4 points by brett 6 days ago | link | parent Ha. It's only mildly relevant here, but my inadmissibility to enter Canada just recently expired. I was touring with a band trying to play a show in Vancouver and we got banned for a year for lying to border guards. Boneheadedly, we let the bassist do the talking and the Canadians googled their way to quite a few holes in his story.
8 points by brett 6 days ago | link | parent The unexpected Ted Stevens reference at the end really made me grin. I find Stevens so hilarious and horrifying at the same time.
I was surprised to find it in a PG essay, but on reflection it seems really appropriate in context. Though it did distract me enough that I had to read the last section twice.
The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
3 points by dood 6 days ago | link Sounds to me like they're looking for cool judgement more than simple flexability; flexability without judgement being a third immature response to the challenge: unquestioningly doing what you're told.
2 points by brett 7 days ago | link Nice. I find those more compelling than slugging through all the explanatory text (though I don't have kids, so I'm not in the target audience). You might try and figure out a way to get them on the homepage.
2 points by rms 8 days ago | link It was ill considered in that they didn't consider the enormous impact the loss of a partner would have on the original poster.
1 point by brett 8 days ago | link I'll concede that my question over simplifies the issue: Burning bridges is bad, you can definitely be stupid about how you try to recruit talent ...
But whenever someone comes to work with/for you they're likely precluded for working for/with someone else. Sure there could be reasons not to try and poach someone, but in general I don't think you are responsible for the person/company left behind.
4 points by brett 16 days ago | link | parent Really? That bad? Why not? I like editorialized titles, and without the editorial DHH's post is essentially a linkjack to something fairly old.
2 points by socmoth 17 days ago | link i'll look in to it. no matter what i do, mod proxy balancer appears to not actually balance equally. i think i need to read more about it. and see if there is a mysterious setting.
balance=1
of the boxes, the first box always has a much higher load.
1 point by menloparkbum 17 days ago | link Mongrel, mod_proxy_balancer, and mongrel are all ass. Moving to nginx helped out a bit, but not really. Rails is lame because all the time you saved writing your app gets eaten up by rewriting it and doing sysadmin tasks with undocumented software. Sadly, for my next project I'll be pulling a Derek Sivers.
2 points by zach 17 days ago | link I am using swiftiply's evented mongrel + nginx for my site. I am tremendously happy with it and would be happy to spread the love (and config files). Email is in my profile.
5 points by brett 21 days ago | link | parent They are a little different.
With Wesabe you download a desktop app, put you bank credentials into that, and then the desktop app uploads your data to the Wesabe site. With Mint you give their webapp your bank credentials and they store them on their server.
2 points by brett 21 days ago | link | parent I got a beta invite a couple weeks ago and tried it out. It's pretty useful. Integration with the first two accounts I entered was really easy once I decided to commit and give them my credentials. I noticed later integration with another bank was much more complicated due to the security measures on the bank's site. Mint did a good job of explaining why they needed so much info and how to extract if from the bank's site.
Categorization of transactions is done really well. Most things were categorized correctly by default and I like the ui for manual categorization. You get one big overlay with every possible category visible at once.
My main complaint so far is how many times they've emailed me so far. This is aggravated by the number of places I've had to ferret out to get the emails to stop. There isn't one email pref page; you have some global email preferences and then preferences for each account that operate independently.
1 point by greendestiny 21 days ago | link It's really not. Trollporter - some big green dude who carries bags, or a futuristic way for troll folk to travel instantly. I suggest Journatroll, it rolls of the tongue a little better than Journotroll. As a plus its fairly easy to work Journatrollism into a sentence where you would have said Journalism.
2 points by brett 22 days ago | link | parent You're really close. Trying to figure out exactly how you managed to get three letters wrong is probably a more interesting problem than the original.
2 points by brett 24 days ago | link | parent How did you manage to post the reddit redirect link? I wonder if reddit still logs it as a click through when they are not the referrer.
2 points by rms 24 days ago | link He saw this post in his recommended links on Reddit and he right clicked, copied, and submitted here without hesitating.
5 points by brett 24 days ago | link | parent Wow. I can't remember ever seeing a negative nostrademons comment. Obviously that's not earth shattering but it is feeling like downvoting is more generally on the rise around here.
5 points by brett 28 days ago | link | parent If anyone around here creates something based upon a lifehacker post and then subsequently would like them to feature what you've built I can now recommend from experience simply emailing them at tips@lifehacker.com.
3 points by brett 30 days ago | link | parent There is also the problem of otherwise talented and determined potential co-founders who are unready or unwilling to commit fully due to the inertia of their lives.
I wouldn't describe them as "lame", but they can still be especially risky. They will likely be apt to entertain working on the startup which will be enticing, but you really don't want to get strung along. The sooner you can assess the likelihood they are capable of committing the better.
My guess is that the best tactic in this case is to figure out way to convince them the startup is happening with or without them. Just like investors the best motivator is probably fear of missing out.
1 point by brett 32 days ago | link | parent > I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users?
My bet is that up voting is definitely representative of a large number of the users, but that many are voting out of support for Ron Paul instead of because they read and liked the linked article. You could argue this not necessarily a problem. I guess it becomes one if it hijacks the focus of the site for the remainder (or majority?) of users.
3 points by brett 32 days ago | link | parent So the obvious question becomes: How does version 2 of social news prevent this? How does/will news.yc deal with it?
For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of legitimate users using the site for something other than the expressed goal of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user base.
4 points by kingkongrevenge 31 days ago | link The idea of a popular and high quality "social news" site is fundamentally broken. Either you want a mass market or you want quality content. The mass market has an IQ of 100 and will not choose content that generally appeals to people here puzzling over "social news". Any fix that gets rid of the stuff morons like will cost you the mass market.
The metafilter people already went through all this. They started to achieve mass market popularity and quality started to go to shit. They cut off new membership and let attrition get rid of some people. Then they were happy again with their small community.
If you introduce an editorial role, well guess what, it's not "social news" anymore. Slashdot and Fark are far from new and web2.0.
This problem is nothing new. Look at reddit's sister company, Wired. Wired went from great in the 90s to mostly moronic and consumerist now. It's also a lot more popular now.
4 points by pg 32 days ago | link I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would probably be enough.
There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened:
There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count their votes less. Etc.
3 points by brett 32 days ago | link The editorial solution is interesting. It's just a way to scale out the tastes of a group of editors beyond the articles they can look at themselves. If it works well then eventually the only users who would stick around would be people with similar taste to the editors.
The subreddit did not work because they did it backwards. You don't ask users you don't want to move somewhere else. You leave the bad users where they are and move yourself to a new site. Sounds familiar.
1 point by gwenhwyfaer 31 days ago | link > There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it.
That would probably have worked better if people were forced to choose a subreddit for their submissions, and stories from all subreddits got aggregated onto the main reddit page - and logged in users could choose not to see links from certain subreddits. (That's an aspect of slashdot that does work quite well.)
2 points by brett 32 days ago | link At the very least reddit can tell when people upvote without clicking through as they hijack the link and then redirect to it.
1 point by brett 34 days ago | link | parent It's back up now so the original title makes no sense. Shoutfit was returning an apache error message for a few hours.
2 points by brett 35 days ago | link | parent When I see non-idiomatic Ruby code, it tells me one of two things. The first assumption I make is that whoever wrote the code is not a Ruby programmer. That's usually the case.
I've been using rfacebook lately and this is definitely the case. I'm constantly going back to the rfacebook source to figure out how to use it and every time I come across code that strikes me as highly unrubyish (what's with all the gratuitous "return"s?).
I did not know facebooker existed. I will be looking into it very soon.
