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I could be wrong but I think this is a satire on what happened to Posterous, he's saying Posterous is the "landlord" and they built this "space" to work in for free; but they just did it with the intention of getting their name out there knowing that there would be an exit at some point. He feels betrayed b/c there was all of this trust built up and now they are closing down.
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People ... don't have tests? o_O In 2012?

I am seriously considering putting together a "Software Engineering for Small Teams" course or set of articles. With a little bit of expertise, you can inject testing in to most projects, use the minimum of Agile that'll help, and generally massively raise your game - and by that I mean code faster, better, and more reliably, with considerably less stress.

(edited: turns out I forgot which year we're in :-P)
I don't believe anybody that says they test all functionality. Most? Sure. All? No way. Not in a non-trivial codebase.

Article about the group that writes the space shuttle software, sort of relevant?: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html
I'm given to understand that Debian and Arch linux have GNU Hurd live CDs out there for people who want to run it. I don't really know much about the OS, but does it meet your requirements?
> The rest of the web2py framework is excellent, and support is very good.

Which parts? IMO, the web2py framework is not excellent.

It sounds like you hit some limitations with the DAL and switched away, but those type of limitations are peppered throughout the framework.

Web2py is not well designed, not standard python (look at the source), and it tricks newbies into bad practices.
I thought this guy was an "executive director"? I think a lowly VP writing something like this wouldn't make nearly the splash he is making right now.

A story like this is a nightmare to GS though. They've always prided themselves on valuing their reputation above all else and this is yet another shot to what they want to be seen as. However, it is important to realize that the public's perception of GS is different than their customers' perception. They were #2 in the league tables for M&A last year and their long time clients haven't shied away from using their services.
I thought it was rather obvious what I would like to see you do: Always support the latest version of Python as soon as possible after it is released. Not supporting Python 3 years after it was released isn't just a problem for Django, it is a problem for Python. I'm assuming that Django's developers know that as well and that they (you) care about Python, so that's why I don't understand why this hasn't been fixed a long time ago.

I can totally understand that you don't like my Oracle/SAP comparison and I do apologize for the tone, but there is actually some substance behind it. Oracle and SAP provide core transactional capabilities to very large corporations. These corporations make money based on their scale, not because they are particularly nimble on the IT side.

They're not startups. They rarely do any real greenfield stuff. They don't hire developers who want to be on the bleeding edge. Their IT culture is one of mediocrity and that's why it doesn't matter how many generations/years the software they use lags behind the latest platform version.

I would have thought and hoped that Django is not just for that type of corporation.

But judging by the reactions here you seem to be in sync with the majority of your users, so the problem isn't yours so much as it is mine. I should probably not get agitated about it and just move on.
I'm glad to see a news organization emphasizing this point. I bring up physics in conversation with my friends, who aren't as familiar with the subject, perhaps more often than I should. On more than one occasion, they have remarked on how it seems such a waste to simply find evidence of a single "god particle." They're often fascinated by the amount of openness this project has achieved, in addition to the many, many experiments and projects that are utilizing this incredible machine.
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Indeed. Maybe it's actually a metaphor for cool free apps and what happens when the startup behind them gets acquired?
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It would be awesome if he pulled a George Costanza and showed up to work next Monday and pretended that the op-ed piece was a joke.
Where's the option for "We thoroughly and immediately test every change (and all affected processes) ourselves to also ensure UX is top notch"?
Well, there's `all` and there's virtually all. All is 100% branch and statement coverage, and is a big waste of time.

When I saw my codebase has 'all' functionality tested, I mean we don't commit code without tests included too. I think that's a pretty reasonable definition.
I thought it was interesting that tanenbaum's operating system is now using something that Linus made. I think it is a neat detail to an old story. Circle of life, small world whatever cliche you want to attach to it.

It was not meant as a jab at minix, i thought others would appreciate the continued interconnection between Linus and AST. I apologize that I did not explain my comment in greater detail.
We already have SMS though :) The answer to killing email isn't turning it into SMS. There is a lot of value in long emails, not everything is an action item. Email is a todo list, a social networking medium, a message queue. This is why superseding email is so hard.
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The funny thing is that you'd pass by millions of rocks on the side of the road, but once a single one of them splits open and shows it's got gold inside then it becomes valuable to you and you stop and pick it up.

