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Yep, we are seeing exactly the same things and have more or less the same response. I've long been a huge Github fan so to think of moving away makes me quite sad, but the frequent chunkiness (even exhibited in things as simple as switching between page 1 and 2 of open issues) causes me a lot of frustration every day. I'm not ready to give up just yet however.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've also used Jira in the past and wasn't super impressed with it at the time for just the reasons you mentioned -- lots of features but not integrated seamlessly and often overloading the user with options and not presenting a very good user experience (both in terms of speed / design / etc.). That said, I have the sense that GH is slowing down, I constantly have issues that seem to be similar to the old Twitter fail whale problem, either with what appears to be incorrect old cached data or Octocat "hello these droids that you are looking for can't be found since our ORM sucks." I assume this is some Rails stack issue (i.e. some aspect of the old Rails can't scale argument that was never really refuted but people forgot about as they stopped trying to optimize Rails apps for speed).

btw, I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong Milestones, but there are always too many clicks involved in the GH interface and the buttons are often not where I expect them to be -- even when you have something that works well (i.e. dynamic adding of tags that automatically updates the DB), there is frequently no indication of actual success, which ends up puzzling the user.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion for YouTrack, will definitely check it out.

Sadly doesn't provide any filtering on tags, which is the only way to assign priority. In fact, all I really get is a list of all open issues.

This is a huge problem for us also, and I've considered moving things over to Jira several times over the past couple weeks because of it. The only quasi-solution I've found is to feed multiple repos into a single chat room in Hipchat so people can get some idea of progress. More broadly though, I'm quite dissatisfied with GH issues (UI, poor search, clunky milestones, no burn charts, etc.).

Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products.

As is generally the case in the enterprise space, this means providing more features than the competitors. There is also a network effect in that the more features and integration points a particular platform has, the more valuable it is.

Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive. One note here is that although the UI has had its warts, Salesforce is actually has a much better UI experience compared to most other enterprise apps (lightweight competitors tend to be better, but not deliver the feature set).

In any case, marketing is a natural extension for Salesforce at this point and I have ever reason to expect they will be successful at dominating this market segment just as they have in other sectors and points on the value chain. If they have to pay a bit of a stock price premium in order to do so that's not a lot of sweat off Benioff's brow.

To a certain extent I wish that the Paypal mafia had been more successful since I think if they had been able to launch a their own currency it would have shaken up the industry even further, and moved a lot more of it towards productive ventures (i.e. Tesla, SpaceX) than the cruft that fills the industry today. But anyways, they weren't the people for the job. Maybe someone else will do it soon.

I can understand why pg sees this as a problem that needs to be solved, but personally I see it as a natural extension of the point / counter-point dynamic, in which the obvious counterarguments or oversights of a particular article are brought to bear in a pithy comment. This doesn't take any great deal of intellectual effort (and is justifiably called a "middlebrow dismissal" ) but I personally am guilty of upvoting many of these comments simply because (particularly on articles which I don't read) I appreciate someone pointing out the obvious deficiencies.

That said, I do think they often take away from detailed and serious discussion of the article, and there may be some problem with the way that they absorb upvotes and end up at the top of the page, but I don't see the general dynamic as particularly troublesome (unless you are trying to produce conformity in opinion among participants, the often problem of benevolent overlords who don't like to see strife amongst their minions).

Should have been titled "Andrew Mason arrives at YC... in order to sell his hawt business music album"

Even though I'm not a huge Greenspan fan (are there any?), I find this money transmitter stuff incredibly fascinating. I haven't reviewed the relevant legal code, but I strongly suspect that Greenspan is right in that:

(1) there are lots of little annoying laws related to money transmitters that makes it very difficult to get new payment stuff off the ground

(2) If you have deep pockets and good lawyers you can pretty much ignore these laws

I strongly suspect that the correct solution is to change the laws, but that this is also an even greater pain in the ass than protecting yourself with highly paid lawyers, esp. since relevant laws vary significantly from state to state. What exactly Greenspan is attempting to prove here is beyond me, but I'm still quite curious as to the results.

One word: finally!

