spolsky

31 ms·

241.
by spolsky 17y ago
Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable from the beginning so they don't have to re-architect it if it really does take off. P
242.
by spolsky 17y ago
You're not paying to get a job, you're paying to have your CV seen by employers, which is a heck of a lot less :-) Having a small barrier to listing a CV ensures that most CVs in the system represent people who are genuinely interested in f
243.
by spolsky 17y ago
That's crazy fantasy extrapolation, almost too absurd to address, but I will anyway since you asked :) There are 1492 CVs on StackOverflow right now, and maybe 9,000,000 programmers in the world. Even if we're monumentally successful we're
244.
by spolsky 17y ago
Look at http://stackoverflow.com/users , those are all famous Netizens, you should be able to figure out if they're high achievers or just basement StackOverflow nerds
245.
by spolsky 17y ago
PS when I search StackOverflow I look for lisp, OCaml, ML, Smalltalk, etc., not because we need them, but because we like to hire people who know them.
246.
by spolsky 17y ago
That's a nice theory... I don't have any way to test it, but I've seen a LOT of StackOverflow CVs and have NEVER seen someone who was unemployed. More likely that they're UNDERemployed, bored at a dead-end, stupid job, so they have time to
247.
by spolsky 17y ago
It depends on where you are and who you're competing against. In smaller markets, or if you have unique skills, employers searching will be finding a small number of employees, and won't care about Stack Overflow participation. So for examp
248.
by spolsky 17y ago
Interns are college students. College students can be kind of dumb about job searching... for the most part, they will tend to apply to the companies who come on campus, and ignore the companies that don't. Pick one or two campuses and go a
249.
by spolsky 17y ago
I have no idea where you got the idea that reflects a company's physical or organizational structure. Not in any company I can think of. The most old-school company I can think of, say, Ford building cars, knows that the very process of bui
250.
by spolsky 17y ago
I have been looking closely for years ever since someone wrote on Wikipedia that I was an "advocate" of the waterfall method. There has NEVER been an "advocate" of the method. Nobody has ever said that strict phase-by-phase progression, wit
251.
by spolsky 17y ago
Mariette Systems solved the problem for TechCrunch by using primarily WIRED internet access, not WiFi, and the cost was absolutely breathtaking. The ServerFault thread that followed that incident about wifi at conferences has become the enc
252.
by spolsky 17y ago
Not a series of ten conferences in ten cities, running every other day. Most of the cities on the DevDays tour were new to them.
253.
by spolsky 17y ago
I hope I didn't create that impression. Carsonified was an equal partner in the event. It was the first time for both of us. We learned a lot. They learned a lot. I made plenty of mistakes, too (at one point I actually forgot my own passpor
254.
by spolsky 17y ago
It looks like somebody already fixed that. When I link to my own articles on Inc.com, I redirect it through my own site because I want to track how much traffic I'm sending them. Every year when they're considering whether to renew my contr
255.
by spolsky 17y ago
Reminds me of Hearst running the headline, "How do you like the Journal's War?" taking credit for the Spanish-American war.
256.
by spolsky 17y ago
http://squadedit.com is a pretty similar service. The free version has too many flashing ads for my taste... hopefully they'll fix that!
257.
by spolsky 17y ago
I liked this post quite a bit, but I think that essentially what he's complaining about is that bloggers write from their own perspective. That's the whole point of blogs, isn't it? They're one person's voice?
258.
by spolsky 17y ago
Well, the OCaml kid is legit, but, no, there are no lisp programmers in Bagdad or Clojure programmers in Window Rock... did someone say there were? Do you need one? Window Rock is a dusty tiny town, seat of the Navajo Nation--I've actually
259.
by spolsky 17y ago
I think that's already the case. When I get a resume the first thing I do is Google the name. If I find an intelligent programming blog, good questions and good answers on Q&A sites, and intelligent comments on online discussions I'm wa
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by spolsky 17y ago
You don't have to file a CV. It's completely optional. So far about 7000 people have filed CVs, which is a tiny fraction of the millions of people on the site.
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by spolsky 17y ago
It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.
262.
by spolsky 17y ago
Jeez, everything is a conspiracy on Hacker News. How about I wrote it because I'm a columnist at Inc and I have to turn in one article a month? And how about, they hired me because they like columnists who are actively running businesses to
263.
by spolsky 17y ago
I'm happy that my article is causing some conversation, but I was NOT advocating that there is anything wrong with the nature of CS education, other than the fact that it happens to be poor preparation for a career as a programmer. Anyone w
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by spolsky 17y ago
wrong, i still make special deals with apress all the time :D
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by spolsky 17y ago
stackexchange is free during beta.
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by spolsky 17y ago
Don't vote up my dinky post... vote up the serverfault q&a, where there are some terrific answers already. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870554
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Making WiFi work at large conferences(serverfault.com)
67 points by spolsky 17y ago|13 comments
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by spolsky 17y ago
Nope, that's a great deal.
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by spolsky 17y ago
More duct tape!
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by spolsky 17y ago
The easiest way to tell is that Helvetica is obsessive about straight horizontal edges, while Arial tends to use angled edges rather unsystematically.

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