chadnickbok

Oh for sure there's a reason that approach is dropbox's default - its really hard for people to understand their files aren't really "there".

That said, my point is more that for people who start storing 100GB+ of data, it becomes harder and harder to actually manage which bits you want at any time.

What's also impressive is doing away with Dropbox's clunky "selective sync". While having everything stored locally sounds like a good idea at first, as you store more and more data is gets less and less user-friendly; in other words, power-users get the worst user experience.

Additionally, creating an easy way to share files with friends without taking up their quota is awesome. This looks like it could be a very, very powerful competitor to Dropbox.

I think there's a marked difference between conversations about basic income and "two-cent gasoline".

In this case, direct market manipulation of specific goods paid for by a budget entirely reliant on the price of oil being at historical highs doesn't seem like good policy, even to those who'd vote for Bernie Sanders!

Its not exactly hard to come up with a counter-point on right-wing policy here using the same, broad logic. Putin's Russia is having similar issues with an unbalanced budget due to a low oil price - would you say that his mistake is leftist causes?

At the heart of both countries current circumstances are _populist_ causes, and it seems to be the combination of populism and oil dependency that's at the heart of Venezuela's current problems.

In short, relying on the price of a commodity being at or above an historically high level to balance your budget is going to lead to large blow-outs in your budget if the price falls drastically. The comparison to Norway is a good one simply because they created a buffer-fund for handling prices swings. Left or right, that seems like sound economic policy.

Relevant xkcd what-if: http://what-if.xkcd.com/143/

My fear is that some managers take this as a sign they need to think about replacing someone - I'd be really careful about taking this option unless I had a really great personal relationship with my manager.

If you're feeling burned out and you've put over a year into your current job, I'd highly recommend you consider switching jobs. My own opinion is, if you're not feeling passionate about your work, the first thing to try and change is the work itself!

On the side of speaking to your manager, what's your relationship with this person like? Its easy to see someone speaking to you about burnout as a warning sign that you should consider replacing them. If that's your manager's reaction, you'll need to start looking for new work anyway. I'd suggest being _really_ careful about how you bring this up with them. Make sure you focus on the positives (I love this job, I really like my colleagues, this is a personal issue), over talking about any negatives.

Finally, perhaps this is a good chance to speak to your boss about taking on a new project, or trying a different role for a little while? A change in your day-to-day might make things seem a lot better :)

Yes, please do put it on GitHub! It does sound like a big claim, but what do you have to lose?

I'm personally trying to get more of my projects out into the open, even before I feel like they're ready - having code I put lots of time into that never gets seen by anyone makes me feel like I'm wasting my time. But at least getting some feedback helps me build better things next time.

Good engineers ship.

Its been my experience that there's a second part to the TCO argument that answers the question of why companies allow their employees, on company time, to work on and contribute OSS.

Essentially, open source provides a mechanism to share the cost of the long-term maintenance of a project. By contributing back, you can leverage the resources of the community to ensure that your new features continue to work against new and improved versions of the software, without requiring future resources to re-implement and update any changes made.

Hey so I currently work on this technology - check out https://www.x.io/ if you'd like to learn more. You can sign up for free and get some free minutes to try it out.

We can run arbitrary windows apps and stream them to your web browser, including videogames.

What kind of progress are you expecting teams to make during the 8 weeks?

How greatly do you anticipate this program impact getting into the "real" YC winter batch? Do you expect that after 8 weeks most good startups would be "ready" to be accepted into the winter class?

Do you expect that after completing the 8 weeks, teams will be ready to raise funds?

The part of this story I liked the most was the team's reaction; gathering up their desks into one part of the office, and breaking down the old desks that were now unused. Seems like a kind of mourning process, and makes me feel like this team must be really special to be a part of.

When executing layoffs like this, the hardest thing _for the company_ is to make sure that the negativity from laying people off doesn't destroy the company completely.

Ben Horowitz has some interesting insights on this in this blog article: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off

I think this is essentially just a better way to make sure that the people 42 floors really wanted to keep knew personally that they were important to the future of the company.

And reading the article again, all they told people is that they were staying, and what was going to happen the following day. They didn't say that the people staying were told who was going to actually get let go.

I think in the context of a pivot away from a failing business model, this move seems smart, not wrong. People affected by the layoffs are being let go - their happiness, in some sense, is definitely going to be impacted by the layoffs. But for those people staying, it seems like they really needed to go through some stuff, and I'm sure they all appreciated the heads up.

I though that the point of the article was that Amazon's hardware strategy isn't working, completely ignoring the echo. The title then invites us to draw our own conclusions about the echo, and enjoy the irony...

This sucks, my heart goes out to his family :(

For a brief moment I wondered if this is what I want to see on HN/Techcrunch. But we're a community, and lots of us live in SF - if it were a friend of mine, I'd be super happy to see this trending. Seems like the least we can do is have each others backs.

This article is incorrect.

