I want this for something like Fiverr.

Instead of my kids accumulating more junk, they learn the skills of hiring and delegating.

Don't want to mow the lawn in this heat? Use your allowance to somebody else to do it. As long as the job is done they will earn their allowance.

I just need a way to make sure they're not outsourcing their homework or paying somebody buy them alcohol.

I find this disturbing in a way I can't quite quantify. Kids should do things, not just appear to do things because they're clever about outsourcing to someone worse off.

Hiring and managing someone else, while being the point-of-contact with your clients, is doing a thing; it's a very useful life-skill, in fact. There are other useful life-skills they might be better off not delegating away the learning opportunities for, of course, but usually "chores" are less learning experiences and more "I used to do this thing, but now you're old enough to take the load off me."

Of course, if there's no life-lesson, why not just cut out the middle-man and have a local chore marketplace where kids from all around the neighbourhood can directly bid on the contract to mow your lawn. (Mostly kidding, but that'd be somewhat interesting for people who don't have kids, and don't need a full-on gardener.)

Here's a little life lesson that was kicked down to me:

"Don't ever ask/command/order someone to do something that you would not do yourself."

Interpret how you like, but to me it means, "Get your hands dirty and appreciate what it takes to do a job before you delegate."

I tend to think that doing physical work, understanding what's involved, is educational, informative, and motivating. A significant part of the world does work with their body. It's important in having empathy for other "classes" (assuming your kid gets an "information worker" job). Related or not, it's important to also learn how to do a job you may not like well, to pursue excellence in one's work.

Lesson learnt by kid: Money is all that matter. Never bother with anything else.

My mom wrote books using WordStar on the original IBM PC. She didn't like the default keys so she learned assembly to change them.

She didn't change ^K^B, I still remember that one.

I had to learn WordPerfect in High School and hated the clunky command codes and the keyboard overlays required to make sense of it all.

I wish Facebook, Twitter, etc had some kind of "accuracy checker" built in.

For example, if somebody posts a photo and describes as something that shocking that recently happened, the social network could add a tag "original photo taken year in location, context."

This would also be helpful in election years.

That would be awesome. Maybe we can do a Chrome Extension that would automatically find the initial photo using Google Image Search?

Ot: how did they do that header in github-flavored markdown?

Github's preview mode doesn't render it correctly and I can't find anything about it in Github's docs.

Here's the source:

  ---
  title: Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book,   Special Edition
  author: Michael Abrash
  date: '1997-07-01'
  identifier:
  - scheme: ISBN
    text: 1576101746
  publisher: The Coriolis Group
  category: 'Web and Software Development: Game Development,Web   and Software Development:
    Graphics and Multimedia Development'
  chapter: '01'
  pages: 004-019
  ---

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/blob/master/s...

I'm surprised that even turns out as well as it does. Those headers are for pandoc. I guess Github must have a Yaml extension to their Markdown renderer which is picking it up.

Hi, I'm one of the creators of Doodle or Die.

The drawing tool in the game and the anti-cheating systems are both things I created.

I'm impressed with your app. Instead of converting a bitmap to a pixel-by-pixel rendention (which people have done and it looks obvious) it re-draws it like a real drawing, picking one color at a time.

Paying users get a replay feature. It replays fairly realistically and that's difficult to detect as cheating.

Nice work!

Hi,

Thanks, it's great to hear that from you. I was also going to implement the brush changing logic which would enable it to draw on large areas of single color with a big brush and further optimize other parts to make it even more realistic (detect shapes and draw them completely and draw over them like humans and so) but then I thought, that would ruin the fun. Actually I'm a paying user of the game[0] and never had the intention of ruining the fun for anyone, so I stopped. I'm a big fan of DoD and how it evolved.

Keep up the good work, and thanks for being nice =)

[0]: http://doodleordie.com/profile/egeozcan

$10,000 at $3/album means over 3000 albums were sold that day, out of 6000 available (according to his ad). So more than half of this random collection was worth buying, and if lets say each person buys three albums, over 1000 people came to his house?

Works on the new Evo 4G LTE.

I wish it had drawing ability, but your art skills are way better than anything I could do.

Was this inspired by Windoodles? http://windoodles.tumblr.com/

I see you are using Node and Express on the frontend - what other Node modules are you using or found useful?

We use a whole bunch, some of the main ones:

- async => helpful async library https://github.com/caolan/async

- nodeinspector => node js debugging in a nice webkit UI https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector

- riakjs => for talking to Riak: http://riakjs.org/

- knox => S3 helper https://github.com/LearnBoost/knox

- optimist => helper lib for writing command line node apps (no more bash :) https://github.com/substack/node-optimist

- mocha => unit testing node code https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha

- emailjs => email helper https://github.com/eleith/emailjs

- uglifyjs => code minification https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS

I've actually been curating this set for a little while. http://clipboard.com/ken/nodejs_modules

Doodle or Die is all HTML5.

Doodles are stored as JSONP: http://doodles.s3.amazonaws.com/d2/5iSFn-ME/8qp73zuBe.js

This json renders in canvas as the page loads like these amazing drawings: http://doodleordie.com/profile/underwearhero

We want to make a native mobile app because we've heard that HTML5 is slow enough to frustrating. I tried a Lua-based framework and it was fun to use but the resulting drawing too was too slow to be usable because every line had to be created as a new object, instead of Canvas-like pixel manipulation.

Impressive stuff!

> The only technical problem where I've seen node be a unique solution is dealing with third party apis concurrently.

Use a library like Async, it makes this really easy.

https://github.com/caolan/async

(assume redis, mongo, facebook, and callback are all functions)

async.parallel([ redis, mongo, facebook], callback);

callback is called when all of the others are complete. If you have dependencies, like facebook needs the output of redis and mongo then use async.auto which will automatically run things in parallel and in the order you need them.

Yes, what I was saying is that Node makes that really simple, and PHP, Python, Ruby, etc don't. That's more of a side effect of having everything be asynchronous though.

This is really simple in Python using greenlet, stackless, or gevent.

Or threads. Simple, non-shared state threads are not that difficult to write, and for IO bound operations, they are not terribly inefficient.