matrix

There are many potential reasons you didn't get a response, but I want to highlight one in particular:

There was no value proposition in this email. For an email like this to be worth responding to, you have to provide a brief, no BS, explanation as to what compelling value you're bringing to the table. The only exception to this rule is if you're famous for your accomplishments in that specific role (in which case, they're probably pitching you already anyway).

Finally, nobody owes anyone a response to a cold-call email. Especially not people that get hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. Don't take it personally.

You're probably right. The book I mentioned is the one I see most frequently recommended as a how-to guide to mindfulness. I have not read Mindfulness in Plain English, but judging by the title it sounds like a similar approach.

Most likely he's referring to this book:

B. Stahl & E. Goldstein, A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

Agreed, but it would be a difficult problem to solve. The technology part is straightforward.

Things happen like shipping containers showing up on the docks without a proper cargo manifest or other documentation errors, which of course leads to the shipment sitting in customs until it gets sorted out. This is because the humans creating those forms often have poor tools, and of course there's the usual factors like staff who are too busy, incompetent, or lazy (in an ideal world they should not be doing that job, but this is reality we're dealing with).

The obvious answer would be a shipping management system integrated with the company's supply chain software (typically, their ERP), but usually these problems are coming from OEMs, subsidiary companies, and occasionally 3PLs that have aren't part of the company's systems. Any integration with those systems is usually rudimentary at best, and it's not unusual for the "integration" to be human-based.

I'm in the early stages of bootstrapping a marketplace similar to those that exist for hotels (e.g. Booking.com, PriceLine, etc). The supply-side is primarily small businesses ("merchants"). The demand-side is consumers. The initial target market niche is small (~$600 million/yr in the US), but the product can serve a much larger market niche and I will do so when resources permit.

Today, this market niche is fragmented with high search costs for consumers. My marketplace will make it much easier for consumers to find and buy the products this this niche. Once off the ground, the marketplace will be a key source of customers for the merchants.

Consumers like the product, but the merchants are difficult to get on board. I find that the prevailing view is that the status quo is 'good enough'; merchants are conservative, and very few are early adopters.

Things I'm doing to address this:

1) Price for growth -- pricing based on a small flat fee that the merchant pays per transaction to align with value delivered, with first X transactions free (obviously I would prefer to charge a % of revenue, but that's a very, very hard sell with these particular merchants).

2) Provide the merchants with tools that help them run their business (i.e. give them reasons independent of the marketplace to use the app)

3) In-person visits to merchants. These are valuable for many reasons, and are only partially a sales call. These visits will always be something I do, but it doesn't scale enough to create a marketplace.

What strategies and tactics do you suggest to get merchants into the marketplace, to build up the supply-side?

If anyone needs convincing to use this site, read the About Us page. It's a big credit to Chanel Reynolds that she was able to drawn on a tragic experience to help others.

Thank you for writing that article. To me, the article is pretty much how an ideal technical article should be: it doesn't assume deep knowledge of the subject matter and uses lots of examples and comparisons to make the case. It takes a lot of work to write that sort of article, I really appreciate that you took the time to do it. Looking forward to seeing the one about Flux!

Sounds like you guys might have used Apache Oltu? If so, I (and I'm sure many others) would be interested in hearing more about that, because modern, non-trivial authorization and authentication is probably the single biggest missing piece for Jersey/Dropwizard.

If the authors are reading this: in your later articles, I'd love to see some details about what method of authentication and authorization you settled on for the REST API and how well it plays with Dropwizard.

Piggy-backing on this topic: does anyone successfully use Amazon S3 as the log store for application event logging? The low cost is attractive, but at first glance it seems like the latency is too high for it work well.

Agreed on the second item. It's sort of like Facebook - I liked people better before I saw what they post. In both cases I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the kind of people that are predisposed to post things.

That said, it's not all bad. It can be handy for recommendations for tradesmen, lost & found notices, and that sort of thing.

Thank you; people like you help change the status quo.

Anyone aware of any large sites using Flexbox that has non-tech users, e.g. Netflix or a major ecommerce site? I ask because I'd like to see any presentations or write-ups those guys may have written about their experience.

They don't mention it on the "what's new page", but it looks like this update also includes all the new features in Webstorm too, including support for a bunch of JS frameworks and tools including React/JSX, Meteor, and Gulp.

https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/whatsnew/

I put readthedocs in the same category because they try to look like the original source of the documentation. They lift the content and style, lock stock and barrel, and then try to rank higher than the actual project's documentation pages.

I have in the past, unwittingly read out-of-date documentation because it looked exactly like the source site, and I didn't pay close attention to the URL.

If they were truly ethical, they would not try to impersonate the original sites. It fails one of the most basic tests for trademark infringement (which is, essentially: "might someone in a hurry mistake it for the real thing?").

Agreed. This behavior is not benign "naughtiness" (as the YC guys like to encourage), it's parasitic exploitation of other people's hard work. Another group I'd lump in with this group is readthedocs.org

Excellent perspective, thanks. I've decided to forego having any part-time founders -- I agree, it just isn't possible to have enough skin in the game.

If you are using Java, I suggest taking a look at JOOQ. JOOQ implements SQL statements as an AST:

http://blog.jooq.org/2014/07/28/jooq-tip-of-the-day-reuse-bi...

I've been using JOOQ lately and liking it a lot.

