Heh, I love the detail on all the confcall/web sharing problems.
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.
There's a good chance that if FB is the only sign-in option, I will immediately close the window and never use your service. It's pretty much an insta-bounce for me for the exact reasons cited in the article.
1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc.
2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice.
3. Filters mail at the server side.
4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month.
Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.
[...] 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.
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.
Facebook engineer here, working on this problem with Joshua.
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.)
Wow. I was expecting an interesting discussion. I was disappointed. Apparently the consensus on hacker news is that there exists a repository size N above which the benefits of splitting the repo _always_ outweigh the negatives. And, if that wasn't absurd enough, we've decided that git can already handle N and the repository in question is clearly above N. And I guess all along we'll ignore the many massive organizations who cannot and will not use git for precisely the same issue.
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".
Why the false dichotomy? The author seems to imply that the alternatives are 1) never touching a drop of alcohol, or 2) getting blind drunk, being incapable of controlling your actions, and blacking out. There are some good points in there about how you shouldn't "need" alcohol, and arguments against getting totally wasted, but he seems to be completely ignoring a huge, huge middle ground.
I'm the one who made that 3D printed Tesla Valve shown in the pictures and video. I'm currently inventing a jet engine with no moving parts. If anyone wants to ask questions about the valve's workings or about Tesla, go right ahead.
This isn't as much about place as it is about time and could have easily been entitled, "Why 1950s Parents Are Superior."
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.
It is sad, but I cannot read this blog post. The Dutch equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA, named Brein, sued two of the major Dutch ISPs for not blocking access to The Pirate Bay. Brein won the court case, and the judge required these ISPs to block The Pirate Bay starting yesterday.
Now I am met with this when visiting thepiratebay.se:
Author seems a bit naive about international sovereignty, though I suppose one can't exactly blame him for it.
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.
On a related note, I once had a dispute with Valve about a buggy game I bought on Steam. Their support wouldn't say anything except point me to the subscriber agreement, which says that they could send you a copy of notepad instead of the game you purchased and you'd still be out of luck.
I considered doing a chargeback, but thankfully I researched it first and found out that if you do a chargeback, Valve will disable all of your games, including the ones not under dispute. It was so cleverly evil, I'm still not quite sure what combination of impressed and disgusted to be.
The answer to "do we own our Steam games" isn't just "no", it's "no, and Valve know this, and they use that fact punitively when they want to".
Don't ever start using vi. After you do, any text editor that you are forced to use that doesn't have vi key bindings will give you fits and make you cry.
Learning vi is your standard process of enlightenment and elation followed by a lifetime of disappointment. Think about how you'd feel if you ate the best meal of your life at age 13, and the restaurant where you ate it went out of business the next day.
You'll be frustrated by all other software. You'll wander around trying to explain to other people why the thing you had was so good, and it was so easy, and that nothing else compares, and wouldn't it be great if everyone did things this way.
"Just don't look 100% like a vanilla bootstrap site."
Unless you're targeting developers or Silicon Valley who cares? Most people couldn't tell you the difference between a Bootstrap site or a non-bootstrap site, even if they could its unlikely they would actually care. As a dev who admittedly sucks at CSS I'll take better looking and clone-like (and cross-browser) over ugly and unique any day.
Stallman reminds me more of Steve Jobs than anyone else does:
- 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
Personally I believe he has some major blind spots -- so did Jobs. The failure of this community to hold him in comparable regard is just that, a failure.
What's interesting is that the sophistication of the attack is immaterial to the fact that they achieved a significant security disclosure. You don't have to be a sophisticated hacker to perpetrate meaningful hacks, you just have to be more sophisticated than the target of your attack.
This is what makes the Anonymous movement so fascinating to me. In Anonymous culture, being "dox'd" is a big deal. That's kind of end-game stuff for hackers. Once you're outed, you're out. Coincidentally, the same rules apply for espionage.
