Take the money.

Having two years of experience in an application or standard is a bad practice propagated by recruitment specialists. It takes a good programmer to spot a lesser programmer. (There are plenty of cases where lesser programmers look equally good or better to management.)

This forum is accessed by people who are above average programmers. Therefore, we'd be above average at spotting good programmers. Therefore, we'd be better at doing recruitment for programmers. So, what stops you from making a very good income from recruiting programmers in a existing company? Well, I researched this problem and I discovered the answer: you don't have two years experience in recruitment. Furthermore, during this investigation, I discovered that recruitment companies specialise to the extent that they outsource the recruitment of recruitment specialists.

Yep, that's right. Recruitment companies find it beneficial to outsource the recruitment of their own staff. And what stops you becoming a recruiter specialising in recruitment? Well, d'oh, you don't have two years experience. So, anyone could be a recruiter's recruiter - if they have two years experience. Based on this profound knowledge they can recruit or become technical recruiters. So, if you ever had the suspicion that recruiters just match buzzwords then you're right. If you ever had the suspicion that you could do the job better then you're right.

It is from this situation that recruiters demand two years of experience in an application or standard which has just been released. It is from this situation that human resources departments do likewise, even when they should know better.

The ultimate solution is to replace the industry with a small shell script.

Here's a direct link to this article.

http://www.toddpinkerton.com/blog/2008/01/01/from-powerpoint...

The first sign of trouble is the sheer weight of CLTL.

The fundamental problem with CL is that it's an accumulation of bits written by many people at different times in different styles. A lot of it is written in a style common in the mid 80s Lisp Machine days when it was the fashion to give everything every possible option. The loop macro is a particular horror, with its unLisplike syntax and semantics so complicated that the ANSI standard doesn't even try to explain it.

CL is also missing a few things. Not having continuations is a problem, and having a separate namespace for functions adds a lot of complications.

Strictly speaking, Pitman is wrong. The technical innovations he describes came with Lisp Machine Lisp and ZetaLisp. But if you consider all three as a sort of family, then he's right: there was a lot of new stuff in CL. The problem was, a lot of it was bad, or at least done in a kludgy way.

Has it ever been easier? Is there some hidden nostalgia for a world I'm not a part of that made application development dramatically simpler? Writing code is hard, no matter what the environment, one of Java's largest failures was 'write once, read anywhere'. Look at Joel's experience with .NET: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PleaseLinker.html. This article is just shrill yelling of 'square peg! round hole!' and apparently it works.

The privacy implications and “unintended consequences” of participating in Facebook are shocking.

Suppose you could make a reply "private", meaning only you and the person you're replying to could see your comment.

Their reply to your private reply should be automatically private, effectively creating an isolated thread.

People who want to disagree indefinitely on some fine point could do so without creating a ruckus.

If anything especially worthwhile came up in the discussion, either party could easily just repost it as an ordinary public reply.

To discourage people from harassing each other with private replies, you should only be allowed to downvote them.

This would also allow people an easy way to say "Thanks" or "I agree" without having those comments pollute the top level space.

What this stock price says to me is that investors are betting that this story, even if it's correct, is not the last word, and that Microsoft (or someone) will eventually get them.

That's an interesting idea.

News.YC does support sending arbitrary messages to other users. It's just only turned on for us and YC founders. I could turn it on for everyone. Would anyone want that?

The advantage/disadvantage of using messages is that they wouldn't be tied to a particular comment. There's also the disadvantage that everyone would invoke whatever that quote is about every system evolving till it adds messaging...

I think that your statement that you should build a web app first is absolutely correct: as long as you assume it will be the 'one to throw away' (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1011623). It will be a toy application and barely a proof of concept.

I've personally replaced dozens of those systems.

I believe that there are differences that are specific and salient to handheld devices that are still quite relevant today.

1. Processor Speed / Battery Life / Energy Density

Moore's law does NOT apply to batteries; they increase in capacity at about 3-5%/a. This means that the limiting factor on processing is NOT the processor, but the energy you can feed it (and that you can wick away as heat). Cutting edge handheld processors are still at about 400-600MHz and have been stuck there for many, many years.

2. Browser complexity and inefficiency

This is related to the first point. Browsers are among the most complex applications that run on desktops and handhelds. They tend to eat up obscene amounts of memory and use a lot of clock cycles interpreting languages (CSS, HTML, Javascript, Flash...). This chews through the available (slow) processing available on handhelds. You could limit what you use, but AJAX and its ilk are part of what make a web interface workable.

3. Security

This may only be relevant to the work I did in Healthcare. While I trust the SSL implementations, I don't trust the caching implementations on Handheld browsers. Given that these devices get lost, do you want to be liable for confidential patient data stored on them in a format that isn't under your control? Want to encrypt it with some clever javascript in the browser? See points 1 & 2.

4. Diversity

Developing for IE6/7/8, FF, Opera and Safari is one thing. Adding the proclivities of the browsers on the iPhone, WinCE, PalmOS (where there are several), RIM, and all other smartphones will make you go bald. Now imagine testing on all of them as well. The issue is more interesting. If your marketing dept gets wind of the fact that it works on a mobile browser, you're suddenly flooded with support calls the moment a new fancy phone appears on the market.

5. Novel User Interfaces: beyond the G in GUI

One of the cool things about these phones is that they have neat UI things to take advantage of: the 5-way scroller on the Palm, the rocker switch on the RIMs, multitouch on the iPhone, fingerprint, passcard and barcode scanners on some specialized devices. NONE of these are under your direct control if you build a web app. You're at the mercy of the common set of UI made available across the browsers and how each of those browsers interprets the gestures.

6. Constant connectivity

Again, this may be due to my work in the medical field, but I was shocked at how many installations were crippled do to lack of building-wide WiFi or huge dead zones. Like ALL of radiology. Or the entire wing that was put up in 1948 where the internal walls were plaster on chicken wire. Even looked at the size of chicken wire? Ever compared it to the wavelength of a 2.4GHz signal? It'd be hard to block signal more effectively. And if you're moving around a list of 14k ICD codes or 7k CPT codes, you're going to need that pipe to stay open.

Now, having ranted, lets look at the world as it stands:

- why were developers up in arms over the lack of an iPhone SDK?

- why isn't Android just a set of javascript libs?

- why are are ALL apps on the RIM fat, local applications?

- why did Google invest time/money/effort into creating local Java implementations of Maps and Mail?

- can you name a single, widely deployed mobile app that's purely on the browser?

I think the world has changed, but not nearly enough.

You know, that would actually be an amusing hardware-hacking project.

If you made a keyboard that had every character in every language spoken in the EU, you could even file to make it a standard with whatever earnest standards body is in charge of such things. No linguistic minority should have to use control keys! It would be like giving peanut butter to a dog.

Who would see the comments?

There are comment links in the rss feed. Some readers show them and some don't. If anyone can give me the exact syntax that would work in the latter, I'll try it.

Awesome! One less person i have to compete with!

It's really very easy to make an anonymous account on this site. In fact, it is easier than going to bugmenot.com. And the way you did this, a malicious person could come along and delete this story.

Probably yes, but they're lucky idiots. It's the buyer's problem now...

I don't see the point of explaining your mods. I think modding comments is of dubious value by itself.

Private messaging might be helpful, but I don't see an urgent problem to be solved.

Yeah, I was totally dumbstruck by how well this article is written. It's one of those rare NYT gems.

It's nice to read something that puts Fischer in a somewhat positive light, considering how much negative press there was around his death.

There are some pretty good comments about the deal over at slashdot.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/09/1812239