duggan

If lack of punctuality being used as a signal causes these VCs to drop Steve Jobs or Travis Kalanick I think it's safe to say it doesn't speak volumes.

Otherwise you're optimizing for criteria other than "selecting whether to invest in Apple or Uber."

This is fascinating, and yeah, since I was a teenager around then, VHS probably just became ancient history as soon as I could play DVDs.

Hardly, if done correctly, you're probably improving the CTR by reducing the number of ad impressions that would never result in a click.

I’m slowly working my way through Scavengers Reign, it’s absolutely brilliant — somewhere between Alien and Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible.

Champloo came out in 2004, wasn’t VHS a distant memory by then, or was I just “living in the future”? :)

Sure you’re not thinking of Cowboy Bebop?

I suppose "flowery" is open to interpretation, but generally I mean those occasions where it looks like someone is randomly choosing from a thesaurus for every other adverb.

Anyway, I don't think it's in any danger of disappearing – it's pervasive and popular – but I've never been able to complete a book with too much of it.

> And while I'm comfortable writing in English, I'm not a native speaker and it probably shows. Getting from alright to good is a lot of work and the bar is extremely high

For what it's worth, at least from this comment, I don't think I'd have any way to distinguish your writing from that of a native speaker (as a native speaker). I'm also not sure that mastery of English is the most important skill of a novelist. Obviously I'm just a random commenter on the Internet, but I don't think you should let English being a second language dissuade you. Might even be an advantage if it discourages you from using flowery prose.

Ok, you’re building a service that scrapes e.g., property rental websites to find entries that are trying to scam naive renters.

The property websites are incompetent to solve the problem, or don’t care, but either way they sure don’t want you scraping their valuable data.

Is it still unethical?

Love the source available API proxy, that’s a useful component on its own! A little disappointed to see that most of the really good stuff is not available for self-hosting, but an IPaaS/Unified API is a not the kind of project one tinkers away at on the weekends for the joy of it. It’s hard work, deserves congratulations, and bills gotta get paid.

I remain ever hopeful for an open source IPaaS some day (had a chat with my cofounders about it this morning actually) but I just don’t see the incentives aligning. 1.) It’s hard to do, 2.) I don’t see a megacorp sponsoring a CNCF project, 3.) some amount of the work is in mapping concepts to your own platform, 4.) there is a gauntlet of legal agreements, branding guidelines, security reviews, etc., to go through with third parties regardless.

All that said, I'll be taking a closer look at Nango, because this is an evergreen problem, and I'm interested in finding the best solution.

Agreed, there are plenty of small companies out there. Early startups, pre or early product-market-fit, etc. Mostly can't afford to pay large salaries. Need people who are interested and self-motivated. Willing to be flexible in various ways – a lot more is negotiable with small companies.

They aren't going to get in front of your face easily – you'll need to seek them out.

Plenty of exceptions to that – broadly speaking, oligopolies, but generally anywhere with low competition like the only convenience store in a locality, rural broadband, etc.

There is no perfect competition, supply doesn't perfectly meet demand, and incentives aren't always perfectly aligned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In any case, government services change through policy and, thus, indirectly, through the electorate. But a) it lags, b) is not the only issue the electorate care about, c) the supply of money is not infinite, d) the supply of labour is not fungible and e) in this specific case, policy on immigration is generally driven by people not immigrating, so the incentives are not aligned.

You can deal with the world either how you wish it were, or how it is.

The reality is that bureaucracies are full of humans – and we all know how humans are.

I've been using ssh for a long time and somehow it's never occurred to me that hostnames would autocomplete, hah. Every day is a school day.

One that springs to mind is one I "started" on Friday, but other people finished on Saturday[1].

Started in quotes because my contribution was combining an existing project that was about to fail due to capacity issues with the infinite botnet of AWS spot instances and the power of Hacker News.

It's more than a decade ago now, but I think it's a good example of a project with a simple goal that enabled people to get involved and feel like they were doing something useful.

1: http://rossduggan.ie/blog/code/archiveteam-yahoo-messages-fo...

git is fundamentally a sort of database. If people think about it as having a not-dissimilar level of complexity, use cases, and users to Postgres, the complexity shouldn't be too surprising.

Like anything used by a lot of people to solve real problems, it has warts and duct tape, but, honestly, git feels like the least troublesome part of my daily workflow.

"The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself"[1]:

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI

With a bit of coaxing I managed to get this running on my M2 mac with Python 3.11.

Updated setup.py (mostly just bumping versions), and demo output: https://gist.github.com/duggan/63b7de9b5f6e8e74fe4b05af64dbe...

These articles almost always include evidence to suggest that ageism is categorically "bad business", and every time I'm left wondering why older workers aren't taking advantage of this apparent industry blindspot to build their own powerhouse companies?

Being in a series of small startups for most of my career I haven't done a lot of hiring, but I've always aimed for people with more experience than me, so they tend to be older. And man, good software developers with 20+ years of experience are _so_ good that it's hard to imagine anyone passing them up.

Just to follow up, we’re discussing advice to young teenagers here.

I think it’s reasonable to inspire more than hedge. They’ll presumably already hear lots about what the least risky things to do are from many, many sources — that’s the default.

I don't disagree that luck is a factor, but what can you do with that information other than console yourself when it doesn't work out?

I misremembered, as @wiredfool mentions, it’s Netatalk https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk

Agreed on all fronts.

I’m curious about their share server setup; my solution would probably be a Debian server exposing AppleTalk.

I’ve used that to transfers files between a G3 iMac and an M2 MacBook :)

However, this sounds like maybe one of those all in one IT services shops of overworked, underpaid technicians where everything is duct tape and requests go from “my icons have moved how do I send emails now” to this sharing files on Macs thing.

Getting out is the only good move.

I dunno, it sounds like he's as self-made as it gets. Immigrant family, worked in Denny's, got an electrical engineering degree, founded Nvidia.

I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

I’m afraid this is also a case of ochre-tinted helm — girls will bully each other even if their liege lord fully equips them.

Corporations have been perfectly capable of incompetence for quite some time without any special emphasis on inclusivity.

That's quite thought provoking!

I don't agree with you on that code isn't valuable – it varies by product complexity, essentiality of the software as part of the business, etc. – but in of itself is the distillation of solved problems, which generally takes years (not months) to work out.

Still, I appreciate you taking the time to break it down, and it's something I'll think about.

Do you carry this philosophy through to your professional life? As in, do you only work for companies that produce open source software? If so it's an admirable stance, and I hope you're successful.

I imagine it's tricky (or at least unstable) to earn ones living working only for entirely open source companies, but maybe there are more opportunities out there than I'd realized.

"Computer says no"[1] has been a hallmark of bureaucracy for some time.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU

Not likely. Large companies do not make these sorts of decisions based on fear of bugs. They make them based on revenue, strategic advantage, etc.

Can you imagine any hard-charging SV CEO saying "actually it might be a bit buggy or muck up our analytics data, best leave it for now folks, enjoy your weekend, take it easy"

Something vaguely Timecube.com[1] about the presentation style.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecu...