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borison Overnight success takes a long time

Yes, you are correct. Though in mutt you can hit 'n'/'p' while reading a message in a thread and you will move to the next/previous email in the threading order. I would imagine one would need to use scrolling in gmail for any substantial thread which results in a pretty similar experience (i.e., you only see one or two emails at a time).

borison Overnight success takes a long time

Mutt has email threads. It had them for as long as I've been using it (6+ years). It also has regex search and selection, besides other things...

borison Microsoft getting ready to lay off 17% of staff

The question is whether Microsoft management can figure out who is dead wood. Based on their recent product fiascoes, I am not sure they can. It can also be that management itself is dead wood.

borison Portrait of a Bubble

Based on the fact that prices are still declining, I would guess those are forced sales. A good sign is when prices stop falling.

borison Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

We (http://www.codesynthesis.com) are looking for great C++ hackers in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information on what we offer and who we are looking for, see

http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-work/2008-July/00062...

borison Balsamiq hits $100,000 in revenue

"It is also easier to get investment for an idea that is in a “hot” market such as e-commerce during the dot-com boom and social networks more recently. VCs also expect their companies to expand rapidly. This makes a VC-funded company burn cash by rapidly growing in a crowded and noisy field with expensive and scarce engineers."[1]

[1] http://codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2008/11/10/develop-new-...

borison Ask HN: How do you stop reading the internet when you need to work?

I try to do things that I enjoy. Something that I would do (or would like to do) even if it didn't have any monetary payoff. If you can find a project that you would do, rather than read the net, and it happens to pay the bills then here is your journey.

This is, of course, quite a bit simplified. In any non-trivial venture there will be a significant number of things that need to be done and that you don't particularly enjoy doing. But if the greater part is fun then it is easier to sometimes buckle down and get through the mundane parts.

I guess it also largely depends on the personality. I, for example, hate having to do something quickly, without fully understanding the area, and moving on. On the other hand, if I have a chance to spend time and get exhaustive knowledge about something then I genuinely enjoy working on it even if on the outset it seemed unattractive (think sales, marketing, writing, etc., vs hacking some interesting piece of software).

borison Ask HN: How do you stop reading the internet when you need to work?

You seem to enjoy the prospect of the payoff but the journey is hard. You need to enjoy the journey in order not to get distracted.

borison Ask HN: How do you stop reading the internet when you need to work?

Work on something more interesting than reading the net.

borison Ask HN: Anyone running a US-based non-resident LLC?

No, I don't think so. The income is not produced by merely hosting the app in the US. Instead, you most likely develop and maintain it, provide customer support, etc., all outside of the US.

borison Ask HN: Anyone running a US-based non-resident LLC?

If I hire myself as a contractor in my home country, do I have to pay taxes on these incomes to US gov?

If I get paid from US-based company personally (not through company), do I have to pay taxes to US gov on these incomes?

You don't pay taxes to US gov unless any of the following two things are true: (1) you are a US resident (2) your income is produced in the US.

There is a precise definition of being a US resident for tax purposes but it basically boils down to you staying in the US for the majority of the time.

The production of income is a bit more tricky. It basically says that if you use US "infrastructure" to produce your income then you have to pay taxes. The common example of this situation would be rental income from a property in the US. An example when this does not apply would be sitting in front of a computer in another country and writing a web app.

borison Ask YC: "Rock Star" Job Titles

It was a hidden test: we only hire people that spot this. Joking, of course.

borison Ask YC: "Rock Star" Job Titles

What about a "great hacker"? Here is a position we advertised in a local LUG. While writing it up I kept asking myself if I would reply to an email like this. Feel free to take it apart:

http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-work/2008-July/00062...

borison [dead]

Another problem with this is that to view the document you need Flash and if you want to download the PDF version then you need to have an account with scribd and login. I am also wondering what's the reason behind this. It is not like YC has to host the PDF file. If it is to promote scribd (I am not sure whethere it is a YC startup) then that's pretty evil.

borison Is your startup something other than a web app?

It's been a little over three years now however I had some relevant background in the problem area from my previous job. Right now 2 people (founders) are working on it though we are planning to hire some more soon (if you are a C++ hacker in Cape Town and looking for interesting work, drop me a line).

borison Is your startup something other than a web app?

It is not a C++ compiler, it is a compiler written in C++. It compiles XML Schema to C++ but other target languages are in the works.

As for who would pay for this, manually parsing any substantial XML vocabulary using DOM or SAX is a major PITA so there are always people willing to pay for automating this task.

borison Is your startup something other than a web app?

We do a compiler in C++. Probably as far from Web 2.0 as you can get (in this industry).

borison Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Steve is talking about the "link-time inlining" (see the original quote) which is not supported by any mainstream C compiler that I know.

