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Anyone mind sharing his experience working with Mosso?
I am currently debating using it vs other cloud services (Amazon) or more conventional hosting (SoftLayer/RackSpace).
If I get the theme of this right -

Your only a proper developer if you are writing code for yourself - those getting paid for it "suck".

.NET 2002 was aimed at programmers who suck and did not support the C++ "gods" of programming who were well served by the Win32 API. Oh no - now Win32 and Win64 are broken as well.

I rather gave up then on this "Oh I'm great post" at about that point. Surely, our task is to write excellent software that will be used - we target the platforms our customers have selected (good or bad) because that's where they are. Professionals are entitled to be critical of specific (or even all) platforms but critical or not we have to live in the real world.

Say what you like about Microsoft operating systems (all down hill since Win 2000 if you ask me but...) the guys at MS who build the programming tools and Visual Studio are second to none.
Object Oriented Programming Oversold
This was actually a really interesting posit. I think that it's sort of like instant messaging. Someone is going to create the Jabber of Twitter technology but I think there will still be room for the Twitters and Jaikus to run the game.
Clay (angel investor) states, "Why did Omnidrive fail in my opinion? Something strange can happen in the valley and I think Nik got trapped by it completely. Too many parties, too many conferences, too much working between 1-4am, not enough working normal business hours, too much socializing, not enough focus, no business development, and not enough follow up and delivery."

If true, this is more a lack of self-discipline and prioritizing than the "SF effect."
Nice article. I agree with petercooper in that this works in the US, and thats in most places. I lived in India for a while, and in the bigger cities, this will not fly.

Someone once said that if you have don't say anything in a meeting, then you should not have attended to begin with. I take this (or try to anyways) in real life. Treat any interaction as a way of getting to know someone else. Everyone is interesting, everyone has an opinion, and everybody wants to be listened to. All you have to do is the opening act. But at the end of the day you have to be sincere. If you are _not_ interested, don't bother. People can smell phoniness a mile away (thats the reason why the whole networking thing has such a bad name).

"Never Eat Alone" is a good book on this subject. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but I agree with his core philosophy. If I know you, and you succeed, then I succeed. And I will do everything I can to help me succeed. (Thats my version)
who's cuter? well I think this is settled then.
"This means the open source community will almost certainly be more clever about the solution that one tiny closed source company because there will be lots of heads focused on an easy to understand problem."

To be honest, I have to completely disagree. Lots of heads is not a solution to a pure computer science problem. Most companies are formed around a specific solution to a computer science problem. They then make everything proprietary and profit.

That's like saying, only smart computer scientists exist in the open source world. Not true. In fact, you simply cannot claim that there is a strong trend in one or the other. Many smart brains in open source... Many smart ones in industry as well...
Top 10 Concerns of CFOs
Because I want to sell the product I build to Google for a few million dollars.
Great definition of enterprise software:

With "enterprise" software, you can often get away with a clunky program, because the people who are using it have all been trained on what to do. If doing X makes the application crash, that's okay—they can just be taught not to do X any more.
Yes we do.

Perhaps not all schools teach it this way, but my computer science education included a semester of lectures that started us off in the process of Stepwise Refinement.

In S.R. you start with a goal and progressively, or step-wise, refine it until you are at a level in which it is obvious what code should be written, whether it be an assignment, expression, loop, functional call etc.

I believe S.R. dates from Dijkstra and the Algol-W period.
Yahoo shares fall 19.7 pct as Microsoft withdraws $44B bid
Overcome Your Fear of Trying Something New
Also, see: http://www.fora.tv
How much original thought is going into the floor plan of the next McMansion to be built? Or the next 3-storey steel-framed office block? Are these truly developed from scratch by deeply original thought every time? I admit I have no experience of the building industry, but I seriously doubt it. I believe they are created by following standard recipes and checklists (square feet per desk, maximum distance to restrooms, maximum distance to window). I work on a business park full of 3 storey office blocks. They are all minor variations on the same theme. I live in a housing estate where all the houses are also minor variations on the same theme. Thats what I'm talking about. Maybe architects don't design these buildings. Maybe I'm talking about a more junior part of the construction industry. Either way, it completely lacks any originality.
Why Medicine Should Care Less About 'Sick,' More About 'Normal'
Does anyone else think that all this head scratching over what is the most trivial of problems is hilarious? Twitter is just another naming service. Instead of addressing someone as foo@foo.com, they're now just @foo. All that's needed to make twitter distributed is a new protocol for name resolution. It could be as simple as GET http://distribtwitter.com/whois?foo returning <name>http://www.foo.com/mytwitterfeed</name>. You could write it in a day as a wordpress plugin.

