keithwarren

This looks similar to what FormLabs does, granted the approach is different but it reminded me of them.

I would be curious is the projection technique is limiting right now in the build size? Their prototype (or what was shown in the video) seemed relatively small.

"Global sea level rise of 11 feet"

I would really like to see a more clear explanation as to how they extrapolated that estimation from the data.

Someone signed up for an HN account, squatted the name just to get a point across. Hat tip to you sir, well played.

I like Massive and have used it on several large projects, mostly moved to Dapper on stuff since. That said, this is borderline condescending. The guy was wrong about his assumptions and understanding of a moderately complex topic that 90% of .NET developers probably don't fully understand.

This complaint really has nothing to do with open source and is more about the frustration of interacting with other developers who believe they are right about something for which they are in part ignorant. That is going to happen pretty often.

I really hope this is just anger talking and not Rob being serious, he is wickedly good and I learn quite a bit from reading his code. Hoping to see more in the future.

Jump the shark? Seriously? This is probably the best thing I have seen them do in a decade.

I had this same phone, in the post iPhone era we tend to forget that smartphones did exist and some of them were actually pretty fantastic devices. From the 600 I upgraded to the 700w and that was probably my favorite phone of all time.

Dont win, (or don't compete); just contribute. Be an asset.

Remember, most people in jobs will be threatened by a strong and assertive leader - they want someone they can control and extract value from, not someone who might take their job. Understand and embrace that fear and position yourself to handle it.

I have been lucky, in 15 years I have been without work for probably a grand total of less than 6 months and the longest period was probably only 3 weeks. Often times it is not a complete lack of work but more a situation where one project ends today but my next one does not start until the week after next. Usually not enough time to squeeze in something else so I fiddle around learning stuff and take time off.

I dont think there is a secret recipe for staying busy other than the very basic truths. Meet and make friends with other people in your space and be a good person. Be on time, work hard, be honest and fair, respect people. Even if you fail people will give you lots of latitude if they personally like you.

I sub out work on occasion and have tried things at a few different levels. I have hired people off ELance and ODesk (which almost never works out); hired people I was introduced to and hired people off of CraigsList. In all of that certain truths remain, people who cost more money usually do that because they are better. Mostly at this point I hire other people like myself that have been at this for a long time and bill about what I do. I worry less about their work. In fact where possible I just bring them into a deal and let them work directly with my client. That way I am not in the middle of anything, I dont deal with money etc. Since I am not really trying to be a big firm making money off of people, skimming 15-20% off the top is just not worth the risks that come with it. Everyone is happier this way. I sometimes get asked if I worry that the person I bring in may steal my business and while the thought does cross my mind it is not the right thing to worry about. If that happens then I have to question what I was doing wrong that the client felt better using the other person more than me.

At one point, just before I jumped full solo I ran the dev shop of a web design firm. I had 13 guys working for me. I was not happy.

I am a creator at heart, I get joy out of making things. When you try to grow a company you are trading technology problems and challenges for a different set of problems that revolve around financing, sales, HR issues, people management etc and somewhere in all of that, the part I love - writing code and solving hard problems, gets lost.

There is also this period of change you have to go through monetarily. Right now I make really good money doing something I enjoy. To bring on others I end up for some time making less money for the hope that in the future I make more money. Truth be told, it may take quite some time to get back to my current income in this model and during that period there is risk. All things considered I am too happy to try and change it.

That said, I am considering different avenues. Consulting ebbs and flows, there are good projects and bad projects and the fact I can't make something I truly love, something I think is masterful, is weighing on me. Right now I am doing some work in commercial real estate and what I am building makes my client happy but it does not realize my vision for it. The truth is it never will because my vision is my own unique manifestation of what I believe it could and should be - and that vision does not align with my clients business goals (or their budget!).

Finding the right startup to build, something I am deeply passionate about, something I felt I was put on this earth to do is my next big career step. The problem is I have lots of ideas that may even make for good businesses but that spark of passion has not yet been there on any of those ideas.

It took me several years, when I was part time (my first two years) I think I was billing about 40. When I jumped to full time I went to 75 and over a year or two slid it up to 85. I got a call about 10 years ago for a weekend gig doing some perf tuning on a web app and they offered me 150/hr, asked if that was sufficient (It was a large company, they were used to big firm rates). I just about died trying to contain my glee and not be to emphatic with the yes I gave them.

From that point I started negotiations out around 125 or more depending on the client. The whole thing gave me confidence that people would pay more for my skills. Funny, I probably only made 4K that weekend all told, but in a sense I made hundreds of thousands because it taught me to charge more. Only a couple times since then has someone dismissed the idea of hiring me because of rates.

Honest truth: I have been in this range for too long, I worried back when the economy tanked in 2008 that I would have to cut rates but it never really happened. Time to start raising them so new engagements I am now quoting a higher rate.

Lots of networking events are focused on sales or marketing, they attract lots of people looking for work or looking to switch jobs. Often times they are not advertised as 'networking events' specifically, but if the primary point of being there is to meet other people then it is a networking event. Even if there is some guest speaker or something, you will be able to tell why everyone is there.

User group meetings are the flip side of that, while some people are there to meet others, most come to learn something and their motives pivots around that point.

People who are looking for jobs or work, are rarely you ally in finding more work for yourself.

User group meetings, startup weekend, hack-a-thons, give camps etc. Things focused on technology and technology solutions, not events that attract sales people or people looking to hop jobs.

