markokocic

Mailinator has deduplicating. In fact, it has all sorts of nice optimizations, and the author writes about it quite eloquently. I wish mailinator backend could be used for mail servers instead of Exchange ;)

> Java developers are sold to customers as expert .NET consultants, because on management eyes C# is just like Java! :(

If your Java developers have problem picking up C# on the go and doing quality job within few short weeks with the assistance of one or two experienced C# devs as team leads, I doubt that they are good Java developers at first place.

> Also consider that it is hard to hire people to work on your project if you use F#, whereas c# has enough similarities to other languages that it is easy for people to get up to speed.

Also consider that HR departments and some engineers falsely assume that it is hard to hire people to work on your project if you use F#, whereas c# has enough similarities to other languages that it is easy for people to get up to speed.

In SQL it does.

Just a link without a clue what is it about doesn't help too much. All one can see from the link itself is that points to article with id 4801782 on hacker news.

Yes, he moved it to the right side of the blog. Glad that the complaint worked ;)

Of course you could do that, I also do that sometimes, but after being welcomed in such an unrespectful way I just didn't want to bother, since I assumed the quality of the article is the same as "welcome" message.

Zoho actually has quite a nice offering of web based applications. They have mail, calendar, contacts, documents and various additional tools. I used it for some time, but switched back due to a lack of sync of contacts with my phone. But for a business, it looks promising, though not as flashy as what Google offers.

> This is an assumption.

This is a fact seen in practice. You can check it if you want. Just create Google Apps account and configure mail without setting any MX records in your DNS. You will be able to send and receive emails to and from that account and regular Gmail account.

When I set set up my email account at google apps few years ago my MX records were messed up, so no mail could be delievered to my new google app address from outside gmail. However, my regular test gmail account was happily sending emails that were received on my apps account although MX records were messed.

Thinks might have changed in the meantime, but my guess is that Google still sends emails directly for accounts that it "knows" are hosted on gmail and apps and happily ignore MX records.

I haven't read the article. First thing that I saw when visiting this blog/site whatever was a long pageover list with checkboxes and email input fields asking me to subscribe to something. There was no close button immediately visible, so I just closed the tab instead of proceeding.

Sorry, but if you really want your story visible, please stop treating your visitors like that.

I agree with the complaint about the lock in that's the problem for some of the users. But it's a lock in only if one consider twitter vastly different than other services. I don't see it a unique snowflake. There's no a big difference between Facebook wall and twitter. That being said, I might be missing something, since I never saw any use for twitter. I would use it just for promoting my business if I were in marketing department, and seems like that's the path to monetization twitter is heading to.

Also, I can't see twitter as a monopoly. Monopoly to what? They have a monopol on SMS length message network run on internet? Yes, twitter has a monopoly on twitter. It's not like they have a monopoly in complete social and news network market.

Everyone creating a twitter client or application should have known that twitter can refuse to let it run, or change the rules. They have been pretty clear about that, and they have been doing it for a while. That's their right to do so. There is a feeling of betrayal amongst developers, but it was their choice to build a product upon platform they don't control, in the same way as iPhone developers that know that Apple can just refuse to let them in the app store, but they still build for that platform.

I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and have to earn real revenue, and thus they cut everything that can potentially affect that.

Is trying to be profitable now considered a bad thing? Is selling a startup to big company that will close it down the only exit strategy that HN praise?

I know that some people feel betrayed by twitter for cutting something that used to be free. But what should twitter do? Jeopardy its own business in order to make others happy? That's not how business works.

edit: s/that/they/

My advice to _anyone_ in our field is to read this book. Even if you yourself are not manager, and never have managed any team, it will at least make it easier to spot some common pitfalls and be aware of the consequences before it's too late.

Sometimes I wish it was rocket science, since rocket science is at least a science. Corporate CRUD application usually have so complex and contradicting and vague requirements that sometimes software developer has to be very at mind-reading just to figure out what he has to do. And that works until the next change request when it all starts again.

But .Net is not open source, so you don't have information about the internal classes used in it.

Anyways, we are shaming Java here because of one obviously automatically generated internal class.

This one[1] from .Net comes quite close. Though, it was almost decade ago, they might have passed Java on class name length by now.

[1]http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/archive/2004/02/05/68350.as...

Seems like automatically generated class name. You shouldn't ever see that as a Java developer unless you work for Sun, since this is internal package. The name, though long, seems pretty consistent with the rest of the names in the package [1].

