Twitter has done well releasing this and when I first saw it ages ago it looked neat and fairly professional.

However, like a pop song which has been completely overplayed on the radio it has become tired and frankly a bit annoying. It has its uses offline to quickly get a demo up and running but it shouldn't be used on a live site. At least not in its entirety.

If you have to use this for your project due to convenience or lack of design skills then do everyone a favor and mix it up a little bit. Change the colors on the buttons. Avoid the black bar running along the top of your website. Just don't look 100% like a vanilla bootstrap site.

I've been using Foundation for a new project and am really digging the responsive layout features.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/download.html

(Bonus: note the use of ScrollSpy to pin the sub-menu on that page!)

Even though the main use case for Bootstrap seems to be for rapid prototyping, any thoughts on using it for a production app (but perhaps custom-themed), instead of rolling a custom design altogether? It seems Bootstrap has matured to the level that it can be used as for most projects with little customizations if any. A lot of what I read in the comments imply that Bootstrap is great at prototyping an app and once that phase is over, you throw it all out and start developing a custom design based on what has been prototyped. Why can't one just stick with Bootstrap and customize it as needed?

This would imply a fluid grid, which it lacks.

http://www.zeldman.com/2011/07/06/responsive-design-i-dont-t...

I understand that you can re-skin but I'm thinking many folks will go with the pre-built look/feel.

Even so, this is awesome for getting stuff out quickly. Great job.

I have a personal project that uses Bootstrap but it pains me to use it on my mobile device.

The js templating (loading JSON data into the view) that I do is a necessary part but I'd be willing to hardcode.

Is there a reason for this?

I wonder if we can look forward to mustache being implemented in in 2.1?

I would be a little bit sad if every new web app I visited overused Bootstrap and stuck to that now increasingly popular design.

One slight problem (Chrome, Mac OSX Lion): http://i.imgur.com/SOrUZ.png

Anyone that's already done it - how easy is it to upgrade from 1.4?

Every conf call I join includes at least two of the following.

- The leader who is in the conf room calls in from the table phone and from their PC and can't figure out how to stop the screaming feedback. What's funny about this one to me is that the same people do it every time.

- Tom calls from his car. He must be on the interstate, judging from the road gradient we can hear.

- Dick joins from his laptop, where the microphone is conveniently part of the same physical device as the keyboard. CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK.

- Harry is working from home. We become intimately familiar with his three-year-old daughter's escapades with Cheerios and love of Phineas & Ferb.

- Judging from the number of sirens, Jake apparently lives in a bad part of town or is watching Blues Brothers in the background.

- Lucy has apparently joined while sitting in a conference room, attending another meeting simultaneously.

- Robert joins 15 minutes late and would like everything he missed to be recapped.

- Mark absolutely will not let the meeting progress unless someone is recording. Everyone spends 10 minutes figuring out how to do this. No one can find the file at the end of the meeting.

- James calls in via a VOIP connection from India, introducing a slight delay. "Hello?" "Hellohello" "Hi James, can-" "Hello" "Hi James, we are-" "Hello, hi yes-" "Hi James-"

- Dave joins from the airport. According to the PA, someone named Janice needs to report to the ticket desk.

- Mike has apparently set his cell phone ringer volume to "over 9000" and has placed it next to his mic.

- "Can you see my screen?" "No". "How about now?" -cue pictures of cats- "Yes but I think you have shared the wrong monitor." "How about now?" -cue spreadsheet- "Yes." -cue scrolling that the video broadcast can't keep up with- "Now if you can see here, here and here..."

Mass meetings are the funniest. During one surreal leadership presentation where hundreds of people joined via a web meeting and many more were present in person, someone forgot to lock down presenter rights, and people kept drawing on the slides.

The browsing-HN part of the story really struck me. Back at the dawn of the web, when surfing-while-compiling and surfing-while-on-concall first became possible, I worked with Andy Gavin at Naughty Dog. Andy is an extraordinary programmer, but not just because of experience and smarts; he's also very disciplined. When he's waiting for a build to finish, or engaged in some other "idle" activity, he switches emacs buffers and starts working on something else. He doesn't just browse the web while waiting for something; he works in parallel on multiple problems to make the most efficient use of time. He's never really idle. This is pretty hard to do, and requires great discipline. But it means that Andy automatically gets 10-20% more done in a typical work day than his exact equivalent who is surfing while compiling. And he probably has a lower "switching cost" than most, because he's practiced switching so much he's really good at it.

Likewise, the best developers I worked with at ITA Software would write code and fix bugs during what would otherwise be time-wasting periods: during pointless concalls, on airplanes, etc.

Personally, I am now so busy that I measure disruptions in terms of percentages of my day or week. E.g., taking one hour for lunch means I just consumed somewhere between 1/8th and 1/16th of my productive time for the day. (And since I am now in my 40s, I have to be realistic: it's closer to 1/8th than when I was 20-something.) Ditto for a one-hour concall. And then there's switching cost, time to get focused, etc., so multiply those costs by, say, 1.1 for the transitions.

Once you start measuring time-cost this way, you quickly realize that it's not just the PHBs at your particular megacorp -- it's the entire world that's set up to distract you from getting anything done. The very fact that everyone still wants to talk on the phone when it's 10-100 times less time-efficient than emailing or texting a 150 character message is evidence that most people's social needs outweigh their desire to be genuinely productive. And, to be fair, most people view the kinds of people HN readers laud as "10x programmers" as dysfunctional, miserable, obsessive workaholics.

I don't think you have to have "engineers all the way up" to make a software organization productive. I think you need to have disciplined people who value time very highly all the way up. Engineering fields tend to emphasize discipline, patience, and focus, so good engineers often have these qualities. But some non-engineers do too, and not allowing these people to help run your company is, IMO, a mistake that leads to less creativity and more group-think.

This post just cost me 30 minutes: 1/8th of my possible productive time today. But it's OK, because it's Saturday.

A previous boss was-- and I am not kidding here at all-- a grade school teacher. He was in charge of the programmers. Knew nothing about programming but since the company was making educational software, obviously an gradeshool teacher should be running the department, right? The person running the art department was also a grade school teacher. They all had mastered that patronizing "settle down children" tone, and used it constantly. When we'd tell them that what they were asking wasn't practical or would take extra time, they'd be patronizing like we were trying to lie about having spilled milk. It is hilarious in retrospect.

Why does senior management at these companies think that programmers should be managed by people who know nothing about programming?

Since your boss is apparently unaware of the problem, who's going to solve it if you don't speak up? There are no magic hacker fairies on HN that are going to do that for you.

Boss: Hey, we've got an urgent production issue that needs to be looked at. I'm getting some heat on this one and I need someone to diagnose it to see if it's a blocker for our release.

Me: Would you be able to ask X and Y to investigate? It seems they are on the support rotation for production issues. It'll take me at least an hour to clean up what I'm doing and switch over to run the old production instance locally.

Boss: It's urgent, I think you need to drop whatever you're doing and look at this.

Me: OK, sure.

(50 minutes later, as I'm almost done building the old production instance)

...

X and Y come back from a meeting.

Boss: I'll have X and Y look at this, you can go back to working on your stories for this sprint.

Me: !@#?$

Some people really can be as productive (or close to it) doing 6 10 minute tasks in an hour, switching every few minutes between those 6. To them, they still just spent 10 minutes on each task, and they're oblivious to the fact that not everyone's work can be sliced around like that with the same degree of quality that theirs can.

I haven't been able to make a point about how it's not "just ten minutes" without coming off as rude/unhelpful/lazy. I've tried to explain the cost of context-switching, or push it off until I'm not being interrupted, or at least have other people do pre-requisite work first (filing a bug would've fast-forwarded to somewhere between 12:14 and 12:38 here).

In my dream world, a manager respects (or fears) you enough that you can say "you sit right here with me through this whole ordeal, and every minute of mine we waste, you owe me after 5 o'clock" and pull it off. Out here in the real world?

This gets even worse when we, the creatives, get feedback about functional changes.

"When I click the checkout button, it goes to the shopping cart."

"Uh...yeah."

"Could you have an upsell page pop up between the two."

"I can write the copy and spec the creative and functional design, but I can't change the button functionality. You'll have to get that prioritized in the next sprint."

"We don't want to bother engineering. We need to get this done quickly."

"It's a functional change. We have to involve engineering."

"So you can't write the page."

"I can write the page. I can spec the page. I can't build or deploy the page."

"That's disappointing."

"You have no idea."

I give them an answer and then they take 3 hours going in circles to arrive back at my first email. I am slowly coming to see it as them paying for time towards their education when they decide to insist understanding the inner workings of something better than someone who has built it.

Despite my best to bring it to their attention to send me the information complete and once to get the quickest resolution, folks feel productive when going back and forth.

I squarely blame this on the Blackberry exec mindset. Talking all day by email or IM or phone doesn't mean you get anything done.

If you point it out, they won't like finding out they're the cause of slowing everything down, because they're so important.

0.02

Sure, bosses and customers frequently underestimate the amount of time these sort of calls take and an intermediary (support) ought to take a stab at pulling a clear issue out first, but they're not always wasted time. There's a lot of value in getting devs and customers talking directly. It just needs to be (and can be) planned in a way that avoids breaking up the developer productivity curve unnecessarily.

Not the fact that the conference call was a mess of technical difficulties, or that Ed's boss interrupted his workflow.

That Ed sat back. That the company's culture would even tolerate anything near this level of lackadaisical disengagement.

If you're a Hacker, you don't say things like "that's not what I'm paid to do." You don't even think things like that.

Your job is to help make your company, and those around you, successful.

If you're not in a company with a mission you believe in, where you are excited to help achieve the goals the whole team is working toward... then freaking leave. Can you not find a job programming at a company that you do believe in? Then you're not a Hacker. You should probably stop reading Hacker News.

The failure in management here isn't interrupting Ed. It's allowing such a lazy, selfish culture to exist in the first place. It's not inspiring Ed enough that he actually wants to help his co-workers be more efficient, because he realizes they are valuable components of the engine that is trying to accomplish a shared mission and set of goals too. It's not firing Ed's ass any of the number of occasions where he has doubtless sat back and watched teammates make mistakes without even trying to help.

This is really, really gross.

I worked in one company that was managed nearly perfectly. If someone came to the developer to tell him something, he wasn't met with "hello". He was met with "Write a ticket!". Even though all employees occupied almost undivided space of less than 50 sq meters.

Ticket system was only legal means of communication. Tickets had to be written well because you had no other way to reach the developer with your message. From time to time developer came to the ticket issuer to verify some details but he might as well just ask further details in ticket comments.

There was one half an hour meeting per week that was attended by product manager that knew what she wants and two or three programmers working on the interconnected parts of the same thing. Product manager was available for instant contact for the developers at any time and had enough decision power to respond instantly.

Developer could talk to the other developer when he had an issue or was interested in what the other developer was doing and if he has any issues. These "meetings" where usually announced via skype or happening at natural time when target developer was already out of zone because he was just getting back from toilet of with fresh cup of tee.

There were of course "sky is falling" events that needed to be responded to urgently. There were communicated to developers by product manager via skype or in person but they were rare and serious enough so the developers wanted to deal with them in the first place to get "I just saved the day" feeling.

Ticket system was the communication hub, wiki and google docs were the knowledge hub. Skype was when you have to ask someone about something but you don't want to make noise or interrupt them. And mouths were for drinking tee (or coffee) and swapping short remarks with the developer that is at the moment looking at the same physical screen as you do.

And no slacking off because you monitor is visible to everybody.

I think that the issue described by the blog post author would be resolved by "boss" telling Sue to describe step by step how to reproduce the issue or record a movie of her reproducing the issue and create a ticket for the developer with that description or the link to that movie. Boss could further (if it's really important) ask the developer politely at 30 minutes Monday meeting if he could take a look at this issue (after checking of course before the meeting if developer didn't do that yet).

If you allow for other thing of communicating business issues (like email, skype, meat flapping) then the ticket system becomes cargo cult device that no one really pays attention to.

I get the point, and it's definitely true, but I spend those idle minutes doing mail and other short tasks. I don't see how one can justify "well I'm waiting for you so I'll just not work for a while."

Is this common outside of the computing industry? What do other people do in their 'in between' time?

Boss: we have a problem in production. Can you take a look at it right now?

Ed: What's the ticket number?

Boss: Sue entered it; I'll get it from her.

[Boss gets ticket number; in the meantime Ed does something else productive.]

Ed: Thanks Boss; I'll call Sue if I can't figure this out from the ticket. By when do you need an update?

Boss: I'm concerned that pending changes could hold up a fix for this. If that's the case I'll need clearance from Steering before we can patch it. Let me know if this needs a code change, and what else could be affected.

Ed: Right-o. [taptaptap]

One reason that I bring it up is that I've been there, and I've moved on to greener pastures. Where I've been still isn't perfect, but it's way better than the distant past. Your posts bring up a lot of bad memories for me. I could barely even make it past a year in that situation.

If this happens to you more than once a month, you're not in the 10x club. If you want to be in the 10x club you need to avoid this at all cost. Otherwise you're just another muggle chafing at the bit.

If you want to focus, and your work is programming then you should delegate support to someone else. Probably a knowledgeable person about the software and some programming/technical skills to solve trivial problems.

Along with status checks every 15 minutes.

I love it though, every problem is an adventure. I couldn't be one of those dig in for a month and code developers.

On average it takes 15-30 to get to someone else's screen to a productive point.

After he failed to understand that the video contained no video of the software, because corporate could do no wrong, I told him I would watch it. The things one does...

Well the manager went nuts against this change. Argued in emails citing problems that had long been fixed in the review thread emails, making up a bunch of incorrect complaints (he couldn't understand the difference between AAC and AAC+ and how they had different device support, and after having it explained to him, started with just vague "it's too much change" bullshit that couldn't be corrected). When I talked to him over IM about it later he admitted the real reason was because he said it took me days to do it and he wasn't going to approve any work on it no matter what. He was always the sort of guy who did the popular thing in big meetings with the employees, then pulled the rug out in private.

He should have had Sue just paste a couple of before/after screenshots into a doc file with a sentence or two of explanation and send it to Ed.

"Here's the sales history for R27-93 (screenshot)... I hit F5, F3, F7 and the part number now incorrectly shows GT548 (screenshot)..."

Ed is a bad employee not because he is wasting time, but because he is publicly cultivating a culture of blaming time sink on others.

If you're the creator, should I go through the contact us stuff on your website, or is there a better way of discussing possibilities with you?

(edited: @gpakosz contacted me on twitter)

A small note on what we don't support yet:

no cube roots, no nth roots either

square root's top line must be a single line (make it wide enough up front)

no matrices

no system of equations

no corrections, no scratch out (use top left undo/redo arrows)

leave enough space between integral/summation symbols and main expression for better accuracy

LaTeX output pleases MathJax as much as possible (thank you guys for your lovely rendering library)

Hope that helps,
Thank you for trying it out.

PS: MathML seems to get little attention, why is it so?

--- LIST OF SUPPORTED SYMBOLS (encoded in UTF-8) ---

Letters

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  € $ £ ¥ ₩ ¢ ( ) < > [ ] { }  ! # % & ? @ / \ | ∥ © ∂�... ∇ ∞ 
  ℂ �• ℚ ℝ ℤ
  + - ± �- ÷ * ∘ · = ' , .  : ; _
  ← �' �' �" �" �• �- �- ↘ ↙
  ⇐ �' �' �" �" �•
  ∀ ∃ ∄ ∈ ∉ ∋ ∌ ∩ ∪ ⊂ ⊃ ⊄ �...
  ∼ ≃ ≠ ≡ ≢ ≤ ≥ ≪ ≫ ∝ ∠
  ∏ �' ∫∮∧ √

  �" �" Ω α β γ δ ε η θ λ ν π ρ σ τ φ χ ψ ω �• µ

  km hm dam dm cm mm µm
  ha
  hl dal dl cl ml µl
  kg hg dag dg cg mg µg
  ms µs
  GHz MHz kHz Hz

  sin cos tan sinh cosh tanh arcsin arccos arctan cot coth
  min max arg argmin argmax
  inf sup lim liminf limsup
  ln log
  dx dy dz dt

A couple desired improvements:

-Allow uploading of images

-add an eraser/undo

-some Greek/Hebrew letters (aleph, beth, xi... ) aren't being recognized despite my tries... they've very similar to X's, equivilant, and ='s. Beth really should work, but isn't.

I wish there was a function to upload an image or to capture an image via webcam or something like that. Then I could write it on paper and show it to the webcam and get the markup, or upload scans of notes to have them translated.

