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felixmaron Stuff I've learned at Microsoft

Try out stuff

How common is that at Microsoft? My perception is that few Microsoft employees participate in projects not directly related to their work, even if it's Microsoft technology. Take for example F#. I haven't seen much from Microsoft employees other than from the F# team (who do a great job) and (paid) evangelists.

felixmaron AWS Price Reductions and Free Inbound Data Transfer

The free inbound transfer is obviously a reaction to Microsoft's pricing. Windows Azure has free inbound transfer during off-peak hours until June 30 (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/#pricing).

felixmaron Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features

I don't think it is useful to bring attention to that. Hacker News readers familiar with AWS will recognize the name. A certain amount of pseudo-anonymity may encourage people like him to post more on HN.

felixmaron Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

With MinGW you can cross-compile from Linux (and perhaps also from FreeBSD). Imho Cygwin is not suitable for applications like tarsnap that should be very reliable and fast.

felixmaron Announce: Haskell 2010

The situation for 64-bit Windows is similar (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1884). I imagine it will be even more difficult to find someone with extensive low-level Windows and Unix skills to create the Windows port.

felixmaron Odeo Releases Twttr [2006]

It does not take much time to contact them personally and let them know about your site. A bit of courtesy in the startup world is never wrong.

felixmaron Ask HN: I'm looking for a technical co-founder/partner.

The programmer creates a spark. The designer creates a lantern. The businessperson creates a lighthouse.

felixmaron Tell HN: Couldn't Sleep Last Night, Wrote a (No-Flash) HTML5 Viewer for YouTube

Firefox does not support MPEG-4 video because of patent licensing issues. Firefox supports Ogg files with Theora video and Vorbis audio. Google has an agreement with MPEG LA and is therefore able to ship an MPEG-4 AVC decoder with Google Chrome.

felixmaron Google Dashboard: This is a brief of how much Google knows about you

They should add delete buttons to all listed services which remove the service and content or at least reset everything to the default empty state.

felixmaron IPhone Flash prototype got 30 min battery life

Silverlight is pretty terrible

Compared to what? Silverlight uses a bit more CPU time when playing MP4 videos compared to Media Player or VLC but about the same as Google Chrome. It may be different on OS X. How does Silverlight's video performance on OS X compare to native Quicktime for example (which is relatively slow on Windows)?

felixmaron Ask HN: What's the best webapp UI you've seen and what was used to make it?

+1 for Google Maps. I've noticed several times that Microsoft's map technology is more accurate, but i keep using Google Maps because of the superior UI.

felixmaron If you think you haven't found your passion...

Hacker News excites me and i am sometimes a bit scared to post a comment. Now i know what to do.

Watch me dive in deeper baby!

felixmaron Co-founder or employee?

I upvoted you, but i think you underestimate many programmers.

felixmaron Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?

One difference is that you could work for thousands of software companies. In search there's Google and somewhere down the road Bing. Everyone else faces a near impossible road uphill. What if the only places you could work is Google or Microsoft? Do you think you would still get a fair treatment from either?

felixmaron Why F#?

I like both Haskell and F# so perhaps i can give some reasonable counter-arguments.

1) F# will be integrated in Visual Studio 2010. Large commercial companies like banks use F#. It is very unlikely that Microsoft will drop it.

2) Actually the F# team responds very quickly to bug reports. Just send your report to fsbugs@microsoft.com

3) F# is not yet open source, but the source code is available. They have promised to eventually open source it like Microsoft has done with IronPython and IronRuby.

4) Visual Studio Express editions are free. It would be nice if MonoDevelop had a good add-on for F#.

5) No arguing with that. Haskell can be very elegant and has a very good community.

6) I could argue that F# is more cross-platform than Haskell. Despite Simon Marlow's amazing work Haskell's Windows support is lacking compared to Linux. There are no current plans for GHC to support 64-bit on Windows and several Haskell packages use low-level C libraries which can be less reliable on Windows or difficult to compile whereas the .NET framework and Mono function as a common abstraction layer between Windows and Unix.

felixmaron Cappuccino Turns One

Atlas got tired of his job. He was replaced by a bunch of turtles.

felixmaron MongoDB 1.0 released

Not officially supported, but someone is working on a C# driver: http://github.com/samus/mongodb-csharp/tree/master

felixmaron Haskell is 4.2x as good as Erlang at lightweight concurrency. Give it some love.

Mature, consistent and simple to use libraries with good documentation is what Haskell lacks most. The foundation is great. Scalable servers could be a good niche for Haskell, but it would probably need backing by one or more companies to get there.

felixmaron LaunchSet: Manage Beta/Alpha/Private Access and Data for Startups

Seems like a useful service. One comment: the "Request Invite" link should be much more prominent imho.

felixmaron Riak: A decentralized key-value store

http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distrib...

http://themindstorms.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-reference-to...

The comparisons in those posts are probably outdated soon with so many new nosql data stores.

felixmaron Microsoft releases STM for .NET

Reading the pdf makes me appreciate Haskell again. It seems really complicated whereas using STM in Haskell is simple. One paper by Simon Peyton-Jones explains STM much better than this large user guide.

felixmaron Ask HN: Twitter and Spam

Keyword spam is another issue. Yesterday i was watching a Microsoft conference on digitalwpc.com and it shows tweets with the #wpc09 keyword. Initially it seemed nice to show tweets on the site, but spam (and sometimes stupid comments) made it annoying after a while.

felixmaron The Firefox 3.5 fiasco

I used Procmon to monitor Firefox at startup and it indeed traverses my entire temp folder and Internet Explorer's cache folder.

felixmaron Ask HN: Bay Area .Net Devs - Stigma on .Net

I don't live in the Bay area, but i think Microsoft's problem concerning startups is that they haven't created many exciting platforms for some time. Take for example the activity around iPhone and Android. Apple creates more roadblocks for developers than Microsoft ever did and Java is not the most interesting language to program in. But both platforms are attractive so developers keep developing new applications for them.

felixmaron Help convince Media Browser's author to charge for his awesome product

The author does not have to rewrite anything because he owns the copyright of the work. The GPL is a license granted to other parties.

felixmaron IPhone 3G S, the best phone out there, but power users should wait it out

I stopped reading after "Before the iPhone, cell phone cameras were an add-on, something that you used in a pinch when you didn’t have anything else."

felixmaron Ask HN: Protecting your identity with domain registration?

You can use fake whois data for a few days. It doesn't matter. Some time ago i reported a domain to ICANN that did not have a single valid looking whois field. The registrar (Melboure IT) did nothing and after a year or so the same data was still present.

felixmaron Ron Conway To Focus On Real Time Data Startups: 40-50 New Investments

"Real time" to me means an interaction delay in the range of milliseconds. If the delay is more in the range of seconds like the web application i am working on then "live" would probably be a better term.

felixmaron New York Times abandons WPF and Silverlight in favor of AIR

Many Apple users don't want to use Microsoft products.

Unlike some Linux users i don't think most Mac users have a strong opinion about Microsoft. If Microsoft delivers a quality product that works well on the Mac people will use it. And Silverlight is already one of Microsoft's better products.

felixmaron Ask HN: I am bored. What programming language should I learn ?

Haskell (e.g. http://learnyouahaskell.com). Learning Haskell is exciting (when the headaches subside ;)) and although becoming more popular Haskell can be considered exotic. The best part imo is that learning Haskell's functional concepts is useful for other languages as well.