warwick

As a writer, were there any benefits to you to grant that permission? Or was it more along the lines of there being no downside and it's nice to be asked?

You tell your boss something along the lines of "I've never worked with Perl before, and I don't think I'm going to be able to complete the project with the time we've budgeted, since it can take some time getting up to speed with a new language." Then you present options iike using a language you're comfortable in, or lengthening the time that's available for the project.

Often part of a technical job, particularly a technical job with any interesting work or responsibility, is educating your boss about the true costs associated with a decision so that they can make good decisions. If they want you to do it in Perl, that's fine, they're paying for the time and you've informed them why it will cost more than they thought. It's a good idea to follow up with an email restating this so that there's a written record you can point to later when the project falls through.

Honestly, I had expected that you'd refused a project that was unethical or illegal, not that you'd just decided you weren't interested in the stack they wanted you to use. If you told me that story during an interview, I certainly wouldn't hire you. It shows a level of inflexibility as a developer that makes me seriously question if the reason you refused the work is because you're not capable of picking up another language.

Five years ago I was at HOPE Number Six and Michael Hart was the Saturday keynote speaker, giving a talk on his work at Project Gutenberg.  I didn't know very much about it, but I recognized the name.  There were Project Gutenberg discs floating around the conference so I snagged one and had a look.

I don't really remember anything specific from the talk, but I remember it was inspiring.  It was called "Using eBooks to Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy".  There's audio of the talk online, and I think I need to hear it again.

The next day was the last day of the conference, and as was usual Jello Biafra was the getting far less attention than the other keynote speakers.  They'd closed off the back part of the main hall, a hall which had been filled to capacity and then some for Michael, and some of us were tossing around beach balls.  I pounded one particularly hard and hit some guy in the back of the head with it.  When he turned around I recognized Michael.  I don't think he was too happy with me in that moment.

With the eloquence that only a twenty year old can muster, I stuck my hand out and said "I love your work.  It's fucking absurd."  That's about the highest compliment I can give a person, and I'm glad to see that Shaw quote in the obituary.  It says what I was awkwardly trying to express.

The tension drained out of the situation, and he shook my hand before turning back to his companion and returning to his conversation.  I went back to playing with beach balls.

I admire what Michael built, and I admire how he did it.  Project Gutenberg was slow but steady, and will continue past his death.  I can only aspire to leaving that kind of a legacy.

Goodbye Michael.  I loved your work.  It's fucking absurd.

I really don't like the bias in the headline. It seems to imply that coding isn't something you'd do after you got growth.

Why not "How Coding Helps Y Combinator Manage Growth" or "Paul Graham Keeps Coding to Help Y Combinator Keep Growing"?

I took an awful lot of graduate level courses as an undergrad. Most of the time there was some sort of additional vetting where the prof had to sign off on your involvement in advance.

You don't have to get very far in the undergrad before they'll start letting you take the interesting stuff, especially if it looks like you know what you're doing.

That's superb then. My big concern for any project like this is that maintenance and upkeep costs end up outstripping the initial layout by a considerable amount.

Are you planning on maintaining these? In my city the route timings change depending on school schedules and time of year, so the transit schedule's that are posted at stops have to be swapped out three or four times a year.

A minor bug: One of your tabs is labelled IFrame, and seems to link to the contents of your iFrame.

3.2 for my app that needs interface builder plug-ins, and 4.whatever-the-latest-is for my other stuff. My general rule with all things Apple is to keep at the forefront of what's available, unless you have a very good reason not to. Apple isn't sentimental about dropping support for older products.

You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.

If it has potential to cause customer confusion, it might be a trademark violation. A company is required to defend their trademarked terms, otherwise they may become generic terms.

(Standard I Am Not a Lawyer disclaimer. Go talk to a real one if you're worried.)

If you think the background and the font together are going to make a change, then by all means, conduct a test and see if whichever metric you're working with goes up. I'm in favour of isolating changes as much as possible, but if you believe that two elements of your design work only in concert with each other, then they should be modified accordingly. These aren't random permutations you test, they're new tweaks to a design that you suspect might help.

Sure, changing the font may be meaningless, but at least with a test, you KNOW it's meaningless. I try to let experience and taste guide my changes, but without checking that the change is effective you're just guessing.

Design exists to further a goal. Sometimes the goal is brand related, which I'll admit is just about impossible to measure, and sometimes it's seeing if you can reduce the frequency of support requests. One of these is obviously a better candidate for A/B testing.

[Edited to fix a spelling error]

Asking if design makes a difference is kind of a silly question. We know it makes a difference. Using A/B testing, or even just by changing one element at a time, we can measure improvements in things like conversion ratios or download rates.

Of course, to measure if each part of your design is effective, you have to change it in isolation. I wouldn't surprised if there are elements of the new Wordpress site that decrease conversion, as well as some which are increasing it. If the design had been iterated on, instead of just rolling out the new design, we might know which elements should have been changed to create better results.

He mentions they're using Eclipse. The store is written with Java/WebObjects.

Dick isn't the source of most of the ideas discussed in the article.  Minority Report is a pretty short read, and well worth the hour or two it takes.

Social Advertising: There isn't any advertising.  The only media that's referenced is the radio which is a broadcast medium, and as such can't be individually tuned.

Virtual Shopping: Anderton buys some essentials at a drugstore, and a second hand set of clothes.  It's important to the plot of the story that he takes the risk of exposing himself to get these items.

Crime: Alright, I'll give you that one.  Pre crime is a cool concept.

Robots: The only automatic machines mentioned in the story are those that tend to the needs of the pre cogs (presumably life support type stuff) and things like automatic card printers.  Hardly robotic spiders.

Gesture Based Computing: In the story, Anderton has to lookup where data will be stored on a tape and manually copy it to another reel of tape.  That's as close as he gets to a cool interface.

Cars: Flying cars feature into the story, but they required a human driver.  Anderton has to ask his wife to take the wheel at one point as he has to deal with something else.

Sometimes it's alright to acknowledge that an adaptation of a work has added to it.