Is there a plan to offer this as a non-web-browser service? I would love to be able to write math out on paper, or a resistive screen tablet, and then import it into a LaTeX document.

I am faster writing equations by hand than typing LaTeX (and definitely faster compared to using a WYSIWYG equation program).

Edit: By the way, this is the perfect example of a problem I've always wished a start-up would come along and solve for me.

I asked about exactly this a while ago here: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-f...

The answers at that point were quite limited. The Tesseract OCR engine was just not made to recognize such structure. There are some other closed solutions, though.

I wonder if it has any contextual smarts (e.g., sees a partial derivative sign in a numerator, knows it should "vote up" interpretations of the denominator that start with another partial derivative sign).

I'd be more interested in a write-up of how you made it more successful than previous attempts however, technologies used, etc.

Brilliant.

Where's the code?

Since this is a forum for startup founders, put it this way: such a scanner would be of more use to mathematicians than, say, the sum total of Elsevier's output, and their latest financials show annual operating profit in the ten figures.

FOSS would of course be even cooler (IMHO). But, food for thought... :)

Really impressive and useful, nonetheless.

How about image save for the rendered formula? I could copy/paste straight into Word for a nice homework exercise.

Basically education lower down the system could use this, not just University level.

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg820/scaled.php?server=820&#...

Looking forward to more devices supporting both fingers and stylus, like the Flyer or the Galaxy Note.

I'm impressed.

Edit: is even more fun on a tablet.

But some formulas doesn't work (for example: $\sqrt[3]{2}$) and I can't find a feedback / suggests a better translation button.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gridpaper/id385633188?mt=8

> Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs?

and the Path CEO replied:

> This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this.

Really guys? REALLY? This is why developers need explicit guidelines, because as they just demonstrated if there are no guidelines companies default to the thing that exploits the end user! (incidentally, its unfair to pick on Path too much as almost all social networking applications do exactly this also.)

I actually cringed when I read this "however, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works" ... which is why it took someone running a proxy and writing a blog post for you to suddenly be transparent about it. Mind blowing. Why even say that?

Btw, times like this? You destroy any and all credibility when you say you are trying to build a company that is built to last or one that is going to follow in the footsteps of Apple.

Apple would never do this to their users.

(do not make this a discussion about the evil and good sides of Apple. Apple has repeatedly not bowed to companies desires for owning contact information and I expect they will fix this contact hole in the near future.)

It's sad because I respect Path and their love of design. But design isn't just about how it looks. It needs to resonate through the entire vision, company, product, and how you treat people.

>Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

>We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

edit: Morin responds to a response
http://mclov.in/2012/02/08/path-uploads-your-entire-address-...

To the suggestion that they just hash the addressbook entries:

> 1. This is a good alternative solution which we'll look into. Thanks for the idea.

I also want to thank the author of this post to discover this! I wanted to try Path some time ago, now I can safely avoid it without regret.

http://gizmodo.com/5028459/aurora-feint-iphone-app-delisted-...

Ever since I learned this was possible, I've been very careful about which apps I download, and actually have downloaded very few since, as a result. There are a lot of random iPhone developers that I really don't think need to have access to my entire contact list.

Ideally the OS should prompt you if an app wants access to your address book, just like it does for location.

I also asked about whether and how Facebook intended to enforce their platform terms of service, which essentially said apps could use such information temporarily, but that they must discard it no later than 24 hours after a user's most recent use of an application.

I remember that in answering those questions, he essentially said that his preferred approach was not to try and make violations of those terms difficult or impossible through technical means. His inclination was to give apps the benefit of the doubt, and deal with troublemakers if and when issues arise. He also relayed a story about his college days, in which he said that his study of the workings of government was better preparation for his web career than anything directly related to technology.

Do they explicitly state that what personal information they download to their servers, what they use it for, and how long they retain it?

If not then they're breaking the law in many countries, regardless of what Apple's current developer guidelines happen to be.

Zack S.
FEB 08, 2012 | 05:19PM PST
Hi Jeff,

Thanks for getting in touch with us! I have erased your contacts and their information from our servers.

On behalf of the team, I'd like to apologize for any privacy concerns that you may have had. Our current release of Path for Android requests permission to access your address book. In the next iOS release, we will have this same permission request added.

Until the update is released for iOS, selecting “Add Friends” will display the names of contacts that you have stored on your phone. But now that you've opted out of contact uploading, we will never re-store this data on our servers.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you. I'm more than happy to address any further questions or concerns that you may have.

Best,
Zack

Well shit. How do I get it off their servers?

"The Address Book framework provides access to a centralized contacts database, called the Address Book database, that stores a user's contacts."

It has been there since iOS 2.0

Disappointed in Path, especially since their focus was on a more private, tightly knit social network.

Morin and company need to provide an "opt-out and wipe all of my contact data now" option if they don't want legal action and backlash, as well. Simply making the app require opt-in to share this data in the future isn't nearly enough (and, especially in the EU, isn't legal).

Update: I'm working on a MobileSubstrate tweak to neuter AB* functions in non-Apple apps, and it's now possible to get your information wiped from Path... by emailing service@path.com.

Though I also don't really think it's something private companies should solve. Now, I can of course avoid services that let me be too easily findable, but the proper solution is to make said opt-out required by law. Otherwise it's just not beneficial for the company to provide it.

"Contacts are suggested from among persons in a user's electronic address book, as well as people with whom the user is communicating by email."

It's been there for over a year. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Path_%28social_net...

I emailed to have my Path account deleted a few weeks ago and was told it had been 'deactivated'. After querying this, it was confirmed that they did not yet have the functionality to delete your data, only hide it. Worrying that he said they can.

That being said, I wholeheartedly agree it should be opt-in (or at least have an opt-out) for people who are concerned about their personal data.

I thought about this with whatsapp. This is scary because while we are used to having multiple emails for different parts of our lives, juggling multiple phone numbers is still a chore despite services like google voice.

The "Beluga" app did this, without user permission or warning, and it boomed ahead of competition that did not. "Kik" did something similar. "Industry best practice" indeed.

Sadly, it's a winning strategy, and will continue to be until someone fixes the rules of the game.

I am outraged by this scandal, and I still can't bring myself to believe that Path has been collecting this sensitive personal information. My 6-month old's pediatrician's # is in my phone. If this were EVER exposed or shared with a 3rd party, I can only image what kind of damage could occur. Path should suffer for this. I forgive Apple for secretly tracking my iPhone's location for a year, but I DO NOT FORGIVE PATH. Not this time. This went to far. Dave Morin should know better. I bet an engineer voiced that he felt morally wrong doing this, and Path just fired him. This is just wrong. A defining moment in our industry. We need to stand united on this issue, and just try to move forward.

Did he say that with a straight face? Heard a lot of corporate BS in my time but this takes the cake.

This is Apple's fault for allowing all apps access to the address book. But there is a deeper issue here, trust. Just because I leave my office unlocked doesn't mean my colleagues can steal from it.

I love this app and had great hopes for it but trust is a limited commodity and Path just lost mine.

Is there any regulation to protect consumers here? If not, are any legislators drafting any?
Would the FTC step in or does this only happen when a giant like MSFT/GOOG/FB makes a mis-step?

The above was their official response to me when I asked to delete my account... and I had to ask by email since there is no link on their website to close your account...

Their collective decision making has proven to be a huge liability. Would you hire them for your next venture?

A 14 year old girl could tell you that her address book is private, private, private!

Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO of Path

Most businesses outside major corporations didn't start commissioning custom software until the rise of the commercial use of the internet in the late '90s, when all kinds of small and medium sized businesses wanted their own website. Websites were relatively simple back then, and the people willing and able to make them cheap. Hell, even though I was already a professional programmer for years, back in 1994 the idea that someone would pay a few hundred bucks me to make a "homepage" was just cool enough in itself.

Websites became more complicated applications, no longer something hobbyists could do on the side, and became more diverse, including apps for specific platforms like iOS. The cost of having an online presence has multiplied many times in less than a decade because of the sheer amount of work involved, and the level of professionalism required these days.

But most businesses don't commission software ever few months, or even every few years. So every time they want a new app, or a refresh of their website, they are suddenly faced with a shockingly high price tag compared to the last time they wanted something similar (or at least similar from their perspective).

And we're only just getting started. The shortage of decent developers has only begun to translate itself into higher costs. Most employers are still rather conservative in the current economic climate, and developers are notoriously bad at selling themselves.

1) how much did it cost other people to build similar apps (comparative analysis)
2) that you are able to build the product successfully (reducing technical risk)
3) that the price is low enough that the estimated Rev will produce a return (ROI)

-
If you can present those points clearly you will be in a much better position to make more money with less frustration

_____________

I am seeking a telephony app. builder that can deliver a PhoneGap lie ( non-native) inexpensive app. for a telephony project.

pay is:

$350
+ 1% equity stake in a newly formed Delaware Corp.
and 2.5% on all residuals.
possible board seat (future paid projects)

if you can deliver an additional investor, you can get 5% of the transaction on the capital raised through you contact.

First, too many stories along the lines of "I built this app for $1,000 in India and it is making me $50K per month".

Second, kids who don't know how to value their time who'll work like slaves for $2,000.

Third, bad programmers who deliver product cheaply enough, however, the underlying code is an absolute mess. They charge nothing, throw it together and move on.

Fourth, people tend to come up with an idea of what it is that they want to pay for something and try to fit that something to that number. When it comes to software that's like the square-peg -> round-hole problem. I've been to countless meetings where the other side says things like "We'd like to do this for no more than $10K" ... and then they describe an intense six-month, four-person job.

You can always try to educate. Sometimes that works. It can be painful. What you don't want to do is be the educator and have someone else walk away with the work for less (even if it is 1%) than what you would charge. So, don't invest any time unless you know that there's a really good probability of getting the deal.

If you have to outsource the entire cost of development, and you want a good looking, well functioning app, it's very expensive. And then there are the inevitable upgrades, improvements etc.

The problem is that so much of what we buy is mass-produced that we forget just how expensive person-time is, especially creative person-time, since for most modern products this gets amortised over hundreds or thousands or millions of units. Even user-facing software has this issue, since the programmers do their work once and then the marginal cost of each additional copy is pennies or less. But custom work? There the cost is borne entirely by the one commissioning the work, and if it's an individual, or a small business or startup that has never had to purchase enterprise or custom software, they simply have no analogous experience, with software or anything else, of bearing the entire cost of everything.

Enterprises want to move fast, if they can, but they can't because of the mistakes they've done in the past were covered with more processes to make sure that 1) it didn't happen again and 2) if it happened, we can blame the process.

Sometime engineers don't understand 2 facts:

1) You will get fired if you made mistakes

2) You will make mistakes

So people tend to hide and blame "processes" to avoid firing.

CEOs are cold blooded firing squad. Just like "Businesses". What matters are profits.

Business people will wear a very thick layer of skin and try to pull unimaginably stupid statements to push the price down ranging from "I thought Facebook was done in a weekend" to "It shouldn't take a day or two to fix a 'simple' Database issue. You just go there and change the data"

"With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can't do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why."

Isn't this what the Navigation Controller is for? You just push a view controller onto the stack, and pop it when you're done.

Regarding the UITabBar: "if you want colors icons instead of the blueish tint, the change in code is substantial!"

I have been using this method, which is not really complicated: http://sugartin.info/2011/07/01/customizing-tab-bar/

You need to make images for the bar in both orientations (if you need it). The only time-consumer is the "more" button, for which you'll have to create a custom UITableView -- and still not have the handy "edit" command to rearrange the tab bar buttons.

...unless this is the wrong method to use, in which case I would love to see an example of the right way to do it.

Tightly integrated code: With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can't do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why. The way iOS codes are structured is like a breadboard, everything is hard-wired, you still can change a few things here and there, but if you change the wrong wire, the whole board might stop working. Even extremely well structured code does not increase the flexibility by a lot. Adding an additional email button to ‘About' screen might only be worth a few more lines of code, but adding a Facebook Like button on the same page is a different story, don't expect that to be done in a few hours.

The iOS and Cocoa Touch APIs are really robust, and with libraries like RESTKit, it's not that big of a deal to whip up an app that works well. Indeed, I've done it a few times myself.

The problem is that no one is ever satisfied with the UI kit that Apple provides. Browsing Navigation views of Tables, and doing simple CRUD to a simple backend (e.g., Rails on Heroku), is a weekend project, IMO.

I think OP is really talking about how unrealistic people's expectations/requirements are �" not how difficult it is to make a working iOS app.

Of course, the reality is usually exactly opposite.

A quick example, I implemented a very good looking custom badge system for an app. The result looked just liked design, could be generated programmatically, and worked like a charm. It also took me a couple of days to implement the whole thing in quartz. If I were doing this as consulting, that's a $2-3000 feature. These things add up very quickly, particularly if someone wants to "try a few out."

WRONG. Mobile applications supplement existing solutions, which means they generally are a subset of features tailored to a handheld device. Enterprises generally don't adapt a lean methodology. For example they just assume that the current Facebook app you see today was birthed in a weekend...as Facebook itself was. Which, as we know all know here, is simply not true.

I disagree. Yes, it's nice to have everything in hand when you start, but I've built multiple apps concurrently with the backend development. The trick is to isolate your networking in the model layer (a good practice regardless of whether or not the API is already done). This allows you to stub or use dummy data until things come online.

It's not their responsibility to know the market they're trying to consume; it's yours. Be prepared to quote market rates for varying levels of experience, and have examples to explain why your time is priced in whatever tier you consider yourself to be in.

I found out that it's not worth it to mingle with offline-small business. Their budget is usually $1,000-$2,000. That's barely enough to buy a stock template, a couple of plug-ins, setup WordPress and customize it a little.

The problem is not with small or medium businesses. You need businesses that works on the web. Their web presences is everything they are. They know how web dev. is hard and expensive and they also value it. Highly.

If you are a freelancer, find a few of them. Make a good relation. That's it. They'll make you a good salary.

That's the price of a demo.

Like creating quality TV/Film content, crafting mobile applications takes time, talent, and money and one day this will be better understood by the mainstream.

For example, my company focuses on building media-based apps. We have a platform and internal SDK that allows us to build these apps quickly and afford-ably (and not just on iOS -- we can release simultaneously on Android, Blackberry, WP7 and others too).

There are other services that make developing apps for mobile smartphones cheaper as well.

It's a fresh market and the consumers in this market don't know the options. Not every app is a unique, bespoke snowflake that requires a massive budget and a team of highly-specialized engineers. Once they do though I think we'll see a lot of these budgets come back down a bit.

I judge books by their covers. In fact, I don't know anyone who doesn't outside of trying very hard to convince others they do not.

The layout of the blog draws my attention to your picture and subsequently your "download my resume" link. I clicked since I was interested in learning a little about the author, his background, and what may have caused him to write such an article.

As soon as that link opened, I knew I would not read the blog post because the resume layout rendered the content difficult to read. Why does that bother me so much? The answer is simple: it ruined your brand for me before I even had a positive impression. Right off the bat, I'd give 2 suggestions to clean up your resume a little:

1) Do something about the half bar headers you are using as it currently divides the page when viewed, this wouldn't be an issue if you actually had a 2 column design which lined up, but it doesn't.

2) Never and I mean NEVER use justified alignment unless you're publishing a newspaper.

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh, but being that you're fairly young and these are very simple mistakes to correct, I thought I'd point them out.

Best of luck!

it's just an 'if' statement

The idea that you can whip up a very complex iPhone app "in a weekend or two" is naive and, dare I say, bubblethink.

Is there really enough money made from apps, to justify this cost?

Hard way to learn to value my own work more.

(1) Big infrastructure needed: Seriously, if the client is not picky, you should be able to build a working basic infrastructure for the back end in a week. And that's generous.

(2) You need a way to communicate: The claim that there is no standard way to do it is just plain wrong. There is absolutely a standard way, its how everyone with a brain does it these days, and its easily supported through every device SDK - you use HTTP

(3) Design the API: No, design the app. Then determine what question it needs to ask the server, and figure out how to make the server answer them. Designing the API first is a very engineer thing to do - if you're the only user for the API its just a flat-out wrong approach

(4) Pay for it: Sure, but I'll pay for the amount of time it should take to do this. Which is a week. Engineers that want me to pay for them to sit and write 200 page requirements specifications need not apply. I want to work with the people that want to build something on day 1, and then keep tweaking it.