The only ones that complain are the rocks that never get picked up.
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There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended. I apologise if it comes across that way.

I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.

FWIW, I knew this could happen when I first started using Posterous, and I deliberately cut my blogging in two. The stuff that is just hot air—like this post—is on Posterous. I could honestly live with losing all of it, permanently. It’s personal and not mission-critical to my livelihood.

The stuff that I cherish, the stuff with code, is on Github. That’s my business, and I treat it differently. They seem to have a working business, and I have an automatic backup strategy, I have other places I can re-host it, I can Jekyl-ize it to a standard web host, I have my own exit plan.

So no quarrel with Posterous, I’m not losing a thing. I’m just pointing out that while I might do something personal with a pre-revenue business, I’m not betting real money on it.
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Even more amazing... it's 2012!
Sometimes I'll forget what year it is too, or maybe that was just a typo. But my OCD just isn't letting me let this slide...

*2012
"tax" giveaway? It's all borrowed money anyway, not actual tax revenue. Drop in the bucket compared with the rest of the federal budget, and most of it was paid back.
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With no new data since March 1, it seems like the page would be better served as just a static page, instead of regenerating the graph from data every time...
I believe it does. I think I seen at least one UK-based YC funded startup.
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Could you define what you mean by "overpaid"? Is it merely a complaint that CEOs are paid more than you wish they were, or something else?

Meanwhile the rest of us produce vastly more than, say, 20 years ago, yet wages remain mostly flat.

This claim betrays a misunderstanding of how productivity is measured, and how workers are compensated for their productivity (i.e., comp is wages + benefits, not wages).

Wages + benefits is not flat. http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_displa...

And productivity can easily go up due to factors unrelated to workers. E.g., if a company replaces workers with robots, the measured productivity (total production / # of employees) of the remainder will go up. Is this a reason to increase their pay?
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I always understood HN to be more a place for sharing interesting stories than a machine for garnering attention, but the very idea of a "best time" seems to imply a secondary motive for sharing a link. Not sure I'm comfortable with that.
Is minix competing with things like VxWorks and QNX? I did a cursory google/wikipedia search for minix uses and the results were all for education.
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The author must be really angry at Goldman. Didn't he get his 500k bonus, but only 200k? The other thing I learned is that corporations are out there to make a profit. Who would have thought? However, as an outsider, it's good to have some insight into the real business model of Goldman. It appears it partly relies on information asymmetry, i.e. ripping off clients without them knowing. This business model seems to have been damaged by this bad PR that aims to dissolve illusions of the clients. I hope this kids gets his bonus, but probably Goldman will just fire him after such a move. This is what happens when there are too many greedy hands wanting the honeypot, but one isn't satisfied. Not that unique to Goldman to be honest. When your business model relies on information asymmetry, whistle blowers can be a real pain. To combat that Goldman must discredit the source, and distract from the topic, which is what we saw here in their response.
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Is it just a question of paying lots of money for a distro? Or is it a question of the market decentralizing, and so vendor-centric solutions doing increasingly poorly?

BTW, this back and forth proves what Heisenberg forcefully argued in his book, "Physics and Philosophy," that theorizing fundamentally involves projecting your own assumptions onto data you see. We all see the same graph. We get to argue to no end as to what it means.
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I agree. When interviewing I can usually weed out those who write tests (and write good tests) from those who just claim they do.

How?

People who don't really write tests will tell me that the advantage of unit testing is being able to see when code changes have broken stuff (which is fair enough and true).

Those who regularly write unit tests will probably bring this up- but often their first point will be 'It helps to structure code properly, make me think about dependencies, modularise code appropriately'
I don't think the issue is so much "what should they do now", because what they should do now is constrained by what they can do. The issue is "what should they have done in 2008?" - should they for example have said "please note that our current business model is not sustainable, and while you are welcome to enjoy it while it's here you are cautioned not to behave as though it will be here for ever"? Providing a limited, ephemeral, or best-effort service is a perfectly OK thing to do provided your service users know that's what you're doing and can (as raganwald says he has) tailor their behavour accordingly
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Took me a minute or so to figure what he was talking about. I am not sure what the greater message is, here. Was Posterous "evil" for selling themselves to Twitter? Or, should users generally beware any company that does not have a revenue? At what level of revenue should users stop worrying? Not saying that it is likely, but should users of Dropbox worry that Apple will acquire them?

