gerner

you're not the first person to suggest that to me :) although I haven't thought about using ZFS for this. You're not the only one to suggest ZFS. Why that and not compression in btrfs (or something else entirely)?

_hopefully_ the mmap interface would provide the best of all worlds: mongodb continues to be simple with respect to how it handles getting data from disk and the kernel/fs can do it's magic behind the scenes of mmap. Of course, it could be that mmap + compressed filesystem leads to some unexpected (and bad) perf results. But then again, I've never tried :) have you?

have you (or anyone else) done this and have some experience to share?

That sounds great if you've got large fields with lots of redundancy. In fact, we do this.

But small fields won't compress so well on their own. Often there's a lot of redundancy across records for the same fields which is great for compression. This might be a great way to achieve the benefits of field name tokenization too (which is similar to part of how most compressors work). I'd like to see block compression, rather than field compression .

I don't know if that's always true (at least, not for founders I want to work for). I worked at a startup where the founder totally ruined his personal credit, and was paid a small portion of what everyone else was making until well into profitability. I bought a beautiful house in a good neighborhood while working for him. He _still_ lives in a tiny rented condo.

If things work out, I'll walk away with enough to pay down some of my mortgage, and he'll be set for a life of luxury. But if things don't work out, then I still have a great house, and plenty of savings. He'll have no credit, and no savings.

It seems like a poor use of funding to pay the founder a great salary (i.e. more than key employees) at an early stage startup: before profitability, or even early into profitability.

If you want to make a good living with little risk, be a dev, a designer or something like that. Given that most startups fail, and of the ones that don't, most are only modestly successful, you'll probably be better off (from a purely economic standpoint) as a paid employee (or service provider) to a startup than as an entrepreneur starting one up. I think there's something magical (insane?) about doing your own startup.

Note: I don't have the hard data about this, but this seems to be the consensus (although those people never presented their data) and my anecdotal experience. Please, tell me if I'm wrong :)

But that brings up the non-deterministic point the author makes. You can't know when the object will be garbage collected. It could be a long time from now, or never if you get an unexpected deadlock.

There is a ton of casual tech stuff going on in Seattle. check out http://www.seattletechcalendar.com, or (disclosure: my blog) http://fourthirtysix.com/tech-sci/

We're not lacking the meetups, the events (Seattle 2.0 awards tonight!) We're lacking the leadership and super-stars participation in the community. While I see Dave Schappell at Hops and Chops, I don't feel like others mingling with us casual masses without it being self promotional.

I want to go to some event (and Hops and Chops seems like a good venue), have a real conversation with the CTO of a startup about solving some tech or product challenge. Or I want to hear about how some CEO got started over a beer. And I want to meet another super-star who's actively looking for help.

It's great to hear these stories of success. And yes, it seems like a positive attitude is critical to success, rather than looking for reasons not to do something.

However, this kind of over the shoulder throw at "what it takes to succeed" seems pretty shallow. I'd rather hear about what really made these two people different. How the one overcame the actual challenges s/he encountered and the other did not.

Maybe the key difference between these two people is that the one tried and the other didn't. But this article doesn't really make that argument.

OTOH, I don't have 2 million in annual revenue at the moment :)

Thank you for making this point. To my great dismay I see more and more people think that you need concurrent threads in one process in order to scale. It seems as if many programmers believe this as scripture and subsequently have difficulty thinking about distributed systems (not just multi-core, but multi-host).

I was on one of these academic integrity hearing boards as a student representative at Cornell. In my experience the board was strongly in favor of failing students outright and adding a notation to their academic record. It's not as bad as expelling them from the university. But it's not like it was some softball slap on the wrist either.

And the cases we were presiding over were not simple. We had a case where a student started a test early, as the exams were being handed out, but before everyone got a copy, and we took that as a serious violation of academic integrity (this student was not completely failed out of the course.)

Our objective was not at all to "mildly scare the students until they Learn Their Lesson and then let them off the hook."

tl;dr build your personal brand via social media, blogging, Q&A sites, and open-source. Communicate what problems and technologies you're interested. Get other people (recruiters, blog readers, followers) to look for new opportunities you'll be interested in and they'll reach out to you.

To help fuel a (I hope helpful) discussion (but seriously, I'm looking for advice/opinions here):

I think it's unenforceable. Ultimately LinkedIn can shut off your access, but that's really the only recourse they've got if they don't like what you're doing, unless you're breaking some other more well respected rule (like copyright, trademark...)

I also suspect that they're extremely unlikely to try anything else since it's irritating for them to do anything else.

That said, if you're a startup and you (in LinkedIn's eyes which is the only thing that matters) violate their TOS, and they do decide to go after you under section 1.8, you have to cave, how could you fight it?

But IANAL.

does point 1.8 in their API TOS seem strange to anyone else?

"1.8 Monitoring. You agree to provide us with access to your Application and/or other materials related to your use...If, following the foregoing, LinkedIn is not satisfied that full compliance has been demonstrated... LinkedIn may perform an audit of materials at your premises to verify your compliance with these Terms."

Is LinkedIn suggesting that they get to look at your source code and other plans (biz plans) if they think you might be competing with them (another, standard, TOS bullet point)? Is this enforceable? Does it matter?

EDIT: here's the TOS link: http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1013

I've worked lots of smart engineers who use these sort of "just-for-fun" tools, or simple hacks. At the time I often think exactly as you do, "why do I need a whole dependency..." And often I leave feeling the same way.

But more than once-as simple as putting null before equalities in conditionals, or as complex as setting up squid to cache just robots.txt for a crawler-I've been surprised and glad that I'm working with that quirky dude who insists on paying a small price for something useful. And I find myself using it again in the future because it actually gave me real value, made me and my team more productive, or happier, and hopefully made our product better.

sorry, here's the page that holds three surveys: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/gritscale.htm

I've been at four startups. Of the ventures, one of the two with investment is successful, the rest are not.

I can't know if the secret ingredient is having a VC. But having someone whose interests are aligned, has experience in the industry, and can contribute more than just sweat seems really valuable. Maybe that's not every VC (good god, if it's not find someone else!). But that seems like a requirement for a good investor.

and the survey measuring how gritty you are is here: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/17-item%2520Grit%2...

a great related article at Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/what-is-success-tr... what PG calls determination I think Wired (quoting Angela Duckworth) calls "grit"

That's an interesting thought, but do you have evidence supporting this?

Another interesting tidbit about society favoring families with children is the tax implication. In particular, you can claim kids as dependents (which, of course, they are), but claiming dependents gets you tax breaks (and other tax credits).

I'm not saying that's wrong :)

It would be interesting to look at all the tax credits and build the profile for the "optimal" family from a (US) society perspective (as expressed in tax advantages). Then compare that to other countries. This could make a sweet info graphic...

I especially agree with point 3: white labeling is not so important. but being able to choose from some designs, or letting me provide my own seems important. And having it say "User Voice" with the logo is either a non-issue, or is a plus for users (who might be familiar with User Voice and appreciate that you're taking user support seriously)