ColinCera

Have you looked at CouchDB and its mobile accomplice PouchDB? -> http://pouchdb.com/

That seems like a good place to start.

That's somewhat true, and to the extent it's true, it's an argument for why most people shouldn't be doing startups -- if you're not yet able to start a business that solves a genuine problem, then don't start a business.

I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups.

It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a small percentage of the real total.

From what I could tell after a couple of exhausting weeks reading these emails at least 99% of these startups are almost completely unnecessary. I'm not using "99%" and "completely unnecessary" as rhetorical bludgeons; I mean quite literally that less than 1% of these startups have anything more than the tiniest smidgen of utility or innovation to justify their existence.

I stopped reading those "startup news" emails because it was depressing to see so much talent and effort being squandered. I don't know exactly what else all these people could/should be working on, but if they can't find some genuinely useful ideas for startups then they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends.

What is the point of having an About link, Contact link, Privacy link, etc., at the bottom of the page if it is impossible for a user to ever get to the bottom of the page because of your infinite scrolling nonsense.

This is the third site this week that I've come across with links in a footer that no user can ever actually click on because of an infinite scroll. Stupid & irritating.

That's going to be a bo-nanza for trial lawyers.

Thanks. I listened to that clip of the author's song and then listened to the entire four-minute-long Gaga song (which I'd never heard before). Maybe it's because I'm not a musician/composer, but to me they sound nothing at all alike.

I guess there is some suspicious circumstantial evidence, if the author's story is reasonably accurate, and I haven't heard the entire original recording — but based on that short clip no ordinary person would ever think that Gaga's song had been inspired by, let alone plagiarized, the earlier song.

Is there a link where you can listen to the author's original recording? It would be nice to be able to compare it to the Gaga song.

That must be for major site-wide downtime — anyone who frequently uses Reddit knows that a few times per week you'll see a funny little "You broke Reddit" cartoon instead of the page you were trying to load. The problem usually resolves in a matter of seconds, a minute or two at most, so it's not a big deal, and I don't believe these micro-outages are universal (i.e., I think it only happens to a subset of people viewing certain subreddits / hitting particular servers / etc.).

I don't think this necessarily means Reddit has crappy engineering. It could be they've just realized that 99.9999% success at serving pages is not a worthwhile goal. I mean, it's Reddit, it's not air traffic control — nobody's going to be hurt if they have to wait 90 seconds to see random crap on Reddit.

The short answer is that you're right to ask the question because it could hurt you badly.

A lot depends on your specific situation. How accomplished and in demand are you right now? Do you have a network of people who would hire you in a heartbeat or at least enthusiastically recommend you and actively help you find a job? If you are in demand (i.e., frequently turning down overtures from recruiters) and/or you're very confident that if you lost your job tomorrow that you could find another equally good job in a matter of a couple weeks or less, then going out on your own for awhile probably won't have any negative impact.

On the other hand, if the above does not describe your current career situation, then I'd think hard about it. There are many recruiters and hiring managers who look at self-employment as barely better than unemployment. That's outrageously stupid, but it's reality. I personally know half a dozen people who experienced significant setbacks to their careers after leaving their jobs to try self-employment or work on their own startups. (But, again, a lot depends on how hireable you are currently, where you live, etc.)

TL;DR: Go home, Kurzweil, you're drunk.

Ray Kurzweil has never been particularly good at predictions. In his book published in 1999, he said by 2019 a $4,000 computer (in 1999 dollars) will be able to do 20 million billion calculations per second. We're still 5 years out, but it sure looks like he's off by several orders of magnitude.

He also said that by 2019 that humans wouldn't even be allowed to drive on highways — it would all be completely automated.

His predictions about nanotechnology, stem cells, and other medical technologies were even more wildly optimistic.

It's not just that he (badly) misjudges the rate of growth in CPU power, he also seems to think there can be exponential growth in all forms of scientific knowledge, even though it's perfectly obvious that the number of scientists isn't growing exponentially (if at all), the funding for research isn't growing exponentially (if at all), etc.

Maybe he expected preposterously fast and magically programmed AIs to achieve all these scientific & medical wonders? I don't know. I do know his predictions from 1999 seem pretty silly now (and I for one thought they were silly at the time), and I don't put much stock in his grand visions for the year 2044.

My experience with many conferences is that only a few sessions turn out to be worthwhile. If I'm there for 3 days with 5 sessions per day, perhaps 5 or 6 of the sessions I attend will be interesting, but in the other 9 or 10 I will know within the first 5 minutes that the presenter is unlikely to say anything interesting/educational. But what am I to do? Get up and leave? That's mildly rude and other sessions are probably already full. I don't have anywhere else to go and I paid to be here, so I might as well sit through the session on the off-chance the presenter might say one or two things of interest.

Meanwhile, all those people back at my company who are still working are sending me emails, and I have other actual low-focus tasks I can be knocking off my to do list, and there's random web surfing I can be doing, all while keeping one ear tuned to the presenter.

Frankly, if I only focused on the presenter's irrelevant talk, I'd probably fall dead asleep. Even if I didn't doze off, I would be fighting to keep my eyes open and not getting anything else done.

The UK will be an altered state, not a newly created one; its membership status in the EU won't change at all.

Interesting. I wonder if the UK actually lets people bank shot their way into citizenship (or at least a long-term visa) via Dominica or if they instead deny such applications on the grounds they're based on a ruse.

Only if you're a citizen of a commonwealth country — I'm an American, so doesn't apply to me.

As an American with two Scottish grandparents, I'm hoping an independent Scotland will implement a Scottish ancestry path to citizenship for Americans. I've visited Scotland twice and would love to live there and build a business there.

