alanstorm

Don't forget that some of the original Hacker News user base is getting older and deciding to try out new things. Working for a large technology company, even if you ultimately want to strike out on your own, is a good experience and can teach you a lot of thing you're not going to learn at a startup or small business (simply because you'll never encounter them)

They're usually considered bad for the web because, if the shortening service goes away any hyperlink that used the shortener instantly breaks.

Dead links are a fact of life on the web, but it's the idea that one domain-name going away would break links to thousands of different domains that unsettles people.

You can tell a lot about the culture of an organization by comparing the official and unofficial duties of the CTO vs. the COO. One of the better things I've seen written about what a CTO is came from this Rands quote

"There are two classes of Free Electrons. Sr. Electrons and Jr. Electrons. Both have similarly productivity yields, but the Senior versions have become politically aware. In technology savvy organizations, most CTOs fall into this category."

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr...

There's a (roughly) 15% tax on income that covers social security and medicare. As an employee, 7.5% of this comes out of your paycheck, and your employer has to match the other 7.5%. When you're self-employed, you need to pay both ends of this (unless you start getting tricky with the way you incorporate)

It's about a New York City that's 25 years long gone, but this question, and thread, reminded of Ted Rall's recollections of driving a Cab in NYC during the early 80s

http://www.rall.com/longarticle_003.htm

A day to figure out how to automate it, a few weeks of babysitting to work out the edge cases, and then however long it takes to get off Apple's blacklist for the unusual traffic pattern.

People would have been miffed, and left with a iPhone that still worked (just like owners of the first generation iPhone).

The Freek Geek thrift store is worth a trip, if only to view The NEXT cube they have on display.

Yeah, I'm that Alan Storm. NOT the WCW scrub wrestler.

Pay off your debts, if only because they're one less thing to distract from whatever you're working on at the time, and because reducing your monthly living costs will be a huge win when you start your company and/or consulting.

Don't quit your job to start looking for independent contracts. Take on a small side gig or two while you're at your current job to work in your off hours. This will give you a taste of what independent consulting is like and the challenges involved. Also, in independent consulting people don't care about certification, they care about you solving their problems.

Also, your questions of "Who wants to hire someone for less than a year?" makes it sounds like you're a good candidate for third party agency consulting. That's where Company A doesn't want to commit to a full time employees, so they hire a consultant from Company B. You're considered a temporary employee for Company B while working at Company A. Contract terms are usually fixed, but will often go month to month once the initial term is up. Some are often contact-to-hire. Certification will help you negotiate your rate with Company B, but isn't necessary, and there's a HUGE number of .NET jobs that use this kind of consulting.

The downside is the consulting firm (Company B) takes a chunk of money before passing you a check. The counter-point is these firms often get contracts that would never be handed out on an independent consultant, and the upside for you is 40/hours a week of stable employment for a period of time, and a loose commitment that makes it easier to do side work and/or plan for your future. If you want to find a few of these consulting firms just search Dice for job listings.

A+++ Would Ride Again!

Also, remember that some programs don't respect the system's proxy settings and instead use their own. Firefox is one of those, you can find its proxy settings in "Advanced -> Network -> Settings"

If this ends up becoming an industry trend it has some interesting repercussions for the music distribution industry. The combination of a compact disc's unencrypted contents plus an optical CD drive in almost every computer really helped push the ubiquity of digital music unencumbered by DRM. To consumers any DRM system seemed like a bigger hassle than dropping a CD in the drive, ripping the bits and then converting them to MP3s.

We're years away from this, but if a majority of computers don't have an optical drive to rip CDs then the average consumer loses this non-download path to digital music. That probably emboldens DRM advocates, helps Apple's music download business, and will effect countless other things that are hard/impossible to predict.

Aren't we past the idea that "ability to instruct a computer and/or runtime via a programming language" comes with a preconceived set of personality traits? Chester describes a certain kind of programmer well, but the idea all programmers conform to this behavior pattern (and, by extension, if you don't conform to the pattern then you're not a programmer) is silly.

Put another way, A lisp hacker, a java developer and a priest walk into a bar ...

This is well worth the money. A good CPA will sit down with you at tax time and walk you through everything they're doing. Even if you don't go back next year it does a lot to demystify the process, allowing you to procede more confidently with your own filings in the future.