I thought it was an "undisclosed" amount

Andreessen Horowitz just put a lot of money into OpenCoin/Ripple, I guarantee you they are going to knit the two services together. Dwolla w/ happy PR buzz, back end provided by OpenCoin.

I guarantee you that part of PMarca and co's game plan here is to integrate the OpenCoin/Ripple technology with the Dwolla network.

Long-term Salesforce consultant here. Can't speak to the specifics in this case, but mixups of this nature are sadly quite common in the Enterprise world. In the Salesforce ecosystem particularly the fast pace of growth in customers with complicated needs has not been met by either by internal professional services within Salesforce or by the larger partner community (it is difficult to re-train people in proprietary technologies and rapidly build up companies around them). This means that many partners are billing high rates for subpar services. In this case they appear to be under subcontract to Salesforce, which could mean that Salesforce is partially responsible (IANAL).

I don't think there is any silver bullet here. Large enterprise projects generally need a lot of hands in the implementation, particularly when there are tight schedules involved, and when there aren't enough quality resources available, people end up using resources that aren't able to deliver on what they promised in the timeline they promise.

I've seen this happen before (generally from a distance) and all I can say my condolences go out to all involved. As far as advice goes to developers, consulting in general is filled non particularly interesting repetitive tasks that rarely attracts great talent, and the most talented people tend to up into management (i.e. architects) rather than hanging around in the trenches. As far as advice to people involved on the purchasing side, make sure you vet your consultants ahead of time. Usually if take someone who promises something too good to be true, it will turn out just that way.

I think if you can't find a job and you are aspiring to have other skills but don't have them yet your best bet is a focused job with manual labor as the core component. You might think I'm joking, but manual labor has the benefit of focusing the mind, and there are numerous labor intensive jobs that pay very very well.

Here are three you might consider: working on a fishing boat / working on a oil rig / joining the US Armed Forces.

The first two of those are very good money with a bit of risk with not a particularly long time commitment. After you are out of your financial hole you can transition to doing something else. The Armed Forces is not a bad option if you are looking for something that could be a longer term option for you and potentially include training in skills you are interested in.

Also, in general, getting jobs is first and foremost about confidence. I suspect you don't have a lot, so going out there and doing something where you can build confidence (my suggestion not knowing you is through a body focused manual labor activity, but that may not be the best), and then use that confidence to build skills, and then go out and get a job that makes use of those skills. That's a general strategy that can carry you for your whole life, the trick is to avoid getting stuck in a depressive cycle (which seems like where you are now).

Anyways, good luck mate, wish you the best!

JRRT, in fact, loathed airplanes and forbade his son from flying in one. Numerous quotations on the horrors of modern technology (airplanes foremost among them) can be found in his letters to Christopher.

Somewhat curiously, the "deus ex machina," usually referred to as cheap trick in contemporary commentary on literature/theatre/film, was an expected and appropriate resolution in classical theatre. One might find in Fortinbras Shakespeare's own descending god, although he presides over a funeral rather than a positive resolution (the preferred outcome of virtually all American theatre).

Never thought of this, but I like the idea a lot. Are there any iOS apps that allow you to speed up the play speed of your music library?

Yes, but I don't like it. It is too slow. I only do it when I am forcibly on a long car-ride and driving and can't do something else.

In the case of Chinese, the pictographic properties are often retained in the construction. For example, a common radical is that of the roof, which appears at the top of this character: 安 an1 meaning peace The perception (correctly or incorrectly) that the meaning of the word is to some degree derived from its parts affects the consumption of the language in a way that differs substantially from other languages with the roman alphabet. In the particular example, all sorts of people talk about how "peace" is a woman under a roof.

I'm in the exact same place. I devoured fiction (especially science fiction and fantasy) in my youth (ages 7-17, including 6 full LOTR readings), but the appeal has been destroyed as I've moved into hypersonic reading speed, in which my consciousness of individual characters and ability to emotionally relate to the plot line has been decreased to the point of near non-existence.

I've recently been contemplating a re-reading of LOTR, but feel so far away from the potential to immerse myself in the universe that I have not even given it a serious try. Virtually all of my consumption is rapid reading of relatively light fare that I can consume in a one or two sittings.

