Nothing. JTV is powered by magic.

I am so disappointed to see this on the first page of HN.

Wow! A summary of privacy settings. Amazing! It's so original and clever. Boy, I wish other software could have a summary of privacy settings. We could even generalize this to summaries of other sorts of settings.

My head spins with the genius of it. I think I need a lie down.

I'd like to see nicknames anonymized on submissions and comments until you vote them up or down. This would make votes count more on the merit of what they are saying than who is saying them.

One of the best decisions I ever made.

Is is "what I thought it would be"? I don't know. Because I had no idea what to expect. (I did my first programming on the job; I started before there was much opportunity to do it on your own.)

I have done projects at over 80 companies. I have gotten involved in almost every aspect of the business. I have travelled all over the country, met many interesting people (and friends for life), and have constantly been learning and doing. Oh, and I have earned far more than most of the people I have ever worked with. It wasn't unusual for me to be earning more than my supervisor and much, much more than my users.

I have done lots of work on my own and have taken lots of time off between gigs.

Sure, there have been lots of negatives. I've even thought of leaving IT and doing something else. I know many who have. But then I think about it and realize that this is what I still really want to do.

There have been horrible working conditions (cubicles), unreasonable people (let's just leave it at that), terrible projects, long commutes, and worst of all, boredom and disapproval on someone else's project. But instead of whining (present post excluded), I always did something about it. I either fixed what was broken for me or moved on.

Because of modern technology and lifestyle, I am more excited about being a programmer than ever before. I don't want to sound like an old timer (I know, too late), but I clearly remember how hard it used to be to get good. I had to go to expensive seminars or to one of the half dozen good technical bookstores in the U.S. My first computer cost $6000 (double that today). Now with cheap hardware, google, downloadable environments, boards like this, and Borders around the corner, everything is so easy! I just can't get enough.

For someone even mildly interested in programming, I would say, "Go for it!" Get a job and play around on your own. Learn as much as you can, technical and business, and if you don't like where it's heading, find a way to make it work for you. Give it a chance. I'm sure glad that I did.

Any software patent is 'non-obvious' to a non-programmer. That's the problem with them.

I request everyone to donate to EFF.

While not exactly polite, the post is right on the money.

The biggest usability problem with Scribd is the lack of the access to the actual PDF. In fact, had they put a big fat link to the PDF somewhere in the viewer, it would've actually become a handy online PDF preview tool.

I can't imagine they haven't thought about this feature. Its usefulness to the end-user is damn obvious, but yet it's not in the Scribd. Which makes one really wonder if the goal of locking users in is not that hypothetical after all.

I think (and I discovered this far too late :-( ) that the most interesting programming is done by people who aren't really programmers. People who apply software to knowledge domains. A biochemist can learn Python a hell of a lot more quickly than a programmer can learn about protein folding, for example. A friend of mine is an astrophysicist and writes programs to model stellar events (then goes and checks his results with uber-telescopes). Me, I can connect interfaces to apps to data, I do a pretty good job of it (tho' I say so myself!) but what am I really adding to the sum of human understanding? Hmmm.

Oh, boy. I get to be cantankerous again.

>While 40W may be small compared with the bigger picture, it is still energy that is completely wasted

The bigger picture is all that ever matters when we're discussing fungible goods such as power. The concept of an "order of magnitude" is fundamental to engineering discussions. 40W is just not significant when talking about the power consumption of an average American. Because of this, when you multiply 40W times the number of Americans and compare it to the total power used by all Americans, it is still insignificant on the important scale. It does not matter that if we all unplugged our TV sets when we're not watching them that we'd save enough electricity to power 10k households, because 10k households is insignificant when compared to the number of households in America.

>and Americans just got a lot more exercise from getting up from the couch and walking to the TV.

No, they didn't. A lot of Americans just got a tiny bit of exercise each. They're still all fat and out of shape (1). You're playing with the third decimal place here, or worse.

>Again, this is an issue that should be solved with better product design.

Due attention to the concept of orders of magnitude directs us to work on the things that matter, not the things that are marginal. This helps us overcome the all-too-natural urge to moralize over every trivial action. In point of fact, this issue _should_not_ be solved with better product design if that effort is better spent on things that really matter. If you could decrease power transmission losses by 50% over high tension lines, for example, you'd swamp the contribution of eliminating appliance standby power consumption many times over (I would guess).

Finally, this principle effects every aspect of one's life and is probably a very good indicator of the kind of person who would succeed in a startup environment. If the "We Must Do Everything We Can" principle invades you or your startup, you will be doomed to failure. You will not have a reliable way to sort out the important from the unimportant, the central from the peripheral, nor the vital from the irrelevant. You cannot afford to be fiddle-f@#king with trivial layout issues when you really need to be getting a product out the door, for example.

(1)This is just a bit of rhetorical license. Not all Americans are fat, nor out of shape.