dmoney

Lots of people have thought of writing "twitter but open". Congrats on actually doing it. When I was kicking around the idea but never acting on it, one thing that occurred to me was that, in order to make it really take off, you have to create some way that everybody already has it. Some way to follow and be followed by twitter users, for example, or a way to make it so that your e-mail address is your microblog address. Just my two cents.

You could always write your own, more politely worded, manifesto.

If it means he just doesn't enjoy working in it, and thus might never get the business off the ground, then it's a good business decision.

What makes the difference between the one developer you would hire and the 89 engineers you wouldn't?

It doesn't say anything about the PDF on the Amazon page, not that that's an excuse for Manning to be rude. Was it really an "FU" or just a polite "no"?

It looks like the page has been amended to say "The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered from Manning".

If you define "luminary" ideas as those that aren't based on any previous ideas, then it's almost a given that none exist. Even when an idea is the logical next step, it can still be game-changing for those clever or lucky enough to realize it.

Sun. Oh, wait...

I notice they have no bullet points listed under "Help your employees with career development." I wonder if this means they feel obligated to mention it but don't really want to encourage it (because developing your career will often mean leaving) or if it just means they don't know how.

Or maybe it's supposed to be so obvious that it doesn't need explanation.

I've done a lot of maintenance programming, and I think it's a horrible way to start and a difficult rut to get out of. Fixing someone else's bugs all day is demoralizing and creates all kinds of cognitive dissonance about whether or not you actually hate programming. Write your own code and learn from your own bugs. If you have to, get a non-programming day job and write code on the side. At least that's what I would do if I were starting over.

Why is it a difficult rut to get out of? Because when people build teams to build systems from scratch, they look for other people who have built things from scratch. Then when they need someone to maintain it, they look for someone who has maintained other piles of buggy crap.

That's the one. Thanks.

I remember reading about the interface for making a class act as a boolean the last time I messed with Python. I thought it was neat that you could make any object act as a boolean, function, whatever. I can't seem to find the docs for it though.

Depends how thin the layer of JavaScript is over the CRUD part of the app. And if the app talks to a service hub for lots of offline processing, is it still a CRUD app?

How'd that work out? (I know in the end Divvyshot got acquired by Facebook. Before that though.)

At what point does a webapp become "ambitious" and not suited for PHP? What about PHP with a framework such as, e.g., Cake? I'm curious because I'm embarking on a project and probably choosing Rails over Cake, but only because the other developer is a Rails guy.

I think it's laymen rather than philosophers that are responsible for things being left as "cool mysteries." To philosophers, I gather, they're "open questions," things that either haven't been resolved yet because discourse is ongoing, or because philosophers have failed to find an answer. Or if they have been resolved, then they're questions presented by philosophy teachers to sharpen their students' analytical skills. But the questions rather than the skills trickle down to non-philosophers.

As a non-philosopher, I do personally like a cool mystery for its own sake, but my point, I suppose, is that since the question of "which one is the fork" reduces almost exactly to the Philosophy 101 presentation of the problem of identity over time, the same framework can be used for analyzing it. If I were to write a paper on it, my thesis would be that the question of "which one is the fork" is the result of a bug in the layer of semantics, and so what actually happens is determined by the lower layers of abstraction: code, law, and psychology.

The comment about the bible was by cema, not mahmud. My impression was that cema interpreted your above comment as saying that people in the US would not respond well to plots based on Christian mythology because it was unfamiliar; when I think you meant that Americans wouldn't respond well to it because they didn't like seeing their sacred stories bastardized by giant stompy robots.

Took me a minute to figure out why it thought my github account had perl in it. Unfortunate that perl and prolog both use the the .pl extension. I think GitHub makes the same mistake, or did when I put the prolog stuff up anyway.

In philosophy this is called the problem of identity over time. A ship is taken apart, piece by piece. Then the pieces are used to build two separate ships. One ship has the original nameplate; the other has the original sailors. Which is the original ship?

I don't get the reference. The search engines don't turn up anything relevant either.

My comment is only going to complain about your headline:

Your use of "hacking" is confusing and possibly incorrect. AFAIK when "hack" is transitive it usually means violating, exploiting, or modifying an existing system, which it doesn't sound like you have yet.

"hacking together a startup" would probably be more clear, meaning that you're making it quickly out of technology without regard to elegance (for now).

"hacking on a startup" might be best, meaning that you're playfully modifying or exploiting (but not violating) the startup, but it still semi-implies that it's a pre-existing system. This also doesn't work with "in 3 weeks", so you'd have to change it to "for 3 weeks" or maybe say "hacking on a 3-week startup".

While I'm at it, the "leave kimono wide open" thing isn't really clear. It sounds like "some guys put together their startup too carelessly and got pwned."

My guess is this is aimed at stopping Google from hemorrhaging engineers in Facebook's general direction. "Look, we've got a programmer in charge again!"

Hint: you can fit more if you melt them.

Is Mark of the Beast a common term for this type of bug (triggered by a certain number)? Never heard it before.

I'm guessing he just linked from one of his essays and it took off from there.

She also writes and produces The Guild ( http://www.watchtheguild.com/ ) and its associated comics. I think the show qualifies her as both creative and a successful web entrepreneur.

Arguably it's not a non-computer system if the customer service rep is just a front-end for a finite state machine.

It seems to be part of the definition of a startup that the end goal is either acquisition or IPO. PG has said (in an interview, might have been on Mixergy) that YC can't make a profit on a startup unless it has an exit.

That is a revolutionary post on the time aspect. What about energy, or was it even an issue? I work about 45 hours a week, but it sometimes seems like that's all the work I've got in me. Working 70 hours a week would, I'm assuming, be almost twice as draining.

How did you find time and energy to work on BCC while working 70 hour weeks?

This is offtopic, but it makes me angry every time someone uses Lego (singular) as a collective noun. When I was a kid they were always called "Legos". I never heard someone say "I built X out of Lego". I don't know if it's worse that they try to enforce this artificial use of language, or that everyone goes along with it. "Lego bricks" sounds artificial too, but at least it sounds plural.