It's sort of silly that a minimum apartment size is even legislated in the first place. Somebody who chooses to live in a small apartment does so because it's their best available option.
It seems as if every single key press, whether or not it affects the output (for example, writing in a comment or hitting enter to reorganize and space out code) causes every single function to be evaluated again.
You can test this out by adding something like this...
(time (+ 1 1))
...and start typing in a comment on a new line and seeing how the elapsed time that is outputted changes on every single key press. Performance optimizations are probably not as important right now, but that's something that can be improved.
Still, as a basic test of the concept, it looks pretty interesting overall and I can see myself using this. As long as the idea is sound, everything else can be improved over time. Keep it up!
I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else companies come up with?
It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company.
Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge.
If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.
This filtering signal works both ways. While you do avoid some of the worst developers, you also reduce your chances of getting some of the better developers who will not likely waste time jumping through hoops unless you're an extremely desirable company to work at.
I think that there's a market for this type of product for larger companies who receive too many resumes to easily sort through and want to hire a lot of developers that meet some minimum standard. However, I think that this is much less useful to startups who just want the best possible small team initially.
Given the makeup of HN, I think that most people here would not look at your product too favorably. I think that you should be looking at finding ways to reach out to companies that have an actual HR department and increasing your price dramatically for them.
Speaking multiple languages is a great thing, but if you already speak English, maybe you ought to consider if its worth your time if you don't have a clear goal in mind.
Do you want to learn a new language for the sake of knowledge? To travel the world? For business?
I would figure that out first and then make a choice on what to do.
In most cases, an unpaid internship is probably a bad idea. But individuals should be making that choice based on their unique set of circumstances and goals. Individuals should be free to make a choice whether or not the experience they gain, the connections they make, the resume blurb, and whether getting their foot in the door is worth more to them than their free labor. In most cases its probably a bad idea, but in some cases some people might see the opportunity as worth their effort.
IMO, the issue here is that labor laws prevent companies from offering unpaid internships that involve something that a business can actually benefit from or that can conceivably displace a paid employee. Ostensibly created to prevent exploitation, these labor laws actually create exploitation by effectively forcing an unpaid internship to be an exercise in busy work for any company that actually follows the law.
* It goes without saying that a request for access to personal data like this is something that nobody should ever comply with.
* Asking somebody for access to their email/social network account is actually a great question to ask in a job interview. If somebody is so careless about their private data to easily give away access to it upon request, that would easily disqualify them in my book.
Wanting to change the world is a great thing. If you're already profitable, you're in a great position.
But please don't dismiss somebody for being a bit focused on how your business will make money over the short or long-term. If a co-founder wants to join up with you and doesn't ask you some really tough questions about your plans to make real money, you shouldn't be happy about this: you should question his experience, competence, and judgement.
Any decent developer has already been approached by many startups: most of which claim to have ideas that change the world and most of which have no real business plan and are destined to fail. Somebody who has been through this before is likely going to grill you hard about money and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Devoting such a significant percentage of your time and resources to what likely amounts to less than 1% of your users doesn't sound like a wise business decision in most circumstances.
It really depends on what you're interested in because there are a ton of neat things to check out in NYC, but often the most interesting and entertaining one is the Web Performance Meetup.
I'm not suggesting you use Drupal without a good reason, but if you're worrying about hypothetical scaling concerns before you've ever even touched PHP or Rails in your life, you're probably focusing on the wrong thing.
Both Rails/PHP are solid choices. If your app fits well within Rails' set of defaults and constraints, you should get to market quicker. PHP has its own set of advantages, such as the ease of procuring cheap hosting and the vast number of trained PHP developers out there that can help build/maintain anything you build.
I'm surprised that a community of internet entrepreneurs is so disinterested in advertising considering how many of your own sites are dependent on it.
I actually like looking at ads. I like finding out about new products and trying to find a good deal. I don't like to use ad-blockers. If a site has too many ads and loads too slowly, I simply won't visit there.
The key though, is having a tasteful amount of advertising. There's nothing worse than loading up a site with a dozen slow-loading ads that makes your system slow down. Look at Reddit as a great example of how to advertise. One text ad and one picture ad per page.
Facebook has 2-4 ads per page, which is sometimes a bit much, but at least they load fast. The problem with Facebook ads though are that despite knowing everything about everybody, the ads on Facebook are pathetically horrible.
In what is ostensibly an effort to prevent exploitation, the government has legally created a situation where an internship is almost completely worthless to the intern.
Whether or not the laws are actually followed in most large businesses, I don't know. However, in the United States there are laws preventing interns from displacing paid employees and doing substantive work.
Because of this, I think all "interns" should get minimum wage to work around this nonsensical legal situation and actually be able to legally get in a position to work on something meaningful and to hopefully learn something useful.
The right choice depends on your target market and what your overall goals are.
But my opinion is that for startups, the smartest way to utilize limited resources is to avoid supporting things like IE6 and users without JS enabled and just build your applications for early adopters, because thats who is going to use it initially anyway and make or break your business.
The answer might be different if you're part of an established company with dozens of programmers and you have the resources to support everybody without any problems.
"Antitrust law provides some interesting insight into the question IMO. It was established because laissez faire economics failed to prevent monopolies."
This is obviously false, both from a logical and historical view.
A monopoly cannot exist in a free market as no company, no matter how successful, can actually restrict entry into any given market without the government banning entry into that market. This is accomplished though various legal means including licenses, trade barriers, so-called "intellectual property" protections, and other tactics. Without the barriers for entry into any market provided by government, establishment of a monopoly on any desired service would be impossible.
Now, you might cite some historical examples like Standard Oil and the like as examples of why monopoly protections are needed, but this standard example only illustrates my case. The price of a gallon of oil, for example, was around 30 cents in 1870 and fell to around 6 cents at the time of the anti-trust trial. And their market share was continuously dropping despite their supposed monopoly.
Good overview, but it's important to keep in mind that there are definitely some very talented people at Microsoft that have their creativity and talents strangled to death by layers of horrible management.
Reading some of these blogs about Microsoft's internal culture (Mini-Microsoft and others) illustrates this pretty clearly and makes for very fascinating reading.
I've built both Firefox and Chrome extensions and would recommend starting with Chrome. Firefox currently has a larger market, but developing extensions in Chrome is MUCH easier and I would recommend that.
But it depends on what your business is. Maybe people in your target market use Firefox more often and if so that may be a better choice.