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The biggest reason you never have to pay back technical debt is because the company doesn't exist anymore.

The next biggest reason is because that debt no longer applies - the idea, feature, or product you wrote that code for is unnecessary and has been scrapped.

The original context of this whole "debt" conversation was startups. If you can't find product-market fit, you are dead, no matter how clean your code is. You have to move fast and iterate quickly because finding that fit is more important than clean code.

All the rules change for established companies with clear product road maps.

I think this metaphor is being stretched way too thin at this point.

This is great - I was looking for the "guide to productivity" last week and realized it was gone. I looked for a cache of it on google but didn't take the extra time to look @ archive.org.

These are some of the best startup articles ever posted on the internet.

Free app on a device I already carry around all day vs. $99 single use-case app... no brainer.

While US companies have no obligation to act in the interest of human rights, it would be nice if they, nonetheless, felt compelled to do so.

Google claims "don't be evil" - this should extend to using information to help, not hurt, the oppressed people of the world.

Yahoo makes no such claim, but the beneficiaries of a free nation have a moral obligation not to choose short-term profits over the lives of those unlucky enough to be born into nations that have no such freedom.

The most annoying off-topic discussion is the meta-discussion.

It's ridiculous that a student who barely coasts through the most remedial track can graduate because of social promotion, but a motivated kid who takes college courses can't get a diploma.

Not to be a broken record, but I think these accounts are setup to "listen" to the brands, people, celebrities, products, etc that the subscriber is interested in. Most people don't blog, but lots of people read blogs. Twitter isn't really a social network, it's a subscriber broadcast medium.

Not exactly - twitter, unlike facebook, is asymmetric, so you expect a large percentage of users who are just listening. That doesn't mean you can ignore them - they are the audience.

Pay $5000 so you can fund someone else's startup!

A prerequisite of "angel investing" is that you actually invest. Here we have a group of "advisors" funneling other startups' money (not their own) to a company of their choosing, and taking any upside in their equity stake!

Sick. This makes Boston look pretty bad, and xconomy looks worse for even giving them publicity for this.

It is on Columbus day.

Would love to jump in on a hn meetup - Monday morning or evening works best for me.

The thing I noticed first was that no one sends rejection letters anymore - you just go into the resume black hole (unless you actually manage to get an interview).

There's no way a city bus travels an average speed of 30mph. I would be lucky to travel at an average of 30mph driving a car in most cities, and I don't stop every 3 blocks for 30 seconds to pick people up.

Only hire A if he completely loves what you are building. If he thinks he is "above" your real problems he'll be brilliantly, independently kicking ass at something that you didn't ask him to do and isn't helping you succeed at all. Worst case, they'll actually make it worse, since he might build complicated systems you will have to work around.

Only hire B if they would rather jump off a cliff than come in late on a project or be a missing link. In a startup, finishing is of utmost importance. Also, only hire if he is motivated to learn. Mediocre people who work hard but aren't interested in learning new things are pretty dangerous as well.

Coherence (expensive) does this very well.

I learned all I know of C from doing the projects for CS167/9 at Brown. The lectures, and more importantly, the project assignments, are online:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/lect.old.08.shtml http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/asgn.shtml

> Up is a tremendous movie; it made me laugh and cry, and was intended to be seen in 3D.

Wrong.

Up was made, first and foremost, as a 2D film, just like every Pixar film before it. 3D was very important to the overall box office strategy, but the primary medium was the 2D big screen, and the 3D was done as post-process, secondary (just like VHS or DVDs are).

The technology behind and amount of artistic energy given towards the 3D version has increased over time, for sure.

I believe Dreamworks has started building their films with 3D as the primary version (staging cameras and shots with 3D in mind) but I have no first hand knowledge of that.

You don't see django folks freaking out about how tornado rewrote URL routing and wrote a new template engine (they even take some shots at django's restrictions in templating). There is probably as much overlap with django as there is with twisted, yet all the "controversy" is coming from the twisted people.

What is wrong with choice?

> That's shortsighted. Maybe the short term goals had different accents, but in the long run, Twisted and Tornado have the exact same goals.

Actually they don't. Twisted is "an event-driven networking engine written in Python"

Tornado is "an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed"

Note that the scope of these things are completely different.

The chat demo seems to have turned into a tech discussion about the framework. Love it.

I'm sure many plumbers are profitable from day one. Amazon wasn't profitable for a while.

Which is the more successful business now?

I agree that you aren't a success until you are making money, but I don't think that it's important to be profitable always.

I believe so - I use pdb.set_trace all the time in my django views (during debugging) and prefer it to code.interact

It depends, but in terms of the ranges, you should probably expect something around the .1% order of magnitude for an engineer - could be higher or lower depending on how close you are to the funding round, how many employees there are total, and how senior you are.

Contrarian view (which to me is much more informed):

http://venturehacks.com/articles/share-price

This argues that all that matters is share VALUE, not percentage.

My biggest pet peeve about twitter right now is how little useful information they provide when you get a new follower via the notification emails.

How about "people you follow in common" or people "who follow both of you"? How about a digest of their last 10 tweets?. Some of this data you can't even get on the site.

They barely hit the minimum bar for a social network.

Thanks - this makes more sense. Just a scheduler wouldn't explain how "With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores, resulting in the best possible performance whether they’re running on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in between."

Can someone give a quick non-marketing-speak version of what Grand Central Dispatch really does?

Sad to see another entrepreneur leave Boston.

This seems like exactly the right way to use a framework -

* start by using it as it is intended. Save lots of time by being up and running quickly.

* find a flaw.

* realize that the workaround is more work than rewriting a piece of the framework.

* stop using that part of the framework, but continue to use the rest of the code that you still haven't had to write.