comrade1

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

Install in your browser disconnect (2?) and cookie cutter (I think that's the name - sorry, on cellphone). It's a completely different experience on the web. Your cookies are deleted every session and all ad/monitoring links are blocked.

Everyone thinks that this is the first time you visited their website.

I only know what happened in my case. I worked for a Swiss company that was bought by Adobe. They pretty quickly expanded our office and we became an rnd center - the other in Europe being Hamburg.

Other examples, macromedia became their san francisco offices, navisware or some other purchase became an office in north carolina....

They must eventually close some down though - they've bought a ton of companies in the last 10 years.

I remember when I moved from obj-c to java (as WebObjects made the same transition) and being amazed at just how bad the java standard libraries where compared to the obj-c foundation and other nextstep libraries. The obj-c libraries were so nice and clean and focused.

Funny to see the 'oak' name reused - it's now an Apache project for a jcr backend.

I usually say that one shouldn't feel loyalty to a corporation because the corporation has no loyalty to you, but Adobe is different. It did feel like they looked out for you - the corporate culture is good and the workers are happy (at least the people I worked with).

I don't think they've closed a single office of the companies that they've bought over the years even if the product has since disappeared.

I read Greek classics - mostly philosophers. I usually have something going as I read modern stuff. And I say, the Greek stuff can be pretty boring. It's a lot of pontificating and observation and doesn't really interest modern readers.

I don't think everyone needs to read 'the classics', but some should.

Something I don't understand about fusion, doesn't it also produce radioactive waste? Does the containment system get irradiated with high-energy neutrons?

Ok, I looked it up myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

It does produce nuclear waste, but with a short half life. The waste is more radioactive than fission waste, but will be pretty much gone in 500 years.

Since it does produce radioactive waste, could fusion also make large areas of the earth uninhabitable like fission when there's an accident?

I used to prefer fission and fusion research but seeing what happened in chernobyl and fukushima I had seconds thoughts, and now seeing how well renewables are doing I don't care for fission and fusion any longer.

Funny story, in Switzerland they release water from mountain reservoirs during the day to produce electricity and sell the surplus to France and Germany at a high price, and then at night they buy nuclear-produced electricity from France at a fraction of the cost and pump the water back up into the mountains to repeat the process the next day.

Men should only use an umbrella in a heavy rain, never in a sprinkle.

Seems to work well in Switzerland. Every now and then there's a trafficking bust that usually involves Asians that aren't legal workers. Prostitutes have to be able to legally work in Switzerland which means that nearly all of them come from Schengen countries. For the most part it seems to work well, with most of the workers independent and temporary for 30 days at a time.

Pimps are illegal, prostitutes must be legal and independent. Brothels are often integrated in neighborhoods and not confined to red light districts, although there are some areas where there are more brothels, like around the train stations. Brothels are nothing more than a place where the prostitute rents out a room for the night or week - there's no madam or anything like you see in the movies. Prostitutes can't advertise on the street.

Jesus, what a mess. Sounds like someone made a decision without doing even a modicum of research into pricing. Bowing to peer pressure just means someone is managing by consensus.

I think there's only one that I'm comfortable talking about since it was long ago and the people involved have all moved on from their parent companies.

Louis Vuitton was relaunching their public-facing website, which was tightly integrated with their back-end systems - inventory, manufacturing, etc. IOW, it wasn't just a regular website.

They hired a consulting company here in Europe who sold them a solution that was the epitome of using the wrong tool for the job - it was a non-relational database solution for what was obviously a pretty traditional relational db application. (except the product content - images, movies, etc, had to be tied to their back-end db systems)

Louis Vuitton rented out the Louvre for the launch party, hosted by the CEO. But no one took it upon themselves to let the CEO know that the rewrite would not be done in time for the launch. Not even close. The launch party happened but the new site wasn't ready. There was nothing to present at the launch.

The CTO was fired of course. We were hired to help bring the project back on track along with a couple of other consulting companies - it was about 5 senior developers and a few dozen junior developers.

However, the work was being done in France where the norm is to not work under pressure like what we had to do. And the senior consultants where all american, swiss, and german, and only one very good and amazing french developer. I spent most of my time working on politics and very little time developing. We managed to get some of the work away from the managing French company to be done by Swiss and German companies. And then I was transferred to another project with another desperate client.

I was in Hyderabad a couple of years later and met the fired CTO at a party - he was starting a consulting company in India to provide consultants to Europe. Nice guy but meeting him made me understand why what happened happened.

Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture.

Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. And that's why we get paid a lot for not doing a heck of a lot.

I worked as a 'clean up' consultant in Europe for a couple of years - going to clients that had failing projects and were desperate to bring in a developer to get the project back on track. My job was 75% calming the client down and making them feel loved and 25% programming.

And boy, do I have some stories...

Are they using Postgres for content, or for data? (at a place where I can't really watch a movie)

There are some great content management tools out there, my favorite being apache jackrabbit, and on top of that, apache sling for displaying/accessing the content. It requires a different way of thinking than the standard mvc process - it is a more content focused display process.

