charrington

This is pretty much my routine as well. I find morning and evening prayer / reflection very useful to help me make small, continuous improvements.

Well played...

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this...

The wind-down cost was very small in comparison to the price Oracle paid.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this...

All the engineers went to work for Oracle and were given large incentives to stay for 2 years. Most stayed and got their incentive payouts, though they all eventually left later on. I think the longest tenure at Oracle there ~8 years.

I was a Sherwood Partners client in 2010. Oracle bought our startup, DataScaler. However, they bought the core assets of the company, not the corporate entity. That's a fairly common strategy for acquiring early-stage companies. The buyer gets the parts they want (in our case: the team, code, and patents) without any of the hassle or liabilities of the corporate entity or any assets that they don't want or need.

That left us needing to wind down the DataScaler corporate entity. This is a fairly technical process and not something you do casually. We hired Sherwood Partners to do the wind down. They filed the appropriate paperwork with Delaware and California, since we were a Delaware C corp based in Cupertino. They stored our corporate files (lots of paper back then) in their warehouse for 7 years in case of any litigation, tax disputes, etc. The offered to connect us with a liquidator to sell off our desks, chairs, phones, etc. They don't actually do the liquidation themselves. Perhaps most importantly, they were legally the "Stockholder Representative" and ensured that the stockholders were properly taken care of, etc.

We used Sherwood exclusively for the corporate wind-down part, as we already had a buyer. They also can help companies find buyers and they have lots of contacts in the valley.

I am happy to answer questions if anyone has any.

The new "clj" CLI tool is not a javascript tool. It is for Clojure, not Clojurescript.

I am also a happy UTOPIA user. I have a full symmetric gigabit pipe to my house for less than $100 per month. There are huge benefits to open choice networks.

I think that at the rates Twitter is writing counter data (Many TBs per day denormalized, ~0.5TB normalized), a RAM-based solution like VoltDB would be prohibitively expensive. Rainbird allows Twitter to use cheap disk-based storage but still get acceptable (sub-second) latency.

Salesforce.com was "The End of Software."

How about just going with the disk-based line if the candidate goes there? On-disk data structures is a rich area for exploration. I think you're getting people a little riled up here because you seem to want to discuss Bloom filters no matter what. You seem to grok that this should be about thinking skills, data structures, and algorithms. That's great. Forcing the candidate to go where you have a particular interest is not so great.

hard really is backwards reading

N7LQX

I enjoy home improvement. I head over to Home Depot most Saturdays. My daughters (8 & 10) go with me and we talk about the various interesting things we pass in the store. After we get home, they often like to help out with my home improvement projects, which makes it even more enjoyable.

This is Trevor Blackwell we're talking about. Perhaps you should be careful before casting aspersions. http://tlb.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell

Ad-hominem attacks are not the kind of thing Hacker News is about. Please keep that in mind.

I used Aquamacs for 2-3 years but never really learned emacs until I swapped Aquamacs for Carbon Emacs and learned the real thing. Training wheels is a good analogy. You aren't really riding a bike if you use training wheels and they slow your progress in actually learning. Sure you can get to your friend's house, but you look like a dork.

I found the Emacs Starter Kit (http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master) and the Meet Emacs Peepcode Screencast (http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs) to be awesome. After a couple hours of working through the screencast, I was a 5x better Emacs user than I had been after 2+ years of Aquamacs use. You have to "get" Emacs and Aquamacs doesn't force you to do that. The $9 for the Peepcode screencast was the best money I've spent in a long time.

I have been learning Clojure casually for a few weeks now. I have been wanting to learn Lisp for years, based on pg's essays. Clojure finally gave me an approachable, useful way to do that.

Pluses so far: + Concise code; no ceremony. + Best concurrency paradigm I've seen. This is huge to me. + Effortless integration w/ Java libraries.

Cons so far: - Not the most readable language. Reminds me more of Perl than Python. Newbies like me take a while to figure out all the sigils. - Making Clojure code run fast is non-trivial. Often a speedup-focused rewrite produces code that is much more obscure than the original.

My opinion may change over time, but those are my thoughts currently. I am really enjoying Clojure.

Henry Ford?

I totally agree that my new iPhone is basically an iPod touch. I get no AT&T signal at my house and marginal signal elsewhere. And it looks like I don't even get voicemails reliably. I should cancel my AT&T contract (there is a 30 day grace period) and get an iPod touch instead. There is no phone in the iPhone thanks to AT&T.

I am learning Clojure because I know lots of "traditional" languages and want to stretch my brain in new ways. I am also interested in new ways to write parallel programs, which is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. Clojure scores well on these two criteria. I chose Clojure over Scala and Haskell, because I believe in dynamic typing over static typing. This is probably more an issue of tase than anything and I also have a high opinion of those static languages. I am very impressed with Rich Hickey's design sensibility and his goals for Clojure align well with my own.

Wow! This is crazy. A similar thing happened to my friend Matt Harrison a while back. Here are the relevant links: - http://panela.blog-city.com/burninated_by_google.htm - http://panela.blog-city.com/back_in_google.htm - http://panela.blog-city.com/google_hates_me.htm

As Matt explains, he was re-added to the index with no explanation. Perhaps Nick Carr will have a similar redemption.

I am (was) a happy Clear customer. It saves me lots of time in the busy airports I visit. Frankly, I would have paid more for the service. I paid more for my United club room membership, which offered less value.

My personal theory is that they tried to price their service too low in an attempt to get mass adoption. Think Porsche trying to sell $20K cars. The busy business traveler who spends $50K-100K of dollars on travel per year is their target market, not the average traveler.

Ultimately, a business has to cover its costs. Clear's fixed costs are (were) substantial and their customer base was limited. At some price ($1000?) I believe it could have been made profitable. However, I don't have the balance sheet, so I may be way off.

I, too, am surprised that Java Concurrency in Practice is missing. Rich has mentioned several times. Odd.

As for the Ruby influence, Rich mentioned that he is a "language nerd" and learns all kinds of languages. Whether any one language shows up in some way in Clojure is another matter ;-) I think the Ruby influence shows up in Clojure's ease of scripting Java, cutting through the ceremony to get things done in minimal code.

Here's his bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tudor_Jones

This is hilarious!

I used a now-out-of-print book by Aaron Watters: Internet Programming with Python. http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Programming-Python-Aaron-Watt...

Python totally changed my world.

This is NOT "Google's Plop" - It is hosted by Google Code, along with thousands of other open source projects. It was part of Google's Summer of Code, as were dozens of other open source projects. Neither of these things make it "Google's."