I think the whiteboard experience is very loosely correlated to programming ability and hope that the simple loop fiasco was an exaggeration. Many good programmers have a great deal of social anxiety, and being put under the microscope is not how they work. A better test of their prowess would be to hire them as a contractor if they can talk shop and have some live projects/open source code out there that isn't obviously copied. Short of that you could always stick them in a room for half a day, with an internet connection for their own laptop, ask them to solve a problem, then have them explain their rationale, stepping you through the code when they are done. Either of these would be a much better measure of how the candidate would perform for you if hired.
I think you are right in assuming that the buyer side of the market is not going to consist of developers. However, there is certainly a market here if the right people are targeted and the projects are presented as businesses in a box as opposed to abandoned side projects.
Potential buyers include MBA's who can't code, or don't have time to, and all of those many people who tell you "I have an idea I just need you to build it and we will split everything 50/50". If the grand vision was presented to them properly, they just might shell out a few thousand for it.
No, while I think other websites with users who are less aware would benefit the cause by having a Stop SOPA message, explanation of the reason behind the blackout, and the blackout for a day, most of the HN community is already aware of the issue.
Yes I agree that local cache is the way it will go, but I do not think think that SOPA will be a blessing in disguise. In fact, I think the internet will begin to more closely resemble the television industry, with a large technical underground. Perhaps some P2P DNS service will become popular, however if I recall correctly the bill outlaws blacklist evasion software.
You may be surprised about how challenging it may be for "anybody's mother". Anyway, DeSopa was a quick way to prove a point. I expect that if SOPA passes offshore DNS services will advertise their IPs for manual setup (resolv.conf, TCP/IP windows settings etc), and local applications will be developed that circumvent SOPA in this and other ways.
True, but not everyone who will be affected by SOPA is a hacker. After (and if) SOPA is passed, releasing this sort of program will be illegal. The point was to illustrate to congress that SOPA is ineffective, and hopefully turn the conversation to something more workable.
Thanks, I agree. That occurred to me too. However, I hoped that it would still force them to rethink their implementation strategy forcing them to allocate more resources to further the effort and buying more time for public awareness.
finnw, the code is actually pretty trivial and does not make use of very special functionality. Further, if SOPA does pass, many even more innovative programs will come out of the woodwork, at the OS layer. I think forcing a patch like that would be a hard sell.
You can rename the extension to .zip and extract. If you have any problems, let me know via a comment or post a contact method and Ill send you the source. Its pretty simple. When on, it intercepts URLs, sends the base URL to three offshore DNS services via HTTP, makes a best effort to check that two of them are equivalent, caches the IP for the browser session, redirects to the equivalent URL using the IP, and substitutes out the domain name in the source code with the IP address for future requests. I admit that it could use some work, however, I wrote in hopes that I could help create some kind of change in the events that are about to transpire before the vote.
Yes, I agree. However at this point I am just hoping that it catches the attention of congressmen giving them another reason to rethink SOPA's feasibility before the vote
SOPA has not yet passed, it is not yet the law and I hope that Mozilla leaves it up for now. The DeSOPA program is meant to discourage passage of the bill by showing congress how easily it can be circumvented, so if it is removed after passage so be it. The link is: