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This indictment of angular and 'enterprise' frameworks is pretty one-sided and self-righteous. I hate the bureaucratic and restrictive nature of some frameworks too, but you can't dismiss the entirety of them and the problems some of them solve because of it. It's very easy to criticise without suggesting or showing any better alternative. For example... if you are a software manager with the 'power' to choose an entire stack for a new product, what would be your choice and how would you justify it on criteria such as: availability of documentation, developer skillset, testing, security, performance, platform compatibility, time to market etc?

Unfortunately all this type of 'boring' shit that enterprises deal with, they have to deal with for a reason. If you don't like that then you have a problem with the structure of the economy, larger businesses, and their politics as well as the technology.

Hi, I haven't had much of a close look at the site. I quite like the initial design, but one thing I think it would really benefit from is a simple search interface on the home page.

Its interesting to hear from someone who's more of a hobbyist programmer. You don't meet so many, mainly I think because once you become half-decent at programming you have access to a range of well paid jobs. Of course as you say, those jobs come with certain conditions that aren't for everybody.

I've often thought of quitting professional programming and it to become a hobby instead. I think sometimes great things come from playing around and working on projects you want to and enjoy working on as opposed to the 'drudgery' of implementing someone else's vision. In my experience although the job has its perks, very few 'real' programmers actually care much about the products they work on. Sometimes they do when they start but it doesn't take long for the pressure of getting something done vs. getting something done you have real pride in generally breaks you eventually.

At the end of the day I think if you can write some code, you are a programmer, whether you are a hobbyist or not. Some of the best developers hack on open source projects and live off very little and they're pretty happy with their lifestyle. A lot of paid-up programmers are in fact more like 'impostors' than these guys.

I think it is nonsense to say that what doesn't work for one person won't work for another. The whole thing is completely context dependent. Here in Europe most people feel cubicles are so isolating that you might as well be working remotely because of the lack of interaction with your co-workers.

Don't get me wrong I think its really important to be able to 'plug in and get on' without distraction as a programmer, but I'm just making the point not everyone works well this way if they do it all the time.

I think one of the first things we need to look at is the poor quality of a lot of new housing developments and the number of unoccupied / 'brown-field' that could be renovated and provide much more affordable housing than the over inflated prices of new properties. I still fail to see why the ideology of a more unrestricted free market economy would be of any benefit to the property market. In fact I think fewer restrictions would worsen the situation with many buying new houses that could become effectively worthless where for example they have been built in high flood risk areas.

I agree the economy should be less reliant on the housing bubble, but I'm not convinced that technology / start-ups are the only way to achieve this. The 'start-up' hubs you mention are just as likely to become another black-hole which the government throws money at with no real strategy in place.

I fully agree with most of what you're saying, but I'm not sure where the degree of capitalism involved comes in. I think it has much more to do with the lack of creativity in government that you mention. Ultimately it does feel like younger generations are the fuel for the engines that drive the UK economy.

The lack of a combination of affordable property and decent jobs in areas within a reasonable distance is definitely causing increasing problems in this country, and only worsening social inequality. Remote working is one solution that I think very slowly will become more mainstream. I mean really why do start-ups have to grow in a 'technology hub'? Most small/start-up companies in these areas I know of rarely collaborate or seem to benefit from proximity with each other.

Acorn machines were great.... ah happy days. The A3010s with their stylish green function keys!

On a serious note, I dispute that government can't have a positive impact in stimulating the technology industry in the UK. In fact if we held on to more manufacturing businesses (through state-ownership, tax cuts etc.) we'd have a more diverse and robust economy. But the current government's so called schemes to foster business and innovation are typical of this administration - there's little substance to them at all. And successive British governments have failed to truly work with businesses and really listen to their needs rather than launching grand initiatives without prior consultation to real business owners.

No worries, I am just one person who doesn't fall into the target market for your product - there may well be many valid scenarios where a having template, particularly with a good design could be useful. There are all kinds of different presentations requiring slide decks so maybe you just need to find the right niche?

Honestly - nothing... I think having a template (beyond perhaps styling and branding which most companies have already defined) for a presentation of any kind seems wrong. Any presentation, whether it is a pitch or a technical seminar, should reflect the person giving the presentation. Their vision, personality and expertise should be projected and to do that you need the presentation to be truly unique. A good presentation isn't defined by a bunch of slides or a specific format. Sorry to be so negative, but I am the sort of person that would happily pay a few dollars for some things I felt had good value and saved me some time, but a presentation slide deck isn't one of them.

A personal presentation / slide critique and suggestions for improvements I would maybe pay for if I felt it was a really important presentation, but I don't know if that is a viable business either.

I think improving on relevance ranking configuration would be a big boost to this product as well as offering some ability to cross-search multiple indexes. Both are quite difficult problems to solve well in search, but if a simple API service was available that might be attractive for larger commercial customers.

The icing on the cake would be to have some support for relational (at least partially relational) data and multimedia / files. Good luck!

sounds a lot like gearman...