What makes this doubly interesting is that Anonymous is made up of young, tech-savvy individuals. The establishment (government, large corporations, etc) increasingly rely on tools that are created, or at least well understood, by their attackers. It's a classical asymmetric battlefield problem. The attackers aren't big, but they have some very specific domain knowledge, and are increasing in sophistication over time.
That previous paragraph is probably way to generous in my evaluation of the skill level represented inside Anonymous, but that's a large part of the problem. We don't really know much about the insides of Anonymous by design. As the establishment pushes harder and harder (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) to enforce the status quo, who will turn? There's a tipping point at which the establishment can no longer wage the battle. Acquiring the talent becomes too expensive and breaks their business model.
I'm not angry at Reuters for using the word hacker in the common way, since it is used by everyone that way, and they are not in the wrong for using a term with the definition the public uses. I'm angry that Reuters used Mark saying that he is a hacker to imply that he is associated with people who damaged Fortune 500 companies, especially when he (Mark) defines hacker to mean something completely different to the common, and they use that in the article. This entire article was a thinly veiled attempt to launch an ad hominem attack against Silicon Valley for opposing SOPA. The opposition of SOPA by Silicon Valley was even mentioned in the article.
Whilst my gut reaction would be that this is the wrong decision, this - "However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times." - is actually a rational and convincing response.
Just speculation, but I have the impression that alcohol "problems" are a larger problem in countries where the age required to legally buy alcohol is rather high.
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.
This is sadly a pretty obvious case. The author was moving to the US to start a company. It wasn't to travel, nor to pop in and out to conduct business, and calling yCombinator a training program is a stretch. It might be, but it's a 'training program' that helps you start a business. A simple google would have told the agent what was what.
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.
This is the piece we (Khan Academy) need to create a compelling math exercise experience on tablets. Playing around for a few minutes, this product seems to be way ahead of anything else out there.
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?
A tip off could have come from anywhere, that is why it is such a good PR explanation for them:
* A random concerned citizen (so it wasn't them looking, they just acted on behalf of someone genuinely concerned, this makes the thing a bit more noble).
* A scorned lover/an enemy ("oh you think are going to go on a vacation? remember what you did to me, I know exactly how to get back... what is that FBI tip-off number again...?")
* A secret (or not so secret govt.) web searching and filtering program. They don't want to reveal which one it is, but it could potentially just be made to generate "tip-offs" so that it looks like a person noticed, but in fact everything is automated. High profile tip-offs can be filtered through human agents as well.
Some of us who lived repressive regimes know how this works. If the govt. is afraid of X, and sets up an anonymous tip-off line to report X. Then is known to go ahead and blindly act on that tip. It creates an awesome/terrifying tool for everyone to use. X can be anything you like: terrorism, communism, whatever the du jour "War on ..." is waged.
In the Soviet Union we had neighbors denouncing each other for anti-communist activities because they couldn't agree on the color of the fence. This stuff will happen. The crazier and irrational the govt. gets the more potential for abuse it creates. With a bit of work and ingenuity, during certain decades, you could have made your whole neighbor's family disappear into Siberia practically overnight.
1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.
2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.
3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups?
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
Patrick, I completely agree with you, which is why I have never publicized my difficulties with problem customers.
But something in my reptilian brain really still likes this. Let me tell you why...
You say "Work with better clients." Working with better clients means avoiding the bad ones. Avoiding the bad ones means being able to identify them. Being able to identify them means being warned.
It's almost like seeing an obstacle in the highway and wanting to warn others going in the opposite direction. But how do you do that? I once had the idea of putting a giant tattoo "Avoid me." on my bad clients' foreheads.
The biggest problem with bad clients isn't that they took you, it's that they never go away; they just keep popping up over and over, only to take advantage of others.
One former client of mine is the perfect example. He never paid his bills, he was extremely abusive, he was often very unethical, and would do anything to make an extra buck. He would pop up all over the country with a different name, starting the cycle all over again. I recently noticed he just got out of jail with a brand new name and web site. If only I could find a righteous way to warn others, "Run the other way!"
As a "business person" I need to know three things to hire someone:
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