But I'm actually more interested in a deeper aspect here: what will button colors do to my conversion funnel? So here's an idea for a weekend hack: I would pay money for a PnP button A/B testing solution that automagically converged to statistically optimal colors.

  linear-gradient(top, color1, color2)

  linear-gradient(to bottom, color1, color2)

I suppose the generated CSS works pretty much with any templates, not just Twitter Bootsrappers.

Here's another tool which I use it often: http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/

A good illustration of this fact:
Cars, what's the difference between a 370z and a Porsche Cayman? Well the 370z won't turn as many heads because you see them all the time.

It takes time to make a nice custom button/graphic/logo but it is time is well spent!

Unfortunately this guide does not mention ssh-agent to have usable passphrased keys. Tip: Mac OS X Keychain integrates fantastically with ssh-agent.

My favorite trick is transparently bouncing via ProxyCommand+netcat:

    Host target.domain
        Hostname target.local
        ProxyCommand ssh -q bounce_host.domain nc -q0 %h 22

Ssh agent forwarding is also particularly awesome instead of naively scattering keys.

Ssh ControlMaster allowing to reuse connections can really improve responsiveness. Tip: start the master connection as a daemon (-f), so as not to mistakenly close the terminal which handles it, else you will close the channel for all other currently opened slave sessions. I wish ssh would fork and start the master on demand then close it when the last channel closes.

[0] http://www.cmdln.org/2008/02/11/restricting-ssh-commands/

Re: iOS -- Panic (makers of Coda, etc.) developed a _really_ nice little iOS app for SSH called 'Prompt'. It got some coverage here when it was released, and I immediately replaced iSSH with it and haven't looked back once.

http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for...

Here is an article with some less known features of ssh:
http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/08/27/ssh-tricks-the-usual-and-...

  $ tar czf - foo | ssh remote "cd /where/to/unpack && tar xzf -"

    > $ cat .ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh host 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

    ssh-copy-id host

The remote port forwarding feature can be very handy. I've used a combination of ssh and daemontools to set up remote access to a machine behind a particularly nasty firewall.

https://grepular.com/Smart_Cards_and_SSH_Authentication

Another config option that has saved me a lot of time is the "ProxyCommand" option that lets you specify a command, whose stdin is used as a pipe to talk to a remote server. So, something like:

    Host inside
        ProxyCommand ssh gateway nc inside 22

SSH agents let you keep your key encrypted while only needing to enter your passphrase on first use (with the default ssh-agent, you must load the key manually with ssh-add; gpg-agent and seahorse both prompt you the first time it's needed). Add that to SSH agent forwarding (where multi-hop SSH connections authenticate using the agent on the originating machine, and your key is (A) only on the local machine and (B) encrypted when not in use.

   ssh -[N]D 1080 [-p 33] user@server

While corporate IT couldn't tell exactly what was going on, they did ask him why he was ssh'd to an ISP-provided IP for X hours using Y bytes. So don't try to outclever your company this way; they can still nab you on suspicion of whatever, even if what you did was non-harmful in any way.

here are my 2 cents:
http://txlab.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/call-home-ssh-scripts/

ProxyCommand /usr/bin/corkscrew localhost 3128 %h %p

Finally, set up the socks proxy (most of these proxies only allow outgoing connections over ports 80 and 443):

ssh -ND2345 -p443 host

I use this technique constantly at school to browse the web unrestricted and with privacy.

http://kitty.9bis.com/

IMO, Facebook's future depends on two things:

1) Figuring out how to serve up contextually relevant ads on mobile platforms in a nonintrusive and, ideally, useful way.

2) Figuring out how to serve up contextually relevant ads outside of Facebook, to Facebook Connect-backended partner sites and apps. (Sort of like an AdSense/AdWords hybrid, but based on very intelligent user-interest and browsing data).

I'm betting on #2's being the runaway breadwinner for Facebook in the long run. The longterm strategy seems to be to reduce reliance/dependence on Facebook.com in favor of Facebook Connect.

"In 2011, Zynga accounted for approximately 12% of our revenue, which amount was comprised of revenue derived from payments processing fees related to Zynga's sales of virtual goods and from direct advertising purchased by Zynga. Additionally, Zynga's apps generate a significant number of pages on which we display ads from other advertisers."

It appears they would still be profitable without Zynga.

I wouldn't by into such an ownership structure, though to be fair, google has such a structure and those that bought that at IPO have done very well so far.

From the risks section:

As a result of voting agreements with certain stockholders, together with the shares he holds, Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, Chairman, and CEO, will be able to exercise voting rights with respect to an aggregate of XX shares of common stock, representing a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock following our initial public offering. As a result, Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the management and affairs of our company as a result of his position as our CEO and his ability to control the election of our directors. Additionally, in the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor. As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally.

(3) The fine print.... The amount reported represent approximately $692,679 for costs related to personal use of aircraft chartered in connection with his comprehensive security program and on which family and friends flew during 2011.

Like a boss.

Before any impression on any online media, advertisers will make a query to Facebook to find out which of the ads should be shown to this user. And Facebook will charge a small fee for each such query.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebooks-s-1-and-the-large...

- Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results;

- Facebook user growth and engagement on mobile devices depend upon effective operation with mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control;

That's pretty darn good money, but not a huge amount more room for user-growth. They'll grow by having new businesses/making current ones more profitable. New business would have to be monetizable (eventually, at least), current businesses would either have to convert better or become less costly to run.

Facebook is full of some smart cookies - it'll be interesting to see how they accomplish those paths.

Molly Graham, the daughter of Donald E. Graham, a member of our board of directors, is employed by us. During 2009, 2010, and 2011, Ms. Graham had total cash compensation, including base salary, bonus and other compensation, of $98,058, $133,620, and $189,168.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120...

I'm really proud of him for clearly and loudly representing the hacker way when the whole world is watching.

Link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120...

A valuation of $80-$100 billion dollars after the IPO would mean Facebook would be trading at 80 to 100x earnings.

Facebook is going to need to see some serious growth to continue to command a PE ratio like that long term. Serious Growth

2011 Compared to 2010.
Revenue in 2011 increased $1,737 million, or 88% compared to 2010. The increase was due primarily to a 69% increase in advertising revenue to $3,154 million. Advertising revenue grew due to a 42% increase in thenumber of ads delivered and an 18% increase in the average price per ad delivered. The increase in ads delivered was driven primarily by user growth. The number of ads delivered was also affected by many other factors including product changes that significantly increased the number of ads on many Facebook pages beginning in the fourth quarter of 2010, partially offset byan increase in usage of our mobile products, where we do not show ads, and by various product changes implemented in 2011that in aggregate modestly reduced the number of ads on certain pages. The increase in average price per ad delivered was affected by factors including improvements in our ability to deliver more relevant ads to users and product changes that contributed to higher user interaction with the ads by increasing their relative prominence.

http://theairspace.net/commentary/letter-mark/

The Hacker Way has grown up and lambasted Wall St.

Disclaimer: This analysis is flawed

- Using multiples is not a perfect method to understand the valuation of a business. It's one of many. It's a proxy. It's quick.

- This chart uses 2011 financial data. Facebook is growing fast - their multiples would come down significantly if we used 2012 projections - which we don't have. If I had more than 10 minutes on this - I would use 2nd half of 2011 or Q4 2011 as a run rate.

Quick Thoughts (Not Conclusions):

- In Ben Horowitz's argument against the bubble - he says the valuations they were seeing at AH for large private tech companies (like facebook) is in line with large public tech companies (google). So just looking at the data quickly, I was disappointed that FB appeared to have higher multiples (his blog post: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/03/24/bubble-trouble-i-don%E2%80%9...)

- DAYAM FB has a crazy operating margin

- And they're getting better at monetizing each user. User growth was 40% from end of 2010 to end of 2011, while revenue grew 80% (http://allthingsd.com/20120201/facebook-has-845-million-user...)

Awesome.

That blows some estimates out of the water.

Wonder what amt of RSUs the rank-and-file are getting?

Also, it'll be interesting to see how the culture changes when a good % of the populace are millionaires

Subscriber rates have fallen and the future is filled with uncertainty. Let's go Public!

Google SYWP changing the game of advertising. Panic!

Exit strategy for investors to monetize their investments.
Priceless!

http://hc8217.tumblr.com/

edit: downvoter ... I just wanted to provide context for others so they wouldn't wonder what this is all about. I agree that this comment (parent) does not belong here ...

In the business world, we can now call this "Doing a Jobs".

The author's occasional dry humour is also quite welcome. Here's a sample:
"Due to his meager funds and general inability to budget himself, Tesla had but one suit, which had withered from use. It was the time of a religious festival, and Szigeti inquired what Tesla would be wearing. Stuck for an answer, the youthful inventor came upon the clever idea of turning his suit inside out, planning thereby to show up with a seemingly new set of clothes. All night was spent tailoring and ironing. But when one starts with a wrong premise, no amount of patching can right the problem. The outfit looked ridiculous, and Tesla stayed home instead."

http://www.tfcbooks.com/special/my_inventions_index.htm

[1] I'm a bit confused as to whether it was genuinely an autobiography, or a compilation of articles. Either way, it was interesting to read, though very light on technical details.

I wonder if a fractal version of this would work better. And what if there were side channels on the top and bottom too.

Of course, this will always pass some fluid. but if you need a complete shutoff valve, combining it with the tesla valve would allow you to use a smaller one and makes its failure less traumatic.

Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
Another simple yet fascinating device

But then, he was thinking a lot about electron flow and built up a good intuition that had wider application. That doesn't make it any less amazing to me though. I'd like to be able to do that.

2. Liquids and gases have different viscosity, so the Tesla Valve would be different for each fluid and flow regime. I am unfamiliar with this series-of-petals geometry you are remembering. However, it reminds me of this excellent work done on optimizing topology for different Reynolds numbers in Tesla Valves: http://www.senlin41.org/topology-optimization-of-tesla-type-...

3. One of the original intents of the valve was for Tesla's Bladeless Disc Turbine. In Tesla's time, materials were not what they are now, and thus valves with moving parts were not as reliable. Also, getting a valve that can close and open with high frequency is not always easy. The valvular conduit that Tesla designed was his solution to this problem.

Thanks for the book reference. I read "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" But I hadn't seen this other book. I might pick it up.

1. Security - this should really be going over SSL. In fact, the whole site needs to be SSL'd.

2. P2P - I bet you are not P2P, and you won't be able to be P2P if you keep the viewer in the confines of the browser. However, the client-to-client traffic really needs to go peer to peer. It's an absolute must. This is what keeps the cost of running the service low and this is what allowed LogMeIn to grow like a fire and eat Citrix lunch. You keep pushing all data through yourselves, your bandwidth usage and infrastructure upgrade bills will likely to kill you. Scaling a server-relayed service is a bitch of an issue, don't underestimate it.

3. Java dependency for sharing - you'd be surprised how many locked-down corporate setups have no Java (not that they are your target audience). I personally don't have Java installed either (and again, I am probably not your target user either). A fallback to Flash would make a lot of sense. Also the screen sharing on iPhone/Pad/etc would require a native app, which effectively means that you are on your way to replicate join.me.

4. Patents - I'm sure the easiest way to knock you down is through a patent litigation. Be mindful here. Try and build a bit of a defensive portfolio if you can.

All in all, good luck. You are entering a crowded market littered with failed startups... and interesting acquisitions ;)

Go for a home computer setting or even an office setting.

Like one of these or something.

http://us.fotolia.com/id/28015494

http://us.fotolia.com/id/35919645

http://us.fotolia.com/id/27612067

1) Can I safely assume you're working on a way to share desktop control, for things like tech support? Seems like the next semi-major logical step.

2) Out of curiosity, how do you plan to monetize this beast? Freemium, with a more feature-rich paid version (voip, desktop control, etc)? Or...something else?

3) Very cool. Great job guys!

How do I know my privacy is protected?

How do I know you're not a phising company trying to steal personal data by spying on screen sharing sessions?

Those are some of the questions I ask myself. And it's also the first impression I get when I look at the site. Also, I don't see a phone number anywhere on the site I can call to speak to somebody, or to even verify that you're a real company. There's also no real explanation of how the technology works, and how the tech could protect my privacy--if it in fact does.

I'm not trying to be harsh, just giving you my honest opinion. You have to find some way to make me trust you, if you want me to use your product.

GOOG & Skype are also getting a lot faster on their feet in this space.

I'm intimately familiar with this landscape as we're preparing to launch our FREE webinar platform, http://www.MeetingBurner.com, in the very near future after ~1yr in beta.

Our target is the "webinar" space which includes all the trimmings like registrations, invitations, bundled conference lines / skype / telephony, analytics, pay walls, etc.

But we have a solid contingent of users that just want screen sharing 90% of the time and I love your focus on "2 clicks to start a meeting" etc.

Elegant solution and good luck.

This operates exactly like join.me - however I like join.me's shorter URLs - I would suggest copying a format similar to theirs.

However I really like the "share whats in the rectangle" feature.

It works on Linux as well.

Here is a link to the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhk...

The product was effortlessly easy to run. Obviously there was a usage overload but otherwise, people were able to watch me Tweet and screenleap into other people's screenleaps in real time (and also watch me scroll through cat gifs). Extremely well done, bravo!

Stellar job though - no barrier to use whatsoever.

(I'm running Ubuntu 11.10, and chrome 16.0 if that helps)

Also, I feel "No downloads, installs" is a little disingenuous - just because it's not installed as a full-time application doesn't mean that it's not downloaded or installed.

However, I am glad to see another competitor in the space. The killer feature, IMHO, would be adding a VoIP / Telephone bridge so people could get audio either way. Webex and Gotomeeting do this, but they are clunky in other areas.

Thank you for helping keep the hair on my head

Only gripe, the window re-sizing wasn't working properly. Once I re-sized it once (width-wise), it didn't let me re-size it any more, only move it around.

Otherwise, very easy to use product

The VIEWING is from any device, but SHARING is not.

Ability to view on iPad in the browser is a step up from join.me, but it appears to be the only major difference. Am I missing something? I am a long time LogMeIn user, so I am probably right smack in the middle of your target audience.

As for monetization, I think a good strategy might be something like the first 3 are free, and then you pay $5 for 30 screenshares afterwards. Atleast for me, I'd be willing to pay that and it seems like a straightforward/fair way to price it.

Good luck!

Works well, and yes, effortless. Impressive.

Great product. Best of luck! :)

How is this different from https://join.me/?

I have been using https://join.me/ since it allows me to control the other person's screen as well. The setup is just as simple but it requires you to run a downloaded file.

1. Right now my screen share app of choice is TeamViewer. You could own this space if screen control was added, very easy to setup and use.

2. Monetization strategy? Are you looking to monetize this app?

Are there any plans to share the screen of an android phone? I think that would be pretty fun.

How are you guys streaming the images down? Any interesting technologies or methods used?

Do you have an API?

I just dropped you an email :)

So instead of (potentially very enlightening conversation) identifying and talking about limitations and possible solutions in git, we've decided that anyone who can't use git because of its perf issues is "doing it wrong".

http://source.android.com/source/version-control.html

  Repo is a repository management tool that we built on top 
  of Git. Repo unifies the many Git repositories when 
  necessary, does the uploads to our revision control 
  system, and automates parts of the Android development 
  workflow. Repo is not meant to replace Git, only to make 
  it easier to work with Git in the context of Android. The 
  repo command is an executable Python script that you can 
  put anywhere in your path. In working with the Android 
  source files, you will use Repo for across-network 
  operations. For example, with a single Repo command you 
  can download files from multiple repositories into your 
  local working directory.

  With approximately 8.5 million lines of code (not 
  including things like the Linux Kernel!), keeping this all 
  in one git tree would've been problematic for a few reasons:

  * We want to delineate access control based on location in the tree.
  * We want to be able to make some components replaceable at a later date.
  * We needed trivial overlays for OEMs and other projects who either aren't ready or aren't able to embrace open source.
  * We don't want our most technical people to spend their time as patch monkeys.

  The repo tool uses an XML-based manifest file describing 
  where the upstream repositories are, and how to merge them 
  into a single working checkout. repo will recurse across 
  all the git subtrees and handle uploads, pulls, and other 
  needed items. repo has built-in knowledge of topic 
  branches and makes working with them an essential part of 
  the workflow.

So often, the tool used to manage the central repository, which needs to cleanly handle a large codebase, is different from the tool developers use for day-to-day work, which only needs to handle a small subset. At Google, everything is in Perforce, but since I personally need only four or five projects from Perforce for my work, I mirror that to git and interact with git on a day-to-day basis. This model seems to scale fairly well; Google has a big codebase with a lot of reuse, but all my git operations execute instantaneously.

