skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Me: Of course, sales and marketing are important functions. The question is when do you need them? I would argue that for most early-stage tech companies these days priority #'s 1 through 10 should be product, product, product ... product. Get as far as you can as fast as you can with the product, then once you have gained some decent degree of user feedback and user demand, then focus on go-to-market, not before.
Perhaps many people design without having the artistic talent to design. These are well-known design principles, yet without talent, you will still create bad designs. Take me, for example. I do not have the slightest bit of talent for static visual arts. I can't scribble, draw, paint, or design.
"Disclaimer: This article is not about "I am so clever, Google is so stupid". This article is about some Google AppEngine problems (or peculiarities) which might not be obvious for newcomers."

It would be nice if the title reflected that sentiment.
They surely did influence the process. But it is also true that any rational business would have bid less for spectrum with a neutrality or open access mandate. I don't have much sympathy for AT&T on this one, though, since they've been trying to do the same thing to their competitors by pushing wired net neutrality. Any new regulation upsets the calculations and forecasts that businesses made to justify the risk of expending capital.
It's like anything else: some mathematicians see mathematics as a science, and others don't. Most probably don't think about it one way or the other.

> I think most mathematicians would disagree with your assertion that math is about "definitions".

An analogy: math is about definitions in the same sense that go is about placing stones on a grid.
I would say it's not a good business decision, even though it sounds cool. Just like internet cafes, I just can't see there being enough paying customers to make it worth it.
no. he used Eclipse. Apple-7 would have worked.
Yo dawg, I know you like to browse, so I put a browser in the browser in your browser, so you can browse while you browse while you browse.
For me Firebug is crapping out all the time even when it's off -- I regularly see the "This script is stalled" dialog from it.

Firefox is pretty useless to me without firebug -- extensions can't be disabled/enabled without restarting, and it seems impossible for any nontrivial extension to noop itself because of the event handling nonsense. I really don't want to have to always be using multiple profiles, but it might come to that.
I can use MMS (and tethering) on my iPhone with Rogers in Canada.
Has anyone here used huperzine?

It's fairly cheap as nootropics go, and the few studies look good, but I see hardly any reports about it & certainly nothing about how it interacts with the -racetams (which it might share a mechanism with, according to Wikipedia).
I am politically progressive, but you're right, I should make the distinction more obvious.
They also have an algo that protects against DDOS, and allows for resources to be allocated as organic (even viral) activity increases... see their article about load testing to see that you can get quite a lot of load by staggering it.
How to Decide if Entrepreneurship is Right for You
I've heard that too, but haven't read any of its source myself. (The OpenBSD userland is particularly good because it has a lot of utilities that are useful but small, and whose code can be read in isolation.)
Its def an idea I have been playing with as well, but have no financial backing yet.

Expenses could be paid in a variety of ways.
1. Membership dues.
2. Promissory notes. That if you did make it big or make a profit a percent or cut of that would go back to the hackerspace.
3. Adverts on the equipment used.

I think the biggest thing was the notes to pay back a certain percentage... So you would def need some capital to make some profit on this one tho.
Even with billing, GAE expects gradual ramp-up of traffic, as would happen in the real world. Your app will fail to scale if you hit it with an artificial blast of benchmarked requests because the back-end wouldn't know to fire up more instances.
I've heard this sentiment before. Can anyone explain to me exactly why the use of the word "retarded" is offensive? I mean literally explain it to me, assuming that I'm someone who doesn't find it "obviously offensive."
Outlook 2007 uses Word's HTML rendering (no meaningful CSS2 support!), not IE's Trident.
What would it be called then?
One week of anything is rarely enough to burn out.
Sounds like
http://techshop.ws/ or http://portlandtechshop.com/

Both sites have a breakdown of what they have on site, and you could get an idea of the pricing. It may also be a good idea to get in touch with the people who own/run it to get their take on the business side.
"There's got to be a million synonyms for really stupid people doing really stupid things"

It's curious though that some similar words are acceptable. Nobody complains about "lame" or "dumb", even though there are people with those precise medical conditions. Nor does describing something as "brain dead" seem to arouse this reaction. And it's fine to call something "crazy" or "mad", or say that an organisation is "schizophrenic", etc etc.
My professional life, definitively.

(It certainly has cut back on my life expectancy, too.)

But I shouldn't complain. Bacteria infections over a long time might attack the heart or the spine.

