FollowSteph3

Actually another great example is a new pharmaceutical drug. Homw can you accurately predict that effort. If something is complex and or newer sometimes it's very hard if not impossible to predict.

It's not as simple as you make it to be. How long do you think it would take to walk from San Francisco to Los Angeles? I guarantee you that your max will not be high enough. Try it and then read the following article and let's see how close you came http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/50/

Just because you can't always have an accurate estimate doesn't mean it's now worth it.

Also remember that estimates are based on resources. We were able to go to the moon in a decade but a lot of work was done before and the budget to get there was much higher than what most software development efforts ever get relatively speaking. It might not be going to the moon but that doesn't mean some projects aren't very complex either.

How long would it take to walk from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Even that almost impossible to estimate and not be off be several multiples, if you're lucky!

http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/50/

I say you're all wrong, the best language he/she should use is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Especially for mobile ;)

A quick suggestion, can u move the logout link away from just below the refresh buttons on mobile devices. I've hit that logout buttons more times than I care to when trying to refresh a page.

I think the main issue most devs struggle with is not the changing requirements but that the timelines are not adjusted accordingly and have to be swallowed by the dev with overtime. And in most cases when there is some adjustments it's not nearly enough to cover the actual costs. If that was somehow resolved I think the vast majority of devs would be fine with changing requirements. Problem is I don't think there is an easy way because most non-dev don't truly understand the costs involved.

Fr example can u imagine telling a plumber no the bathroom is now going to be 30 feet to the left. The plumber says ok but that will cost u a week of work. How many people would say no, u have 1 day to do it and u will be held accountable for my estimate and not ur estimate because I don't trust u when u say a week. Now assume the walls are closed and it's only after u open them u learn there are other issues. Doesn't matter, one day. This is what most de s deal with. I assume ur not like this but this is how most devs have to work. It's frustrating. If u would be given the week then u would be fine, but instead ur told the timeline and/or cost. U may even be told no u can't use those tools they r too expensive, but u need to complete the task in the faster then even people who can use the tools.

My whole point is it's often not the change requests that are the issue, it's what it entails, in that the schedule and costs are not adjusted fairly.

He said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this.

There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on.

A prototype is great but there's still a good a lot of work left to productize something ;)

Also just to add to the complexity what happens for online websites. If you're from Australia and visit Google and the server is in the US and you click on an ad, the a houldnt the revenue, and hence taxes, be paid in the US because the server is located in the US. That's were the revenue was made. Assuming that's true then wherever you host the server is where you should be taxed. And in that case certain countries would be more beneficial to put your hosting servers in.

Basically all I'm saying is that it's not an easy problem and there are no easy and obvious answers :(

Although great in theory how do you collect the pay the taxes for revenues collected in every country? A big business like Google can handle this but a smaller business will be crushed by it. Imagine a 1-2 person. Imagine a 1-2 person business selling online. Are they capable of paying taxes in a hundred countries? That burden alone would crush them. Try managing the tax rules for 100 countries as a 1-2 person shop. Good luck.

Ignoring that who will enforce it? If say a Russian owes taxes to the US how will they get the payment if the person doesn't want to pay?

But even then why should the taxes go to that country? All the infrastructure to allow your business to operate in the first place is in your country. The roads to get your employees to work etc.

That being said if your going to open factories or offices in another country than I believe you should be required to have a corporation in that country and pay taxes in that country for the revenues those entities make. But even that is challenging. It's honestly a very hard issue to resolve...

You're absolutely right, this is the problem that should really be solved. The other is a workaround because it's a lot easier to implement. Kind of like applying a quick hack to code rather than refactoring or re-architecturing.

This is great for students who want to learn but as something that is offered to the general public it will fail because too many students want to do the minimum possible to graduate. That being said I think it's a great idea to try in schools with highly motivated students.

Read The book Code Complete 2.

How is this different then a phone? Are you liable for the conversations others have on your phone?

I'm surprised the discussion isn't focused on the 3% fee, it's almost not discussed. Think about that, that's 3% of all retail transactions for electronic processing. And their not even liable for charge backs, that's paid by the vendor.

Another thing to realize, most credit cards have some kind of reward program that amounts to about a 1% payout. That's coming out of the transaction fees, which if you do the math is actually being paid for by the merchant. If the fees were 2% there would no longer be rewards programs. I find that interesting. The retail world is being taxed to pay the credit xard reward programs of their customers. Makes you think a bit doesn't it ;)

The article mentions government grants, does anyone know of a small software shop that has been able to get one? We looked into it at one point and its next to impossible. Our advisor told us we had to modify the product in weird ways to maybe get a grant some years later. In other words getting a grant was nice for the media outlets to report but in reality impossible for a small startup...

Trust and a well implemented feedback system cost money and effort and if you're going there it's most likely to get the lowest price and not the best service.

That's the reason why you get such good prices. Hire cheap developers and you have to take a gamble on the deliverables. If you're willing to pay a fair or premium price your worries decrease ;)

How many smaller businesses that use salesforce would have lost all their data with hardware failures over the years? Most smaller businesses have absolutely no backups. Remember HN is the exception as were a technical crowd ;)

I think this is very good. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost form data by hitting backspace.

For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.

The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.

I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace

If a restaurant lets their customers use their phone are they liable if the customer uses the phone for illegal purposes?

If this were true then how do you explain all the crime that still happens. Even high profile cases. It would be a lot easier to manager bigger crimes. But since we still see them struggling with even big profile cases, where not having an arrest is embarrassing, it's extremely hard to imagine this being true.

I agree with exactly what you say except for the price. At $24/year there's just no room to stay in business. Even just one support request would put you in the negative for that customer. Nevermind the server costs, payment processing fees, you're barely leaving anything on the table unless the company can achieve massive economies of scale. Again I agree with everything but price, I just can't see the. Staying in business at a lower price point...

Imagine if you were more intelligent then everyone else by a large margin, how boring would it be over time? No matter who you engage almost no one can even understand you, never mind push or challenge you. After a while this would be very challenging. As an adult it would almost be like being surrounded by kindergarteners all day long every single day. Not maturity etc but intelligence wise.

My understanding was that total annihilation didn't work on modern computers... Do you have links to the communities that play TA?

The thing is different people have different tax needs. Some people have very tax filings while others are very complex and some things can't be downloaded at all. It would be great but it's just not possible. FYI I work in a related field and I can tell you some tax filings are complicated!

Also not every source generates valid data files :(

I wrote a blog post explaining exactly this in detail based on my previous experience doing government contracts. I called it why a hammer costs $5000: http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost...

I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue.

And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(

Most users say they want stability but when it comes to actually paying, unfortunately most users will only pay for features, especially new shinny ones that demo well. This is the challenge faced by software companies.

To make it really work I think the cost would have to go up exponentially with time. Maybe once a decade you pay. And you could even pre-purchase but at the exponential price. This would allow most works protection early on at an affordable price and companies like Disney that make a lot of money to be able to keep their copyrights.

The other major benefit is that if something is successful and people want it such as a book you have a monetary incentive to publish it to pay the copyright fees. When it's not popular enough to make money with the copyright alone than that's a good signal that it's been copyrighted long enough