Then other people could come along and write recursive caching distribtwitter name servers so that they can still twitter at people they've never twittered before when distribtwitter.com is down.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that web 2.0 rots the mind and turns trivial problems in to seemingly impossible problems.
> It is hugely inefficient compared to rail.

Good point.

Compare moving a shipping container worth of stuff by tractor-trailer on rubber wheels on pavement (including dealing with traffic) to moving it on steel rails. Not even in the same ballpark.
<i>It's a hard problem to which I have only a partially satisfactory answer... but I digress.</i>

On the contrary, you touch the heart of the matter. You say what you are doing is "hacking", with the implication that there exists some other process by which your problem could be solved. Can you tell me what this process is, and why you are not following it?
I can also recommend mod_wsgi in daemon mode. The developer (Graham Dumpleton) is really great about supporting it on its mailing list.
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So I went to Startup School
i'd suggest that you learn to use photoshop, do the basics, photo manipulation, cool patterns, etc.. read some photoshop tutorials and such.

although thats not freehand art, it'll help get you there in multiple ways. its a good place to start.
Loopt should keep a serious eye on the south korean market then, because it's currently the most advanced country with mobile phone technology. They all walk around watching real TV on their phone (not internet TV or else pseudo-TV). You can see a little of our own future just watching them.
Ask YC: What do you think of CakePHP?
Would you recommend it for a startup?
Is it scalable?
He's posted numerous posts on this pertinent issue. As much as I love Twitter, I'm considering unsubscribing to his feed.
Yeah I agree about the suburbia problem, but I still maintain the reason that public transport has such a bad name in most of the US is because the only contact we have with it is these 'trial projects' that don't actually go anywhere and so seem totally useless. My argument was that if you want people to actually try something new, it has to be useful to them, so you have to build out a whole system on faith (faith that the public will use it). This is probably why bus systems are more common than rail. Routes are more flexible and you are less committed to mistakes since you can change them as you learn where demand is.

> The amount of money the government dumps into the highway system is massive.

And imagine if all that money were instead dumped into rail transport? (Hello Europe.) I don't think privatizing rail would lead to much innovation regarding public transport. Rail is vastly more efficient than highways (over long distances), but the only place that private companies profit is in freight, and they are already doing that. I think you could have private companies own/operate the passenger trains themselves, but the actual track would have to be built out by someone with billions to do it (on total faith that it will someday actually pay off). Maybe Warren Buffet will get in on that, but an easy solution is to spend some of that crazy highway money on it.
Build Rails Apps Which Build Rails Apps For You
Ask YC: What does it mean to own a web application?
Does owning the domain name cover it? Do I need to patent the code? Similarly, if I want to make a web version of existing 3rd party software that is not offered online - would I be breaking any laws by creating a web version that offers same functionality but a different brand?
cake's ok. i kind of prefer codeigniter, but thats a personal preference. here's some performance numbers:

http://www.sellersrank.com/web-frameworks-benchmarking-resul...
The completely described process for buttering bread is of sufficient complexity that we should never attempt to make a process for developing software. Unless you keep it simple:

Step one: Look medusa in the face.
Twitter isn't a "computer science problem". It's a nice GUI for subscribing to RSS feeds; RSS feeds that can only contain 140-character posts. Oh, and it can email new entries to your phone.
We took a long look at CakePHP, Symphony and Code Igniter during the first month of http://tinyurl.com/3amqf4 (democratic development = fail).

We determined that Code Igniter is a cleaner MVC framework, handles more requests/sec etc. http://tinyurl.com/5dcjzd has performance data.
The SF effect itself is a lack of self discipline.
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disclaimer: I am not a great coder.

I think CakePHP is one of the easiest frameworks to deploy (you literally just upload the files and modify the config file and you're up and running) and given that it's PHP there are tons of tutorials for how to "do things" with Cake. Also just about every web host in the world supports PHP out of the gate, so you won't have to install anything extra.

Other than those things, I think it comes down to preference of programming language - if you like PHP you'll probably like Cake. If you like Ruby or Python, you probably won't.
I don't know... I think the DS Lite and the Wiimote are approaching Apple's level of simplicity in design, although they lack the premium in cost.

As for ugly Apple products, there are probably some out there that qualify (mostly non-Jobs stuff)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II_series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
I like this post. I wouldn't mind being on the open source twitter effort.
I work in an office that has a doorway that opens onto a brick wall. Fortunately they knocked a new doorway into another wall before walling up the old one, but it's a bit of a hack.

