daveungerer

Bootstrapping means creating a self-sustaining business. At a minimum, this means you have revenue to cover your running costs. You can only say "bootstrap with less than $10K" if that 10K gives your business enough revenue to cover its running costs. Yet this is what one of the founders has to say in another comment here on HN: We will try first to build a community/traffic and then will look for revenues.

I guess it's not the founders' fault that the article was written this way. But once they've spent a lot of time and money on actually building their community/traffic + the inevitable further development costs, and they start making some revenue, we'll know how much it cost them to bootstrap the business.

Some great tips for getting an MVP together though.

So he's basically whining instead of doing something about it. Why hasn't he started a profitable Haskell project? Or why doesn't he learn Ruby or Python, which are at least far better than Java? "Spoiled child" is exactly correct. If you really want to use a niche language, you can hope, but not expect that the world will give you a job programming it. Create your own, profitable opportunity. Otherwise, get used to being a starving artist.

But, as a single founder, you should have no need to communicate the kind of information conveyed by a UML diagram. If you require that much hand-holding, you're not ready to be a single founder. Time is a very limited resource for a single founder, and if you're spending time discussing UML diagrams, where are you going to find time to talk to customers, create a good marketing pitch, and all the other things required to create a profitable company?

OK, so you give yourself only a month to launch a web-based startup and you spent some time... creating UML diagrams? I'm trying really hard not to be snarky here, but that immediately disqualifies you from writing blog posts about startup myths.

It sounds like you took the development process from your day job and applied it to your startup. But you're forgetting that these processes were designed to facilitate communication between larger teams. Which means you've given up one of the most important advantages of a smaller (even single-person) team.

Also, your version of a single-person startup is a straw man. No-one ever said being a single founder means breaking contact with the rest of the world.

As a single founder, here's my humble advice:

- You learnt a lot in this month. You'll learn new lessons on your next startup, whether you fail or not. Take some time to process it all while you think of your next startup. Maybe read some PG essays (Read them critically, the same way you'd read anything else. I'm trying not to sound like a fanboy, but his essays do have a high insight to noise ratio).

- Don't for one second deceive yourself into thinking a month of full-time work is enough. Even if you could complete all the coding in a month, things like SEO and just generally getting traction take much more patience. You said: "...get the first core part of my service in working order, and profit". Know that the road between a working service and profit is very long.

- If you need a Chief Architect or a DBA to evaluate your technical design decisions, you're probably not ready to be a single founder. Try to get more design experience in your job, or team up with someone who has complementary skills for your next startup. As a single founder, time spent talking to people means mostly talking to customers, not other technical people.

- Your article seems to be pretty focused on just development, I guess because you never even got to beta. You'll have an entirely new perspective on things once you launch a service and come to the shocking realisation that customers don't magically appear. Most startups don't fail for lack of technology.

- Have you given up on your idea now, before even giving it a chance to prove itself in the market? Then you had the wrong idea. An idea you really believe in is one you'll only give up on after serious repeated attempts to get customers deliver no results.

Just 2 days ago, a new version of authlogic was released that accidentally broke 2.3.5 compatibility. And that's a respected and widely used gem. It happens. Also, many gems are starting to deliberately break rals 2.3 compatibility - their newer versions are rails 3 only. Not to mention that gem authors sometimes deprecate and then obsolete some interfaces. So if you're not fixing your versions yet, and you don't have "sane practices" for updating them, it's time to start.

The problem is, the system is set up in such a way that it's impossible for a small company to stay legal. Even if you grew into a medium sized company, and you managed to spend the time required to research all the patents you're infringing on, the licensing costs for all those patents would be greater than all the money your company will make over its entire lifetime. Because you now know about all the patents, even the silly ones, and you can't actually afford to challenge all of them, so you just have to license them.

That is what would happen if a small / medium company did its best to stay legal when it comes to patents. It's absurd.

From http://rubini.us :

Wherever possible Rubinius is written in Ruby. Where not possible (yet), it's C++.

And further down:

The Rubinius bytecode virtual machine is written in C++, incorporating LLVM to compile bytecode to machine code at runtime. The bytecode compiler and vast majority of the core classes are written in pure Ruby.

So, it's the VM that's C++. The bytecode compiler (which is technically what's meant by "interpreter" in this case) is ruby.

Also, RVM installs RC2, not the 1.0 release. Maybe someone can give them a poke...

UPDATE: Nevermind, http://rubini.us clearly states that 1.9 compatibility will happen post-1.0. Can't wait, even if it's just to know that my code is compatible with what may be a very real option in the years to come.

AND: I should probably run "rvm update" first, to get the 1.0 release...

