apgwoz

> I really don't think I need to cite a study that 5 years of time is a lot to give up on a company that goes nowhere.

I think your problem is that you have one definition of success for a startup and that’s to become a unicorn.

> working any other job than at a startup you cofounded that limps for years before winding down.

Not everyone starts a startup to become a billionaire, and not everyone seeks to _make more money_.

But aside from that, the way you’re going to _make more money_ in another job is by working at a large company that can pay you more money. That large company has lots of people and lots of jobs that are specialized… because? Lots of people are there to do them. If I work on a team in a large company, I very likely have a narrow focus and I am not “solving interesting problems” on average.

The section of the population that needs to think about the Inconvenient Truth didn’t watch the movie, because they don’t watch documentaries unless it’s about a Poop Cruise, or a celebrity.

Both of us are arguing based on feelings and intuition, so this is going no where. If you can cite a study then so be it.

I think what we can both agree on is that it is pretty obvious that prior startup experience is key to the next startup being successful.

LOL. Completely disagree.

In that 5 years, I’ve identified a shit ton of stuff that works, doesn’t work, and made relationships along the way. I’d bet money on the founder of the 5 yr startup being successful over the 6 months founder.

I got your point (after the Free Parking clarification).

(To be clear, my comment wasn’t on Double specifically. No clue how strapped for cash they are while winding down. They seem to be doing right be people (paying fees and such), and that’s great.)

Finally, maybe it’s unintentional, but you seem to be implying that “it’s not worth burning your life on a failed startup,” which seems like a bad take.

If you spend 5 years on a startup that shows promise but ultimately doesn’t pan out, is that always worse than spending 6 months on a startup that fails fast? First, this would be wildly hard to prove, and second, there are obviously counter examples.

But then this analogy doesn’t hold… Has there ever been a startup in history where it’s break even everywhere? Investors don’t get their money back, customers (hopefully!) are made whole, and the founders and employees are now out of a job and _perhaps_ didn’t get their final pay check depending on how bad it is.

> It's like landing on Free Parking in Monopoly.

I have no clue what you’re trying to convey with this analogy? “Free Parking” is different in virtually every household.

I think we found a new backronym for MCP: Mashup Context Protocol.

(The mashup hype was incredible, btw. Some of the most ridiculous web contraptions ever.)

There is a sibling post describing this particular project as known dead from the author.

However, my comment is a larger commentary. Imagine if a scientist went off and did research for 2 months and didn’t provide any updates about what they were doing? Would we assume their project was dead? Or a writer who publishes a short story and says “I will turn this into a 500 page novel.” 2 months later… no novel… must be dead!

Why can’t we, instead, assume that people who work on open source are sometimes taking a break? Why can’t we create more fluidity around software… fork it… try to integrate it later? The git model was literally designed around this, but we’ve instead decided to live in a centralized shithole where only the original author is smart enough to make useful contributions… and when they don’t… for whatever reason, we shit can the project and start from scratch.

Revolving door.

No activity for 2 months implies death?

Is this the core reason that we have a proliferation of packages, arguably doing the same thing, slightly differently, in some ecosystems… We’ve become this impatient?

Yes. The group I used to run also addressed a lot of these challenges. However, this isn’t so easy for everyone who runs meetups.

Part of the promise of WeWork buying Meetup, for instance, was “oh look! We have access to tons of real estate to house Meetups in.” A large amount of organizer support was providing ideas for places to have events.

I worked at Meetup for a couple of years. There were often Meetup groups that started up in the guise of $GENERIC get together, that ended up actually being literal lead gen for a pyramid scheme. This wasn’t likely a tech meetup thing, but perhaps a knitting circle, or whatever.

This is [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com). Meetup has obviously not aged well, but this is mostly due to changes in ownership and leadership. It’s original mission of “a Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” is pretty much exactly what The Offline Club seems to be seeking.

I think they’ll find a lot of the same challenges:

    1. Finding space to have events
    2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going. 
    3. Bootstrapping groups such that when I stumble upon The Offline Club, I can signup for something relevant to me, happening a short time from now. 
    4. Keeping organizers willing to continue hosting events
    5. Keeping away organizers who see it as lead gen for their sales job

Basically, good luck!

Edit: On second look, this is different than Meetup in that it’s not centered around a specific topic … except for being “offline” together, which obviously could create other opportunities for hobbies, etc.

As long as the DB doesn’t show its disco, I think we’ll be OK even without an answer.

Too bad they weren’t French, or a new breed of Riot Grrl databases. Le Tigre DB rolls off the tongue.

> We chose the Tiger back in April 2017.