The good part is that I sat down and thought "It seems I can't take stress badly or that I start doing things before I'm really healthy. It should help if I do things I love, so I'll try to do that." The right decision, for the wrong reason.
Don't fool yourself. Steve Jobs has forgotten more about building computers then you are likely to ever know.
Yeah, that bit made me cringe a bit too, since you have to do the something similar for storing insurance policies (track when things become effective, including forward-dated changes, storing past versions, etc.). No predictions necessary in our case. I'm guessing dealing with the time dimension is a general property of any system that needs to store anything that qualifies as a legal contract.

It is true, however, that adding in that time dimension makes everything a much, much harder problem.
But this dumbness is transitive. If it's dumb for a company to make assumptions about a developer because he's certified, it's dumb for a client to choose a company based on the percentage of developers who are certified.

> Playing an averages game, that at least means that somebody in the company is going to know when corners are being cut, rather than just having a group of people hacking along.

My argument is that this is completely false. In fact, I suspect that there would either be zero correlation between cluefulnes and certification or actually a negative correlation. The reason for this suspicion is both from looking at certifications required for other disciplines and looking at the best developers I know, all of whom have little to no use for certifications and are too busy doing awesome stuff to bother with formality and process (yet whose code consistently has the fewest and least severe bugs and is the most unit-tested of any code in the repository).

There's certainly no question that a certification process could weed out maybe the bottom 5-10% of all developers if all professional software developers were required to take it. But the nature of software development is such that these developers are not the ones in danger of causing the collapse of civilization anyway. I would guess, and this is just my guess, that it's the ones who are in the top 50% but not in the top 10% who tend to wreak the most havoc: they have shown enough skill to be given important tasks, but due to time constraints or inexperience or whatever they make mistakes or cut corners.

Thus, if I were a client, I would be more interested in choosing a company or supplier that has a policy where any code checked in must be reviewed by at least one experienced developer. I'd be interested in making sure that they write repeatable automated tests and use code coverage tools to ensure that their tests are testing what they think they're testing. I'd be interested in making sure that they had a mentoring program that allows new hires to be taught by experienced developers. Any one of these things would put my mind at ease more than any certification process.
Really? Who won then?

Last times I checked, Windows Mobile is the prevalent operating system on phones.
I'm pretty close to dropping my iPhone for something else soon. I love the phone itself. Minus a few bugs here and there its the best phone I have ever used and likely the best on the market. But AT&T is a joke. Anywhere with high density population and your phone seizes to function. I'm in Manhattan. I often wait 2 hrs for voicemail and texts and about 6 out of 10 calls end in a drop. Outside of NY my phone works much better. Internet seems to be 3x faster and no dropped calls. I'm close to leaving and returning to Verizon. iPhone: An expensive paper weight.
No.

It's part of the sales closing process. After you say you're ready to check out, you'll get special offers for discounts for things you never even knew existed, let alone knew you needed.
There´s a probability gap explained in one of those "make money" in http://en.exposedcasinos.com they say they´ve found a gap in the limits of some roulettes to make the math work. I´ve tested it and it worked at least yesterday and today. About 300 spins.
Understanding Domain Names in Internet Explorer
Which is several years behind Android and iPhone OS in terms of features, with no new release announced.
These seem like great business cards to me:

http://www.meatcards.com/

Not sure about how well they take ink though.
DVD Releases September 22 2009
And what about a real-life case? I'm pretty sure that a GAE app can handle much more than what is said in the benchmarks.

In fact, firing 100 connections to the same host from the same IP is not a real-life case for me. But I'm pretty sure that those 50 req/sec (for example) aren't shared among all connected users to the same GAE host.

Anyway, I still don't like GAE but I think that this is not a real reason. And I personally don't like giving everything, including my apps, to Google. Uh.
You ignored the requirements and demonstrated expertise in the wrong area, IMO.

In a similar situation, I wrote the required command-line app, but it handled queries, basically parsing to an expression tree predicate.

Of course, it doesn't matter now.
The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.
I think there would be fear of a support nightmare. An automated email contains a link to the internal foo system. Which browser should be used? Should IE6 be the default?
I feel that the whole web concept using a browser based interface is a bit hyped now. And anyways believe it or not, iPhone is the first true Web OS. And so is Google Android. It's sad Microsoft hasn't taken this kind of thing seriously yet.
There are a few other ways to make it self-sustaining.

While you could provide free/open access some of the time, you could charge for 24/7 access and locker space. You could also rent out the space for occasional seminars/workshops/corporate off-sites.

Shipping/receiving for parts orders might be handy if many of the occupants have a day job.

There is also the possibility of government grants which, especially in Canada, are available for this kind of program. They would, at least, get the project off the ground even if they weren't used for running expenses.