Many projects can "shard" their code across repositories, but this is usually an unhappy compromise.

People always use the Linux kernel as an example of a big project, but even as open source projects go, it's pretty tiny. Compare the entire CPAN to Linux, for example. It's nice that I can update CPAN modules one at a time, but it would be nicer if I could fix a bug in my module and all modules that depend on it in one commit. But I can't, because CPAN is sharded across many different developers and repositories. This makes working on one module fast but working on a subset of modules impossible.

So really, Facebook is not being ridiculous here. Many companies have the same problem and decide not to handle it at all. Facebook realizes they want great developer tools and continuous integration across all their projects. And Git just doesn't work for that.

What this comes down to is that git uses a lot of essentially O(n) data structures, and when n gets big, that can be painful.

A few examples:

* There's no secondary index from file or path name to commit hash. This is what slows down operations like "git blame": they have to search every commit to see if it touched a file.

* Since git uses lstat to see if files have been changed, the sheer number of system calls on a large filesystem becomes an issue. If the dentry and inode caches aren't warm, you spend a ton of time waiting on disk I/O.

An inotify daemon could help, but it's not perfect: it needs a long time to warm up in the case of a reboot or crash. Also, inotify is an incredibly tricky interface to use efficiently and reliably. (I wrote the inotify support in Mercurial, FWIW.)

* The index is also a performance problem. On a big repo, it's 100MB+ in size (hence expensive to read), and the whole thing is rewritten from scratch any time it needs to be touched (e.g. a single file's stat entry goes stale).

None of these problems is insurmountable, but neither is any of them amenable to an easy solution. (And no, "split up the tree" is not an easy solution.)

I'm not sure what the exact situation at Facebook is with this repository, but I'm positive that if they had to start with a clean slate, this repo would easily find itself broken up into at least a dozen different repos.

Not to mention the fact that if _git_ has issues dealing with 1.3M files, I wonder what other (D)VCS they're thinking of as an alternative that would be more performant.

So what's the story here: kernel developers put up with longer git times, the kernel is better organized, the scope of facebook is more massive even than the linux kernel, or there's some inherent design in git that works better for kernel work than web work?

It's not wise to offer Facebook to split the repository. Looks like it's time to improve the tool.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/08/02/version-co...

  echo 3 | tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

  echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I'm just wondering if this is an idiom with a deeper meaning that I'm not aware of.

EDIT: I'm guessing that when you run it in a script (without set -x), rather than on the command line, you can see in the log what it is you sent?

> factor into modules, one project per repo

where i work we have a project with clear module boundaries, but all in the same repo. we have an "app" and some dependencies including our platform/web framework. none of these are stable, they're all growing together. Commits on the app require changes in the platform, and in code review it is helpful to see things all together. Porting commits across different branches requires porting both the application change and the dependent platform changes. Often a client-specific branch will require severe one-off changes so the platform may diverge -- it is not practical for us (right now) to continually rebase client branches onto the latest platform.

this is just our experience, not facebook's, but lets face it: real life software isn't black and white, and discussion that doesn't acknowledge this isn't particularly helpful.

They keep every project in a single repo, mystery solved.

Edit:

> We already have some of the easily separable projects in separate repositories, like HPHP.

Yeah, because it makes no sense, it's C++. They probably use for everything PHP i assume then. Is there no good build management tool for it?

Git as so many interesting uses at scale as just a tool that navigates and tracks DAGs over time.

MSFT with Windows codebase that runs out of several labs. Crazy branching and merging infrastructure. They use source-depot, originally a clone of perforce.

Google with all their source code in one Perforce repo.

Facebook will be on perforce before we know it.

The solution is an internal Github, not one giant project.

Ideally they should have many small, manageable repositories that are well tested and owned by a specific group/person/whatever. At least something small enough a single dev or team can get their head around.

Sheesh.

http://www.schoenitzer.de/lks/lks_en.html#new_files

I'd be very interested to see some benchmarks on their current VCS solution for repositories of this scale.

Since "status" and "commit" perform fairly well after the OS file cache has been warmed up, that probably can be resolved by having background processes that keep it warm. (Also, how long would it take to just simply stat that number of files? )

The issue of "blame" still taking over 10 minutes: We need to know far back in the repository they're searching. What happen if there's one line that hasn't been changed since the initial commit? Are you being forced to go back to through the whole commit history?

How old is the repository? Years? Months? I'm probably guessing in the at least years range based on the number of commits (unless the developers are extremely commit-happy).

At a certain point, you're going to be better off taking the tip revisions off a branch and starting a fresh repository. It doesn't matter what SCM/VCS tool you're using (I've been the architect and admin on the implementation of a number of commercial tools). Keep the old repository live for a while and then archive it.

You'll find that while everyone wants to say that they absolutely need the full revision history of every project, you rarely go back very far (aka the last major release or two). And if you do need that history, you can pull it from the archives.

If a project depends on other projects, have it reference the other projects. Where appropriate, include exact version numbers and/or commit hashes. Gemfiles are good examples of this good practice at work.

Yes, git has submodules for this sort of thing, but after investigating that route, I decided against using git submodules. Use something independent of the VCS instead. Then git won't do weird or unexpected things when you switch branches. Also, you might want to mix in projects that use other version control systems. And really, why unnecessarily couple a project to its version control system?

If (when?), even after splitting a megaproject into manageable subprojects, these performance issues creep in, I'd certainly be interested in whatever improvements people are coming up with...

They've reached out to the developers on git, and I guess that's a first step.

Putting aside the question of whether or not an enormous singular repo can be broken up intelligently into modular projects, is there something about the submodule approach that makes it a uniquely unsuitable way for sharing changes amongst projects?

Still amazed that breaking it up would do more harm than good when the code isn't even written yet...

Amazon and Google have already solved this problem, and the solution is to reorganize things into smaller manageable packages.

Finally - someone who recognizes that there's a curious & busy part of the brain which must be kept preoccupied during complex tasks, and mixes music just for that purpose.

"Trance" music podcasts are a great approximation for this. (See "The Vocal Trance", "Above & Beyond: Trance Around The World", "The Perfect Mix", "Push The Night", "Perfecto Podcast", "The Sound of Trance", "Shakedown Podcast")

ETA: Alas, too many managers don't understand this; they think you're getting distracted by the music, and can't comprehend that it is necessary to facilitate focus.

http://www.pandora.com/#!/stations/play/738121268334091862

Otherwise though, vocal-less trance is usually pretty effective. I love all the recommendations these threads bring up -- thanks everyone!

It got me through my Master's dissertation, where I had it on loop for hours at a time.

Fiddler tells me you can currently grab the mp3 from here http://173.193.205.68/audio/RainyMood.mp3
(this was especially useful for the times I wanted to be disconnected from the internet to focus on work).

I found (the majority of) trance music superficial and get quite easily bored listening to them. Songs with lyrics messes with the language processing module of the brain and I don't want that kind of distraction. So I listen to classical, instrumental, OST and some techno (that are NOT tons of bass).

Example of songs I am listening to now:

Pierre Bensusan - Kourouts Nota (highly recommended)

Eric Johnson - Gem

Steffen Schackinger - On a rainy night

The Glitch Mob - Animus Vox

Klint - Diamond (OST from Snatch)

Mirwais - Disco Science (OST from Snatch)

Nathaniel Mechaly - Opéra (OST from Snatch)

...

In case anyone is interested, this is my playlist on Grooveshark: http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Sen+s+Music+For+Coding/66931...

Again, music snobbery is one of the worst topics of discussion (I certainly don't want to invoke it), to each his/her own.

Endtroducing by DJ Shadow is also worth a listen, as although there's vocals, they're generally calm. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32X-ieCav-M

Here are two mixes you should DL & listen to:

http://archives.bassdrivearchive.com/1%20-%20Monday/Atmosphe...

http://archives.bassdrivearchive.com/4%20-%20Thursday/Scenic...

Lush atmospherics, low-slung 29-38hz basslines, rock out to either full-time at 175bpm or half-time at 87bpm, depending on your mood.

"If someone integrated a contextual playlist generator into a web-IDE and changed the music based on length of current session, degree of nesting or other complexity values, time of day based on location, etc..., I think it would be a much appreciated feature."

9 beet stretch might be of interest to anyone wanting something long noise/dronescapes

I've also really enjoyed listening to motorik rhythms lately. Something about that beat makes me feel like I'm constantly moving forward. Stereolab are the modern masters...

Based on the comments here, electronic music (whether it's ambient, trance or dubstep) appears to be the assumed genre.

Stuff like a lot of post rock, such as Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Another option is Math Rock like Battles (I am actually listening to Gloss Drop right now).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKqVswlAZ0&feature=relat...

- Classical: sometimes pleasant, but can be too dramatic.
- Hard electronic (dance, club, dubstep): too distracting

Minimal or ambient techno tends to be way to go when I'm trying to focus on something, but need something to keep that part of my mind occupied. Soma.FM and Digitally Imported have the best streaming stations for that, IMHO.

http://somafm.com/spacestation/ http://somafm.com/dronezone/
http://www.di.fm/minimal http://www.di.fm/chillout

And I want to say that Com Truise's album Galactic Melt is one of the best albums for me for 2011. It gets even better if you combine it with Daft Punk's TRON OST and put those two on shuffle.

Happy coding / knitting / drawing / running / painting / writing / baking cakes!

Apparently this should really be called "MusicToGetThingsDone" :)

Actually hate working with headphones on now. Similarly using music I love to block out noisey work environments doesn't work. (Well, noisey work environments just don't work do they!).

FWIW: I'm on last.fm as rock666

Michael Brook - Err: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcyQISCPTTs
Michael Brook - Ultramarine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITFyP9b7ius
Michael Brook - Several Times II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK-oVQaTg_4
Cliff Martinez - Helicopter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogDj3uXLP7w
Hammock - Maybe they will sing for us tomorrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kKjyHrXMw

Guess the hacker news-dotting did it. Care to torrent the files? :-)

I like short, simple songs. Something like a song off CYNE's album Evolution Fight works really well. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2ISUThbcQ&feature=youtu...

This site has some good minimal mixes http://deepmix.eu/

Try Johan johannsson http://www.ausersmanual.org/stage/ which is good but also with extra hacker kudos given the topic

Also Olafur Arnalds http://olafurarnalds.com/multimedia/

Particularly of note is his 8 hour album "Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell" http://zacbentz.bandcamp.com/album/field-recordings-from-the... . It's my go-to when I need to sit down and concentrate.

i can't handle the monotony of trance, and dubstep can be a bit too much. a lot of dnb also tends to be repetitive, but finny keeps things lively enough for you to pay attention to code

Nonetheless that's rara avis among my coworkers, anyone else listening to similar stuff while coding?

http://pileofturtles.com/2010/12/music-for-programming/

Philip Glass symphonies
Wagner's The Ring ( unless you speak German )
Slayer

[...] it also depends on where you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The lower on the pyramid your product is, the crappier it can look. If your product is core to helping people make money, pirate movies, or sell your useless couch, you don't need a designer. But if you're high on the pyramid, ugly/clunky UI makes it impossible to for people to see your vision.

Never heard this advice in reference to Maslow, but it's truth! I should print this up on cards and give it to a load of my tech and designer friends.

The entire "It's like [Craigslist/Amazon/eBay]... but with a beautiful design/UI!" fallacy falls to its knees with this paragraph.

- this is cool, but I could build something better (how many 37signal open source clones are there)

- this is cool, but way too expensive (Github complaints)

- this is cool, but let me use Google AdWords to get free upgrades (DropBox)

- this writing is great, but I'm blocking all the ads on the page (daringfireball)

Another problem is that when developers decide to do their own startup, the only domain they really understand is software development.

There are millions of people who have problems who can't code - building another bug tracker, productivity tool, email management app, GTD widget might be fun, but the economy of real "business" software that's out there is far larger and more lucrative.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/11/18/nailing-th...

Clay Collins also advocates for a similar approach that he calls the "interactive offer":

http://mixergy.com/collins-interactive-offer-interview/

http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/

What are some ideas that you would do if you weren't concerned about "working smarter" or something having to be elegant from the get-go?

My most successful product has been a magazine (and let me define that success: very successful in terms of contacts it's given me, unsuccessful financially). The "build process" for that has been neither elegant nor free of mountains of schlepping.

That's not to say that there's no value to be extracted from popular subjects. Of course there is a lot of capitalization to be done on trends and fads, and mass markets are the biggest, but as a daily visitor to HN I think I can safely say that I could come here once every two weeks and gain almost the same marginal value, significantly less than what I'm gaining in daily work experience.

Although I understand the sentiment, and have followed it with a number of my projects, an aweful lot of companies build and sell software that is not necesarily useful for their own purposes (banking, financial, retail etc).

A better and more general rule, and one that has been stated millions of times is simply its really REALLY important to known and understand your client*.

The client could be a 'normal' Internet user, or could be a multi-million dollar enterprise, but unless you understand them, you can forget trying to get money out of them! (and if they are a multi-million dollar enterprise, the people you need to sell to are very unlikely to be the people that actually use the system and you absolutely do need a mature product strategy and the necesary resources to even make a single sale).

I think people forget that there are a lot of other characteristics besides intelligence necessary for successful Entrepreneurship

If you have innovated and not imitated you will have something that no one else has. It's really that simple. You could sit and fret about how easily Google could destroy you, you could worry about the fact that maybe Facebook offers a similar app/service/whathaveyou… None of that matters. Build your thing.

True originality always wins out in the end.

I have enlisted other companies within the industry to use our software before it is completed, so we can get it right before release.

My job is to help them reach required outcomes in the fastest and easiest way... this process has helped me to stop trying to imput what i think it best, which only clouds what customers really want to pay for.

A year into my first startup, my first major product epiphany was to never, never, ever try to build a product you couldn't be a user for

You have to have the vision, understand everything around it. Relying only on (potential) outsiders doesn't cut it. You need prioritization, focus (" means saying NO"), simplify the UX... You need to be committed. Otherwise you just get "feature creep"

or, you know, you're overthinking the problem. ;)

In my home country (Austria) I could buy alcohol at age 13 without any problems. No one would ask for an ID. I think nowadays they are a little bit stricter, but you are still legally allowed to buy alcohol once you turn 16. Once you turn a little bit older alcohol isn't that interesting any more. Of course, you'd still buy a beer (or more) if you're partying with friends, but getting totally wasted is something teenagers would do.

I've moved to the US some time ago, and here I have the impression that even people in their late-twenties get regularly drunk just "because they can" and are "allowed to do so". Seems they just never learned how to use alcohol responsibly while they were young, and at some age it's too late to learn it.

However, I do enjoy getting drunk. I've never drunk so much I threw up, or fell over, or hit anyone, or... etc. But yes, when I'm out with friends or colleagues we will happily enjoy a night with much alcohol flowing - enough to be classed by the UK government as "booze drinking", at least.

I sometimes do or say something I feel embarassed about afterwards (most recent example was a conversation about poetry with a London taxi driver at ~5am), but nothing I've been ashamed of.

Sure, I can have fun without alcohol. Sometimes I do - certainly I've never had the thought that being drunk is a requirement for having fun. It just provides a different type of fun. Different things make you laugh, you have different conversations...

Obviously these things vary for different people, I've known people who I don't want to be around when they're drunk - but also plenty of people just like me.

edit: Just read the first paragraph of this comment and thought "I wrote that myself and even I think that sounds like an alcoholic in denial". When I'm out and drinking I'll drink a lot, when I'm at home I'll have a glass or two over an evening. If I tried to get drunk off the whisky I have at home it would be a really expensive night.

OP probably does feel more "fun" in a given month than most of us. But the article comes across as though the reader has never experienced such a life.

A lot of us have - in our teenage years. The life of skinny dipping, cross-dressing, and acting like an idiot, all without the aid of alcohol, aptly describes my own. Sure, those times were fun, perhaps among the most fun of my life. But a lot of that fun came from both their novelty and ignorance of the perhaps more enjoyable adult fun (alcohol, sex). Unfortunately, as life went on, those activities grew mundane. (Besides, one seeks higher levels of happiness as he ages, for instance the self-actualization that comes with building a successful business). In a sense, I envy the author's enjoying such activities at 30 as much as a teen would. Why he thinks he is able to would make a great follow-up blog post. Most of society after all shifts to the "adult fun".

On another note, the extremism of the post bothers me. The author equates drinking alcohol with getting drunk. Which of course excessive consumption causes. But I can certainly remember everything if I consume just a few shots, but those said shots certainly make the world around me seem much more entertaining.