I have been on my own for 15 years. I bill around 150/hr give or take 20% depending on the situation. Most of the work is Microsoft stack web related but mobile apps and api building has been steadily increasing for a several years now to the point that probably 20% of my 2014 revenue was in that space.

50-60% of my revenue is sub-contracting. I have a few firms that often take on projects that they are not suited for or do not want to increase staff to cover and they often sub out all or parts of the project to me. These relationships were built through networking with other developers who worked for these companies - never the bosses per se. Meet other devs and when the company needs help, they remember and recommend. In my experience this kind of introduction is about 5x as fertile as a cold intro.

Roughly 30% of my revenue is from direct relationships between myself and another company. These tend to merit a higher rate but also increased risk.

Very few of my direct relationships start from cold calling/intro (not sure if any ever did actually); most came via word of mouth recommendations of other people. Networking at the right kinds of events can also increase your profile and help you meet the right people.

ProTip: Networking at networking events is a terrible idea.

Lacking a sales force the best pseudo sales force you can create are acquaintances who understand your skill set and respect you as a person. They don't need to see your work, they don't need to have hired you before - to drop your name to someone who asks. They need to know your name, what you do and have a generally good feeling about you. If you pay them back for this, even with a simple thank you or lunch - they will continue to be an advocate for you.

Another tip which probably falls into the anecdotal evidence category - get off of ODesk and ELance. You are right about the price war. Your name and value to people also gets damaged because you seem to be just another guy among thousands who need to find work that way - it is a 'dime a dozen' mentality and they will always see you as that.

I expect a publication like Wired to be able to distinguish between writing code and writing a 'computer program'. If this is the bar then I wrote my first 'program' when I was in 3rd grade in the 80s doing LOGO.

Don't get me wrong, making programming a core competency is a novel goal and everyone should do it like everyone should do some chemistry in high school or do a physics project (I for one built an awesome bridge of balsa wood). It is an important skill that people should be exposed to at some point but the idea everyone should 'learn' to do it is a misnomer.

I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to help him build something awesome, be specific.

Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better.

^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.

This is a little tone deaf and lacking deeper thought. Surface level stuff like x color buttons are ugly is not really helpful. Telling a guy who has been focused on this for months he should spend more time dogfooding - again, not helpful.

What really got me though was complaining that you could not upload a resume. Seriously, give it some thought. Parsing non-structured data in an accurate way is a very hard problem and I would venture getting highly accurate results on 80% of resumes would take hundreds or even thousands of man hours to build a system, getting it on 90% or more could be exponentially more difficult. It simply is not worth the investment of time unless you have a breakthrough technique, and if you have that - well that is your startup, not a job site.

Feedback is awesome, but not everything that crosses your mind is worth sharing.

I went to Startup School in SV this year and must have met 3 dozen startups but the only one I kept thinking about was this one. Scott is brilliant and is thinking about this space in a refreshing way. I am actually a bit blown away TrueJob is not in the W15 batch - SamA and team often say they mess up and miss big things, if any partners read this - please take another look, he is the real deal.

This video http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2014/3-615; start at 39 minutes. Mark Russinovich explains their update rollout procedure (or at least part of it).

Willing to bet the rollout infrastructure depended on storage and so their ability to control or stop the rollout was broken once the storage failures began.

I hope to read more in the post-mortem RCA but I am curious what their flighting missed, is flighting so limited that is does not see the cross region scale or something? I also had the feeling from watching Mark Russinovich discuss previous failures that their patch rollouts were much more controlled.

Over 80% of the Fortune 500 run on Azure.

20% of Azure VMs are Linux.

You are not well informed.

anecdotal but I have not had such issues, but being fair I have mostly not had to deal with non-english scenarios.

It is one thing to say 'SQL Server takes some effort to import CSV files with X scenarios'; but to say it does not import them at all?

In all honesty it would take hours to write a proper rebuttal. There are many factual errors but there are also many errors that are mostly incorrect. CSV import/export is one of the first things he calls out and he never mentions BCP or SSIS, which are the methods for CSV import in SQL Server. It would be like saying Apache does not support SSL - it is just factually wrong.

I know numerous guys on the SQL Server team and it actually causes me a bit of anger when I read a clueless statement like that, for the author I feel sorry for his ignorance; the anger comes from the fact that lots of clueless people will actually read this and believe it to be authoritarian because of the verbosity of it alone.

see rest of comments, it is not taking long for people to point out the flaws in the OP

As someone who has worked with PG, MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL and others for almost two decades - I can promise you the author is misinformed about more than just enterprise politics.

QFA "MS SQL Server can neither import nor export CSV"

There is so much here, it is so verbose...so religious.

There is the appearance of facts, but mostly it is bias by omission. Take for example the CSV complaints..."MS SQL Server can neither import nor export CSV. Most people don't believe me when I tell them this". This is just false, patently and obviously false. BCP and SSIS, both part of SQL Server have excellent support for importing and exporting flat files. I did keyword searches through the whole post, no instances of BCP, SSIS or Integration Services (the long term for SSIS).

I am sure others will break this thing apart section for section but I wish people would be fair and open about stuff like this - I mean, seriously if you are going to put the time and effort into a long document like this, don't be so blatantly bias.

Crazy, that will never happen :)

The email invites/sorry come out late evening on October 28th.

They have said in the past if you have a deadline with another accelerator to email them directly with details.

There should be trace numbers associated with the wiring of the money - start with getting that number from the company and then give it to your bank.

The good news is stuff like this doesn't get lost in some 'check is in the mail' scenario. There is an audit trail that can be proved.