Completely separately, Posterous lost all personal credit when they did that anti-Tumblr campaign a while ago. Not that I care at all about Tumblr, but I felt it was in bad taste. When a company does bad things, I cannot help but imagine that they will do other "bad" things.
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6.4/5.2 = 1.23 .

Is 23% improvement considered that small(assuming it's statistically significant) ?
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Ask HN: What does it take to be a YC single founder?
I'm strongly considering applying to YC's summer funding cycle, and I was wondering what the HN community could tell me about what "makes" a Y Combinator application. What are Paul Graham and the other investors at YC looking for in people?

I'm a 17-year old college student (graduated high school in 2011), and I've been programming since I was very young. I've always been interested in computers, and I released an iPhone when I was 15, which was a great experience. My job at another startup (which I joined in September of this year) has also gone very well.

I'm just wondering if my age, and/or lack of experience, would disqualify me for consideration as a YC applicant. My hope is that my passion for software engineering and technology will make me a more attractive candidate.

Thank you very much for any input you can offer me.
According to the Mozilla wiki[1] the release is on-target for Firefox 14, which means it should hopefully land in Nightly within the next six weeks.

I feel your pain, though. Download Statusbar[2] has been indispensable for my purposes. Will be curious to see if the new download manager will be worth switching back to the default.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:P.A./Panel-based_Download_Mana...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-stat...
people are already beginning to use other methods to discover, and find what they need. for instance, the app store. instead of googling, people are searching the app store instead. another instance is siri, or stackoverflow, or yelp. in a sense, it won't be 1 thing that will eat into google's market share but a bunch of other ways to find things.
It just looks like an arrow pointing down. Seems to general to me.
Today there are many more startup accelerators than five years ago. MassChallenge and Start-Up Chile offer mentoring and seed cash without taking equity stakes in founders' companies. Instead these accelerators are attracting talent to their area: Boston and Chile in these cases.

Is it fair to say that YC has decided to step up their offering by guiding founders through the idea brainstorming session? Instead of playing the bidding game of taking smaller equity stakes or coughing up more cash, YC has decided to give founders something much more valuable: an idea. It is always refreshing to see companies focus on innovating the product and not the pricing. Kudos to YC! I expect other accelerators to follow through.
The class only took 5 weeks (24X2 hours sessions).
But on top of that, I wonder how much management could be eliminated. Management is, in most businesses, fundamentally a communication infrastructure. How much of it can be replaced through implementing IT through was that work for FOSS projects?

My thinking is to have a relatively small group of high level managers, a group of project managers, and an HR department, and eliminate all middle management. I think teams should have rotating leadership but coordination should take place in ways which include both the upper management and folks on the floor directly using things like email lists.

Maybe this is a pipe dream. But maybe it can be made to work.....
Interesting metaphor.

The reason this doesn't happen with real-estate is because unlike startups - there are no Facebooks.

Someone once explained Disney's town of Celebration to me this way:

It took Disney more than a decade to develop Celebration. They spent several hundred million dollars. In the end, they made about $200 million. The ROI on Pocahontas was significantly better.
> There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended by the post, and I apologise if it comes across that way.

> I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.

That sounds like (and certainly comes across far more strongly in the blog post as) a criticism. It sounds fairer the way it was put here than how you said it there. Not having a monetization strategy that involves charging customers is not coextensive with being a mere portfolio exhibit.
I use Posterous, Weebly, Hacker News, and twitter, and love them all. I don't pay a nickel to any of them and never will.

I hope very much that they all last forever.

But I will lose nothing if any or all of them disappear without giving me a chance to retrieve my data. Why? Because everything I've ever posted to any of them was already saved on my hard drive first. A simple solution for a frugal, OCD hacker who wants the best of all worlds.