Grellas wrote a very informative series of "Startup Law 101" posts. Well worth reading:

http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup.html

It sounds like you've taken the most important step, which is appreciating that "what got you here won't get you there".

One of my favorite books when stepping into a new role is M. Watkins, "The First 90 Days", which is very helpful in formalizing an effective approach to succeeding quickly when in a new management role.

It is worth trying to get some education in people management. While much of it is common-sense, it's worthwhile covering the basics -- the applicable laws, managing conflicts, that sort of thing. I have yet to find a good, practical book on organizational engineering (if anyone has a suggestion, please post it), but this is an area that I feel someone in your role should seek to understand well, because it has a big impact on the success of a business.

One of the most important, fundamental skills for a senior level manager is understanding finance. I recommend B. Knight, "Financial Intelligence" as a primer.

My favorite book on business strategy is M. Porter "Competitive Strategy", however, this book and all other business strategy books should be taken with a large grain of salt. They often suffer from survivorship bias, being applicable only to certain industries and times, and in at least one famous case, allegedly faking the data used to draw their conclusions. I treat business strategy books as leisure reading that simply provides another perspective.

This is the behavior I have observed too. There are addresses that could not plausibly be gotten by any means other than unauthorized scraping of my mail or contacts.

The only other mechanism I can think of is that maybe they're getting them via Android or iPhone apps (not necessarily linkedin's app) with less-than-upfront disclosure of what the app's doing. Either way, it's slimy behavior.

Their shadiness is not limited to usability dark patterns; I am fairly sure they're scraping people's contact lists from gmail and the like without consent via impersonation (have gmail open in one tab, linkedin in another...). Exactly how they're accomplishing that, I'd love to know -- Facebook is likely pulling the same trick.

It's a demo page. You can see the other examples here:

http://maroslaw.github.io/rainyday.js/

(click on the images to see each demo)

The risk is lower, but still high. The last estimate was a 16.5% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in 100 years[1]. I expect the probability will be revised to be higher in the seismic hazard assessments due to be released this year.

7.0 doesn't sound big, but keep in mind, the epicenter would be quite close to the surface and likely to be right in the middle of a highly populated area on the Wasatch Front (Salt Lake City, Cottonwood Heights, etc). Also, many buildings in the vulnerable areas pre-date construction codes that take seismic risk into account. For example, it wasn't until the late 70's that they started reinforcing masonry construction.

[1] http://www.livescience.com/28782-utah-bigger-earthquakes-was...

In my brief try-out of it, it felt to me like if you want to do anything different (e.g. your own implementation of something), you pretty much need to switch to Scala. It's a Scala framework first and foremost.

A minor demerit was getting SBT and Play Java to work correctly in IDEA was enough of a pain to make me wonder how much overhead that was going to incur in the long run.

If someone who has used Play Java in production on a large project can weigh in on whether these points are true or not in real production use, I'd love to hear it.

Following up on my own question, there doesn't appear to be any that quite fit the bill right now, if we define the ideal framework as having the following characteristics:

* Java as a first-class citizen

* Strong core of basic web app functionality

* REST and Search engine friendly URLs

* Action oriented – basic framework for routes, MVC etc

* Stateless

* Good documentation, active community

If we look at action frameworks only:

* Play 2: Great except it's Scala. Ruled out.

* Spring MVC: Spring is bloated old-school Java with Hibernate. Out.

* Stripes: hasn’t had a commit in over a year… which is unfortunate because it looks interesting. Out.

* Spark: appears to be a one-person project. Out.

* Google Sitebricks – ditto

* Ninja: Ditto

These results are tempting me to do my next project in a modern lightweight Java framework. No Hibernate, bloated frameworks of yore, or weird complex build and dependency management. Play is ruled out - it's Scala (Java is a second-class citizen in Play).

Maybe something that ties together things like ebean ORM, Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Guice. Dropwizard is the right idea, but is geared towards building REST backends.

Any suggestions on a pure Java framework that has critical mass and would fit the bill?

This site is awesome! A feature request, if I may: on the calibration page, it would be helpful to have the ability to mute all the sliders except the one you are calibrating. Or perhaps, like slider in a color tool, have a text box with a number representing that volume that slider is set to.

I like Go. I really want it to succeed as a language. However, it does have some unfortunate warts.

To me, one of the biggest issues is the lack of true exceptions. Exceptions that show the call stack (as in Java and .NET) take a lot of the mystery out of real-world troubleshooting an issue with a third-party library (for example). Panic or returning an error doesn't provide the same utility.

Go is awesome, and I'd love an excuse to use it in production. The problem is that being a young language, there aren't many libraries, and the ones that do exist are often at very early stages at best too. That means when you need a library to solve problems like printing a PDF, you are out of luck.

The other thing that makes me a bit nervous about using it in production is the idea of linking to the latest/head version of a dependency. Maybe I just don't properly understand the paradigm though.

Those nits aside, I believe Go has bright future and within 2 years will be mainstream. Meanwhile, Scala is better suited for projects that need lots of libraries and mature tooling.

I'm in the same situation (literally). The FBAR penalties are even worse than you describe. It's a case of well-intentioned legislation with unintended consequences. The extreme penalties were intended to hit people with offshore tax shelters, but instead it is mostly a source of revenue for tax lawyers.

This is, unfortunately, true of the US tax code in general...