The introduction of digital means has not helped me (i.e. Kindle, Kindle App), as this increases my propensity for speed, and virtually the only novels which conform to my expectations are overly long novels (i.e. Neal Stephenson) which provide enough change of pace without any particularly deep or moving characters.

Frankly, I have no idea what to do either. I also feel like a greyhound on steroids, incapable of fictional engagement if it does not come at breakneck speed.

"that all writing systems, properly so called, are systems for writing out speech."

This is true by definition, at least by the definition of a "writing system" commonly used by DeFrancis and others. For the Chinese system, it is true that the vast majority of written characters are based on sound, but there are also characters that are primarily semantic in construction (e.g. pictographic, at least in origins).

The more complicated (and somewhat philosophical) question is whether or not it make sense to call something a language (or writing system) that is not based on speech, or cannot be represented as speech. Symbolic logic, for example, includes a formally defined set of symbols that represent meaning in a consistent and intelligible way. How we discuss these sets of symbols is a very interesting topic (albeit rather distinct from the topic at hand).

The problem is that the HN front page can't be used for this sort of thing or it will be swamped with free offers of various sorts (not to mention other types of advertisements). Sadly, I don't know of a good alternative except to find some people that you like here and contact them individually. You might even have luck cold-emailing startups that are doing something in your areas of expertise.

Btw, it doesn't help that you have virtually no karma.

There was a Chinese general (Zhu Chenghu) who has made several controversial statements to this end, including that initiating nuclear war would be acceptable in case of US intrusion in Taiwan (still considered by most mainland Chinese as a Chinese possession). However, to the best of my knowledge he hasn't been in the press the last couple of years.

Very interested in this also. I'd be willing to help organize too (via Facebook or other websites).

If all value is relative then there is no such thing as value at all. Of course the converse statement, that "inherent value" is a construct is true, since people rarely agree on the value of any given object, and generally the only way we can speak meaningfully about value is to take something that people agree has value. That said, there are certain types of objects that have been considered by most people to have value at most points in history. Gold, a fungible, maleable, shiny metal has been considered to be this for most of human history. There are other things of course, water being a very good example. The problem for currencies has historically been that alternative valuable objects either are not especially limited or not fungible, making them a bad base for a currency.

There may also be things that have "inherent value" insofar as they are necessary to the continued existence of humanity, whether or not we perceive them as so. Damaging our environment beyond a certain degree would certainly be this. Unfortunately international governance has not risen to this particular challenge and fully utilized available technology (e.g. carbon credits).

Although I do agree with you that the difference between Bitcoin and other fiat currencies is a matter of degree and not type, there is a rather important difference that you are skipping over. The fact is that there is accountability with respect to Bitcoin issuance, whereas there is little to none with respect to the amount of currency issued in other venues (i.e. central banks), except the possibility that people will flee the currency and devalue it.

In fact, with respect to money creation there are not a lot of set rules. The main problem is keeping supply matched with demand. From a governmental standpoint demand is usually enforced (at the very least by forcing taxes to be paid in your currency).

This is a very complicated and interesting topic. Many economists believe that inflation is necessary to keep people from hoarding. Spending, either in the form of acquisition or investment, is necessary to keep the economy juiced up.

In other words, your criticism would be considered a design feature by many economists. Some even considered adding a fee (demurrage) instead of facilitating inflation, encouraging you to use whatever money you had. This would be akin to a 1% asset tax instead of an income tax.

>> that value is in allowing people to make exchanges they wouldn't otherwise be able to make.

Well, you could say the exact same about every currency. If you are a chicken farmer, it is easier to buy a pound of pork for $5 than trying to trade your chickens for a slab of a pig (i.e. barter). All currencies provide value, since they are a lot easier than barter. The question is not that, it is whether or not they are based on something of inherent value.

I think Q is closer to the size of the market rather than the size of the "economy." "Economy" implies both tangible goods and buyers and sellers for those goods. The problem with Q in the Bitcoin sense is that it can move around a lot, since it is an obvious target for speculators with no interest in tangible goods.