Fair. But a mascot is not a name. I hope you can see why I bring this up?

> Also TigerBeetle is an insect, not a fast cat.

It is? Damn. I thought a Tiger Beetle was a six foot long cat wearing costume wings and a springs for antennae?

I thought about that, but, but it’s not the comparison of the second word, it’s the strength of the first. Read this list:

* Tiger Shark * Tiger Beetle * Tiger Data * Tiger Games * Tiger Woods * Tiger Attack * Tiger Snake * Wild Tiger

Only one stands out as not like the others. Tiger is too strong a word. The second word disappears.

So there’s TigerData and TigerBeetle. I wish they would have chosen a different fast cat…

In theory, Dark and associated infrastructure for running Dark apps is the perfect companion to LLM based vibe coding… I think, and I am just understanding this now. The goals of Darklang were always “no this, no that, not that either.” And so the focus was not on targeting 3rd party stuff of questionable design, but rather a single integrated set of patterns that abstracted the messy bits away.

Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job…

> Why would HashiCorp provide free hosting of providers and modules for projects competing, using HashiCorp's own code at that?

If you recall, my point is that “providers were in danger,” and this is a reason in support of that. HashiCorp, of course, has no obligation to host providers for competitors. But, this is one more reason OpenTofu succeeded!

> Terraform Community Edition is still free and usable for anyone as long as you don't sell it to compete with HashiCorp.

Except, it’s rather unclear what “compete with HashiCorp” means, and there’s very little assurance that if you stick with terraform community edition you won’t get screwed over and be forced to pay in 6 months.

You can make all the arguments about “needing to make money”, “free loaders”, etc. HashiCorp is not unique in changing licenses and getting backlash.

But, as someone who joined HashiCorp, in part, because of our open source strategy, and hearing over and over, for years, how it was the reason we were so successful…

The providers need a “driver.” Without that, they aren’t very useful as is. That’s the danger. (Yes, pulumi, etc)

Additionally, HashiCorp changed the terms of service on the registry, making it only acceptable to use the official terraform binaries to download modules or providers.

Now, the providers are mostly open source, so, it was never impossible to recreate the thing—just work. But the point here is that Hashicorp took steps that caused the community of terraform users to recognize that closing off the ecosystem would have a tremendous impact on devops.

That’s why there was so much outrage and immediate action taken.

Probably because Terraform’s value was always the community of providers and modules, and that was in danger.

Where as, Redis/Valkey’s ecosystem exists mainly as advocacy and happy users. It might be central to an architecture, sure, but using a previously open sourced version was unlikely to cause considerable problems.

Contrast to potential huge changes to the BUSL’d terraform that create incompatibility with existing providers would lock you in to HashiCorp’s new, unfavorable, terms.

Isn’t this a NOP?

I think you could batch these things though. You just need a slightly more advanced protocol. If B is the first id, and L is the last, create range(B, L) as R and insert R after L (assuming Ctrl-v a second time).

I uploaded a photo, though. I didn’t give permission for the camera.

I think it’s simply a matter of it assumed a person, found glasses, and a bit of hair above and below and filled in logically.

I am extremely impressed. I literally put my hand fully in front of my face, and it got me spot on. My glasses were partially shown, as was my beard and hair.

That being said, the resolution is such that saying messy hair, full beard, and black glasses, would pretty much get it.

, is typically “unquote.” Clojure is the only “mainstream” Lisp that allows , as whitespace. Has meaning in CL and Scheme.

Error message usefulness is not a strict requirement of type systems.

My mistake. I am sorry that early 2000s memories of Windows malware disguised as virtual friends is failing me.

Clippy? Bonsai Buddy? Is that you?

How is it not related?

Because Python is “strong typed” vs “weak typed” for Tcl?

    $ tclsh8.6
    % expr 1 + 2
    3
    % expr 3 + “hey there”
    invalid bareword “hey”
    in expression “1 + hey there”;
    should be “$hey” or “{hey}” or “hey(…)” or …

vs.

    $ python3.11
    >>> 1 + 2
    3
    >>> 1 + “hey there”
    Traceback (most recent call last):
       File “<stdin>”, line 1, in <module>
    TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: ‘int’ and ‘str’

I don’t really see a difference. Both checked types at runtime. Clearly Tcl can check types at runtime, even though it represents everything as a string. Whether all commands do so is another story. But, not all functions in Python check types before trying to do things that don’t make sense, either. So…

And in Tcl the runtime type is computed at time of use. An optimized Tcl could cache an integer with a string that represents an int to avoid that cost.

Nevertheless, a runtime type tag is an optimization. That doesn’t make Bob’s statement any less true.