marcusf

I'm sure he means self-employed.

Ok, very cool. I might misunderstand the use case then.

Do you do any sort of history-based analysis? E.g. solving "I just imported this, which I tagged with a,b,c from locations x,y,z, now I want to import this, that has d,e,f also from positions x,y,z" - I guess Wikipedias info boxes would be a typical example of that kind of semi-structured data. Or does that require setting up an import channel yourself?

So this seems to be about superimposing the relational model on ad-hoc data? It seems like an idea that has been explored ad infinitum. It also seems like it's for want of a use case, in its current form.

Like they say in the article, the main issue they'll run in to is that people really don't want to build taxonomies manually. My skeptic prediction: Unless they get some really snappy text mining to go with the product, it'll be dead in the water. When you want to ad-hoc mine certain data sets, it's usually because you've just figured out you need some specific query answered. Having to spend several hours structuring the data before you run the actual query seems about as laborious as just doing the original work yourself. Though I might be of limited vision, or just missing something fundamental here.

Yeah, very true. What I guess I object to the most is the implication and stereotype that all people with a knack for business will take the first opportunity to slack off work and go golfing. From my experience, that's (usually) simply not the case.

This is going on like a broken record; No flack to the author, he got all rights to have his grievances. On the other hand, it feels like I've read this post before.

One thing that always comes up in these posts is: > If we fail fast you have lost almost nothing whereas I have lost months of intense work.

I don't get that...? Presumably, the guy you jump in a boat with will also have invested 6 months of his life in to this, and presuposing he, even the abstract random business guy he in this post, can't contribute anything of value seems inflammatory at best?

Finally, I think that we should recognize that this is a fantastic problem to have. If you're approached weekly about new business ventures, you've probably made a good name and good game for yourself. Which is fantastic.

Like a few other in the thread I'm now stuck looking at an application where I can use this. They look friggin' awesome.

For some reason, the basic CSS reminds me of Wipeout, and that makes me both nostalgic in general and nostalgic for my young naivitë for future (I bought everything associated with that game when I was ~12). It's weird that UX can evoke that sort of response, but now I want to use it everywhere.

Yup, totally correct and really not that pedantic. I realized that about two hours later when I reviewed my own comment and promptly punched myself…

Sounds like what you're looking for is the original Bash source code, circa 1977, for example [1]:

  LOCAL STRING	copyto(endch)
  	REG CHAR	endch;
  {
  	REG CHAR	c;
  
  	WHILE (c=getch(endch))!=endch ANDF c
  	DO pushstak(c|quote) OD
  	zerostak();
  	IF c!=endch THEN error(badsub) FI
  }

Applicable macros if you want to give your code that classic ALGOL 68 smell in [2].

[1] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...

[2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...

Does anybody else get chills from the implication of the final sentence in the article? Makes the whole article read like CISPA propaganda.

Further, and this is preaching to the choir, if the security researchers of the respective companies could get the same unfettered access to their CEO's as the government, I'm sure they could 'scare the bejeezus' out of them, just as well.

That doesn't seem like a crash though; I'd wager the investor class and the general populace are quite disjoint sets, e.g. there's not a mass of pension funds involved in IT venture capital. What we might see is a "return to senses" and a shortfall of capital for a while, but not a crash.

I doubt their reasons but not necessarily their conclusions. Breaking in to the laptop market seems fiendishly hard, at least due to economies of scale. Sure, 10% might be willing to buy a Linux laptop, but at what markup? When do you just say sod it and buy a Windows laptop to re-install. And from what I gather, Windows is so highly subsidized for OEM vendors that the cost is really negligible.

Further, it seems like the 10% savvy enough to want Linux won't be a perfect subset of the people buying laptops from brick and mortar retailers any way. Breaking in to the market would require a lot of other stuff, not necessarily retail (e.g. an efficient supply chain, direct sales to corporate, quality laptop builds, ...).