If I'm at a bachelor party making gay jokes ("no homo"), the amount of alcohol I've consumed is somewhat irrelevant.

After dinner, his father (a Doctor, along with 80% of the family) shared his views about alcohol, predicting that in one generation alcohol will be socially rejected the way tobacco is today because of how utterly destructive alcohol is to the human body.

Remember! Just 50 years ago, the majority of the United States had no problem with cigarettes.

I still drink, along with almost every adult I know, though I cannot help but think that my friend's dad is right.

Maybe it's not relevant for some people - if you're not the kind of person who parties and gets drunk regularly (where regularity is obviously subjective) then clearly his experience may well be irrelevant. On the other hand, if you are, maybe you can try it - maybe it won't work for you and maybe it will.

I do want to add before I write more that if you don't enjoy drinking, don't do it. Just because other people are doing it that doesn't mean you should. I know some people who don't actually enjoy alcohol, but they still feel like it's the thing to do socially. If you enjoy not drinking, rock it.

If you're out of your early 20s and you're still getting drunk regularly, you probably have an alcohol problem. I'm 27 and haven't been drunk in years. I drink a few times a week and usually only have a drink or two. I might have three-ish tomorrow because of the big game.

It's fine if you don't want to drink, but there is something missing from his story. Maybe he needed to stop drinking, but many of us can responsibly handle and enjoy alcohol.

I love beer. I love trying different kinds of beer. I love the taste, and I want to discover new kinds.

If you're drinking alcohol just to get drunk that's the issue. Many of us drink beer, wine or mixed drinks because we actually enjoy the drink.

I know I have a few tasty microbrews lined up for tomorrow.

Yes alcohol can be abused. But just because you choose to get shitfaced doesn't mean you don't know how to have fun the "real" way. It also doesn't mean you're an alcoholic. And just because you don't drink, doesn't mean you're the outcast.

Your post would have been a lot more meaningful if you neglected the part about the alcohol altogether. I think what's inspiring is that you chose to go down a different path and it led to amazing things in your life. Drinking is irrelevant and takes away from the good message you try to convey.

drugs are a big influence of human history, art pretty much was build on it. you can tell by trends in art which kinds of drugs were fashionable.

it is interesting to "hack" your body with drugs. you change, like vacation from reality.

sobriety is overrated.

I definitely got the "Wow, you've been sober for 4 months?!? But we partied so hard last friday!" thing a lot. When people are drunk, they really don't notice you not being drunk..

I agree with most of the article, and will probably go back on the wagon again soon. But he left out some of the negative stuff...
For example.. How grating it gets when your friends get so drunk that they start to repeat themselves... Over and over again.. And how hard it can be to get a point across to someone who's drunk when you're sober. Making conversations, at times, highly frustrating.
When I'm drunk I'm just as stupid and the conversations run smoothly!

I don't get wild and belligerent when I drink. So there's definitely no need to be that way sober.

That said, I did hear one argument from a friend once that made me understand drinking a little more. When you drink heavily with a friend, you're in effect saying that you trust that person enough to see you without full control of yourself. It's a more intimate interaction as a result. I half buy that, though I still avoid alcohol.

The most important thing to remember about all this is that there really isn't any judgement involved. When I'm hanging out with people, I want them to be fun and uninhibited. If that requires alcohol, that's fine. It's a personal choice to increase my own happiness, not a judgement of anyone else.

I think the drinking culture in the UK is really bad. The French will happily drink a bottle of wine... but with a meal. I definitely drink most people get bored of it pretty quickly. I think it's insane that people get "pissed" weekly. Hangovers are not fun.

However, I have a (mini) fridge just for botted lager, which I dip into when watching football. I have a collection of 8-16year single malt whiskys which I slowly sip of occasionally. I often buy a nice bottle of ale, which goes well with a steak.

No clue why people would continue getting very drunk behond the age of 25. (I'm 21 and mostly bored of it)

When forced to think about that, then yes, it significantly improved my life; I met great friends and girlfriends (which I wouldn't have met in such short period otherwise and at the time that mattered to me), had conversations with friends which were far more honest than we would've had without drink.

One case for instance I was at a very boring party, everyone was ready to go home at 10pm. I was together with my gf and we decided to drink some cocktails and go home too. After feeling a nice buzz, we started dancing alone on the big dance floor with almost no-one around (and surely no-one dancing). Another couple joined in a bit later, we started talking and that guy is now my best friend. This is over a decade ago. This would not have happened if both couples didn't drink; we would've gone home. I know there are people who can 'do this' without alcohol and now my wife and me can too, but back then it was just 'boring party, waste of time, bye' when sober. And I wouldn't like to have missed that for the world; there is almost no chance I would've met him otherwise (I know that in hindsight).

It's about he had a cancer in the eye, realized life's short, cancer got fixed and he lived his life the way he actually wanted but never dared to.

I quit drinking because of my aunt who died because of liver cirrhosis (result of alcohol addiction), started it again because the last year wasn't an easy one for me. :/

I was very proud that I could stop drinking and still having fun. I had the exact same moment you mentioned, where some random girl told me that I was sooo drunk yesterday and I just replied.. nope, I was sober. :D

During my time drinking I lost extremely much of my former productivity. I have to admit I don't regret every drunk evening, there were some really good too! But I definitely lost mental strength during my drinking time.

I had to lough at the point where you wrote about the lost money and in my case gained weight. That's all true too.

I'll quit drinking again, one more time. :D

Especially with alcohol, there's a huge difference between what's promised and what's delivered. It seems to promise fun and relaxation, but really it just makes you a little wobbly and a little sick.

A friend of mine would always joke that "we're in for a night of beer and yelling!". It kind of put things in perspective.

That being said, it's easy to claim that you can be just as fun,charismatic,etc without alcohol, but I have tried before and its really hard. Can you share how you transitioned to being drunk sober?

that's part of the whole reason to get drunk for me

Haters gonna hate.

Drugs are fun in moderation (let's not throw the babies out with the bathwater) but only to the extent that they cause fun rather than detracting from it. In my experience for a given drug such a point of inflection always exists.

Drinking for the taste also makes sense.

Considering that this guy had cancer, his hangovers must have been of truly epic proportions.

Lamernews looked real cool the first 2 weeks as well, and then it mostly died out. How will Hackful be different?

I mean, I'd love it to be different, I'd love a site about hacker culture more focused on European issues, people and businesses. But I can't see why it'll work.

On a more constructive note: please implement an RSS feed.

I live in Europe, but AFAIK none of the places where I've lived/am regular even have an HN meetup. I have no idea we would want a splintered HN.

On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with "splitting" HN, especially by geography. The main reason being that news that would interest only hackers in a specific region/country wouldn't see the light of HN's front page, as global readers just wouldn't care as much. As a matter of fact, I even run an "HN splinter" myself, for Israelis (https://bitorama.com), and I'm pretty hopeful about it.

That said, the EU is a pretty big and diverse place. Would a guy from Romania or Finland be more likely to find stories that interest him in an EU-wide site rather than in HN? I'm not convinced. Maybe a more regional approach is required.

Then again, I could be proven wrong. So best of luck to the guys running the site!

I would very much like to see instead a single additional site (HN') which would have a larger focus than simply the European scene, and where obvious US-centric post/comments would mercilessly be deleted.

After all, we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...

Hackful has sort of shot itself in the foot by trying to use HN as a medium to expose itself. for a long time now HN has started to cross the line from a place for people to share ideas and experiences with running a startup to a place for people to link to tutorials and hot topics in the tech world, or high ranked questions from SO (i'm guilty myself). I really don't see why we do this, we have r/programming, et al for that. HN is a place to talk about statups.

look at Hackful. I ran through the first 3 pages and here are the topics. i broke them down by irrelevan, relevant, and something i call the grey area, where it could go either way. the count is very off. i could only pick 20 out of 45 posts as 100% startup relevant. or course my opinion is my opinion and i'm sure there are people who will argue that my lists are debatable, and they are, but that's not the point. the point is that it is not 100% on topic, and we need to figure out a way to fix this.

one way is for the community to have the correct mindset and get involved and fixing the issue: 1) don't post irrelevant topics. 2) if we see off topic posts - since there isn't really a way for us to stop that now - just ignore them and let them disappear. we come to HN to read about startups, if we want programming info, tutorials, etc then there are other places to go (reddit, so, etc).

another option is to go sort of the reddit-route and allow for subs. that's an option, but again we would be diverging from the original purpose of this site.

just shooting out some thoughts, and trying to make us think about where we're going with HN.

irrelevant list: (count = 11)

8 reasons for switching to Git(blog.fournova.com)

Git cheat sheet(blog.fournova.com)

How we are using Big Data to solve Social Travel(tripl.tumblr.com)

The switch from apache to nginx(news.ycombinator.com)

Top 10 IT skills in 2012(ciozone.com)

Nicnack for easy multicast testing(adventuresinfabric.posterous.com)

Only 6% of Wikipedia Readers Have Ever Edited Wikipedia Content !!(thetecnica.com)

Tech in "Hollywood Edition"(aaronklein.com)

Teach yourself Git in two minutes(jperla.com)

Show Hackful: Browser Based Strategy Game (Spoils Rotten)(spoilsrotten.com)

Show Hackful: My Digital Guidebook Startup (Artworm)(artworm.hillsbede.co.uk)

relevant list: (count = 20)

Show HF: Cubecolor, a fancy HTML5 colorscheme generator(plainas.github.com)

Dutch startup is building the most simple customer support software in the world(apo.io)

Startupbootcamp to shape up Berlin(venturevillage.eu)

Ask HE: What are the missing pieces of the European ecosystem?

15 startups from Berlin - there is more than Soundcloud, Wooga and Amen(netzwertig.com)

Who is missing from this list of young entrepreneurs to watch in 2012?(yourhiddenpotential.co.uk)

Twitter developer teatime in Berlin(techberlin.com)

Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Helsinki - We Have A Problem(arcticstartup.com)

Show HE: My first RoR-app... a platform for winning a dribbble invite.(showwwdown.com)

Berlin Startup Jobs. Marketplace For Inspiring Jobs(berlinstartupjobs.com)

Marketplace for Startup jobs in Berlin(berlinstartupjobs.com)

SEO Tool & Collectible Card Game. Boost Website Traffic - SERPs & Spyders(serpsandspyders.com)

Ask Hackful: Do UK angel groups work?(t.co)

Flagons Den Beginners' Poker(london.flagonsden.com)

EatSocial - 2nd Feb(eatsocial.net)

A local European Angel List

London needs a place for hackers to hang out

Citymapper - Find your way FAST(citymapper.co.uk)

Show Hackful: adscaped - Monetisation without compromise(adscaped.com)

Digital Shoreditch festival 2012(digitalshoreditch.com)

grey list: (count = 14)

Ask HE: Is the source open?

Hacker News

Tell HE: Hackful sounds (and looks) too much like Hateful

Hackful Team: API please?

Who registered @hackful? Can we have it please?(twitter.com)

Hackful Team: Can we have a daily roundup email please?

Is it ok to post articles in other european languages?

Tell HE: Please improve the contrast between comments and comment-attributes

Hackful Team: RSS feed please!

Founder of german ridesharing startup gives his car away (flinc.org)

Facebook S1 Filing (Official IPO Document)(sec.gov)

Whispero(whispero.com)

Longform - for lovers of essays(longform.org)

Openbrand(eu.techcrunch.com)

Edit: cleaned up the links

Focus on fewer posts on the front page; no more than 20% of the posts on it should have 0 comments, because it just serves to make the site look barren - which it probably is. You don't even have a community yet, so there is no hive mind nor zeitgeist on the site; bringing people together to discuss a few issues will make people get to get and know each other and help build the community.

Make it scalable.

Also, for more people than you might imagine a site thats in English (and not in their local language) could be a barrier.

We have been working on a community for entrepreneurs and startups in the UK (in addition to our information website), lion.co.uk/community, we're still in the phase of optimizing things.

We've found that there's many entrepreneur and startup websites but gaining critical mass to make a useful community is another thing.

We should probably work together but then again, as others have mentioned, there's different requirements for different people. Founders of businesses other than technology and hackers for example might not have reason to collaborate.

That said, the more resources there are for business founders the better; especially in Europe right now.

If it looks like an HN clone, that's how people will treat it. Differentiate.

I do think that we should be trying to move away from the 'hacker' label. People are never going to understand that 'hackers' can be good -- See that AP Press article. And really, our definition is the less popular one, and therefore less correct, and it is we who should change our wording.

Maybe hackful will show us that such a feature would be heavily used.

I think it needs some guidelines: is English the preferred language? If this is limited to Europe, is it ok to have posts related to other parts of the world?

Hands up if you have an English-language website in which the US is not the largest segment of users?

It would be cool if a system like subreddits was added to Hacker News where it makes sense (e.g. Europe).

I think when I registered on HN, it didn't make email as mandatory!! Or is my memory deceiving me?

1). Work with better clients. You can have invoice collection problems at $50k, too, but they're much less likely than at $500 and you have much better options for... escalation methods at that point.

2). If you're not a bank, stop taking on so much credit risk. Businesses can deal with substantially sterner payment terms than you'd think to offer. If your clients balk, see #1. (Thomas has some suggestions here, too, many of which reduce to "Work for Thomas' clients and charge enough that dealing with their purchasing processes is worth your headaches rather than chasing deadbeats for Snickers money.")

3). Showing up on iamachumpconsultant.com will not enhance your professional reputation, bill rate, or client pool.

I work with a difficult dev/designer for a couple of months trying to bootstap a product. In the end it's not working, we agree to go our own ways, but I keep the name of the product. For what ever reason they get shitty with me, and a month or two down the line when I'm working with someone else they post about me on 'iwasntpaid' - not just once, loads of times - they know a lot about me so they can make it look like a string of unhappy dev/designers are annoyed and I can never be sure who it was posting this.

Would the site owner let me/help me remove these? Will they be asking for proof? If not I can see them getting in some interesting legal battles pretty quickly.

I think something like: http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/ is great - but it is totally open and honest - you state who you are and why you feel you've been ripped off.

This anonymous sniping isn't going to help anyone. If someone rips you off write a blog post about it, tell people you work with, or better yet talk to the offending party in person.

This feels like bitching-meets-4chan. At least http://www.grouphug.us tries to keep both sides anonymous.

The design of the site in question was good, no doubt, but it was also riddled with a stolen Neutraface2 font face and the HTML didn't validate. And there was no RoR backend; the whole site was hosted on a GoDaddy shared server.

From my understanding of the dispute, the site was delivered many months late, and then the designer doubled his price. When Storm refused to pay double for late work, the designer linked in an overlay from a file hosted on Dropbox that announced 'This site was stolen'. That was the 'kill switch'. The designer also made a few blog posts and tweets bragging about his 'kill switch', which he later took down.

This lead to a panicked call from Storm to me to move the site over to my servers until the dispute could be resolved. A few days after that, I received a very aggressive e-mail from the designer threatening to sue me for stealing his work.

What iwasntpaid.com needs is links to conflict resolution and contract negotiation books, which are important freelancing skills that the designer sorely lacked. You never introduce yourself to a fellow freelance web programmer with "Hi, my name's Jeff, and I'm going to sue you over this dispute I have with another party".

Given the designer's history of posting complaints about how he's been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down once he realizes that it might be bad for his reputation, I wouldn't be surprised of that post about Storm gets taken down as well.

Also, from my web-stalking around this issue, I wouldn't be surprised if the hours that the designer put in trying to smear Storm across the internets, billed at the designer's normal rate, exceeded the payment he was expecting from Storm.

tl;dr: Settle on a rate before you start doing work, and if it's not a flat rate, keep the client up to date with projections of the final bill.

PS Carlos 'Storm' Martinez and his team at Creative Mixing are amazing, talented people and I would recommend them to anyone looking for post-sound work. It saddens me to see the post on iwasntpaid.com

The other thing is that there is an endless supply of bad business deals gone wrong so any individual deal that went south may make the person venting feel better (until they are sued) but they don't contribute to the overall success rate of other folks (except perhaps if they are also dealing with a specific individual or business mentioned).

Contrast this with the Nolopress (www.nolo.com) guys who, by example, provide both tools to successfully navigate what may be new territory and provide suitably anonymized examples which demonstrate the problems that you want to prevent. That is a positive outcome to a bad experience, which is shared learning and signs of things to avoid.

Yes, don't extend so much credit - lesson learned (the hard way).