I don't know... if you're using Postgres to store non-relational data you may want to reassess your strategy. You may find you're doing the right thing still, but I think most people would be better served with a system like jackrabbit/sling, which is is used by publishers, fashion houses, etc (via Adobe's product that is built on sling) to store and display their content.

(that said, you can use postgres on the back-end with sling)

There's plenty of helium in natural gas, but it isn't being separated because the current price of helium is artificially low because of government manipulation (subsidies probably isn't the right way to describe it)

How would one know that there's an uber car to wave down? Or does the uber driver see someone trying to pick up a taxi and stop?

This has come up before on hn, but I always find it interesting how hard China is pushing into Africa economically: http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/2163955...

http://thediplomat.com/2015/01/china-embracing-africa-but-no...

http://qz.com/217597/how-a-million-chinese-migrants-are-buil...

(that third article is probably the most interesting)

That's an impressive picture, but the 'lumberjacks' that I've seen lately by our cabin in WI are two guys with a giant robot-like machine that grabs onto the tree, cuts all of the branches off, cuts it into separate sections from the top down, and stacks them for the trucks to come and pick them up.

I don't know what their rate of clear-cutting is, but they seem to clear out about a city block size in a week.

Something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzaXMzYFtSM

except the ones I've seen don't walk.

So I would expect the numbers to get better going forward.

It's the argument of a two-year-old. I asked about revenue, not about personal value.

So Github gives their product away to people that don't have enough money to host on their own secure servers, and... what else? Where do they make their money? It seems from the comments here that their enterprise market is trivial.

There have been multiple examples of github's poor security over the years. https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...

and also poor security on the part of programmers where they submit ssh keys, for example, to publicly facing projects.

I asked about revenue. His ironic comment completely missed the point.

Yes, it is trivial to run your own email, storage, backups, etc. In fact, you can't even use amazon for email since you can't set up a ptr with them.

But if you do want to use Amazon securely I believe that they have the ability to encrypt your drive.

That said, rack space is incredibly cheap these days, and throwing in a 1u ubuntu server in a 1/4 secure rack is cheaper than hosting a dedicated vps at amazon.

I completly understand starting out using shared services as a startup, but eventually, and soon, you'll want to move to your own systems. It's just an expense for your business, and you would be irresponsible to leave your systems vulnerable.

(my projects have been more sensitive in the past than the typical CRUD app, and so perhaps I'm paranoid)

So, no competition doing competitive analysis?

McDonalds has a huge amount of revenue! Are you kidding us?

But why would you put your IP on another company's servers? I guess if the value of your company was something other than your code then it would make sense.

Does it really make sense to put your company's intellectual property on another company's servers?

How does github make money? I read the article but it's only a couple of paragraphs.

Github seems to be mostly personal and open source projects. With good reason since it's trival to set up a git server yourself and so you'd only want to put up stuff that you want public-facing. But it's not so trivial to set up the web ui in git server and so I could see some value there (not sure if $2B of value though)

I used github at a company but only for some code that we wanted to share outside of our company. And if we had to pay for it we never would have used github since we could have spent a 1/2 day setting up a public-facing git server.

We would never have used it for our internal code - again, it's trivial to maintain your own git server and it would also be irresponsible of us to put our internal code on a public-facing server.

So... what makes them valued at 2B? Do they have any revenue at all? Maybe they can hook up with linkedin?

Haven't owned a TV since 1999... I don't like how they become the focus of the room it's in. However, I do like the new oled tvs, especially the super thin one that can be hung up at any time (prototype only now) and may get one when they're available.

I've sort of given up on Netflix but maybe I'll take a look. I mean, I still pay my monthly fee but I now watch all of my stuff through Plex. I just subscribe to a show and it appears in my Plex server, with a much better ui than netflix.

I'm overseas and at first I tried to use the Plex Netflix plugin and connect to Netflix through a VPN that I would have dynamically open whenever it went to a range of ip addresses, but Netflix's amazon range kept changing - I assume to stop people like me from accessing from overseas.

And so I gave up trying to do it 'proper' and now I just download their shows and watch them from my own server. I live in a country where it's legal to download - just not share, and I think what I do is completely reasonable.

But I at least still pay my monthly fee.

'We know almost nothing about the person who owned this ingenious knife, but perhaps he was one of those who profited from the vast expansion of Rome - he would have been wealthy to have such a real luxury item.

'Perhaps he was a traveller, who required a practical compound utensil like this on his journeys.'

Or perhaps he was a desperate knife seller, traveling from city to city trying to offload this ungodly expensive silver behemoth, where at every city he tried to explain the benefits the crowd would shout 'but I can buy a wooden toothpick for a 1/100 of a copper!', 'I already have a spatula made with olive wood!', 'I already have a bone pick to pull snails out of their shell!'.

The knife seller eventually took his own life by iron blade to the eye.