1 - Lots of apps don't solve any "problem". Lots of apps don't sell anything other than ad space. Some of them succeed

2 - Lots of 'Apps' can be successful with one founder. Perhaps this writer means "startups"? I'd say most entrepreneurs would rather go it alone than make a bad founder choice.

3 - Sometimes all you need is to remove a single pain point to be a world apart from your competitors. Whatsapp was just another messaging app. But it made it easier to find your friends, by using your phone number and contacts to quickly 'seed' your network. Boom.

4 - The one valid point. If you can't explain it to someone, how do you sell it?

I always find the TIOBE Index fascinating, but mainly because I just don't get it! I have no idea how any index can rank Transact-SQL (not even just 'sql') over JavaScript.

I'm not sure where the index pulls in its data, but if its putting a specific branch of SQL ahead of JavaScript, I've got to say I disagree.

It does, however, provide a really interesting comparison to the GitHub version of the popularity contest. This article shows quite a different picture: http://adambard.com/blog/top-github-languages-2014/ (albeit a month or two stale now)

The most surprising thing I see from both these lists, however, is that even though we've had decades of programming-language progress, straight-up C still has a hugely strong showing. Sometimes simple is still the best, I guess!

Perhaps a better argument to make is that, since 2009, "Cloud Storage" has taken off alongside Amazon's S3 service.

So while folks who really do need to reliably store 500GB of stuff might still be looking at RAID, for the 'average' end-user they have a far better solution than complicated multi-disk setups.

I'm not sure I fully understand why RAID10 is better than RAID5. Reading the RAID wikipedia article, they seem to imply that a typical RAID10 setup uses n*2 disks, where each block of data is written to two drives.

But how does that help in the case of drive failure? If a drive fails, then as size increases won't the exposure to a URE also increase? Is it better than RAID5?

Right now it supports Dropbox, Box, and Google drive, with SkyDrive coming soon.

We'll take a look into evernote - Hadn't thought about that before.

We're actually working on both Linux and Mac clients right now; we just started with Windows.

Right now, you can add two different services for free, adding more requires a subscription - we're still trying to figure out exactly what the right pricing model is.

We don't currently plan on limiting the free version in any way, or not providing updates and bugfixes in future (beyond the two-services limit), our wording could be better here.

We're working on the Mac and Linux clients at the moment; if you sign up, we'll invite you to the beta once they're ready ;)

Actually, in this case, no it won't. Your own shell will parse $TMP_DIR and replace it with the output of mktemp, and then execute it.

Its only really bad if some does the following:

  rm -rf /$TMP_DIR

The slash is important

You're right, I'm completely wrong - the worst thing that can happen here is that the whole RVM directory is removed. Hardly catastrophic, and definitely not the extreme failure case the article is talking about.

A quick example - RVM!

http://rvm.io suggests you run the command:

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Which exhibits exactly the failure scenario outlined in the article; partway through the script RVM cleans up after itself by running "rm -rf ${rvm_src_path}"

Simple changing this to

"\curl -L https://get.rvm.io > /tmp/rvm.sh && bash /tmp/rvm.sh stable"

Would eliminate the potential for nasty failures, with a minimum of fuss.

The are quite simplistic, but that's kind of a feature - Use them to get down 'the basics', before moving onto actually using languages to solve problems. There's no better way to learn than through building actual 'things'.

As an aside, my very first introduction to Python was competing with a friend, building scripts that would automatically create accounts on a forum, login to those accounts, and then use them to give ourselves 'karma'. That weekend I learned more than I'd ever known about Python, HTTP and web scraping. Its a silly example, but mini projects like that can really help you learn.

As many people have said, no, you're not too old to get started. And despite what some people might say, a multi-year degree program, with a decent GPA, is a great way of showing employers that you're a decent potential candidate.

That said, software engineering is one of the fields you can get employment without a degree, provided you can 'show your work'. The hard part is building up your skills in a way that can easily be demonstrated. The common wisdom these days is to create a github profile, build some interesting things, commit to some open-source libraries, and use your profile as a resume of sorts.

Here's interesting article on being a well-rounded programmer: http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2011/08/09/programming-achievem...

We're also in a 'golden age' of self-guided learning, with online tools to help learning galore, here are a few:

http://codecademy.com http://www.codeschool.com/ https://www.khanacademy.org/cs

Also, get a few decent books on "Programming 101". Common wisdom suggests you learn C, one of Ruby/Python, Java, and a functional language like Haskell. Here are some good books to learn from:

The C Programming Language (some people say you should start here, I'm one of them!): http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernigh...

Learning Python: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Python-Powerful-Object-Orient...

Learning Java: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Java-Patrick-Niemeyer/dp/0596...

I hope you do choose programming as a career, its been very rewarding for me :)

Being generous - It sounds like beamr has a tool that can choose, for a given input video, which minimum crf option will provide a 'transparent' transcode.

Yes, yes we are.

Edit: And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)