I consulted with a number of people debating whether or not to blog about this situation with the person's name. In the end I chose not to at that time, but realized later that this person had another non-payment suit pending which had been filed the day before I started working with him. Had I researched a bit more, I might have found that (but then again, I might not have - you often don't think to do court record searches on potential clients). I ended up not disclosing his name in my blog, but did disclose the location I filed a suit. Anyone wanting to know can go check the public records and find out for themselves. Felt like a decent middle ground, and it's not irrevocably commiting myself to having been the "name and shamer". But without more naming and shaming, this behaviour by some people will continue. I found out later that this guy had also stiffed multiple other parties, who were then coming to me for advice about how to collect. "File a NY lawsuit" was the only answer I had.

Perhaps some public naming and shaming would either correct this person's behaviour or at least ward off others from working with him in the future. one person complaining about no payment can be written off as a crank. 5 devs in a 5 month period, all from different areas, would be harder to dismiss.

The way to handle this is: When you get the judgement against your "client", slap a lean on his properties equal to the amount owed (and throw in your court costs). That inclues his accounts. All you need is an order from the judge. That's it.

That's about all you can do really. Is to go after his assets. Also I'd let the BBB and your local Chamber know. You'd be surprised how effective both these organizations can be.

http://www.zencash.com/

If you have legal claims, press charges instead of going down this road.

Edit: the first post, an anonymous accusation (by the site's creator?), disappeared shortly after the site showed up on HN. Also, now suddenly submittals are subject to review (by whom?).

What if the developer did really poor work, missed every deadline by weeks, or the client still says there's work to be done before being paid? All this site shows is angry developers complaining about less-than-ideal clients. For me, that's the kind of talk you have over beers at a bar �" you say your piece and then you move on �" not something you permanently record into a collection on the web.

This is why we pay lawyers:
http://www.dvafoto.com/2011/04/fuck-you-pay-me-a-discussion-...

That sounds like a bad idea. You either publish submissions through the website, or you don't publish at all. If you manually take the 'feedback' and turn it into a story, you're now the publisher and lose the legal protections of the Communications Decency Act.

Your site was a better idea, legally, before you posted that.

This can probably be a little more challenging if the account doesn't have sufficient funds in it, but I was happy to see that the system worked. It was a learning process for me (first time I had to do it, and thankfully, knock on wood, the last), but in the end, justice was done and I got paid.

For instance, the entry from Jan 31 says the person worked for _four_ months without being paid! Why would you work for four months straight without a single intermitent payment (or an advance)?

I was eager that the service would let me search for the client names and get reviews on them quickly. And providing a very basic template for each story for the author to enter metadata around the story. I think that would be a much better experience for readers and contributors.

I've been doing freelance for quite some time; and did have two clients try to screw me over; however due to the contracts which I setup ahead of time, and having a lawyer send a simple note upon their threat of not paying, quickly remedied this non-paying issue.

1) Cover your ass
2) Setup a reasonable Payment schedule
3) Don't be stupid

I have found the key to getting paid is milestones. I will not work with someone unless they are willing to pay 50% of the total before I start. This way if they cancel the project you are getting some money for your time. I also make clear to the client they do not need to pay the final 50% until they have the project from me. This way they need to trust me enough to pay the first 50% and I need to trust them that they will pay the final 50%. I've been using this system for the past 12 months and haven't had any problems with clients since.

There is a good thread on Programmers Exchange about charging clients (particularly for freelancers): http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63042/recomme...

1) We discuss the project with the client stating our hourly rates clearly from the beginning and that we also work in our startup so we won't be a "full-time" developer
2) We then make a clear estimation of time and deliverables for the project + time for testing/debugging/QA + time for calls + time to prepare for publication to the App Store.
3) If they accept we make a clear contract with several payments and deliverables.
4) We ask for 20% to 40% upfront payment and then the rest divided by time and deliverable completion.
5) The last payment is conditioned to App Store approval (in case it is iOS)
6) We only give the source code after the last payment is done
7) We keep sending weekly updates usually via TestFlight (when iOS) and use a Google Doc for any observations that they have
8) We have discovered that some clients also want time spent so we always use toggl as time tracking tool.

I know there are still risks but at least with the upfront payment and deliverable payments you always keep healthy cashflow, the clients feel they are protected and you feel protected too.

This way it's also easier to detect a red flag, in that case you can just stop your development until the payment is done (We actually did that once now and it worked really well).

When a client's business is entirely virtual, there's a risk they'll simply change their mailing address or otherwise dodge a judgement, and it can be very difficult to enforce the claim (or at least not economic to do so.) I've seen this happen a number of times in recent years in situations where the amount ranged from $1500 to $10,000.

Why is it your fault? Because as a professional you've not taken the time/money to have a contract created to cover your ass. Contracts exist to protect both parties from each other. And it is your professional duty to know what's in your contract (not a piece meal that you dug up on the internet.) You should be able to explain to your clients what is in your contract, why it's there, and how it benefits them and you.

If you can properly document that you should have been paid and haven't, go to court. Posting on a website won't do anything to actually recoup the cost.

If you can't prove that, you're setting yourself up for a libel claim.

So what exactly is the gain of posting there, except giving in to a temporary desire for revenge?

While self naming probably increases the chance of legal issues I think people should have the choice to say I am the person he did this to to help credibility. And if one have it all documented there should be nothing to be worried about.

Developers have their identity confirmed (to avoid anonymous business-bashing) and can freely discuss bad (and possibly good) experiences with businesses.

The membership agreement could explain that no emotional or biased comments would be allowed and would encourage some level of explanation of why the client did not pay along with proof in the form of bounced checks, etc...

The best way to avoid bad options is knowing where to find a lot of good ones. Then the others have to prove themselves to you, and you can take them or leave them :)

I am a co-founder of a nascent third party payments aggregator (TPPA) called PayGuard. We are currently building our Beta, but our system specifically targets such scenarios. And with such capability, our system inherently solves the same issues with material products as well (a market PayPal currently dominates, though it does so extremely unsatisfactorily).

In addition, when you see something like:

    $('.table a').click(function() { ... } )

Why is that a con for .bind()? This used to be considered a performance benefit compared to onclick.

http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/livequery

"Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated."

Oh so awesome.

   - 70's wunderkind
   - simple, clear belief about what computing should be
   - realized his vision, creating permanent improvement enjoyed directly or indirectly by every computer user
   - uncompromising in his determination to control his environment

When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone.

Reminds me of these ultra leftists, who declare their own government and live without electricity and fresh water. What do they achieve in the big picture? They do this just to feel better themself.

Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible. Google/Facebook would never have existed with a Hurd kernel and Git is now the big accelerator of open source. Stallman started it, but what did he achieve significant in the last 20 years?

But hey - this guy has principles and sticks to his guns. I respect him for that and I don't give a dime if he uses a one inch display on a PC with 64K of RAM

I consider that a practice worthy of adoption.

http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm...

I respect his Setup, but i think if your not the founder of the Free Software Movement, this is a bit extreme ;)

In particular, I think this passage give some key insight into how Stallman developed his philosophy:

> Around this time Symbolics (Noftsker's company) began operations �" it had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital. Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who did not get hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.

Linux siguran 3.1.0-1-loongson-2f #1 Tue Jan 10 15:20:55 UTC 2012 mips64 GNU/Linux

It's fun for a hobby because it feels like the old days of Linux when you had to patch and compile a lot to get things running.

Of course my other computers are macs, this is just for the commute to work on some hobby stuff.

RMS used up his "I was there when" cred a long time ago. He's now the demented grandparent no one has the heart to tell to STFU when he yells at the TV. And yet simultaneously, one of the greats.

Then they refused to give me good raises the next 2 years. My skills were increasing faster than ever, and I was the only guy who knew the entire system inside and out. Everyone in the company came to me when there was a problem because I knew how it all fit together. (I did not hoard this knowledge... Others were disinterested in having it, or didn't stay long enough to matter. I was unable to pass it on, and documented as much as I could at all times.)

So at 5 years, at my review, I asked for a raise. The answer was that if I "really cared" I should go talk to my boss's boss. ... Seriously? After some arguing, my boss eventually told me that they would be looking to correct everyone's salaries within a year.

Faced with the knowledge that they intended to knowingly screw me for a year, and then possibly continue afterwards, I started replying to the job offers that had been coming in. I had previously been ignoring them.

Right away, I found a company that looked good, and signed on. For a 40% pay hike. I had known I was underpaid, but didn't realize it was that much.

6 months later, the pay raises came in at the old job. A friend who was making what I made (!) got a 20% increase. He managed to find get a job offer at the same rate I was now making, and took it back to them. They refused to match it.

And in case that wasn't insult enough, they put out a job ad for 7 new people at the rate I was now making. The rate my friend tried to get them to pay. Their existing, experienced, efficient works were worth less to them than random people off the street.

I told my new boss about all this and he gave the same advice that a lot of people here gave: Do not accept a counter offer. IF the company gives one, they intend to replace you soon with someone who won't hold them hostage. Because that's how they see it. You are demanding that they pay you more, or you'll quit and leave them short of staff until they can find a replacement. They can't take the chance that you'll do it a second time, so you're out of there as soon as they can make it happen.

And he's right. I'd do the same thing in his position. All he needs to do to avoid that problem is to pay me properly, and that's happening. It's so simple.

I didn't heed this advice, and took a counter offer (doubling my salary at the time). This seemed like a good deal.

What did I turn down? 10,000 shares of Microsoft stock. In 1983.

Oops...

1) Most of the worst employees hang on for dear life to their jobs and don't dare risk losing them for any reason (asking for a raise, etc). Incompetence or sub-par job performance not withstanding.

2) Occasionally employees get a fire lit under them by a spouse, mid-life crisis, etc and attempt to obtain a raise. Doing so communicates that the employee wants to stay at the company, and that they can be low-balled.

3) The best employees have mobility in the job space and can get better offers. This is why quitting is the only reliable way to get a raise (counter-offer). The employee has clearly shown market value above their current position, and the psychological effect of social proof kicks in.

There are of course exceptions, but even a moderate amount of time in a large company shows this to be generally true. Managers are incentivized to keep personnel costs down, and only give in if their hand is forced. It's just human nature at work.

Ironically, I only realized the way things worked at my last job. I wanted to get paid more, but didn't really know how. Then a few companies contacted me out of the blue; I interviewed at each and was offered a job at each. They all involved moving, which I didn't really want to do, but I kept that to myself. I then asked my current employer to match the highest offer, which they agreed to do. Then I showed them the offer letter, and they didn't believe that my other offers were so high, and tried to negotiate me back down to my current salary. I put in my two weeks noticed and my managers looked extremely surprised. Apparently nobody had ever actually followed through on their threat to quit; everyone had used "I have another offer" as a way to get an easy raise (but never as much as the mythical offer).

Anyway, my current employer is More Enlightened and I don't think I will have to play this game for a long time. Which is nice, because you never actually win...

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/23/how-to-minimize-politics-in-...

I enjoy Ben's blog post because talks about a more general company problem (politics), and gives guidance and process on how to avoid politics.

Many managers no more want to have negotiations about pay and advancement, than many employees do - there are two sides to the coin, many employees prefer the excitement of an affair with another company than trying to work out the existing relationship. The new company expresses their love; the old ignores the employee.

In other words, the situation described is frequently a failure of communication between supervisors and managers and their employees.

Do some companies really believe that? I can't speak for the world of employees, but if I have to put in the work of finding another job because my salary situation is stagnant, I am going to be very bitter with my current employer and require a crazy large counter offer to consider staying.

A good axiom I've always gone with is that the amount of pressure and process a given company has built into promoting secrecy about pay is inversely proportional to my desire to work for them. If you're asked by management to never discuss salary with your peers, you know they're screwing people.

> The most devoted, upstanding employees are the least paid, and the most conniving, disinterested ones are paid the most.

disagree. the best employees are the ones are constantly being recruited, they know their value, they have the quitting credibility to leave and go get a job anywhere else if their value isn't met.

anyway, if the employee wants to stay, it shouldn't get to the point of a counter offer. they ask for the raise, they have implied quitting credibility that is obvious and doesn't need to be used as a threat, they get the raise. if you have to actually threaten to quit, somebody is doing something wrong.

> If an employee tells you they have a job offer, tell them that if they take it then you'll wish them well, and stick to it.

clearly Mr Cohen isn't working with superstar engineers, the type that are a massive blow to the company if they leave. you do what you need to do to keep them at any cost, not whine on a blog.

Ultimately retention is about creating an environment that is pleasant for your employees. This means creating opportunity financially, professionally, and personally. It's hard for any employee to leave a job that appreciates them and fosters their all around growth. Money is certainly part of it but in the big picture the message is "Build a great workplace". It's a proactive approach of doing good instead of a reactive set of rules on what not to do.

Those which consistently threatened to quit renegotiated by throwing other employees under the bus, which led to a very tense work environment.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that retaining employees by expecting them to renogiate for themselves is wrong headed, but I'm not sure that "never make counter-offers" is a great philosophy. You paint yourself into a corner by having this doctrine which doesn't allow you to have your whole arsenal available when the moment arises in which you might want to make a counter-offer to retain an employee.

The truth is that despite the fact that lots of hn (yc) type startups have employees working for enough to cover their rent or whatever, and a bit of equity that has absolutely no defined value, when the company does take off, it's only fair to ask: All right, thanks for sticking by me, now what are you guys really worth! What is this killer graphics designer worth ; what is this DBA back-end coder worth who has just scaled us from a bedroom to millions of customers ; what is this accountant worth.

If they don't have other offers, there is NO answer to that question. You can't appeal to the cost of their bedroom or car, you can't appeal to the chance to build something great, none of this is external or fair.

Fair is what the market says.

I remember somewhere years ago on Slashdot that it's impossible to be "ripped off" in a transaction, reasoning thus: "When you have a fistful of cash in one hand, and the offered good or service in front of you (forget what the example was), and you say 'ok' and get it, that's your choice, if you get what you thought you would get giving the money that was asked, you physically can't be ripped off. The money was in your hand and it was your choice".

Well, sorry slashdot poster from years ago: that's false. When you have a fistful of money and buy something, but you are radically misinformed about the market price (to your disadvantage) then you just got ripped off. If you sell your vintage gold (whatever) for a couple of bucks, being told it's just for the value in gold, but a vintage gold (whatever) is worth 100x what you just paid: then you just got ripped off.

The thing about talent like this is there is no market price because everyone is unique. The market price is whatever other offers you get.

In the vintage gold whatever example, if someone says "This only has a tiny bit of gold in it, I can give you $100 for it", but in the same town five out of the five other specialists you would sell it to if this person wasn't in front of you offer at least $3,000 - then you just got ripped off.

I'm not talking about if you were to sell it yourself (instead of to a specailists) to another buyer: maybe buyers themselves pay $8,000. I'm talking about other opportunities in the exact same circumstances and market.

The fact is, "intrinsic" arguments (like how many ounces of gold is in something), what food and rent costs, what you paid the last guy, whatever, are worthless:

the ONLY thing that establishes the market price in my market of my graphics designer is their other offers (not their own other work, which is a different market).. The ONLY thing that establishes the market price of my back-end engineer is their other offers (again, not their consulting work, which is a different market).

I want to be fair with my employees, and I want to be treated fairly. I don't want to rip anyone off, nor do I want to be ripped off.

The ONLY way to do this is to explore market prices, and the best mechanism to do this is through other offers (since no one is fungible with other people in this industry; you can't just 'look it up').

So I'm going to have to strongly disagree on all points here.

I think firms need to be consistent. Either play the game all the time, or never. If you waver, you might lose someone who just thinks it's a way to get a raise.

The investment banks are the worst at this.

Unfortunately jobs are not the stuff we often fall in love with. Those opportunities are few and far between. But I think it is a far nobler goal to try and make more places like that than to have the most competitive salary policies.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper... (see q&a in at the end of the transcript)

It seems best for the species that wages be allocated to where they have the highest marginal impact on the final value of goods produced or services rendered. If a great employee happens to be too squeamish to ask for a raise, but he will still go on adding steady value to the widget, it strikes me as a societal waste to initiate a pay raise for him. However, there is this HUGE possibility of negative externalities from chronic under compensation (resentment of firm, shame of cowardice for not asking for more, laziness, obstinance, etc). This makes the problem of wages extremely difficult. Factor in the complexity that "market prices" based on outside offers are inflated to cover switching cost to the employee and it gets even harder to determine the RIGHT wage. Without quantifying these externalities, the best answer to what the right wage is, from the firm (and probably system) perspective, is the least amount of money you will take to perform the work. If this sounds un appealing to you as an employee, its probably good you're reading hacker news! THE PAIN of salary management comes from finding that "lowest amount" you're willing to take. Spending energy negotiating just to get to your scenario of indifference is slow torture. The winners in the whole process are probably below average people for whom salary reverts to the mean.