<HN201203141055.txt>

[UPDATE: Several people have suggested automating this or making it easier. My response: If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.]
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I think we're currently in the era of the government-funded type of web projects that serve a great purpose for a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise be willing to pay for them. Right now the climate is such that developers with an idea can very inexpensively get that idea built and used, which can in turn, bolster their own resumes or possibly even result in an IPO exit or acquisition.

Profit is not crucial because the only asset that has seen substantial investment is time. However, I don't feel sorry for consumers of these services. The services are, after all, free, and don't usually make any guarantees that they will be around for ever. In this case we're talking about a blogging website that's been around for a few years, not a bank. A little perspective helps a lot.
Interesting. For how many people is "working at a start up" the goal in and of itself?

I've always thought "I want to be an entrepreneur, now what should I do?" was backwards. Rather, it seemed to me that history of real innovation is full of "I have this great idea, I guess I have to be an entrepreneur now". For example, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Ford.

But maybe my perspective is skewed by a type of survivorship bias -- were Wozniak/Jobs initially working on other projects that failed and pivoted towards Apple? Or maybe they happened to hit on a good idea first, but what about others? I guess YC has the data, so maybe it's time for me to re-evaluate how successful companies are born.
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I have heard this over and over, "wohoo Linus won because Tanenbaum is using git", and frankly this is just ridiculous. Their disagreement was over how the kernel should be architected, not over personal issues. Not using a certain vcs because you disagree with its author on a completely unrelated subject would really be childish.

Moreover, vcs used to manage Minix'es source has zero impact on the merit of using one kernel architecture over the other.

[EDIT]: I understand that the "kernel war" argument is not what you meant, nevertheless Minix using Git is hardly a twist in Linux vs Minix history.
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tests are a lot more about design and refactoring than they are about quality.
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I think it all depends.

I used to always write proper full-fledged tests. Then I started my startup, building a product in the few hours left after a demanding high-stress job and a tumultuous private life.

Within a few weeks, I stopped writing tests. Within a few more weeks, I turned off the test suite.

I wrote the product, got it working, received market feedback, realized my model was all wrong, rewrote the entire domain model and UI multiple times all to finally realize that my component boundaries were all wrong and intuitively understanding where they should've been.

Now I feel confident about an architecture that will stay stable for 12+ months and each new component I write is properly tested.

In the meanwhile my lack of tests is starting to bite me very slowly, but I find that I'm just slowly replacing all 'bad parts' with properly tested components with clearly defined boundaries, rather than changing existing code.

And in the end I'm really happy that I decided not to test as much. It has it's place but when your time is really precious and you're trying to mold your software to fit the market needs, it just isn't worth it.

I don't know how many others are in a similar situation but, for me, sometimes it just ain't f*ing worth it.
Testing? Shoot, we sometimes code in prod!

http://www.bnj.com/cowboy-coding-pink-sombrero/

(article's not mine, but might as well be)
I think it’s a question of lock-in. If someone wants to give a free service away and there’s very little lock-in, great! If a new restaurant opens in my neighbourhood, maybe the owner gives away free lunches to all the people working nearby. Great, go have lunch.

But if there’s a big lock-in, as users you have to do your due diligence (we used to jokingly call it “doing the dew”). Say there’s a service for managing software projects. Well, if I’m going to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars plus my career and reputation on a service, I want to ask a lot of questions, that’s natural.

I’m actually cool with Posterous, I hope the folks behind it do really well.
microkernel doesn't do much to solve this problem. "A device is said to be dependable if 99% of the users never experience any failures". Users don't care if the kernel doesn't crash. If the driver crashes, then the user still experiences a device failure, since a device without a functional driver is not functional.
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Great point, but it's unbelievably difficult do carry something like that out practically. Who are the CEO's customers, the market the company is targeting, or the company's employees? I'd argue both, the CEO is the visionary and cheerleader for the staff, and also the public image for the customers. If you come out and say we are not sustainable, guess how many employees you'll have at the end of the week? Guess how many customers? After putting 100's or 1000's of hours into something, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to go that route
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Well, I tried to write it in two sections, one for each point. If I failed, I apologise. maybe it’s just like launching a startup, you get some things right, you get other things wrong.
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Wow, do you always copy+paste or download everything you write on the internets?
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