Why are you generating styling at all? It's not dynamic information. It's a static asset that can be cached.
Semantically correct markup uses fewer tags, so the output is smaller (also, there'd be no online styling, which would also make the page smaller). Even a small difference on a popular site could matter. But only you can answer that for HN.
Look, do what you want. You want to write bullshit markup, be my guest. But there isn't a single web dev in this community who would code output like this for their own site. They're just too chickenshit to tell you.
The OP isn't talking about Ajax calls and Dom transformations. He's talking about using semantically correct markup (c'mon, it is literally an ordered list) and a style sheet. Things that would make the site faster, easier to maintain, and easier to parse.
If this were anyone other than pg, you'd all be excoriating the developer for living in the 90s.
By all means, try to raise your rates. The first step toward being paid a lot of money is asking for it.
But if these templates sound like a good idea to you, you need to focus on something else first. The only way you could change your rate via email is if you're doing your freelance work without a formal contract, which is a colossal mistake.
So, forget these email templates. First, get all your clients to sign a services agreement. The time to negotiate your rate is when you and your client draft and sign the statements of work appended to that agreement.
In my experience, parenthood is often challenging because we are given so little good information in advance concerning what is actually challenging about parenting.
When we talk about the difficulties of parenthood, we normally talk about sleepless nights and tantrums and expense. We do this, I think, because these are safe topics. They allow us to have ritualized conversations about parenthood. We know what we are supposed to say and we say those things, even though we often don't think they're true or important.
But the real crisis isn't something we talk about. Raising children requires a huge commitment of time and energy--time and energy we can no longer give to ourselves or our spouse. And while almost all new parents try to keep their pre-baby lives intact for some period of time, eventually the futility becomes so obvious that they relent and cull many activities out of their lives to make space for the baby. The real crisis is one of identity. We fear that by cutting so many of the things we care(d) about out of our lives, we risk not being ourselves anymore. Am I the same person now? Is my wife the same? We don't talk about these questions because many of us don't like the answers.
For me personally, any such fears were unwarranted. I love my new life. Having children improved an already wonderful marriage--my wife and I are now an unstoppable team. My toddler has become one of my best friends. The infant just looks like a new buddy in waiting. But I'm a fundamentally happy person. I suspect it's like winning the lottery. If you're happy beforehand, you'll be happy afterward; if you're unhappy beforehand, you'll be unhappy afterward.
These are all valid points, but I think you're overstating the case a bit. Certainly, IP creation should not be routinely outsourced, but it can be outsourced in limited cases to the benefit of the organization.
I think there's a common misperception that outsourcing firms charge higher rates because their resources are (supposedly) more technically proficient. But, at least at my company, this is rarely what's going on. Most of my clients have excellent technical staffs. Our clients hire us in part, of course, because we are talented technologists, but the larger part, I believe, is because of our ability to acquire domain knowledge rapidly and our ability to retain that knowledge over long stretches of time when we aren't actively involved in the development process. Finding a comparable resource to hire or contract is so onerous that it doesn't make sense when what the company really needs is to achieve a goal now.
In other words, any product development company worth a damn hires as much for business acumen as it does for technical acumen. Otherwise, what would be the point?
I'm sure that's true for many, many firms. But, in my experience running a domestic product development firm, the single best way to acquire repeat business is to exit completely and gracefully. Doing so builds a trusted relationship not only with the business managers who authorize our work but also with the technical resources who have to live with our code. When we give both groups reasons to trust our integrity, I find that I'm able to negotiate better, longer-term maintenance agreements (when those make sense) AND that I'm presented with opportunities to bid on future projects.
Clearly, many HNers have had poor experiences with outsourcing (whether domestic or overseas). But there are good guys out there, I promise.
I had the same initial reaction. On further thought, I think the author understands the difference. The problem is that he's not a very good writer.
When he writes "one single space", he means what we all think of as padding in one direction or margin in one direction. I think all he's really saying is "don't create extra padding by adding margin" and "don't create extra margin by adding padding."
The argument is valid: it's just kind of obvious and poorly worded.
If you do have trademark problems with HootSuite, you could also consider using an elephant with a couple small birds on it.
Elephants have a symbiotic relationship with a kind of bird that rides around on their backs and provides a valuable service (in this case, eating ticks--feel free to leave that part out!).
I think this would serve as a good metaphor for using tweets to facilitate the long-term retention of information.
My own experience in this area suggested another, more fundamental problem.
In the commercial world, we expect any idea to fail many, many times before we figure out how to make it work for the market. We embrace, rather than stigmatize, failure. Academics are conditioned to view failure as, at best, deeply embarrassing and, at worst, career-ending.
My experience is, of course, anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth. The researchers I met cared more about science than money, and because they perceived the commercialization process as potentially damaging to their academic careers, they threw a huge fit when technology transfer was broached. In the end, the university backed off (which warrants another discussion altogether).
Hi, there. I'm Kenny Dialoggins. If you're a Rails developer who wants to use scriptaculous dialogs but doesn't want to mess around with JavaScript, maybe we should hang out.
That's my reading, too. The author is really making a point about the fundamental challenge of programming purely logical models in the physical world.
It's a little disappointing to me that the HN community is more interested in the concrete example than the meta topic itself.
Amazon Prime is a great service on its face. If you buy from Amazon regularly, it pays for itself, if not in dollars than in convenience.
I've been on the fence about readers for a while now. I'm a programmer, but I have a degree in American literature. Most of the books I own were written over a century ago. Unfortunately, these books simply don't come in a Kindle edition often enough to justify the purchase of the reader. But if Amazon gave me the reader, it probably would lead me to buy more new titles and magazine subscriptions. And, of course, eventually the titles I want will be available in Kindle editions.
I guess the real question is how many additional sales would Amazon gain from someone like me + my likelihood of upgrading to the next version of the Kindle vs. the production cost of the Kindle. I bet the math makes sense over the long haul. It's not that different a calculus than I use when I buy Amazon Prime every year.
Semantically correct markup uses fewer tags, so the output is smaller (also, there'd be no online styling, which would also make the page smaller). Even a small difference on a popular site could matter. But only you can answer that for HN.
Look, do what you want. You want to write bullshit markup, be my guest. But there isn't a single web dev in this community who would code output like this for their own site. They're just too chickenshit to tell you.