I left 100k USD in the midwest to become a west coast entrepreneur. In Chicago I got my salary raised three times in three years, first unsolicited for performance, second to counter a threat to leave, and third as a promotion. The threat to leave tied the promotion in dollar amount, but was highest in percntage terms at the time. The unsolicited raise for performance was so small that it set me down a destructive path of engineering larger pay raises which i thought i deserved and didn't receive.

What I Learned
-Money feels VERY important when you hate your job
-Big company jobs are comparitively more valuable to people with children and houses
-While the employee-led raise environment is painfull to experience, it seems to produce an appropriate allocation of LABOR eventually

Hopefully one of us will someday solve the puzzle of quantifying the value of individual labor inputs to finished goods. This would have two amazing effects. 1) workers would be fairly compensated, 2) all workers would have empirical info on how to improve their value add.

It's not true that management has the goal of minimizing comp for employees. Management tries to minimize _total compensation expenses_, which includes the costs associated with replacing an employee (and those costs can equal a full YEAR of comp in most cases.) Not to mention the disruption to projects that occurs when a key team member departs.

Really smart tech companies take a step farther: if you're in good standing when you leave, they have a special process for hiring you back if you decide you want to come back later. It's smart: they expect that lots of the best employees will want to try their hand at a startup or smaller venture at some point, but they don't burn the bridge with someone they know is a good team member.

"disinterested" means impartial or unbiased.

"uninterested" means not interested.

I wasn't going to comment on this (and thereby be a grammardouche) but I've seen the word quoted/used in the comments so many times that I thought people might actually not know this!

No. Could be they prefer to stay but have found out that their value is higher elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that. Also doesn't mean that the company is knowingly trying to save money and clearly knows the value of the employee or the position. If someone doesn't like their job and finds a job that is clearly better (maybe it's just closer to where they live with a little more money) they might not even care what the response is of the employer.

Besides, if the person didn't in some way desire to stay they wouldn't even present an offer to stay.

By the way, all this info pertains to the tech situation right now. In traditional business it's not always great to be paid the max of your value. Those are the people that are let go first when the boss has to cut costs. The people who provide the most value might very well be the ones to keep their job.

However they have to follow the other part of the advice: "Have clear and consistent salary guidelines, and regularly give raises to people who are outperforming their pay level. Don't be a tight-fisted, short-sighted moron."

taking another offer is a big risk. you're leaving the cozy confines of your current job, where you know everyone and all the systems you've so carefully crafted over the years. Last time, the company i left for ended up laying off 60% of dev staff (myself included) 5 months after switching. But i am still glad i did it. i learned lots in those 6 months i wouldn't have if i stayed, and interestingly enough, when my old boss found out i was laid off he generously offered my old job back.

i have a friend, that outright tells his boss that once a year he'll be interviewing just to see what the market worth for his job is. This seems insane to me, but his boss is totally fine with that. My friend has a great job with amazing perks (sales) that would be very hard to beat elsewhere. This move does let his management know that he isn't going to stick around unless his growth at current place continues.

Why not turn the problem around, instead of only having your most "conniving, disinterested" employees looking for new jobs, why not encourage all your employees to have a look around. Why not even give them some work hours to "assess their own worth". Send out CV's and do phone interviews.

Then when your best employees come back with better offers you will be happy to pay them more. Even better, the guys who are not working out have somewhere better to go and everybody is happy.

Of course, it's a dangerous game and you might not be able to afford more.

.

I've never read a good plan for doing employee reviews and salary increases.

"Have clear and consistent salary guidelines, and regularly give raises to people who are outperforming their pay level."

The problem is right here, what is a pay level. Just because there is a number somewhere in a spreadsheet doesn't mean an employee will be happy with what you give.

I never entertain counter offers simply because I consider it a firm agreement with that other company that I already accepted.

Management, done right, requires the ability to make judgments, including character judgments. Collapsing all possible human motivations into the single dimension of fear/greed may swell the bottom line of whoever can do it the most cynically, until at some point it doesn't, because over time (if not immediately), it will produce an atmosphere that is poisonous to innovation.

Each case is different. It depends on the individual employee, their performance and role in the organization.

And I don't much like how you are blaming the employee for "not wanting to work for you". Of course that will be true for some people, who simply need a change for change's sake. However, do you not share some of the blame for a high quality employee seeking outside employment? What happened to that employee to want to make them work some place else?

I grew up in Vancouver, a stone's throw from the border, so I suppose I take it for granted that we all learn very early on that CBP is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and everyone knows someone who was chewed out, berated, and generally treated like a criminal by them.

Seeing as how I work in the US now, it's probably fortunate that I grew up with such a cynical view about crossing international borders.

Anyways, let this be a lesson to Canadians (or I suppose more generally, all non-Americans) who want to cross the border for whatever reason: be prepared always for the worst. If you are crossing for business, always seek legal advice for your situation, and make sure all of your ducks are lined up in a row. You have no right to enter a country where you are not a citizen, regardless of what treaties and protocols your two nations have set up.

I do have a question for the author though: what kind of training involves setting up a US corp? Also, regardless of how you classify it in your head, I'm fairly certain that setting up and working for a US corp, for profit or education or just plain fun, means you're working in the USA, and would be illegal without the relevant visas.

Without knowing the specifics about his situation, it would seem to me that he was in fact trying to enter the US illegally - though he didn't seem to know this. Ignorance of the law won't help you very much when you're in a room with an irate CBP officer.

That said, attempting to cross borders for the purpose of working illegally (sorry, I don't like the law either, but there is no conceivable way that YC does not count as employment) will not endear you to law enforcement. I wish they had been more polite in the course of discovering your true purpose and refusing you entry, but if they hadn't, that would have been a crazy result under US immigration law.

There's better ways to handle one's business and legal affairs tactically, but start with knowing that the US really doesn't have a visa category "People from countries we like, for any purposes whatsoever, no questions."

>the border guard starts in on me hard. I mean he had it out for me. I still have no idea why I rubbed him the wrong way, but he sure didn't like me.

This happens to me 75% of the time I try to enter the USA.

The best one was when I had my usa-plated motorbike in Canada, and came back into the USA with it. The border guard yelled at me, literally yelled at me for 2 hours about how much trouble I was in. "You gunna get it, boy", etc.
Whenever I politely asked what law I had broken, I was told to "shut the hell up, smartass".
(I broke no law, and was eventually allowed on my way)

Another time in front of about 40 people the border guard booms "Can you read, Boy?". To which I replied "yes, sir", as he threw my passport across the room, hitting me on the chest and falling on the floor.

A while back I was flying out from LA to Melbourne, and upon looking at my international plane ticket, the border guard said "where's Melbourne?". I was then forced to sit in a dark room, by myself for 4 hours, until another guard came along and said "looks fine to me, on your way"

>he was trying to get me to talk and contradict myself - which I have to admit is pretty fucked up.

This is the case every time I cross the border.

For the record, I'm white.

Blame dumb visa requirements, not the agents who actually managed to catch you out. The laws need to be changed, and Obama actually got the point in his SOTU.

In my five years living in the US during the first dot com boom first a student then on an H1B visa I knew enough not to bother trying to start a business. I've since started or helped start over 10, but none in the USA. Their loss.

In my experience the CPB is the worst customs agency in the world and I'm an American. Natural born, of course.

He makes it sound like this is an evil US policy. But in fact, every country I've ever visited outside the US, and I've visited a lot, asked me when I would be leaving and issued the appropriate visa. For example, if you visit the Philippines, the initial visa is 21 days. You can extend the visa, but again you must inform the government of your leave date. But if you mess around with Customs on this, you're likely to get in trouble all over the world, not just in the US.

Traveling to a country which you are not a citizen of is not a right, it's a privilege. There are places where you need to apply weeks (or months) in advanced just to visit. Every country has different types of visas, and each visa has restrictions on what sort of activity you can and cannot engage in. If you are unprepared, or worse, you get caught breaking these laws, whatever happens is your own fault.

Don't like the system? Don't like how a particular country enforces its laws or what the punishment can be? Don't travel.

"Often this training involves setting up an American corporation for the startup activities - but I'll get to that later.".

Why didn't he just say he was accepted into a start-up incubator, and his company was being funded in exchange for a piece of the company that was being incorporated, and that they were going to make a real product and try to find customers for that product?

"We go through his whole list and at the very end, he very stubbornly says none of it matters because the real grounds for refusal are that I am trying to start a business in the US as according to the notes on my file by the Lewiston prosecutor. I refute this, explain the documentation prevents and disproves this, I explain and explain and explain and all to no effect."

What exactly are you doing in YC then...?

Generally, every question that the CBP agent will ask revolves around money: who pays your salary, in what currency, are you attempting to get in to the USA to find a job, will someone be giving you money for whatever reason (e.g. honorarium for giving a talk at a conference), etc. Even if the question sounds innocuous or completely unrelated to money, chances are that depending on your response, a follow up question would be. Additionally, if for whatever reason the agent decides that he doesn't like your story and believes that you are going to the USA and are going to be given money while you're there, you're basically shit out of luck.

> I say Waterloo (totally out of habit) and that I left my job so its no issue about the time off (just a pointer here - never enter the US with an unclear leaving date, and no paying job).

As someone who got locked up in a tiny room for a few hours because I mentioned that (at the time) I had been self-employed, these are basically the worst things that you can say.

I really do understand what the author went through, and I sympathize. But the reality of the situation is that entering a country where you are not a citizen is not a right, it's a _privilege_.

Remember: The CBP agents aren't there to let you in; there are there to keep people out.

The process was ridiculously stressful and daunting. My company is not exactly a huge economic driver in Canada (right now I'm bringing about $500k per year in local economic investment to BC), but it's amazingly time-consuming to get all the paperwork right and get a work permit.

After going through this process to enter Canada, I am considerably more sympathetic and tuned-in to the discussion of immigration reform in the USA. Zak may have technically been in the wrong here (and the border officers may have been correct in turning him away according to the law) but I think the law is profoundly sub-optimal, and it saddens me to see that my native country is this economically backward.

Border Patrol: What is the purpose of your visit?

Liar: I'm helping my friend move

Border Patrol: How long are you staying?

Liar: Heading back on Monday.

Border Patrol: OK, have a good trip.

The problem is, well, primarily that he chose to lie when crossing the border. But, more specifically he chose the wrong lie to tell. If you're crossing the border and planning to lie about the purpose of your visit, you'd be better off making it easy on yourself and lie about the length of your stay instead.

I don't mean to suggest to anyone that you should lie at all - it is much smarter to just tell the truth. I'm just saying that if you are planning to lie because you have the wrong visa type or whatever, then at least be smart about it and think of better story. Otherwise you wind up trying to explain to a border patrol why you are entering the country with no return date and staying for 3 months just to "visit California."

Having done business across this border before I'm sorry to say this is a very typical story. Recreational travel across the US/Canada border is quite simple but both sides are sticklers for business travel. People have crossed 50 times to go skiing or visit family without a problem and get used to that process, and then show up the 51st time saying they're on a business trip and end up getting refused because they don't have the right visa.

One memorable occasion: Just over a year ago I booked a ticket at the last moment, traveling one way and by myself to join my wife for New Years. I couldn't find my passport but with nothing to lose I gave it a shot with no picture ID on me except a 19 year old expired passport and a Costco card. Shockingly, through massive understanding and goodwill, I was able to pass through both Canadian and US security and immigration, albeit not without a few extra questions. Did I mention my mixed background is often mistaken for Middle Eastern and I have a scary drifter beard that sometimes causes my neighbors to politely decline riding in the elevator with me (lest they be mugged or assraped apparently).

So yeah, when I read this article, my impression is the whole story might be a little different. If you could also get the story as told by (1) the guys he was traveling with, (2) the guard, (3) the guard's wife and (4) the spirit medium well might be a cool movie in there.

Border guards are trained to make you feel uncomfortable, because they need to be driving with you to in a reactive state. They adapt to build psychological pressure. Don't get too hung up on them "singling" you out or targeting you, a lot of it is carefully choreographed and rote.

When I landed in Helsinki en route to Osaka, I was stopped by a border agent because my passport was not stamped. I was led back into a downright skeery waiting area for what looked like one of those good-cop-bad-cop, beat-the-crap-out-of-the-suspect interrogation rooms you see in cop shows and movies. She also had a pistol on her hip. No mere paper jockey, this one. She had to be ready to shoot a motherfucker.

Now as it turns out I landed in France, and to the French, it seems, stamping your passport is something of an optional administrative detail that may be overlooked. So my passport was looked at but not stamped. That raised some WTF alarms when I landed in Finland. (Good old EU! A model of international cooperation!) I tried explaining this in the best way I knew how, me not knowing WTF was going on either since this was my first European landing, and waited, tensely, for 15 minutes while they decided whether to do the old good-cop-bad-cop routine on me.

Thankfully, they said I could go. But I was on pins and needles there for a while.

1. Enter via private plane. The staff at airfields handling private air traffic tend to be less stressed and way more relaxed. I've taxi'd right past the allotted space (Found it eventually) as well as made gitmo jokes with BP - they just laugh.

2. Cross by car at a smaller crossing. Again staff tend to be less stressed and more accommodating.

3. (I took CS!) Have all your ducks in a row before heading off. Really. No really, work it all out beforehand. Even if just going for lunch (Which is easy. "I'm going for lunch sir, I'll be leaving in 2 hours")

The border agents don't like one-way flights. My sister was turned away at the border because she had a one-way flight to visit her boyfriend and they figured she was going to visit illegally. She also had "suspicious" things in her suitcase like a cookbook: "So you're going to take an illegal food service job?"

Make sure you can prove you have enough money to support yourself. The guy in line in front of me got sent back once because he couldn't prove this.

Avoid hard-to-explain travel arrangements, such as travelling in the US, crossing the border back into Canada to visit someone, then crossing back into the US to catch a plane. My best friend got stuck in Windsor because of this, although his scary hair and beard probably didn't help either.

If you have a green card, don't leave it at home by mistake. I got taken into the little room and had to pay a $265 administrative fee because of this.

Make sure you have documentation for everything. When my friends drove through the US to a wedding, I told them to make sure they had the invitation, hotel info, etc, to show customs so everything went smoothly.

Don't have a complex story that makes no sense. I'm sympathetic to the original author, but reading his post I couldn't figure out what he was really doing in the US and I'm not surprised he got turned away.

The strangest questioning I had crossing the border: "Where are you visiting?" "What's your father's name?" "What does your father do?" "A teacher? What school did he teach at?" By this point, I was wondering where this line of questioning was leading. But then the border guard said, "I know your father. He taught me in Grade 11."

While I'm on the subject of border crossing, I've opted out of TSA body scanning several times. I've seen complaints from others, but the patdown has always gone smoothly for me.

At least he didn't do anything stupid enough to get banned for ten years.

Next time: Try being nice to the border guard. Let them do their job but at the same time try to engage in some conversation that is of interest to them. Don't try to engage to much. Social engineering goes a lot further than the rule book.

Don't forget border guards know how to use the the internet and read his blog/website/Resume. Which leads to the question, if he wasn't working for upverter anymore, what exactly was he wanting to do in the US.

Seriously folks, this isn't like walking to the corner grocery. Know what documents to have, what to say, how to act -- everything -- before you cross the border. There are lots of people who get paid everyday to "protect" their country, and they would like nothing more than to have an excuse to fuck with you.

Now you may not like that. I do not like that at all. As an American, I really wish we could be more friendly about these things. I love my country and am proud of it, but I am also ashamed about it in many ways. This is one of them. But whether we like it or not or whether we're ashamed of it or not -- you still gotta know what the hell you are doing when you go to cross a border.

I wish I could upvote this, but sadly it's just too much like a bunch of other articles.

Do your homework, be a smart traveler!

Now, I think the behaviour of some of the border patrol agents seems unacceptable, but he was trying to enter the US for 3 months with no proof of ties to home and no return flight.

Putting the business visa aside, that alone is enough to be rejected. If you have no job, and do not own a house or have a mortgage, and have not booked a return flight home (and I don't believe he had any documents to prove he could afford one) you are going to be rejected.

Normally I wouldn't side with border patrol but despite the poor treatment he received he brought a lot of it on himself through poor planning.