If you don't have time to contribute, you're welcome to offer a donation instead. (Our cost is roughly $20 per person per day, plus your own food consumption)

It really does sound like a cool idea.

http://images.businessweek.com/mz/10/19/0509_chairs.pdf

Rant (stop reading if you're not interested): Posting it here, since we're all so obsessed with printer friendly versions of articles, because we can't stand clicking to view the second half of an article. Unfortunately, the printer friendly version doesn't contain links like this one.

http://images.businessweek.com/mz/10/19/0509_chairs.pdf

I'm just going to continue as usual, using the ball chair and alternating with a normal chair if needed. My spine feels great and definitely has a more natural shape when sitting on the ball vs. a normal chair.

A ball chair is not an exercise ball chair. Looking at the illustration on Wikipedia, it's clear that a ball chair forces a C-shaped spine. Your spine will stay in an S-shape if you sit upright on the "chair" I'm referring to.

Most people have weak core muscles due to chairs with backs, so if you're going to try out this kind of chair, don't be surprised if you can't do it for more than an hour a day at first. Also, it may not be a good idea if you're tall, since the ball can only inflate so much. If the angle between your upper legs and your body isn't greater than 90 degrees it probably won't work for you.

I still have a normal chair. If you're working crazy hours, you need to give your supporting muscles a break sometimes.

Oh, and it's really cheap: mine was about $60 if I convert from my local currency.

EDIT: here's an example, but don't buy it online if you haven't tried it: http://www.opentip.com/Sporting-Goods/Dynaflex-Fit-Chair-p-1...

Even if the "blogged X" usage is accepted, having insightful things to blog means you could blog insightful things. Not blog insightful. Otherwise you could also write insightful. That's nonsensical.

If you can't put your finger on what's going on here, you need to first learn what an intransitive verb is. Then, that "blog" is such a verb (from the OS X dictionary, which I assume is based on common usage, seeing that it's such a new word). "Sleep" is another example of such a verb. You don't sleep the bed any more than you blog the post (or the cow). That's why we have the word "write".

Now, would you even say "How to write insightful" rather than "How to write insightful posts"? Because if you would, you actually want to be saying "How to write insightfully" - writing insightfully is the act of writing "insightful x", but dropping the x. You see, they already thought of that. Grammar acrobatics should be left to people who have a very strong command of the language - it will destroy your writing otherwise.

You could also say "He died insightful", which would mean that he was an insightful man at the time of dying, but the dying is once again incidental to him being insightful.

Now, logic breaks down when you say "He blogged insightful", but I'll analyse it anyway. Here you're saying that he was an insightful person, who happened to be blogging. But you're not relating his insight to the blogging at all, so it makes no sense to tell us that he was an insightful man at the time he happened to be blogging.

English isn't my first language, but I'm pretty sure the above is correct.

This is a guide on how to blog insightful. Not insightfully. Because insightful isn't a writing style, it's a type of idea.

Insightfully is an adverb, insightful an adjective. You can blog insightfully. You can write insightful blog posts. But how do you blog insightful? To me, that makes the opening sentence of the post a confused jumble of words, which made me skim over what might otherwise have been a good read. Can someone please enlighten me as to what he's trying to express?

And just to drive the point home, let's modify it slightly. See if the following makes sense: This is a guide on how to wait patient. Not patiently. Because patient isn't a waiting style, it's a type of...

I went back and read the first few paragraphs properly. It seems that what he's trying to say is "how to increase the insight of your readers, instead of merely displaying your own insight". Maybe not a snappy opening line, but at least it can be understood. Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent.

So basically, the "last mile" infrastructure, whether it's cables or wireless, was never the main limiting factor when it came to internet in Africa, but may become more important in future as demand increases.

There's a bug with scrolling though: if you release the mouse outside of the network graph, it stays in scrolling mode until you click on the canvas again. I hope that's not some kind of inherent limitation.

You'd be working on http://www.simplepay.co.za - South African online payroll system. Equity possibilities depend on salary.

If your employer keeps rejecting your requests for taking leave for a certain period (not going into the details, let's pretend it's a simple rule of 6 months), you are entitled to take the leave without their permission.

The vacation time doesn't have to be taken consecutively - 3 weeks is just a general way of saying 15 working days. If your normal working week is 6 days, you'd have 18 working days of annual leave.

Now's your turn to treat us like space aliens. How does it work in Japan?

You get 3 days a year of family responsibility leave, e.g. death of a close family member, having to take care of a sick child, etc.

You get 6 weeks (which translates to 30 working days if you work 5 days a week) of sick leave for every 36 month cycle.