I do like the idea of promissory notes. That is a great way to fundraise. I think, no matter how we raise the initial capital, the running profits of the hackerspace will stay invested in the hackerspace. I like the idea of it being a self-sufficient organization and suspect the profits on our end could be made just by what the space does to the real estate value.
So because there's a chance for someone to fix a bug is a reason that certifications are useless in software? Not buying it for a second. Whether or not the bug can be fixed is immaterial: it may have already caused thousands of $$ of problems even if fixed. Tell that to a business whose eCommerce site has been down for a day because of a dumb error by an inexperienced programmer.

As far as your comment about engineers being a better comparison and axod's comment that "most software is fun..." (WTF!!! do you think businesses expend millions of dollars yearly on IT so they can have "fun?"), I call bullshit! As someone with experience and in both hardware and software engineering, I can assure you that most engineering is verified by non-certified (I assume you mean PE's) engineers.

I live daily with software that has to work. Serious bugs are not tolerated in medical devices. The attitude that "oh, we can fix that in the next release, just tell the operator not to hit F8 before F7 or they'll misdiagnose the patient" simply doesn't fly around here.

Sorry for the rant, but attitudes like this are exactly why software development isn't taken seriously by most professions!
http://ge.la.to
That seems to be it. If you approach any area sufficiently dense with geeks/gadget fiends, permanent or temporary, the actual data use by iPhones strangles AT&Ts network.

Looks, walks and quacks like a classic case of oversold capacity.

My first year with the 3G was an experience like yours: network problems were something other people complained about. But in the last 4 or 5 months, my experience has quickly and notably nosedived.
Extremely impressive. ...although it's not clear why this isn't a huge vector to cause all sorts of havoc.

The idea of having an executable sandbox that anyone can drop executable code into sounds famously ill-conceived. Every time a site like yahoo mail or myspace has a javascript sanitation problem, this causes major problems..

Sure, the "web at large" is like a big space filled with executable scripts, but at least there is a level of accountability established by the site that is hosting any scripts you're executing.

While javascript might execute in a sandbox, it's still wise to use NoScript. I don't know enough about silverlight to know whether or not to trust it, so by default, I am skeptical. I'm even more skeptical of a site that built on the idea of user-contributed apps that run in a silverlight sandbox.

I do appreciate the built-in ability to view the source code of the apps, however. The reputation system for apps might also make it possible to crowd-filter out the worst ones. All the same, I saw an app named "infinite" that I imagine amounts to a denial of service. Yes, it was voted "-1" but it's probably a DOS, lurking in the user-submitted apps.

Interesting experiment, but I have reservations.
Popular perception of race among Americans. The "one-drop rule" is widely attested, and for the most part is still true.

This can and does vary from country to country--mixed-race Brazilians are considered white in Brazil, but black if they immigrate to the United States.
Indeed. See this for an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberport

The idea was to build a complex with shared resources for high-tech companies. They built the complex, but nobody is renting.

I was there last week, as I have a friend that works there, and there was absolutely nobody there. It is probably the least populated point on Hong Kong Island, including the mountains :)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/sep09/09-01Win...

Windows Mobile 6.5 is due out Oct 6th, and "will deliver new customer experiences through an improved, easy-to-use user interface, better browsing capabilities and access to valuable services, including Windows Marketplace for Mobile and Microsoft My Phone"

I was referring to Windows Mobile 7 though

EDIT: here's more about WM7: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/03/windows-mobile-7-to-be-a-...
Anyone care to share a real-life GAE performance figures non-free billable account on a long running application?
Polymorphism is one of the cornerstones of if-less programming, along with lookup tables and the Visitor pattern (or double-dispatch). All we need now is a manifesto!
edw519 is closing in fast on nickb
> The idea would be that the tenants of the building would be hardware startups who would use the space during the day, and it would be open for hacking and workshops by night.

So you're going to look for startups where all the employees leave by 5pm?

...and you're further going to tell them that their space is not secure, and anything that they leave out on a desk will be seen by hundreds of strangers?

That sounds really...suboptimal.
Kinda always had a feeling that's what happens but nice to see graphical proof! I feel good now about choosing +/- rating only for launchly.
Programming Language theory, I think.
Assuming that some hackers were using "Workspace" in Vancouver, you should know that it closed in August for lack of business. "The Network Hub", however, seems to be alive and well. I think it's an interesting idea, but I also think lots of research needs to be done - especially finding out how hardware startups like to work. How do we contact you?
Yossi Kreinin on XP and Pair Programming
Foulab was actually the impetus for this conversation. I used to live in Montreal, although I only heard about it after I left (from an old friend). It's a great, lean, model and I definitely intend to visit next time I am in Montreal.

