aparsons

Would it not be correct for those callers to keep calling the old (shared) implementation?

I am NOT envious of Zenhub right now!

I wrote this months ago, but worth repeating- from a Microsoft perspective, as Java was seen as the Microsoft platform killer by many:

“Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array<int> on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and [MSFT] didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.

The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable.”

Everyone knew the internet was going to change things massively. It’s just that nobody with any sort of power in the industry knew how exactly things were going to change. A lot of people overshot by trying to work on video streaming, video chat, document editors (Google Docs like) decades before the technology got there. Microsoft had a demo of Excel running in the browser by 1999.

This is very neat. I love that this is an on-device product, not a recurring bill service. There was a YC company that was doing the same thing, but with ridiculously expensive monthly pricing, that had a Launch HN thread here recently. To be frank, I like your execution and product/pricing choices better than theirs.

Also my first thought. If these folk can share metrics to prove otherwise, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I think this is neat. You may need to make this customizable for users. As a tech lead / manager, I used to have 5-15 in-flight PRs at a time. Some of them took a week to review. I can see having them all in slack possibly becoming tiring. The bottleneck is not my attention span, but my schedule.

Secondly, and this is an easily debunked point but I want to ask it nevertheless - what stops Github from building a bot to do this? How to you plan to create additional value beyond the notifications?

BillG was a huge believer in visual computing and digitized personal assistants for the masses in the early 90s. This was before the internet went mainstream, so making a single machine smarter through presentable data repositories seemed the way to get another 100 million computer users. Encarta was a good example of this push.

At the time, Microsoft Research, who were an independent org but still well-tuned at coming up with things the mothership’s C-suite enjoyed*, came up with a lot of concepts like the Bob computing environment. Microsoft ended up shipping a lot of these as products largely due to the personal curiosity of a lot of folks, not just Bill. A golden example of several good ideas being combined into one really bad idea.

* Ballmer the biggest proponent of going international for growth. There were some neat projects around internationalization, content translation, and regional functionality that didn’t see light as far as I know.

In my experience, great abstractions without a good data migration blueprint is as about as useful as no abstraction at all.

In this example - great, you have a “queue” abstraction. When you switch to RabbitMQ or Postgres, how do you move your existing data without a quality of service or data loss? It can be difficult with production datastores even if the abstraction within your service is beautiful.

Cat and mouse games lead to very surprising innovations.

During the Sri Lankan civil war about 10 years ago, the Tiger rebels had acquired Zlin Z 43s, modified them to carry several bombs [1], and were bombing targets left and right, including the country’s capital.

The populace was increasingly pondering why the country’s well-trained air force, with modern fighter jets with years of scrambling experience [2] could never seem to shoot these slower planes down. In fact, there were no confirmed kills during the conflict.

It was later revealed that the rebels knew the capabilities of the enemy Chengdu J7 and MiG 29 interceptors, and had modified their own aircraft engines with anti-IR capabilities [3]. Complex IR jamming equipment was suspected, but the country’s PM later said that the rebels had simply redirected the exhaust fumes from the back of the aircraft to the front, throwing “unlockable” heat signatures [4].

By the end of the war, the rebels had actually “won” the war in the skies by destroying over 30 aircraft and losing 2, despite ultimately losing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zl%C3%ADn_Z_43

[2] The government’s prized jet fighters were stationed in the capital, about 400 km from the main conflict zone. In 2000, the rebels launched a devastating offensive and the government held on by a thread due to their ability to scramble ground attack craft to battles in 7 minutes. It’s said that had they lost that battle, all hopes of winning the war would have been lost.

[3] http://www.sundaytimes.lk/081102/Columns/sitreport.html

[4] https://www.dailynews.lk/2020/01/18/local/208783/slaf-most-e...

The classic “I’m sorry you were offended”

He deletes tweets that don’t fit his narrative (that he’s a genius building a product nobody else is capable of building) on the regular, so don’t be surprised if those tweets magically never existed by morning

Could you explain the text at the bottom? Translation of the above text?

PG will say what he needs to say for his investments to pan out. He’s even written a desperate essay on Mighty’s behalf when their reception was less than stellar. I wouldn’t read into his opinions that much.

Happy to contribute as well, if a GoFundMe / some other crowd fund is set up.

OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.

Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering

Mentioned in my other comment, but just all the more evidence of a megalomaniac, insecure CEO trying to build a company out of shallow moats and little value creation

Amjad comes off as super insecure in this- and it’s not all that surprising considering REPL.it really has little or no competitive moat

YouTube does this notorious thing where the ad above the first search result appears after the results, so you accidentally click the ad.

Initially, I misunderstood the title as referring to pupil (as in student) and went, “Weirdly, that makes sense”.

The problem with statements like this is - what’s obvious to us may not be obvious to them.

The thing is, even when they were big evil, they had the best developer tooling by a mile. Visual Studio, MSDN, etc were novel and leagues ahead of other platform providers’ equivalents

Microsoft has always had the best developer tools. This is an exciting step forward for low-code

I didn’t realize they gave the devices away for free

Not sure why you’re downvoted

+1 for Khan Academy. I watch their videos for fun at times

Thanks for the response. Very impressive, and best of luck!

Simple, beautiful app solving a real pain point. Kudos to OP and team! I have some general questions, not directly related to the product, but rather, the company:

- How long has it been since you released the product? I’ve always been curious as to when exactly in a product’s lifecycle that HN Launches occur. Certainly seems to skew towards somewhat established companies.

- You have some great names using your product! Did you market to specific teams within these companies or to the company as a whole? I’d love to learn how you went about successfully acquiring these “big fish” customers as a young product and company.

Thanks

I remember a post here this year about Big tech being used as a tool of oppression. The poster was laughed out, but this is a very real issue.

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117559

AIOps is the hot new buzzword. Saw it thrown around quite a bit recently, like blockchain in years past