Actually I think you're about a factor 10 off there, hardware sales FY11 was $99bn, compared to $57bn in FY10, which is a growth year over year of about 72%, while content saw growth of about 28% from $4.9bn to $6.3bn. As for total impact on revenue, hardware sales made up 91% of total revenue in '11, compared to 88% in '10.

Cool! I've never heard of them before, probably due to me not following the scene enough and them not being available in Stockholm, but I'll keep an eye on them from now.

Yeah, good point. I think it's vital to distinguish between local success and global success though; Sweden has a number of companies that have made it big locally but with a non-existent international footprint (Adlibris, to name one), and a select few lobal players, like Spotify.

I agree that you should look at the world as your home market, but in practice there's more to it than that. Just opening shop in another country usually means incorporating for example. Our founder has mentioned a few times that his biggest regret was setting up shop in England after Sweden, instead of going after the US directly. In hindsight, the gain/pain ratio would've been a lot better.

Right by the end of the article, he hits on one of the big pain points of starting a company in Norway, Sweden or any other small sized country compared to the US: The comparative lack of a home market. It's basically impossible to make it big in Sweden alone, a country with a population just slightly bigger than NYC. Expansion of course means grappling with international governance, international law, wildly differing cultures etc.

It seems to me that the large home market is probably the biggest advantage US startups have (together with comparatively easy capital and a healthier attitude towards new ventures).

This discussion isn't wholly centered on mobile though - the OP mentions Mozzila, Msft, Google and Apple - I think we're equally talking desktop browsers.

And while I agree that file upload is a major, glaring omission and a constant source of pain, I still hope it's not permanent.

I'm missing the conclusion to that sentence. During 2011, the app store generated $3.4bn in revenue. Given Apples 30% cut, they'd see about $1bn revenue there, out of a total revenue of $108bn in fiscal 2011 [2]. That makes the app store about ~0.95% of Apples total revenue, compared to iPhone hardware sales, generating $47bn or 43% of Apples total revenue [3]. Now, you might argue that the app store accounts for some percent in that in that people buy iPhones to be able to play Angry Birds and whatnot, but from what I can tell, the most popular apps on iPhone are equally available on Android [4]. Pair this with the fact that iOS Safari seems to be the most capable mobile browser out there (or at the very least, in the top 2) [5] and I'm saying there's no published reason Apple would fight web intents or more powerful web apps in general.

Of course, I'm open to other interpretations.

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-andro...

[2] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Four...

[3] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/1856667914x0xS11...

[4] http://www.pcworld.com/article/226531/apples_popular_apps_no...

[5] http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/

Not sure why the Apple punch was necessary? You do see that this is a commit on WebKit, right?

I have to say, having stared in to the abyss of large Haskell code bases, they're not necessarily easier to read than a large Java code base.

Reading bad functional code can be just as painful as bad OO code -- trying to untangle a mess of fold's that an overzealous developer who just learned of catamorphisms wrote can be painful. Even more so if that young developer is you, five months ago.

Sure, the language doesn't impose as much discipline in Python/Java/… as in Haskell(+), so it might require more of you as a developer to write clear, readable code (note: not saying that it requires more of you as a developer in general, just that it's easier to fall in to lazy anti-patterns). But if you work in a decent code base most of the pitfalls in the post are basically straw men. A well designed OO system will generally not be riddled with singletons and arbitrarily mutable state.

(+) I'm using Haskell here cause that's the only purely functional language I have any experience with. Substitute as you please.

What most people don't realize is the massive disconnect present in any current newsroom. In one corner, there's the print staff, in another the web staff. They work in separate systems, follow different workflows and are treated like different P&L centers. Couple that with the very conservative organizations that print papers are and you have a recipe for infighting and 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'-like power games.

