felipe

Another solution is to use a TrueCrypt hidden volume:

http://www.truecrypt.org/hiddenvolume.php

I've been using TrueCrypt and I'm very happy with it. It's probably less secure than the PGP's solution, but my main concern is not really hackers, but some thief stealing my notebook and getting access to my scanned documents, Quicken files and so on.

I used to get frustrated too, until I switched to Flex!

Three days ago I received an email from Amazon alerting me that "one or more of your instances are running on hosts degraded due to hardware failure.", and giving me a week to migrate to another instance. I have a script that creates daily instance images as a back-up procedure, so the "migration" was just a matter of starting another instance using the most recent image and I was up and running.

I looked back on my logs and found out that the particular degraded instance was running since June without any problems or shutdowns. Not bad for a VPS...

I'm very aware that Amazon provides no guarantees, but I have to say that my confidence on EC2 increased after this incident.

The problem is that David is not Linus nor PG, so that sounds awfully arrogant coming from him.

The other problem is that David's ideas are not really "his ideas". He simply recycled XP and Agile concepts from the 90s. I for one prefer to read the originals (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Ron Jeffries, etc...)

I believe the key problem is that (most) students who enroll to a CS program expect to become engineers, but the CS curriculum is supposed to form scientists, not engineers. The key distinction is that in a SW Eng program the emphasis is on the process to build software (stuff like CMM, XP, quality processes, architecture methods, etc...).

Sure CS grads can make fantastic engineers, but my point here is that the difference between CS and SE is not well understood in the industry.

The CMU SE program in Silicon Valley is exactly like that:

http://west.cmu.edu/prospective_students

I am an alum from this program, and it was the best learning experience I ever had in my life (seriously).

I for one agree with the author's point. I live in SV, working on a seed-funded start-up, and yes, it is a lot of personal sacrifice and risk. And, yes, a lot of founders risked their own money, careers and family relationships building their companies. Read "Founders At Work" for some examples.

I definitely would not risk my family or my retirement account, but I do know people who did and succeeded (and people who failed too, obviously).

I totally agree with you, chaostheory. IQ completely ignores social skills (aka Emotional Intelligence), which is extremely important.

I brought up IQ simply because the previous commenter mentioned it.

1) "Best" is subjective. What you consider best for your kid most probably will not fulfill the needs of all kids.

2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor.

Most educational software is towards students, but I think there is a huge need to empower educators, so they can create their own tech solutions for students.

Another area is parent involvement. Unfortunately the 20/20 show did not touch this subject, but I would bet that the underperforming schools also lack parent involvement.

The charter schools (mentioned at the last part of the show) are the equivalent of start-ups, while the big public school districts are like the big corporations. I think a mixed environment of (competing) charter and public schools is the way to go.

Personally I don't see any problems with that, and in fact great hackers tend to have strong political point of views. To mention a few: Stallman (Free Software), Kapor (civil liberties advocate), and esr (libertarian, second amendment advocate).

I think Netflix is built in Java (at least part of it), because:

1) When you log in, you will get redirected to a .jsp page

2) Netcraft identifies Netflix server as Apache Coyote, which is the Tomcat connector (Tomcat is Apache's Java-based web server)

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.netflix.com

"Its only in failures that you would lose data."

Failures, and also explicit shutdowns (ex: "shutdown -h now")

I don't know if it will be the next big language, but I strongly believe there is a space for JS on the server side (actually ECMAScript). Why should web developers deal with two sets of languages? (JS on the client and whatever else on the server)

I am a long-time Java and C++ developer. More recently I've been actively developing in Flex, and I'm impressed with ActionScript (which now is ECMAScript). I for one would love to use ECMAScript on the server as well (today I use Java EE 5).

IEEE Magazines:

http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/journmag/index.html

"Software" and "Computer" are more in-depth and oriented towards latest advancements and practices. "Internet Computing" and "IT Professional" are more practical.

I've been hearing a lot of criticism against GoF lately, and I think now I understand why: IMHO I believe that since the past decade or so we moved up one step above the "complexity chain". Nowadays we hugely rely on frameworks to develop code, and therefore we don't need to think in terms of design patterns as much as before. However, one level down in this chain (at the framework level) design patterns are heavily used behind the scenes. Even at the language level (iterators, for example, came from GoF).

In summary, nowadays we don't need to rely on design patterns so heavily, but the frameworks we use still rely on them.