If you look at it once more I guess that it is used as a Painter for MaximizeButton located in InternalFrameTitlePane of InternalFrameTitlePane of InternalFrame.

How would you name such thing?

[1] http://javadoc.bugaco.com/com/sun/java/swing/plaf/nimbus/pac...

Java GC is one of the finest pieces of engineering. It can be configured and tweaked in million[1] ways to provide one with the behaviour that he wants to see.

[1]http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions...

His previous interaction has shown to him that McKinsey might not be a loyal contractor for the prospective contract. The way they treated him in the past might just indicate the way they would treat those hospitals. Since nowadays there is a thick competition for every contract, just the gut feeling of the person in the deciding position is enough to tick them off.

Besides all, he has the first hand experience dealing with them, and they acted unprofessionally. It would be irresponsible for him not to take that into account.

Everyone on this thread focus on business decisions should something be automated based on perceived monetary value.

However, there is another important aspect in developing internal tools. In a lot of setups, developers rarely have a chance to investigate new technology, new development approach, different architecture, even different programming language on a day to day basis. Work is mostly done using predefined set of technologies.

For tools, the technology requirements are almost always much more relaxed, so the developers themselves gets to choose and try different approaches. While not every tool might end up being success in strictly measured time/money saved sense, in the long run it will help developers stay up to date with the technology, and even apply lessons learned in the real/product development.

As a bonus, employee retention might improve as people won't get bored so soon if they have a chance to try doing something new from time to time.

If it were really established that in software free means "Free" the way FSF defines it, then we would not have this 100+ messages discussion here arguing what is free, and in which context.

Maybe if would be easier if instead of "free" we started using more precise terms like Free(c)FSF, $Free, or name actual licenses, since each one goes under some assumptions.

I completely agree with you here. People should take care about licenses of the software they use, especially in a commercial setup, for all the reasons you stated.

But, you read the license, you decide if you are going to use it or not. That's it. If you are not sure, just don't use it. Use something else if available. Or build your own.

What I don't understand is the basis on which some people complain about the authors choice of the license, and feel offended by his license choice.

edit: s/started/stated/

I agree with you here. But the software is $free, just now for available to everyone, and "non-free" in the FSF definition of "free".

You can also say that GPL is pushing an agenda, while Crockford is standing up to his high moral principles. If you don't agree with it, just don't use it.

Do I understand correctly that you think that outlawing creation of custom licenses besides the chosen and already existing few will solve the perceived problem?

What's the next step, outlawing forks, since there are already enough projects?

And why do you see the very existence of the library with "no evil" clause as a market failure? Is that some people think that it's basic human right to be allowed to do evil? Doing evil, if we define evil as illegal, is already outlawed, so this one phrase is clearly redundant.

I said you, but it's not addressed to you, but to people that got so offended and turned up by this small "do no evil" purpose.

The market already decided, and that clause is there for a purpose. The author clearly didn't want people unsure if this piece of software will be used for good or evil to use it.

It's funny that people are ready to sign all kind of nonsense in commercial licenses, and this small clause makes so much pain to some "open source" developers.

I don't understand. The guy complain that json license is not "Free" in the FSF sense of "Free". So what? Not all licenses has to be FSF or FSF compatible. How is it harmful to FSF is the license of some piece of code is not compatible with GPL?

Guess what, I can't use GPL in my projects, because it's not compatible with the kind of license I release my programs. You can't use this software because it's not comapatible with GPL. Feel the pain. FSF would advice people not to use GPL software if they can't stand the license. The same applies to you, if you really want to use your software for evil purpose, just license it that way. Otherwise, use something else. It's that simple.

It's true that specialization is good for company, but you have to have right employees for that to work. If forced overspecialization makes your developers bored, they will be less effective at work, thus diminishing the effect of specialization. In addition, your best people will leave out of boredom, or require much better compensation to stay. Luckily for software developers, right now we have a choice to change jobs, and don't have to put up with things that people in most other professions have to.

Isn't that the point of the article? Everyone could pick one of those and reationalize why it should be the "standard" answer, but it doesn't mean it's the only right one. Good test would require candidate to pick an answer and then explain why, but that would make scoring such test too subjective.

I clicked the link expecting to find more about the language, but instead of the hello world or any other example, it was just a wall of text. Tried clicking around to find some example code, but no luck. I still have no idea how the code looks like.

This is not how one should mark new language.