vtail

Part of the quest. I too was reading from the iPad.

Try entering anything with monthly revenue >= monthly expenses.

Very nice! I wonder what your revenue model is going to be, if it's OK to ask that early in the game?

Disclosure: I'm a management consultant with one of the big firms.

Management consulting business is built around providing knowledge to clients. There are several ways to get it:

1. Face a new client problem and think long and hard how to solve it.

2. Ask colleagues who have experienced similar problems before for general guidelines - "frameworks" or "best practices" in consultant-speak.

3. Share some proprietary knowledge in a disguised form, e.g. percent ranges instead of absolute numbers, or get client's data and tell them where they are versus the industry[1].

4. Directly share proprietary knowledge.

(Have I missed anything?)

In my experience: (1) is usually ~80% of work, (2) is ~19%, (3) is ~1% - happens very rarely and only with explicit client's consent, and (4) is strictly prohibited - people may violate it, as people my violate any law, but any management consulting firm is very strict about such violations.

To me, (1) has no moral problem whatsoever, and (2) is probably not very different from how any professional is getting experience - in McKinsey/other consultant's cases the speed of sharing the new codified knowledge is obviously much higher than in other industries, but that's part of their business.

My personal opinion - grey area in consulting industry is certainly not darker than in many other professions. Author of the article probably underestimates percentages for (1) and (2) above.

[1] Example: there are databases that management consulting companies keep on e.g. operational performance indicators. You can get access to some aggregate statistics from that databases in exchange for providing your own data. The individual data points are never shared.

Thanks for your answer. I somehow missed the news that delicious is shutting down. Your positioning does make sense.

A feature suggestion: when I upvote an article @ HN, I would certainly like it to be stored in my bookmarks somewhere :).

Ups... I somehow missed that part!

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/ http://llvm.org/releases/download.html

So... why would I want to use your site instead of using delicious?

Also, "It's free... for now! Users signing up from February 2011 onwards will be required to pay a small fee." - in contrast with "Bookmark for Free" in the features.

I'm really wondering if any HN users actually use Octave in their daily lives?

That is a certain world view, indeed. Milton Friedman had an excellent argumentation defending this world view: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/fr...

Oracle is not a person to make such a decision; it is its shareholders who should decide how they want to spend their money. I wouldn't want to have a tax (as an Oracle investor or a private citizen) to support OSS. I may want to contribute my money and/or code as a donation, but that will be my own choice.

I've posted this in part to reply to this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2149610

I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

3-SAT is NP-complete, so if you have an algorithm to solve it in polynomial time, you've solved them all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3SAT#3-satisfiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete

Here is a though experiment. How fast do you think Salman Khan, of khanacademy.org fame, would advance in a US public school system?

While unions make it easier for workers to defend their rights, they make it _much harder_ to create a meritocracy in the organization, and so much harder to reward people based on their performance - just ask anybody who have ever tried to transform an organization with a strong union. (Notoriously ineffective PG&E comes to mind first).

Here is an example of how "easy" it is to fire a low-performing teacher: http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the...

I'm a bit surprised that Scheme-based languages, especially Logo and Racket, are not mentioned.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_languag...

Putting emotions aside, decent news ranking algorithm should: - put high weight on the original content - put higher weight on the local reporting - put higher weight on popular news sources (e.g. high quotation index, high page rank etc.) - put lower weight on second- and third-hand reporting

Under such conditions, it's extremely hard (if not impossible) to ignore propaganda, which _by design_ generates lots of original and local content, unless you execercise some political judgement, such as punishing news sources for being funded by hostile governments - which is what Google News is trying to avoid, according to them.

It seems to me that Google News is just reflecting (sad) reality where more money/resources can generate more coverage. Any ideas how technology could change that?

> until you get to apt-get which just slaughters OS X

So what's wrong with macports?

The syncing problem should go away once all of our files will move to the cloud.

Tricks 1-7 are also supported by Ruby - it accepts the same command-line options with the same functionality.

> I've used Emacs in the past, but something about the way in which you can navigate code just makes me feel less than efficient in it.

Have you ever tried IDO, http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings?

TextMate/Ruby = Emacs/Elisp

I don't think it's 0%. That would imply that Facebook has no negotiations power in this dispute. But I think quite the opposite is true: Zynga cannot really afford leaving Facebook platform right now, so they don't have any credible threat, other than creating more bad publicity for Facebook.

Based on how things are evolving recently, it doesn't look like Facebook is paying too much attention to it.

My conspiracy theory is that bigger firms are expected to have PR departments, and people working in PR departments are expected to write longer paragraphs to justify their existence.

That's a lot of words for saying "Facebook and Zynga entered a 5-year agreement on using Facebook credits in Zynga games, but details of that are not disclosed".

Reading all those press releases, I'm wondering who is the target audience for them?

* Surely it's not an average Facebook user - she does not read press releases.

* Surely it's not a journalist or a technical person - they don't need all the marketing mumbo-jumbo.

* Surely it's not an (educated) investor, for the same reason.

My question is, who?

I forwarded this to my (soon to be ex-) wife. I wish I had such an understanding partner...

> I don't know how you could expect a delete not to be a delete unless you were familiar with something like git already.

Ability to control and be able to reverse any changes you make to the source code tree is an essential feature of version control system - precisely because you don't know in advance what will work and what won't. The fact that people are not used to that simple idea just shows how broken are most of the other tools out there.

There is no reason not to want an unlimited undo for almost everything, especially today when disk space is so cheap.

Do I read it right that your bill is about $10k/year?

Given that their profit margin on a paying customer is not 100%, more like 15-20%, they would probably need 5x as much, or 10k paying customers, to cover the costs.

Anybody knows what percentage of these 60,000 apps are actual paying clients? If e.g. 50,000 of these apps are free, even for a modest cost of $3/month to host each one, that quickly adds up to ~$2mn of cash burn / year.

Another interesting question is how well they scale. http://success.heroku.com/ has some interesting companies, but nothing with very high traffic (or am I wrong)?

PS. I'm a happy heroku user myself.