While Costco does treat its employees a little bit better, people normally ignore the fact that Wal-Mart benefits a huge amount of low-income families who shop there. Costco in the other hand targets the upper-middle-class.

Poor families do not have the space neither the stable income required to shop wholesale.

That was exactly what we tried a year ago (mobile-based ridesharing).

It did not work for us because:

1) Hard to get traction due to the classic chicken-and-egg problem: Ride sharers do not sign-up due to the lack of riders, and riders do not sign-up due to the lack of sharers.

2) People do not trust on anonymous riders. We hoped to solve this issue by introducing a social network where we would prioritize the matches by degrees of separation. But that didn't work due to #1

3) The large majority of the population enjoy their privacy in their own car and do not have a motivation to share the ride (perhaps when gas prices get higher)

4) For those who are motivated enough to share a ride, there are plenty of options available out there: Craigslist, employer's bulletin board, in additional to local authorities (ex: 511.org and casual car pooling in Bay Area)

Seems like this one (web based, not mobile) got some traction: http://www.ridester.com/

Jboss Seam introduced a very interesting concept to deal with sessions called "conversations": http://www.jboss.com/products/seam

Like sessions, conversation objects live across page requests, but die after a given action or event. A Conversation is a mid-ground between a session (long-lived) and a page request (short-lived).

Seam also offers good support for dealing with the session scope: All you need to do is to basically say "hold this object in the session scope" and Seam manages it for you. No cookies or manual session handling (unless you want to)

Another huge side advantage of automated tests is that it becomes a live documentation of how to use your code (unit tests as "sample code")

Research has shown [1] that unit testing actually cuts development time by 20%-30%, because in the long run you will spend less time debugging code or fixing code broken by other changes.

[1] - I don't have time to look-up the specific link right now, so you'll need to trust me on this one! :) But I'm sure one can google it. I remember reading it on an IEEE magazine years ago.

His suggestions are somewhat similar to Joel's "Smart and Gets Things Done" rule:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

In fact, I believe his new book that came out very recently is all about recruiting.

Here is a good link: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=735309

I guess the bottomline is that you can start and invest in a company, but not work for it.

Have you already applied for a Green Card? While you wait, maybe you could invest your free time now in an open source project that you could potentially leverage for-profit services later on, after you get your GC.

Another thing you could do while you wait for your GC is to simply start a savings account and accumulate a little bit every month, so when you get your GC you have enough funds to start a company and survive without a salary for a while (I'd recommend 1 year of living expenses).

Another option is to go get some higher education, which you can do as a H1 / work visa. Because you work for a large company, they probably offer tuition reimbursement programs. Take advantage of those programs as much as you can!

In short, use the time between now and your GC to prepare yourself and your life to eventually start a company. I'm now a GC holder, but I have immigrated to US via a work visa as well... So I understand your frustration, but I don't think you have many options, unfortunately.

I highly recommend JBoss Seam:

http://www.jboss.com/products/seam

It is quite stable and mature (granted it's around for only a year or so). I've already used it in 3 different projects and IMHO this is the best web framework for Java. The community is very active, and it's leaded by Gavin King (from Hibernate fame).

Apparently Seam supports Groovy now (I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising):

http://blog.hibernate.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2007/05/07

http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/charting/ (it is affordable, but not free)

Excellent point about tech products for emerging markets. This is absolutely true. I just want to point out that people normally think that "emerging markets" are the same as "developing nations", when in reality it means "underserved markets" (aka "bottom of the pyramid"):

In developing countries, the middle-class or above has access to the (more or less) same life style as in developed countries, and thus products can be launched without much modification -- Localization is normally enough. In the other hand, undeserved markets do have its own set of challenges, which we technologists are normally unaware because most of us never experienced life in those conditions.

Also note that developed nations have underserved markets too: For example, if you are in Bay Area, just drive around East Palo Alto or East San Jose and note the diversity and number of products developed specifically for those communities.

Here are a few excellent resources on the subject of underserved markets

http://www.amazon.com/Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating-Paperback/dp/0131877291/

http://www.nextbillion.net/

http://rdvp.org/

http://www.nokia.com/A4126014

Here is a previous news.yc post on a related subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13035

I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, and I highly recommend the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Your-Business-Successful-Company/dp/1593373872/

http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building-Successful/dp/0971187304/

And here's a good intro article to bootstrapping:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20020201/23855.html