Of course I also hope there will be some reforms in taxes and bureaucracy to make starting a business in Scotland a reasonable proposition; currently it's not rational to start a tech business in Scotland, given the immense advantages of doing business in the US. I don't have much confidence that Scotland will actually become more business-friendly, but it would definitely be more likely as an independent nation.

But, yes, if an independent Scotland did create a business climate friendly to entrepreneurs and did make it easier for tech people to emigrate from the US, I for one would make the move in a heartbeat.

I believe parent comment was probably alluding to compilation time. My experience with Go is that the compile times are usually close to zero seconds and this indeed makes it feel almost exactly like working with Python or JavaScript.

Parent may also have been thinking of Go's concision, which feels more like using a scripting language than using a class-based monstrosity like Java, and certain other features, such as type inference that make variable declaration as painless as weakly typed languages.

Almost all Linux developers have used Qt, because KDE, and Qt has been around a long time; a significant percentage of all C++ programmers have used Qt on one project or another.

Which "Lua wrapper API" did you use?

Why would you do this? Is this the kind of "contribution" to the world you want to make? (Contribution is in quotes because this contributes nothing to the world; it subtracts.)

Interesting. It says it doubles night vision ability, but night vision goggles/scopes give 10000x - 50000x amplification. If the scales are comparable and doubles means 2x, then these eye drops seem nearly useless — but of course the scales may not be at all comparable.

It's a legitimate question because Uber and Lyft are a "new thing" and they're international brand names, something that's not true of regular cab services.

If a cab driver in New York City rapes and kills a passenger, it wouldn't make people distrust all cabs in NYC, much less cabs in other cities; there's no brand name to be damaged by news coverage, and as a news story it probably wouldn't even be covered by media outside of the NYC area.

But if an Uber driver rapes and kills a passenger, it will be covered by media everywhere, because Uber is a newsworthy company and because Uber has a global presence, and the Uber brand will be damaged worldwide, not just locally. Because Uber is a "new thing" there will be lots of people/media asking questions about the safety of Uber (in many cases stupid questions, but still).

I have done this for short stretches, 2-4 weeks at a time, by giving my cable modem to a friend with strict orders not to give it back until a specified date.

It made a huge difference in my productivity and my overall well-being when I didn't have internet access.

When I sat down at the computer, I got right to work, since there was nothing else to do — no email, HN, reddit, etc. (I'm not a gamer, at all; that might be a distraction for others.)

When I was burned out working for the day, I turned the computer off and did other things like reading and relaxing. No aimless web surfing, useless forum opining, etc.

When something came up that I needed to research or do on the web, I wrote it down in a Word doc, and once or twice a week I'd go to McDonald's and use their wifi for an hour or two, knocking out all the specific web tasks on my list.

At present, I am a programmer and I work remotely on software that runs in the cloud, so it's very nearly impossible for me to go without internet at home.

That's a bummer, because my past experience tells me my life and my productivity are both immensely better without it.

I urge you to give it a try. If you don't want to cancel it right away, consider giving your modem to somebody to keep for a month. (One time I mailed it to my mom, and then she wouldn't send it back, for my own good, she said — I had to buy a new one — so... don't trust your mother.)

I'm surprised he doesn't talk about Zotero. https://www.zotero.org/ Especially for a grad student, it seems like a better option than any of the other things he's tried/discussed.

You have a point, but on mobile and embedded devices, nobody is "wasting gigabytes of memory through virtualization" and not caring.

I think one of the motivations is that they want Go to be a language suitable for Android development and other use cases. In mobile and embedded devices, binary size still matters.

Why oh why didn't the Times give this story the headline, "You Won't Believe What Facebook Is Doing To Your Timeline"?

I have a hunch that WebRTC is going to make P2P a much more mainstream technology. Once most people are running browsers with WebRTC support, and there are good high-level libraries available for developers, I think we'll start to see it used for all kinds of things — not just real-time video conferencing, but all kinds of information sharing and dissemination, both real-time and who-cares-about-real-time, just because WebRTC will be there, will (mostly) work, and will be (relatively) easy.

You mentioned something about saving bandwidth costs, and I admit I've had a few ideas for bootstrap startups where I've thought, "Well, I could do this, but the second it became semi-popular I'd go broke and have to shut it down," and then, "If only there was a way to have the apps distribute the data P2P, so I didn't have to pay for every single user downloading from the server."

My guess is it's a combination of development complexity and (probably more importantly) firewall/router issues.

It's very hard — impossible, really — to deploy P2P technologies on a mass scale without thousands of users encountering problems with their routers & firewalls.

For mass market products, you can't get away with asking people to whitelist your app, make sure port 28777 is open for UDP, etc.

Many P2P systems have freeloader issues, which can usually be resolved/avoided/ignored on desktop systems, but when you add mobile into the equation — with its paltry bandwidth limits and sky-high overage charges — the potential for it to become a problem is much greater.

Wear them. I haven't bought undershirts in 10+ years, thanks to a failed startup. I still have one more entire garbage bag full of brand new t-shirts yet to go.

Edit: In this case, it wasn't a failed startup (though the company did eventually fail), it was the marketing department picking a name for our new product, and printing up 500 t-shirts and a truckload of other sales collateral for a trade show, without bothering to check if the name was already trademarked (which it was, by another software company, in the same city).

Fair point. The spacing and margins are totally wrong, for sure. But that's just spacing & margins, and I assume that's easily adjusted (and they should do that, so their demo doesn't look ugly). But nonetheless, the widgets are native Cocoa widgets, so they not only look native, they feel and behave native, something you can't say about Qt (at least not to the same degree — although I develop with Qt, love Qt, and have zero issues with the way Qt applications look and feel on Mac).