Inlining in the same translation unit is possible though its application is too limited to explain why C is faster than dynamically-typed languages.

borison Dynamic Languages Strike Back

I stopped reading after this:

"C is really fast, because among other things, the compiler can inline function calls. It's gonna use some heuristics, so it doesn't get too much code bloat, but if it sees a function call, it can inline it: it patches it right in, ok, because it knows the address at link time."

This statement shows that Steve has no idea how the base of every modern OS works: separate compilation, calling conventions, machine code, shared objects (libraries), etc.

Once I compile a .c file which defines a function into object code, there is no practical way for the linker to "patches it right in" -- that would require actually decompiling the function to get rid of the calling convention implementation as well as tie-in all the argument references in the function body to those in the calling code.

I noticed something similar a while ago in one of his posts about Lisp (I think it was about why Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp). There he made pretty strong statements and when people who actually know and have used Lisp in real world pointed to his numerous mistakes in comments, Steve admitted that he actually doesn't know the subject matter very well.

borison VC Funding Spelled Backwards

"Had Xobni taken $1 million instead of 4, they’d all be buying beach houses right now. On the other hand, Microsoft might come back and offer the $40 or $50 million it would take to make the VCs agree (I think it would be a good idea for them to do so) and they’ll be buying beach house and Bentleys."

Let's say an angel would invest at the same valuation as the VC, then for $1M they would get 12.5% of the company. That would mean that when acquired for $20M, founders are left with $17.5M. For VCs with 50% stake and $40M acquisition founders are left with $20M. Not sure where Bentley's come from.

borison Maintaining a Sense of Urgency

And that's why your startup needs an enemy. Otherwise you will have to be the one everyone is fearful of.

borison Tales from the WTF company, part II

I was in a similar situation and in my case I also had the fourth option:

4. Try not to touch any old projects. Instead try to "own" a new one where you can do things the right way.

There are, however, a few problems with this approach: your will probably be implementing the whole thing alone and will quickly become unpopular with the others.

In my case I ended up implementing a compiler frontend alone from scratch while everybody else were thinking it was a waste of time and we should have based our work on the old code (which, agreed by everybody, was hell of a mess). When time came to implement the backend, I had to bring one of the "old-timers" on board which caused a lot of tension (he preferred to do things the "old way", for example, to indent the generated C++ code manually instead of using the automatic indenter that I wrote).

One other thing that I tried with mixed results was to "recruit" new hires with some sense of design to work with me on the project before they got exposed to the "dark side".

In the end I left that place not the least because of the "us vs you" attitude which was, on the most part, the result of my own actions. I couldn't stand the attitude most people working there had towards software design (most of them were grad students so they weren't there for the long haul). I am now running my own development tools company and find it a much better way to spend my time.

In the end I suggest that anyone stuck in a situation like this get out of it as soon as possible. The extra effort required to make it work is just a waste of your life.

borison Apple ignores Java developers with Leopard

And why would you choose the slower one for development then?

borison Apple ignores Java developers with Leopard

So much for run anywhere.

Seriously, perhaps Apple is trying to discourage people from developing MacOS applications using Java in order not to make the whole experience appear slow. Their OS is already quite inefficient (which, BTW, makes me wonder why on earth anybody would make a Mac their development machine).

borison Why D kicks serious ass over C++, leaving it dead and broken on the sidewalk

"D is a multi-programming language"

No wonder there are so many useful applications written on D!

borison On Pricing Strategy

You are approaching this problem from a wrong side. First you need to determine how much your service is worth to the customers, in monetary terms. Then you can base your price on that. Normally you would divide your service benefits into two parts: "commodity" and "unique". You would charge what it costs you to provide it for the commodity part and how much it is worth to the customer for the "unique" part.

Also note that educating the customer about the value (in monetary terms) that they will receive by using your service is the key to make this strategy work.

borison Pmarca: Why brainstorming is a bad idea

If we believe this to be a general rule, then a single founder will have about as many ideas as two brainstorming co-founders.

borison A pic of our start-up [pic]

Wow, that's hell of a clean desk. Where are all the books, pizza boxes, paper with random notes?

borison What is value proposition? Does your startup has good value proposition? How to measure it? :)

Value proposition is a term used to refer to the benefit(s) received (or perceived) by a user of your product or service . A more precise and useful measure is the economic value of your product or service to a user. In an ideal world it is defined as the difference between the amount of money the user can make or save using your product less the amount that they can make/save without. In the real world an estimated economic value (EVA) is normally used. It is used for both pricing decisions and value communication to potential users.

borison Why PG was not right on co-founders or two points of view.

"I think the statistics are pretty favorable to having a co-founder"

It's all in the details. Let's say we have the same success rate for single founder and multiple founders ventures. There are many more multiple founders startups for at least two reasons: (1) it takes some guts to go alone and (2) VC/angels won't fund solo undertakings. Since the multiple founders pool is bigger, there are more successfull startups of this kind. Here you've got your misleading statistics.