Smart of them to respond quickly and swiftly, but the core issue of this specific case wasn't addressed. A naive business owner was aggressively sold into a plan that wasn't sustainable for their business, and by all accounts wasn't aware of the cap system which Andrew says "has always been Groupon policy to allow merchants" to have.

So the PR responses read wells to people who have already decided Groupon did no wrong here, re-enforces to businesses that there is a model that could work for them, but does nothing to address people who found the whole thing unsettling/distasteful.

It doesn't seem like Posie's is "blaming" groupon, the owner owns up to their mistakes

From http://posiescafe.com/wp/?p=316#

"the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner"

"we cannot afford to lose any more money on this terrible decision I made"

Jessie owns up to being the one at fault here.

Beyond that though, what does it say about online marketing, and our industry in general, that high pressure sales tactics are leading small business owners into bad decisions like this?

An industry based on caveat emptor, a lack of trust between actors, zero sum games, and the love of a quick buck over all else leads to an ugly future.

There's an old rule of thumb I read somewhere (can't remember where) that says the maximum amount of money you could charge for "consumerish" software sold in the enterprise was the per-purchase limit on the average manager's corporate credit card. As soon as you went over that it meant getting approval up the org chart chain, and getting approval up the chain meant having a dedicated sales staff to work that chain. As soon as you need that sales staff, the price of your software need to go up to pay for the additional staff. In other words, it's just as hard/expensive to sell a $2,000 product as it is a $20,000 product, so charge $20,000.

Good points for anyone if they're weighing the fulltime gig vs. contracting vs. consulting. However

1. The "Self Employment Tax" (in other words, FICA and Medicare) is closer to 7.5% extra for the self-employed. When you're an employee you pay 7.5% of this, and your employer matches that. When you're self employed you pay the entire thing.

2. The FICA and medicare tax can be avoided if you're contracting through a third party agency (and being paid W2 via that agency). This has its own set of tradeoffs and rewards, but is another option worth considering.

3. Remember that the 401k match has to vest, meaning that 4% match is closer to 1.6% if you hold the job for only two years. (on the flip side, that 1.6% is pre-tax)

The matching can also be a temporary benefit if your smaller company gets bought out by a larger one.

4. Paying your own health insurance is a burden, but it's a burden with a fixed monthly cost. It's worth investigating self-insurance options and doing a straight up dollars to dollars comparison.

Consulting and contracting aren't for everyone, but if there's parts of full-time employment that frustrate you it's definitely a route worth considering.

A philosophy degree?

The unstated question Yegge is answering in that essay (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...) is "Should Industry™ choose lisp", and his answer is no.

The unstated question Tim Daly is answering is "Can you, as a lisper, complete projects for Industry™", and the answer is yes.

The two essays are answering two different questions, and they're both "right".

Cribbing from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)), he's five years away from the traditional US retirement age of 65, and he was a director level executive at DEC. I imagine he played the money game long enough at DEC that he's in fine shape, even without his teaching income.

This reminds me of a lot of the "discussion" surrounding the Mozilla project back in the pre 1.0 days.

Non Project Member makes a decent point about performance, but does so in an incredibly presumptuous, entitled, non-helpful way.

Project Members make a lot noise and had waves about pre-production, non-optimized versions, etc., but never come out and say "Yes, version n+1 of our project will most likely use more ram and run slower on the same hardware as version N of our project"

Weird, it comes up fine for me

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_att_fail/all/1

stupidbrokeninternet

Not that I don't ♥ The Gruber™, but the link should probably be pointing at the original article, as all John is doing here is quoting from the Wired piece.

When has Negative PR kept a dominant technology company from remaining dominant?

For a profession that's all about analyzing the impact and trade-offs involved for any particular solution, there's a massive amount of lazy and bullying writing about the various methods of software distribution that exist in 2010.

I live in Portland, so I'm questioning your premise off the bat. :) I'd say freedom of movement and the ability to reasonably exercise that freedom is the right, which governments legally support by creating/maintaining/policing the roads.

It's nice to see some governments recognizing that something which was once a luxury is now becoming a necessity as offline alternative for mandatory services (paying bills, job searching, etc) get stripped down or removed entirely.

I know a lot of good copy editors who are out of work.