Even architects find it hard to plan for growth it seems :)
>> The fact is this: there is no process for programming.

I disagree. There is a process, but it is so basic we may not realize it:

1. identify the big problem

2. break it down into smaller problems

3. solve the smaller problems

4. repeat as needed
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> "Many smart brains in open source... Many smart ones in industry as well..."

And many of them are the same brains, showing up in different places at different times.

Twitter could have been disintermediated any time in the past year; the interesting question is why this hasn't happened already.
Dual n-back: IQ boosting exercise
YC companies consistently score impressive PR hits. Would love to know how this one came about.
Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf
"On Jan. 31, just before Microsoft’s uninvited bid for Yahoo became public, Yahoo closed at $19.18."

Now, after reporting good quarterly results, they are trading at $24.04.

The sky isn't falling.

Update: that puts Yahoo up 23% since Jan 31st. For comparison Google is only up 5% over the same period.
this is a little confusing to me, because i've been working with .net since it came out and i always thought of it was an example of the type of good products microsoft was capable of releasing if they tried. there are certainly bad portions of the API, but i don't think it's nearly as bad as the author makes it out to be. an obscure threading bug in windows forms is not really that damning. assuming you couldn't find an equally stupid problem in swing (if even java is good enough) it's not even a relevant issue if you're not using winforms, and not everyone is.
I recommend Zend Framework. This is use at will and corporate friendly licensing.
actually the scaling is absolutely an interesting problem. Its the reason they keep going down. because messages are not point to point it is a much harder problem than instant messaging. I have spent a fair amount of time considering the issue in detail because a friend of mine developed a caching system targeted at microblogging. It is non-trivial, and cannot be done with RSS feeds.
it's a simple roi issue: would i rather spend a lot of time writing something which (most likely) no one could care less to read vs programming something new / cool ?

the choice is almost a no brainer at this point in time.
Choosing a Language
We run our own business, and I have set up several subsidiary companies in the process. If your ownership structure is simple, it is actually pretty easy to get started. Here's what I do:

1. have your state filings done by a registration service (I have set up several LLCs through "the company corporation") and get their starter kit with books, seal, certificates, etc.

2. register for an EIN number with the IRS. you can do this online for free:
https://sa1.www4.irs.gov/modiein/individual/index.jsp

3. once you have a EIN, you can open a bank account
one word: plastics
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Open Source and .NET
Bootstrapping: the esoteric art of writing a compiler for a language in itself
I've been a user of mosso's for 2 years. And quite honestly I would not recommend them. They do some things well (availability of support, fast servers), and do others surprisingly bad: ill-informed support techs, really odd clustering problems like two authoritative ftp servers for one domain in one recent case that no one there seems to have a clue how to fix, and usage (hit based) metering.

I hope they fix the problems, but for now, I wouldn't recommend them.
This seems to be similar to http://cognitivefun.net posted some time ago... Cool idea. Thanks
I have built web apps in PHP for 8 years now, and created a few crawlers in perl and python over the years.

I looked at Cake and Symfony and began creating sample apps, both are an improvement from building php apps without a framework but I opted for django instead.
If you think it's a hard problem, you aren't thinking about it correctly.

When you say "@foo Hi, foo!" You're sending a message to some person named foo. That's a push. If you start thinking of it as a pull, then you get in to the sort of trouble you're mired in.

In a distributed system the process goes like this:

1) Sender queries name server: WHOIS foo?
2) Nameserver responds foo is http://www.foo.com/mytwitterfeed.
3) Sender pings recipient http//www.foo.com/mytwitterfeed?ping=messageid&origin=bar
4) Recipient queries name server: WHOIS bar?
5) Name server responds http://bar.com/mytwitterfeed
6) Recipient requests message text, http://bar.com/mytwitterfeed?id=messageid and verifies it actually is addressed to him.

From then on, you have to worry about spam but that's a solved problem (killfiles, Bayesian filtering, etc.) No caching is involved. Recipients store messages addressed to them, just like any other messaging system. This isn't at all a hard problem.
Why Frameworks Suck
Was anyone else slightly perturbed by this article? The existence of well-funded and -connected companies like Intellectual Ventures, and their obvious influence over the authors such as Mr. Gladwell that serve to glorify them to the reading public, is rather frightening to me. As far as I can tell, they do not make a single product, nor do they provide a single service. Instead, they charge others for the right to use "their" ideas.