Yikes. You really walked into that one. The more I kept reading the more I was cringing. The good cop, bad cop routine, letting you sit for hours, "let me talk to the supervisor" thing.

FYI: If a visitor from a friendly first world nation tries to enter your country carrying a valid passport, the appropriate response at the border should be: "welcome".

The one in a million who wants to enter the country with the intention of outstaying their welcome can do this so easily by booking a hotel and having a return ticket that is is really not worth harassing all the other visitors for.

This reminds me of the difference between Australia and the US in regards to the right to withhold comment. With similar legal backgrounds, there are similar rights about being questioned, but there are subtle differences.

In the US there's the good old 5th amendment that everyone knows (from TV if nowhere else). You don't have to comment, and your unwillingness to comment cannot be used against you in court. However the police can quite freely and happily lie to you to get what they want.

There are subtle differences here in Australia. You can reserve the right not to comment. You don't have to speak, but depending on circumstance, withholding comment can be used against you in court (I guess for things like "I refuse to say where I was on the night of my wife's murder" kind of stuff, I don't know for sure).

But on the other hand, when questioned by police, they have to tell you what they're questioning you about at the start of the interview. If they're questioning you about a robbery down the street and you let slip that you have illegal drugs in the house, it's not connected to their reason for interview and technically they can't use it. There are exceptions for very serious crimes like murder, of course.

It means that authorities do not have the right to go on 'fishing expeditions', though I don't know whether it applies to border control.

disclaimer: I don't follow law in much detail, just read the above from an Australian law site when I was wondering what our version of "the 5th" was...

The border officers ask generic questions and try to see how you respond to them. This is good because the response will reveal more than your words.

However, the caveat is that if you honestly enter with a reason that is somewhat out of ordinary then you just make it more complex the more honest details you spit out. On the other hand, if you manage to appear like the thousand other people who went across the border the same day, you can have lots of things that you never need to or want to explain.

So, it comes down to playing a role. Rehearsing answers to likely questions helps not because you'd want to learn to lie to the border officials but to keep the process smooth by sticking to its rules. Unfortunately, the same rehearsal will allow you to cover a purpose of the trip you don't want to reveal.

If you start a business, you are an employee of that business. People who say, "I'm self employed," are technically wrong. They are actually employed by the business they started.

It's sad that the border between the US and Canada isn't as wonderfully open as it once was. I, myself, have been annoyed by border agents (particularly when arriving late at night on a bicycle, for a poorly-planned trip down the Pacific coast). However, this guy just walked into it soo badly. It's like he didn't give a moment's thought to the fact he was entering another country to conduct his business.

By the way, always arrive in a country with either return airfare or a printout of bank balances to show you can support yourself for the duration of your stay.

The one time I did go to America was precisely through the port the OP did - from Niagara into Buffalo. I got asked some pretty awkward questions and made to feel quite uncomfortable - at the time I thought they were massive bunch of assholes.

He really didn't understand that we were just going over the border for 2 hours to eat chicken wings!

A former colleague of mine tried to get his American girlfriend to the UK and they had massively different stories when she arrived. She got a 1-month holiday visa and a severe threat that both (he was a US citizen) would be deported if she overstayed by even a single day.

The onus is on the person crossing the border to know what they're doing. There's plenty of info, particularly on going to the US and no excuse not to prepare, especially if you're going for work not a holiday.

I'm from France and I can travel everywhere in Europe without having to show any identification and without having to prove something...

Right now I'm near Toronto and planning to go to the U.S. in a couple of weeks... Heard so many stories about other students buying their plane tickets and then being stucked at the border, and now this rant, I'm shitting myself.

I don't think any one begrudges countries their border paranoia. But what is utterly un-necessary is the rude, psychotic, OTT behaviour of the border people. Fine that they want to check people out, but to scream, shot, and abuse people visiting is frankly outrageous.

I've rarely left my country, and every time it was no pain what so ever. But after reading that, which confirms all the negative press, has confirmed that I will never ever travel to the USA. Why would any one want to risk that?

Another post mentions money: they just want you to have enough till you get out and not be a burden. They asked me what my parents occupation was (they were my backers), and I did have documentation as to that (their payslips), not that they cared much.

http://nomadlaw.com/2010/09/more-law-refusing-answer-questio...

Yes I know there are worse places in the world but that doesn't mean we have to be a-holes ourselves.

And stop apologizing for border guards - they don't take that occupation to do anything noble, they take it because they get off on it.

It's a pity that the first welcome people get amounts to "we don't want you here".

e.g. most border guards believe you need a 9-5 job for life and if you don't have that you are probably up to no good. So answer with that in mind. Don't include irrelevant details that don't fit what they can understand.

The more stuff you say they don't understand the worse off you will be.

We were raised in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s much like the French children in the article. We weren't treated like children, but like small adults. There were no children's menus in restaurants. If we wanted to go to out to eat, we dressed and acted properly and ate real food with our parents. If we wanted to go to little league, piano lessons, or anywhere else, we got off our butts and found a way to get there while Dad was at work and Mom was watching younger siblings. We walked to school from age 5. If we were late for dinner, we didn't eat. If we were late getting home at night, we didn't get to go out again. If we wanted money we got a job, not an allowance. If we misbehaved...I don't know what would happen. We didn't misbehave; we just knew better.

Most of our cousins and friends were the same, with a few exceptions. That was just the way it was.

Then somebody somewhere fucked it all up and now schools are surrounded by parents in minivans picking up special people who never really grow up. No wonder.

The French aren't different, just late. Just give them a few more years and they'll fuck it all up, too.

The line between my world and the adult's world was very clearly defined and it was clear that I had to make my own fun, but the parameters around what I was allowed to do were well defined as well. While I got into some mischief here and there, it had been drilled into me at a young age how a good person behaved and I emulated it.

When I tell parents of how I grew up, the reaction almost without exception is complete horror. I have had several women try to console me. One woman told me that my emotional scars must run deep and gave me the number for a psychologist! Needless to say, I don't talk about it much these days.

Now I don't know if how I grew up would be traumatic to other children. I do think that parents act like their children's entertainers/servants and try hard to ensure they like them or they're cool or, and this I'll never understand, try to be friends with them.

I will say that it worked for me and I don't hate my family for doing it. Quite the opposite in fact.

There is no question, in my experience, that the number one problem in American parenting psychology is the idea that you need to always respond to the kids' immediate needs and to give them attention. It prevents them from learning how to intellectually stimulate themselves, or be alone for any meaningful period of time, both of which are absolutely indispensable survival adaptations for childhood and adult life. The best parenting for the average American parent I've run into is less parenting.

I also have the sneaking suspicion that people delay or refrain from having kids here more due to the implied premise that having them is a life-consuming ordeal that totally, completely dominates adult consciousness. It shouldn't do that.

Yes, having kids changes your life, but you're still you. You do not live at the pleasure of your child. When hanging out with adult friends with kids, it absolutely astounds me that they end up repeating the same sentence ten times because their kid keeps interrupting them, in a tireless quest for attention. If I did that, my parents would've belted me silly. I guess that's "child abuse" here. Either way, aside from a good spanking, the best thing my parents ever did for me was ignore me a lot. I probably would have turned out to be diagnosed with "ADD" or some other claptrap if they hadn't.

Actually empowering children involves giving them choices, yes, but within a framework that constrains them. "You have a choice to eat the candy now, but at a cost later" teaches a child to make long(er)-term decisions than "do whatever you want". This mirrors the actual experiences they will have later in life, where they will have freedom, but still be required to operate with the bounds of lawful society. (I can buy myself X now, but I will have to save later in order to pay my mortgage, etc.)

By refusing to limit children by modeling the realities they will face later in life, adults teach children that consequences are fantasy, often to disastrous results when they grow up.

She said, "Funny that there aren't any kids here." I said, "There are tons of them! Just look!"

Not only were there at least 30 teenagers of various ages, there were more than 10 young children under 5, including one infant in arms. All were so calm and quiet that she didn't even know they were there. Not that the occasional toddler didn't try to run away from her parents -- I saw it happening -- but everything was chill. No screeching. No tantrums. No "COME BACK HERE!".

It didn't stand out to me cuz I got used to it, but my friend was flabbergasted.

Austrians love their kids and treat them kindly and with respect, but never do the kids get the idea that they are the entirety of the adults' world. (Which sounds harsh at first, but that kind of relationship is truly codependent and bad for everyone.)

My father on the other hand. Typical manipulative, dominating, threatening, intimidating, masculine, control freak. I love him but I'm still recovering from his "parenting style". My relationship with him is permanently damaged. Even now that he's older and his testosterone levels have gone down I still avoid him. A decade of being yelled and screamed at and threatened doesn't just go away. It's always there.

I've told him I love him lots of times, I just wish I could tell him how much of an Asshole he was.

I have a 20 month old daughter. I constantly struggle with this because I want to be nice even when saying 'no', but it doesn't take long to realize that being stern without being scary is the best balance. I realized that my 'no' when she opens the pantry door is totally without conviction and she doesn't respond at all. But my 'no' when she strays off the sidewalk and near the street is obviously much more stern and she knows I'm serious. The most difficult thing is saying 'no' with conviction when you just don't really care that much (like the pantry door).

I think there is another possible explanation: by stopping to chase Leo, it stopped being a game for him. It might not have been her sterner "no" at all.

Also I'd like to point out that the French are famous for putting their kids into kindergarden from the age of 3 months. From my perspective (dad of a 16 months old who is still at home) that seems rather cruel.

http://www.economist.com/node/21543122

Not to get too "get off my lawn", but when I was a kid, kids didn't rule public spaces the way they do today. Many parents not only won't tell their kids "no" under any circumstances, they freak out if anybody else asks their precious spawn to stop kicking them on airplanes, running into their legs with shopping carts, or shooting BB guns at their home's windows.

Also, get off my lawn.

Anyway we ended up with 3 Eagle Scouts, one now a veteran, one a CS graduate from CMU and one a 3-time all-stater in cello. Just regular Iowa country kids. You could trust them with anything - your car, your life savings, your girlfriend.

They learned to work hard at a young age (6-8) at home, at church and on their Uncle's farm; to get themselves organized for school from the start; to clean a bathroom and do dishes. We never talked down to them.

Their friends work hard with a smile, want nothing more than to be treated as an adult. Its easier I guess when their friends share the same goals, the lessons seem natural and normal.

We did this consciously, left the big city when they were old enough to feel limited by sidewalks and malls, and bought land in Iowa where I grew up. I don't think that's all necessary or possible for everyone. But it sure helped!

To quote the YC application form "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

Creativity, rule-bending and being outspoken are often hallmarks of innovators and entrepreneurs. But obviously patience and obedience are virtues as well. Culturally we have to make trade-offs deciding which of these we want to encourage in kids and which we don't.

It's silly to pretend there's just one way that's better across the board. TMTOWTDI.

no one else tell their kids to say "thanks, please", and no one else dares to say no to whatever stupid things kids might want!

Exactly. Only the French educate their children.

Guess what. Half the people don't educate the children, half of them do. Or maybe it's 2/3. Who cares. The point is it has strictly nothing to do with being French.

(I'm French.)

last time i was in France the general atmosphere was similar to this music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU7bFpPJiww, teenagers
burning down their own city etc. heh.

The article is almost entirely anecdotal with little offered to back up supposition and conjecture.

Most of which because the man is too humble to accept any of it.

The real deal is no less exciting. The clash in name space does not end there. Cormac is the first name of one of the developer's of a distributed memory implementation of the language called phLuid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_%28programming_language%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CM-5

I know this isn't "free software" per Stallman's definition (precludes freedom 2), so don't all rush to flame me at once here. I believe, however, that the GPL's requirement that all software can be resold and redistributed by any recipient has been a big blight on the image of open-source software and has caused companies to actually tighten up lest their software and work become entirely unprofitable.

Someone needs to write a license that can be easily reused which a) releases all source code and requires the release of derivative versions, b) allows derivative works by users who own a license (perhaps up to a certain commercial limit) and allows them to share their changes with other licensed users, and c) restricts distribution of the code or any of its derivatives to persons whom the recipient in good faith believes to have a valid license to the software.

Unfortunately the GPL has ingrained in people that releasing source is the same as negating your whole investment. I don't believe things have to be this way. I believe that every software owner deserves a copy of the source, but I don't believe that every software owner has the right to redistribute that program practically without limitation as the GPL allows. If we have someone to lead the way in profitable source releases, I believe many companies will follow and at least part of the free software vision would be fulfilled: source code would come distributed with every program.

Companies like id who resell their engine techs to other commercial developer studios would still be able to do so due to the commercial limitations in such a license and the requirements to own a valid license for id's particular piece of software and the code wouldn't have to wait five years to see the world. Anyone with the money to pay for the license isn't going to infringe because they know the court costs would be futile and cost 3x+ as much as just buying a license straight out. The open-source contributions could be incorporated into the commercial editions immediately (and hopefully vice-versa). I really don't think id et al have much to lose from this approach, so I hope someone would do it.

id is not beholden to a large corporate publisher and Carmack clearly has the interest and understands the benefit behind a source release. Carmack has the vision to do something like this, imo, and I really hope he does.

Thank you, Id!

- Piece of history lost

- Makes it harder to boot up anything because not a complete, running application.

- Derivatives of the art are impossible

- Artists will have a hard time starting to tweak things, because there's nothing to tweak.

- Coders will despair trying to provide even a basic set of art (because we're usually crap at art) so they could start poking at the code.

Sadly, this "here you have the source, off you go" thing seems to be very prevalent, and it always irks the hell out of me.

If you don't want to release everything, alright, that's workable. But something, at least some basic art, say the first level or whatever suits you. I don't get it why that should be a bad thing. I also don't get why people seem to think that idea is bad.

7,634,504 - Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller (http://www.google.com/patents/US7634504) - The claims really are as broad as the title implies, claiming to cover any system that presents the user questions in natural language, allows the user to select among multiple choices, and then modifies the HVAC settings based on their response.

7,142,948 - Controller Interface with Dynamic Schedule Display (http://www.google.com/patents/US7142948) - Claims to cover any controller that can change temperature from one temperature to a second temperature, while displaying an ETA for reaching the second temperature.

7,584,899 - HVAC Controller (http://www.google.com/patents/US7584899) - Claims the idea of having a movable housing over a display that, when rotated, changes an HVAC-system parameter that is reflected on that display.

7,159,789 - Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface (http://www.google.com/patents/US7159789) - A rotatable selector with several selectable positions, and a potentiometer. For an HVAC system.

7,159,790 - Thermostat with Offset Drive (http://www.google.com/patents/US7159790) - Some more rotatable-selector inventions, involving linking mechanical position and electrical signals.

7,476,988 - Power Stealing Control Devices (http://www.google.com/patents/US7476988) - Something to do with switching between primary and secondary power sources. My EE is too rusty to figure out exactly what this one is claiming without spending more time than I'd like on it.

6,975,958 - Profile Based Method for Deriving a Temperature Setpoint Using a 'Delta' Based On Cross-Indexing a Received Price-Point Level Signal (http://www.google.com/patents/US6975958) - Claim 1 is even broader than the title, claiming to have invented and patented the idea of adjusting an HVAC system's setpoints based on communicating with a remote host.

They strongly have the flavor of taking some standard control method (rotating knobs attached to potentiometers, 1950s-style feedback control & rate prediction), tacking on "for an HVAC system", and deeming the result, which applies standard control techniques in the obvious way to the domain, an "invention".

There are many areas of technology in the home that are controlled by very old companies that are in markets that are very slow to innovate. The real proof of this is in these patents (q.v.), which detail seemingly near-archaic technology. Seriously, this is their state of the art? These are exactly the kind of competitors you want to have.

That is a byproduct of the fact that brands and design for home technology last a long, long time. Recently, I replaced my gas water heater valve and discovered that it's a part that's been around since the 1950's in its current design. Proven technology sticks around. Similarly, Honeywell has been in thermostats since forever.

Finally, the margins in this business can be pretty impressive. There are home appliances and technology products whose premium versions cost twice as much as the regular version even though they're not much different. Some people are just willing to spend a good bit more for the absolute best. Very much an Apple market strategy (i.e. high-capacity iPods).

I hope to see Nest introduce more devices like their learning thermostat soon, as well as a new way for them to communicate and be controlled which can hopefully improve on and replace the ancient X10 automation standard. Nest is in a great position right now.

You're officially successful enough to be sued by entrenched non-innovators who took out overly broad patents so that they would be able to milk anyone who successfully built and marketed a product.