Saturday House was my other inspiration. I used to attend religiously when I lived in Seattle, and was always impressed with the level of discussion and the collective intelligence of the members. It seemed like it should have been the center of something bigger.
> The Palm Pre does this nicely already.

Yeah but the Pre is based on the idea that your data lives everywhere but on your phone, so it's setup to handle multiple sources of everything and merging them correctly.

The iPhone's software was built with the idea that you have one central identity server (either your mac or an exchange server), so it handle multiple "main" sources… not at all.
Yes, arrogant and absurd. It does prove one thing (yet again). Beware of Methodology Cults. That's what Agile and 'XP' are (who'd want to name a methodology after a failed operating system, by the way).

Kent Beck = Jim Jones. Beware.
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

You aren't. The goal is to have push gmail, and Apple's gmail client doesn't handle push. So the choices are mobileme (which Google can't access), Yahoo Mail (same) or ActiveSync.
There are infix-sytnax macro systems that work. See metalua, for example.
Their mistake was going too high-end. Expensive glass buildings, deluxe residences, high-end malls. I want something lean, dirty, and productive as hell.
Why is she talking about her boyfriend and polling her friends on facebook?

Is this a blog entry or a news story?
Here's an article from Entrepreneur magazine this month that talks about people who are successfully doing it.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/octob...

It would be hard to imagine being profitable (or sustainable) just focusing on hardware. It can sustain itself if you broaden your audience.
It's become a blunt, rather crude term for the description of someone whose cognitive abilities are substandard, and thus can feel rather impolitic to use it around people directly or indirectly so afflicted.

Kinda like if might be awkward if you referred to software that wasn't fully functional as "crippleware" in front of a friend that had polio.
+1 for the Spaceballs reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs
i think the key is to find something secure (and thus, "correct") and not doused with tons of portability goo (ifdefs, etc.)

look at openssh, but the one in openbsd's tree and not the portable branch. for that matter, any of the openbsd-developed daemons (openbgpd, openntpd, etc.) at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/ or usr.bin/ssh for openssh.

any of the openwall projects are also small and easy to work with - http://www.openwall.com/
My hope would be that the educational side of things would draw people in and build a local market. The space would be able to hold seminars and workshops, which would hopefully inspire people to come back and work on their own. The tenants of the building would also guarantee some use of the hackerspace.
You make something that's so good you want to use it. You have your friends use it too.

If your product's so shitty your friends won't use it until their friends are there first, then you've made something bad and should fix up your product.

(My mock social network had 10,000 users in a month, and I got them all from posting a link to a blog with a few hundred users. We went viral fast.)
Then you haven't been reading much. I've seen tons of objections to cubicles, some anecdotal and some based on scientific evidence such as noise levels and interruptions from people walking by and chatting disrupting flow.

Even the guy that invented the cubicle hates it. His original idea was for a workstation where you could do some work standing, some sitting, use 3d space and not just 2d. I think we can all see how far from the original concept we have come.

My objection to cubicles comes down to 2 things: Can't control lighting (and offices always have those wretched overhead fluorescents) and there's always that disconcerting feeling someone is standing there staring at you when you essentially have your back to the whole room.
You could simply use the IEView plugin in Firefox to achieve the effect you are looking for. I have a few IE-only sites and it seamlessly uses IE to render those sites while in Firefox. You configure which sites automatically use that rendering engine.
How to properly load test Google App Engine
Evolution of Cell Phone Design 1983-2009
Well, if you have a desk you can have a software company. It might be possible to offer memberships that have limited access to the lab but still have access to conference rooms, desks, printers, reception, etc.
Absolutely no one uses the phrase "time management" in this way. "I found a bug in my time management." <- Huh?

That mutable state has something to do with time is a tautology. Nothing in the recent discussion shows it to add anything significant to what we do or think about the problem. The interview title takes this doodling and amplifies it into some sort of grand theory. I'd be embarrassed.

I'm not criticizing Clojure at all, I'm criticizing this way of drawing attention to it (if that's what it is).
iam (at) nicholasmolnar dot com

Love to hear from you. I am hearing good things about The Network Hub all over the place. I'm going to pay a visit next week. I also did hear about Workspace. I'd love to dig deeper and see if there are some lessons to be learned.
"The sensitive cultural critics behind South Park captured this perfectly in their line, "this is gayer than sex with men"."

I think The Simpsons beat them to that one: "You kissed a girl! That is so gay!" (said to Nelson Muntz by one of the other bullies)

Also, having sex with men doesn't necessarily make you gay. :-P