It sends a bit of a chill down my spine -- I'm trying to imagine what my copy of Kleppner & Ramsey's 'Quick Calculus' (about a $20 book) would have cost if Newton had 'patented' Calculus, and if his (hypothetical, avaricious) descendants and their attorneys had insisted on their 'right' to a cut of the profits.
It's not the big ideas that are rare - it's the execution/implementation.
I don't feel qualified to really comment here considering how few languages I've really immersed myself into, so I'll add this snippet from Paul Graham's "Great Hackers" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html ) essay as commentary, which immediately came to mind when reading bullet #2:

"A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT."
Actually, I wonder about your assertion as to whether Mel would be suitable for a corporate programming job. In the sense that no typical corporate hiring manager would approve of him and his habits, then no, of course he would not fit.

However, even corporations occasionally need people who just get things done. I have, in my past life as a programmer at a bank, seen some incredibly opaque, hard-to-maintain systems hacked together in the course of a few sleepless nights in 1992, which still tick, do their work, and help generate millions in revenue. IT departments then take months, if not years, to attempt to replace some of that code, and typically fail. So occasionally, people who work somewhat like Mel do get approved by higher-ups who value the productivity of one incredibly smart hacker over the productivity of a mediocre team.
Angel Financing - term sheets !
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Part-2: http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/06/angel-financing-term-sheets-part-2/

Part-3: http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/20/angel-financing-term-sheets-part-3/
What I hate about blog: Authors are mostly full of ego and does little fact check on what they are ranting about. Reading blogs turn out most of the time to be a great waste of time.

Why don’t write a blog myself? If I have to I will write about my own projects; for now I’m too busy. I generally prefer forums if I want to give my opinion on specific subject.
Anybody want to read my thoughts more completely expressed?

Well, there you have it.
I do not understand how someone can look at a primitive 160-character web SMS system and suggest that it was open APIs that made them vulnerable to competitors.
I beg your pardon? It absolutely is their responsibility as shareholders to do that _if they want the best price for their shares_. Example: Tonight after the markets close, I offer $35 a share for Microsoft, in cash, conditional on obtaining 51% of the company.

The market thinks about this, and MSFT's price when the markets open tomorrow morning reflects their guess as to whether I will get 51% of the company or not, whether Ballmer will have me killed^H^H^H^H^H^H tied up in litigation to prevent me buying the company and firing him, whether Yahoo will raise some money from Google to buy MSFT as a white knight, whatever.

The point is, the market price when a company is "in play" reflects a bunch of people making wild-assed guesses about the possible outcomes and the relative likelihood of each outcome.

If you are strictly in it for the money, it's your responsibility to make your own guess. If you guess is higher than the market value, you hang on to the stock. If your guess is less than the market value, you sell.

Lawyers will do anything, but IMHO, the only time you sue management is if they make a promise they do not deliver.

But what if Ballmer stands up and says, "Do not sell to Reg for $35, we are $28 today but I am going to buy Yahoo and our stock will be worth substantially more than $35 as a result of the transaction." I don't get my 51%, and then Ballmer doesn't buy yahoo. Now shareholders should sue, they hung on to their stock because of what Ballmer promised.

Consider what happens if MSFT's stock trades at $33 and Ballmer blocks me from buying MSFT in court, then the stock drops back to $28. I can see a lawsuit. But what really happened? Shareholders culd have had a sure $33 in cash by calling or emailing their broker and saying "sell."

They _chose_ to hang on. Why? because they gambled on getting $35 if I got 51% of the stock? or hoping for $40 if I had to raise my bid? That's their gamble, why should Ballmer be on the hook for their wagering?

Hanging on to your stock because you guess that the stock will be worth more is entirely your problem. Hanging on to your stock because management make vague promises about the long term value of the stock is also your problem. You certainly can't sue the week after the offer.
Ask YC: do you think yahoo share at 15-20% below friday price is a hot deal?
Do you think yahoo will bounce back (in short and long term) - may be after a deal with google in couple of weeks.
Charlie Rose has over 4000 videos on his YouTube channel, if you're into in-depth, yet very calm interviews:

http://youtube.com/user/CharlieRose
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Why Microsoft caved. For now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181204
What about offering $24 in 1996?

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-01-1996/swol-01-apple.html

The board turned Sun down and then went out and paid $400 million to buy NeXT. For all intents and purposes, they paidf $400 million to buy an operating system, hire an OS team headed by Avie Trevanian, and oh yes, provide a nice signing bonus for their new part-time CEO, some guy named Steve.

Lots of shareholders grumbled.

Of course, that was Apple and this is Yahoo. I don't personally think Jerry has Steve's touch, but I sincerely hope he makes me look like the wrong end of an Equine.
The dirty secret of ec2: it cannot currently be made HA (highly available)