ballard

Speaking of Android, there's a neat hacker dude at GOOG that has an unreleased Android-based visual environment based on Squeak complete with animated 3D and 2D examples. It's pretty neat that basically anything in it can be changed, and other bits of code can be imported from the web. Would be a fun environment to build a game in.

Yeah, getting a working prototype and alpha users before even thinking about angel or VC.

Later, the right amount of validation will speak for itself and reduce friction. That is if investment would win a race-to-market. Otherwise, plan to get to market as quick as you can on with the team and money you have.

With actual rockstar startups not burning through cash like it's their own personal vacation from profitably and reality, the dilemma is often centered between reasonable frugality and trying too hard to seem frugal ending up penny wise-pound foolish.

FWIW I'm impressed more by how little actual (non-bullshit numbers) cash and time went into something.

Only B-players of second string shops investors and founders behave in such a manner. The valley is too small for such to be sustainable. The top people aren't stupid and are hemmed in by social and reputation considerations. The B-string shops will only fuck with you if they assume you don't have powerful enough friends.

It's push vs pull. If you build value, investors will beat down your door.

Founders have to have enough credibility to find customers and a business model to seek out profit, or it seems like a risky proposition no amount of selling can overcome.

Business people that don't add value tend to focus on appearances than substance because it's an easier business theather to bikeshed than to show progress and interest. The upside is that anyone that's built a business before is unlikely to be fooled by clever packaging or a well-defended presentation.

Given the same problem, I'd look at a reactor pattern MQTT mosquitto like pubsub protocol in Go, Erlang or something JVM/CLR. The beauty of publish subscribe of many low bandwidth clients is that they need tiny bits low latency work in a sizable bandwidth app. Could run BINC/CBOR RFC 7409 over zeromq on lower-end infiniband between boxen. Millions of IM users are just similar enough to tons of smart meters that the solution overlap is enough, but obviously people are more bursty with jagged sinewave daily traffic loads.

Let the clients handle end-to-end encryption with something zk DH/OTR/SMP.

I'm curious how they later monitored this and did other common SRE stuff. Also deployments.

Unsatisfied with the Quora answers, the reality is that they are usually extremely productive in their domain, thought leaders or big brands.

The meta is that thinking strategically from tactical on up about how solve business and customer problems at scale is uncommon, valuable. It's hard as it requires focus, experimentation and intellect. Further, common sense and critical thinking skills are basically impossible to improve from a rote memorization approach because the education system is so hopelessly disconnected from life and business. A wise parent today could act like an investor by taking a step back, do far less for their kids so they can become more independent and more survivable. Whenever I see kids having their food cut for them, ...

The jobs markets and cost of living between countries will gradually level out. The UN data from that TED talk shows there is much less horrible poverty but it still exists. I think the risk is virtually every country becoming a Balkinized, classist place like India. Unfortunately, it seems the momentum is going that way.

The other point is we have to look at a way that somehow voluntarily redistributes some gigawealth for necessities of those that are struggling to survive. There is so much wealth now that survival is pretty much assured, but it's the degree of pleasantness and dignity where a little can go a long ways.

And eventually converge to various degrees implanted tech, worn tech, other improvements and "improvements."

Subsidize mobiles, laptops and tablets.

Oh and maybe food and shelter.

People that operate outside of coherent, explainable, rational principles tempered by compassion are bigger liabilities. It's common sense.

Departing from this is what allows folks to believe violent terrorism to be a viable strategy to "win."

Something like 95% of the entire human population believes in something supernatural. And also, what other nonsense do they believe?

Yes and the guns, mass surveillance and racially unequal incarceration tantamount to genocide.

Now there's some guy in every coffee shop claiming to have an accelerator without any idea how to succeed (specialize/differentiate). They're 95% wooly propositions with the occasional one that can sell nontrivial epsilon of value.

My favorite so far is this guy that hangs out at a cafe near Stanford that has alienated everyone in his potential "deal-flow" by anger outbursts on conference calls and generally acting like a dick.

It's clever branding and nice.

If it could use Heroku as backends for repos, now that would probably break HK's freemium model.

The other point is that bitbucket has unlimited private repos for free and github has unlimited public ones for free. In a business setting, I can't see the time and cost of maintaining code services except as a backup, or if you are Goldman Sachs imprisoning your ex-employees or a defense contractor working on missiles. (Setting up giolite + active directory + Crowd + JIRA + FishEye was a chore I'd rather not repeat.)

It looks a little nicer than gitlab, but has anyone had recent experience with gitlab, redmine or github enterprise?

Ultimately though, github could threaten C&D against the authors if it were to take off because it's such a design ripoff. Although it has almost no commercial viability it's neat for its own sake.

