Painless and easy, and a bit of glue I didn't realize I wanted until I saw it.
Minuscule nitpick: on the Instagram oAuth screen, it asks if I want to allow "Instadrop - production" access. Now that it's working you can probably drop the "production" part.
Even better than the real thing — the video clearly demonstrates the robot bird not flying into all those glass windows like its avian counterpart has been known to do.
And here I just thought it was awesome they had angled the text to match the tilt of having the lanyard connected at the corner, providing more space for names.
Then I scrolled down to discover the booklet and all its goodies.
I think it's important to define exactly what you want from the designer. If you're looking for a graphic artist to come in and provide a slick look and overall template for the site, my guess is you could get by with just a few templates to build out from. 20 to 40 hours per page for that kind of work strikes me as excessive.
However, if you're looking for a user interface designer who will put some real consideration into what goes inside the template shell ("epicenter design" as coined by 37signals), then assume more hours. Ideally this person would want to be there to adjust or tweak elements or flows as you analyze your traffic and success rates.
I have a client who usually knows exactly what he wants from a content/layout/interface standpoint, so my work becomes more graphic production. This generally takes under 3 hours per page. But, we've built up a visual vocabulary for the site over a number of months.
Other projects that are starting from scratch may take your aforementioned 20-40 hours up front to arrive at an agreeable overall design direction. But it usually shouldn't take that much time per page.
The title on the post itself (and the slug in the URL) is "Why I Am Never Going to Own a Home Again" (emphasis mine). In the article, the author states "there are many reasons to not buy a home," and the reasons are from his perspective, which presumably is what his friends are asking for.
However, the title here on HN makes it sound like the author is suggesting nobody ever buy a home again — probably not his intent. Sure, there are numerous reasons for not buying a home just as there are numerous reasons for buying a home — it depends on your situation.
I can personally relate to some of the author's arguments. Having rented out the house I bought 5 years ago while I'm living abroad, I'm essentially paying a 2nd rent to make up the difference between what I'm getting from my renter and the sum of my mortgage, taxes and homeowner's insurance.
Read the article. The author is definitely saying nobody should buy a home again. He structured the article as advice using his own personal experience.
Just because we had different interpretations, you shouldn't assume I haven't read the article.
To me, there is a difference between saying: "From my personal experience, when my friends ask my advice, I present them these reasons for not buying a house," and: "Nobody should ever buy a house."
>If nobody bought a house, who would we rent from?
James is saying: don't buy a home and make it your primary residence. He is fine with buying real estate (homes, condos, apartment buildings, REITs, etc) as investment properties.
An added interpretation of mine: he assumes that you would have a property management company take care of the landlord duties for you. In the case of REITs, it's really hands off.
Sources:
By the way, this is going to sound like a contradiction: but I think housing is a great investment right now. I think housing prices have gone down far enough and I can list the reasons why housing as an abstract investment concept is going to go higher from here.
- from the linked article
Rather than spend $100-200k+ on a down payment for a house (which is like throwing money away since it is completely illiquid as long as you own the house) you can put that money in a portfolio of diversified REITS (REZ is an ETF of residential REITs, for instance) if you truly believe in housing. You can do it with some leverage as well if you believe in the idea (like 90% of Americans do) that you should leverage up 200% the single largest investment in your portfolio (your house).
A friend and I were just talking about a "Career Pattern" in which an executive who brought in a 3rd party (often a startup) winds up working for them after leaving his BigCo. It's all too common.
EDIT: New startup idea: a startup that helps people find out about startups. I'm at the point where I assume any 'simple' idea I have probably exists, but finding it can be difficult (I spent about half an hour google-fu'ing and didn't find joesgoals)
It would be useful to identify the primary driver for this increase in demand for HTML5. Is it iPad/iPhone compatibility? Buzzword compliance? How many clients understand what they're getting when they hire someone with this skillset? And have we defined what the HTML5 skillset really entails?
Can I say I am an HTML5 developer because I know to change the DOCTYPE and wrap items in <header>, <section> and <article> tags? Or should the expectation be the ability to produce Flash-like entertainment-oriented sites with audio, video & canvas animation, or web apps that make use of local storage and offline capabilities? It's a pretty wide range of skills.
My gut feeling is a lot of it is buzzword compliance. More and more I'm finding clients who believe that their site isn't going to work on iPad/iPhone unless it's HTML5. Even when we bring up their site on our iPad and show them that it looks great they still say "but I need it to be in HTML5!!!".
It's a little of both I'd say... You'd say you are an HTML5 developer in the same way you'd say you are an XHTML developer. In the end it will get lumped into the same category that AJAX, DHTML, etc have been -> web developer.
The funny thing is that as an HTML page gets increasingly large and complicated, I frequently see developers add HTML comments demarcating precisely which element was just closed, so that in the future it's easier to insert elements at the right level of nesting. Example:
</div><!-- End of #section-nav -->
Would it be a horrible thing if HTML supported an optional id or class attribute in the closing tag?
</div id="section-nav">
Of course it would have to match to validate. Probably not realistic in that my guess is this wouldn't be SGML-backwards compatible.
An editor with good tag matching should in theory solve this for you. Of course, HTML's complex rules of where a closing tag is required and where it isn't makes this a lot harder than the simple paren matching you'd need for S-expressions.
Minuscule nitpick: on the Instagram oAuth screen, it asks if I want to allow "Instadrop - production" access. Now that it's working you can probably drop the "production" part.