There's currently a major push in the industry towards what's generally called the 'convergent newsroom', bringing print and web together under one roof, so you have a 'Sports' department that's in charge of sports regardless of channel. The tablet has in many ways acted as an accelerator in this process, in a roundabout way. When the tablet arrived, as the author noted, the print people relished the opportunity to find a digital way to go back to olden times. On the other hand, the web people saw it as a natural extension to the website. So massive infighting will have occurred at most newsdesks around the world. Since the print people have the most clout in most newsrooms around the globe, they generally won the initial round, which pushed the print people closer to digital. With the failure of early tablet papers (distributing massive, perfectly kerned pdf's to devices), the web people have gotten a shot at it, thus pushing the organizations closer to each other.

At the same time, the systems vendors, harrowed by the competition from open source sees the convergent newsroom as the strategy to win; None of Wordpress, Drupal etc can easily produce a website and a printed paper. The tablet has in many ways been a spearhead in getting newspapers to look at buying new systems and redesigning their organization around them, producing tablet, mobile, web and print in one system. So every enterprise sales force in the industry is out there pushing tablet systems like it's the second coming.

Newspapers aren't stupid, they're just (1) stuck in old organizational structures, (2) using software that treats different channels as silos, and (3) fraught with unionized contracts that make any change insanely difficult (some contracts stipulate that the editors can only work in specific versions of InDesign, for example). At the same time, they're very clearly on the losing end of the digital disruption as the ad buy withers away from them with nothing to replace it. No wonder they act like a deer in headlights.

It's one of the classics of our trade; Even if you know everything there is to know about refactoring you should really read it just to have read it. So consider that my recommendation :)

As good a list as any, with just a few nitpicks; I'd like the story on (1) elaborated a bit more. Explaining to your manager that your perception of reality differs from hers doesn't seem like it'd warrant losing an ally in the company.

As for (8), I'm not a very metrics driven guy when it comes to my code; Beyond test coverage I've no idea what the key metrics of software development are (at least in "the small", eg not business metrics). Would anyone want to elaborate?

I guess, but it seems like the engineering approach would be to figure out how much downtime is tolerable, compare your IT to GMail, and depending on respective downtimes take a look at the cost and feature equations, instead of reacting with fear (which is, to me, basically what the 'twiddle-thumbs' argument boils down to). I know it doesn't work like that in reality, but it should.

This might be OT, but you seem like a very good guy. I've no deeper insight to offer than that, just wanted to say it.

Yeah I keep it around on my drive but suddenly the backup hassle becomes mine.

I don't know, I might just be reactionary and negative for the sake of it.

I find that most of these are overstated though. Uptime, in particular. What's to say your server will have better uptime than Google?

All the while, I just got my office mail downsized from 3 gigs to 1 gig and had to scrap a years worth of my mail history. Why do companies (at least the small to mid-sized ones) even bother with in-house exchange servers and the hassle that comes with it any more? *

* I know the size comparison is apples to pears since Google Apps is still priced by size, but still. This is stuff that really should be outsourced.

phys.org had an article with some research on optimal plane boarding [1] describing what seems to be another alternative, sadly sans the infomercial.

One thing I find curious about all of these is that they assume back-to-front as the baseline. I've never ever seen a plane being boarded in something resembling an ideal back-to-front. On most flights it's basically a random pounce where the stewards try to keep some sequence but usually fail. I tend to have a small carry on and just sit it out until most everybody has boarded, regardless of my seating.

[1] http://phys.org/news122215582.html

Arrington simply cannot resist making this about himself in some minor way. It's like honey to the bears.

As said in the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3925359) the man has to go, as clear cut as Hurd at HP. Starting of with a breach of ethics like this doesn't bode well for the future or to instill any sense of morale, values or professional ethics in the troops.

I don't necessarily know that that is an insult, but sure, if you're short on cash then free is always better and certainly beats piracy. I was thinking in terms of professional tools, and the output value delta of something you know well (this might just as well be the Gimp) compared to unfamiliar software.