This is why top-down, single-source of truth is mostly the best way for core infrastructure. No pun intended. It's important for some parts to not be infinitely reconfigurable or dynamic because it would create chaos and service dependency deadlock/DoS. Most people not running bare metal don't know the lessons of how and why things underneath are they way they are and the sensible limits what's possible.

It's also more secure because if it's possible to dictate all of the service details, it's much easier to run a lean and locked-down infrastructure.

CoreOS by itself looks great. More JEOS distros need to happen. Trying to bundle more unproven things just looks marketing led the product.

Trying to cast an argument as a strawman with a strawman is pretty weak.

You've also admitted that it's an incomplete solution. But What's worse is that people are going to buy this and quickly they'll have to scrap it when it gets out of sync, deadlocks or can't handle more than 8 boxes.

Configuration management transactions.

Puppet has the notion of stages.

Yes because it's marketing an unproven technology as a solution when better things already exist. Someone I know from (OpsCode||Puppet) even further the recommendation of zk as basically the only proven consistent KVS. A better approach should be to do what other cloud shops have done and ship ZK appliances. Pushing new tech on customers is using them to beta test unproven tech, which is reinventing the wheel and risky.

There are plenty of good things few people know about.

It's bad to promote a solution that don't address the problems of real deployments: coordinating change and responding to it. Updating host files or ssh moduli is about all it seems good for. In reality, files have to be changed at just the right time in a series of coordinated changes with everything else. Chef is what I reach for first, because it solves the problem in the most logical and most complete way. Some people prefer Puppet and that works too. But it's several systems together, like TheForeman (not just Foreman) that make for more powerful infrastructure. There are half a dozen or so other systems in addition to some homegrown (nonportable) ones out there but most others fail to meet requirements Chef and Puppet address (security, auditing, scalability, non/determinism).

Hiera is a like a hierarchal property list that puppet chef etc can use to pull its state. Use zk as a backend to keep multiple instance of hiera in sync to scale for large shops. The neat thing is, like OpenLDAP, Hiera has multiple backends to store your single source of truth. It's like if you wanted to run a Heroku, the environment variables for apps would go in there. Zookeeper is solid but hard to use directly. A more concrete example is a MySQL cluster: you'd want to know what are the hostnames and what is the write master. Sure you could write something that talks to zookeeper but it wouldn't be very general purpose. It's for the use case of scaling beyond what Redis can handle and you do want to get tied to any particular technology other than Hiera. If anyone has funding lying around and wants to take infrastructure smarter and farther, talk to R.I. He knows what the opportunities are and where it needs to go.

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/hiera

PS: I'm glad we're past the days when shops' Cfengine would have a permissions battle with itself (chmod 4750 -> 750 -> 4750 -> ... )

I'm bashing it because it oversimplifies the problem and claims to be a solution that doesn't address the irreducibility of the problem.

It's great for a host file but scp can do that.

It doesn't coordinate the transition of services to other states. Puppet does an incredible amount of work (dependency satisfaction) to get things where you want them to be. Configuration management is as much management order of operations as well as what files should contain what. There's not much separating the two because you have to usually change them between states. Chef does this to, but in a simpler way.

Cfengine was a past attempt, but is really complicated double work of what runs on a server and what runs on a managed node.

It's trying to solve with marketing what Chef does.

There is more to configuration management that templating files, but in inspection and having other services arriving at other states.

Zookeeper is a very specialized distributed filesystem for saving and delivering important details for very large systems. Getting concurrent distributed systems like this right is the equivalent of summited Mount Everest starting by walking from Paris. It was mostly developed at Yahoo and spun off as an Apache project under Hadoop and commercialized by Cloudera. Netflix uses ZK for example.

Except that it's not. Zookeeper was a major pain to get where it is.

This is a pure marketing story pushing a bad solution.

Hiera, a simple hierarchal property distribution system using a backend of Zookeeper plus puppet or chef is far superior. Etcd is the PHP of configuration management.

Activation of the OS requiring network check-in similar to Apple's iOS would potentially be able to disable devices by blacklisting serial number / imei / meid.

It's worth noting that most carriers DO NOT blacklist all types of serial numbers burned into a device with a single serial number. There should be a requirement for a blacklist of one to also blacklist all others and that a carrier should be able to search by any of the serial type number.

Further if a device is legitimately recovered by the original owner, they should be able to unblacklist it.

Finally, carriers should cover return shipping and reactivate found blacklisted devices. There are many worthless blacklisted iOS devices on eBay, but neither Apple nor carriers will activate them nor return them to their owners.

Prey project is semi open-source, freemium and works on ios, android and most desktop OSes too.

https://preyproject.com/

Are there any existing patents on this?