Would you not be curious what people were saying about you and your app? And would it not be advantageous as an app developer to know the feedback you are getting and be able to improve your app? I think these are the sort of reasons combined with the fact that people are very resourceful and persistent in obtaining your contact details make it very difficult to just ignore what people are saying. But its a good point and with some effort you could probably mask your identity to some degree, the trouble is once one comment has really got to you, it doesn't really matter.

This article definitely rings true. As someone who has published a few apps in the past, not even games, 90% of feedback received was negative and completely nonconstructive. It takes a while to realise it is nothing to do with the quality of your work or in most cases at all related. Regardless due to the low volume of downloads I received I responded to every single email or comment requesting more constructive feedback and mostly never got a response. In some cases I actually managed to help users with the ways they were using the apps which gave me a good sense of satisfaction, but mostly it was a complete waste of time. In one instance I really regretted replying as it just encourages further abuse.

Looking back all I can say is I can sympathise with anyone who has this problem and would also like to note weirdly I've never had the same experience with web apps. I can only assume the demographic of usage and ease of commenting on and contacting developers of mobile apps/games affects the feedback and comments you get.

Projects like this confirm my suspicion that traditional academic publishing is going to take a nosedive in the next few years. Working in this industry as I do, I don't see commercial publishers moving quickly enough to change. Really love the idea of this and can't help but support the general ethos of it, even if it / its descendants will put a lot of us out of a job.

I hear you on the lack of focus on modern technologies in universities - but the same is true here in the UK for the most part. It's understandable with the European economy being the way it is, and some countries really suffering, you would want to find a better life elsewhere.

One of the problems is that you will find many of the 'enterprise' jobs that you feel will trap you are commonplace in a lots of countries - certainly here in the UK and I'm sure in America also. There are more jobs in startups in the USA but not so many as you might be hoping (even if you could get a VISA). My point is the grass is not always greener on the other side.

You may actually have more success and find what you are looking for in upcoming 'developing countries' such as Mexico if you are considering all locations.

Whatever happens best of luck and I hope you find a profession you are happy with.

'For its day'? GWT lives in many forms, most notably Vaadin:

http://vaadin.com

Vaadin is consistently rated one of the best web app frameworks. Why its not more widely known is beyond me.

Not sure HN is the best place to report it, however working at a company that extensively uses github on a large scale, for the business I think even an outage of 5-10 minutes counts as serious. I'm amazed that people seem to find downtime of 'cloudy' services more acceptable somehow. We have similar issues when JIRA goes down that has a significant impact on overall productivity.

This is a really interesting product - I can see how it would be useful to a wide audience. However IMO I think you may be pricing a lot of customers out of using your product. I developed a scheduling / booking app (http://www.meetingshed.com), and I found I had to offer a free tier to drive users to actually register and try out it out. Hope it works out for you though. I'm sure HN folks would be interested in learning about the user demographic and how the business develops.

Boo! They've missed http://www.textrazor.com - a very scaleable and interesting API service.

http://www.manchester.gov.uk/info/200028/council_tax/5615/ge... 404 - not so sure

Its easy to bash something someone's posted on HN. Having said that I think this is a really poorly thought out business proposition that is executed pretty badly too. Sorry to be so harsh to those that have probably put lots of hard work into this (no pun intended), but I think it is something they need to hear. Echoing what other people have said the porn industry is way ahead in terms tech and experience catering for as many different tastes as possible. I don't see that this site brings much new to the table, or if it does its not very obvious.

That's interesting, I think Rails has been overrated in the past but this is exactly the kind of project I think Rails is great for - where you've got a very clear simple aim, and you want to quickly develop an app people can play around with.

that's a cool idea and looks well executed, I'd be interested to know what technologies you are using?

Wow, off topic I know but this is the kind of question and responses that give me faith in HN (and online communities in general) being a useful resource for people to participate in. This is a real world problem of someone who has had the courage to ask for help and they're receiving some decent responses and encouragement. My only words are yes I would say you are underpaid and I'm sure there's a better job out there for you so good luck with the job hunting.

This resonates a lot with some experiences I have had, and the reluctance to take a very small risk on whether someone with talent will be able to pick up a new technology is something I do feel a lot of companies are losing out from as a result. However at the same time I'm quite sure recruiting is a very hard thing to do, as there does seem to be a big shortage of both skills and talent in our industry. I suppose you have to always consider the context of what you are recruiting for. But personally if I was given the choice I would go for someone that clearly has talent and ability to learn, as long as there is some evidence available to show for it.

One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be developed to expose self-hosted services (dynamically located) through a publicly accessible API (statically located).

Being a big Prolog fan, I think this looks like an awesome product. This sort of textual analysis will become more important as time goes on. As the interest in search technologies grows, I think intelligent search (contextual queries, query answering, clustering, recommendations, meta-data extraction etc.) will start to appear in more end-user products. One question... whereabouts in the UK are you based?

The cynic might say having only four hours of sleep didn't do her any favors, based on some the decisions she made in her time as PM.

Unfortunately the SSL cert expired and I just couldn't justify renewing it. I know they're not expensive but I have other priorities. It is still secured over https and I mainly keep it running to demo to anyone interested now and then.