attract the eye much better that it does now. Keep the size of the search button consistent with the textbox.Also get rid of the buoy. I get...help, but for the amount of help it gives me it is annoying. Just type the help text in a smaller size above or below the search box.Other than that (and the free icon, but that was already brought up) it looks pretty good on the first page at least. The search page really needs some better filtering of data.Best of luck. |
Do you swear in your code? | MaysonL: I once inherited the maintenance of a PL/I program whose acronym was CSALDE.The first line of source read/* CSALDE - Custodio Sum At Lois' Defecatio EstIs it OK if your s bombs are in Latin? |
Please critique my webapp | henryw: it's slow, Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/taggl.net/www.taggl.net/_data/all.api.inc on line 223 |
Do you swear in your code? | watmough: I have certainly disparaged the Oracle optimizer on occasion.However, I don't believe it's appropriate to swear in code, and that any examples would be expected to come back and bite you on the bottom. |
Hiring an overseas freelance programmer? | gexla: Overseas? Overseas is not very descriptive of what you are looking for. I am an American working as an overseas developer to people in Europe and it works great. They are not outsourcing things to me though because I am a part of their team. We all work together.If you are talking about outsourcing to save money then this likely will not live up to your expectations. Outsourcing can be to save money or it can be to farm out work to people who have skills you cannot find elsewhere. A good pro will charge what he/she is worth (probably not much different than what an American/European counterpart will charge) and will likely give you a better experience because an experienced pro is more likely to smell disaster before it strikes.A "warm body" who is filling a chair for you at much cheaper rates than you can get anywhere else will be a mixed bag. Outsourcing is not fire and forget. If you simply shove your work to someone and expect great results then you will likely be wasting your time and money. Outsourced help needs to be managed just as well as the rest of the team. Certain things (data entry) might work well, but dev projects not so much.Or you might get lucky. Again, mixed bag. YMMV. |
Please critique my webapp | aredkin: Nice, I dont think it will solve some problem for most of the users. Better to think of it as a new tool for online research. Lacking advanced features, but I'm sure they will come. |
Do you swear in your code? | gruseom: In my experience, it's not "normal practice" but it's common enough. I don't like it, not because it's unprofessional as such but because it conflicts with the principle of removing everything extraneous. I think the best code is code that has been distilled to its clearest essence.Edit: incidentally, profanity in code is not limited to comments. "White Like [name deleted]s Balls" is a variable name I saw once and have not yet had the good fortune to forget. I'll let you guys guess whether this was code distilled to its clearest essence. :) |
Do you swear in your code? | jamongkad: Nope I personally find it distasteful to do so. |
Please critique my webapp | slater: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/taggl.net/www.taggl.net/_data/all.api.inc on line 223 |
High-stakes promotions | iamdave: I went from a nice cushy job in the mailroom of the Denny's world HQ to a rather dangerous, disastrous and very frustrating job in the same building as a maintenance technician.Yes. It's been done. |
Shop Software for an indy OS X Developer | bayareaguy: If you really only need a shop to sell your own software, I'd recommend using the Kagi service ( http://www.kagi.com/index.php ). I used them some time ago. They offered to send out serial numbers for my database library but I already had a trivial POP/SMTP script that took care of that. |
Please critique my webapp | talk: Some comments:1. I am getting some strpos errors
2. I don't see the benefit of registering.
3. I think that the tag line can be improved....maybe "tag searcher" or "search the web's tags"
4. I don't like the "?" icon next to the Search button. Either replace it, or use it as an Ajax loader :)-tal |
How to update a large network of computers | noodle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent (i would link to the protocol but the link doesn't show up correctly here)there are probably better options, but this one is already implemented and likely wouldn't be that hard to make work for your situation. might require you writing something yourself to suit your needs, or you might be able to find a turnkey solution. |
How to update a large network of computers | st3fan: Assuming these stores are behind DSL ... DSL upload speeds are usually terribly slow. Are you sure that it would actually be faster than downloading from some central server? |