jswinghammer

I'm a little confused about the need for this service. What languages don't have decent email support at this point? I guess I've never run into this before.

Unless you figure that's he's likely at work now probably not.

I stopped playing the game after my first child was born years ago but I still have an affection for the game. CCP is both brilliant for making it and foolish in their managing of the game. I recall during a war that had virtually every PvP player engaged that lasted years the side I was on felt like we were actually fighting the company itself since one of their employees was involved with cheating on the other side's behalf. As I recall the employee was never fired for acting in a way that managed to really piss off thousands of paying customers. Many left but many stayed just to not be whiners about it.

I can't say I'm surprised that they made such poor choices in directing the game. They want it to not be a niche game but that's what they have and they should probably be happy that they have what they have. Unless you're engaged with other players it isn't even a game at all. It's actually more like playing a video game within a video game. Shallow doesn't even describe it-I've felt more engaged playing missile command.

That said it sounds like they're going to try to fix things which is good. I hope the game does well. I enjoyed my time there-I just never want to go back to it for the sake of my daughters :)

It's worse than that since you do it out of reflex and it is less engaging than what you're describing (though I never played WoW).

Based on the zero information I have I'm going to assume that there was probably more knowledge on the team about how to make MySQL do what they needed than Postgres. That's usually all the reason anyone really needs.

You can approach this in one of two ways. One is to ask why and the other is to gather the data yourself and then just draw your own conclusions. From what I've seen and know about Sam Altman the praise he gets is justified but you might disagree. What you'll get from asking is interpreted responses from the data but if you find out for yourself then you can judge pg's response appropriately. This seems like a weird way to get background on someone when there's google.com available.

This is pretty much what I ran into. That and we had a business requirement that it worked in IE 6. At that point Flash is going to be your best bet and even that has cross browser issues from time to time.

This is a lot easier if you don't support PowerPoint animations. A few years ago I used to work on a competing product and we did support PowerPoint animations. I thought about how to support animations in HTML and JavaScript quite a bit and it just became obvious that doing it in Flash was far easier.

You can probably generalize this and bit and say that capital is currently flowing to activities that are expensive. In this case the activity that everyone is trying to "fix" is marketing. It's insanely expensive to market products and services. Reducing costs there would free up resources to go to things like biotech or whatever else people would rather capital go towards. I try to stay value free in my judgments on this topic so I'm not really moved by this to begin with.

I realize that there is a lot of money spent on health care but that money is spread among a lot of different activities so it's not something a startup could target and hope to fix on a large scale.

I have basically no background writing applications on Windows outside of .Net but I love reading posts by Raymond Chen. I always enjoying learning about things that seem crazy from the outside from have a real purpose that you're just missing information to understand. That's pretty much what looking at someone else's code is often like so it's helpful to remember that even seemingly crazy things have a purpose.

I feel like I've learned a lot from reading his blog over the years. I even bought his book years ago because I felt like I was getting a lot of value from the blog.

It's really too bad Microsoft doesn't seem to value backwards compatibility as much as they did during the times Chen often writes about. It seems like an interesting challenge that they've pretty much given up on. I can't even count how many conversations I've been in where people complained on one hand that Microsoft focused on that backwards compatibility too much and on the other that their driver from 2001 doesn't work right in Windows 7. Often these statements happen moments apart.

India has structural problems in its' economy that will inhibit its' growth going forward. Japan has been stagnating for decades now and has shown no signs that they've figured out what the problem is. They've become the most indebted industrialized nation in the world paying for stimulus after stimulus while at the same time the Keynesians are telling them they haven't done anything to stimulate the economy.

Totally agree with all these points. Ever since my first daughter was born I made a similar decision but I still work less hours than you do. I end up working around 40 hours a week and have never felt compelled to work any more. I will work after the kids go to bed particularly when my wife goes to bed and I don't feel like reading for whatever reason.

My first obligation on this Earth is to my family and part of that means not being gone all the time at work. I do that for the kids but also for my wife. Raising kids is hard work and she needs my help particularly at the end of the day. This changes a little when the kids are older and are less physically demanding I guess but when you have small kids you really need to take your wife's feelings into account when deciding how much to work. She really needs to feel respected and honored in the decision and part of that comes from making sure she is in total agreement with the final decision.

Also if you're any good at programming companies are so desperate to hire you that they will accept pretty much whatever schedule within reason you want. You might not be the absolute favorite employee of management but if you're good people will respect you and your contribution.

Yeah in retrospect you are probably right. I meant in response to the people who supported Obama are getting what they asked for (without knowing it).

I think everyone wanted to believe in Obama and they were finding reasons. I'm not sure why they did given how much support he received from the banking industry. The reason he won was because the bankers preferred him over McCain and gave him dump trucks full of money. It's easy to see why so far. Basically we've had to give the bankers foot massages because a slap on the wrist would have been too mean for their tender hearts to handle. I'm not arguing McCain would have been much better but on this kind of nonsense he definitely would have been better.

And of course Obama doesn't know anything about the market and certainly does not believe in the free market to do anything. His latest jobs program should make that painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. The notion of the technocrat appeals to people who are smart and like solving problems. They feel like any problem can be solved with a good enough team and a smart leader (as an aside why does anyone believe Obama to be anything but an average intellect). That is as FA Hayek put it a fatal conceit but it's easy to see why people fall into it. I said the same thing about Mark Cuban's comical jobs program: top down thinking is toxic to your brain.

Sorry I don't think Obama is any more of a socialist than Bush. My only point was that he wouldn't like the idea of getting rid of the union contracts which bankruptcy would allow. A Republican president would likely welcome such a change.

I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward without a union ideally. They might need to wait for Obama to leave office before doing that.

As for jobs there's always work to be done. There's an infinite amount of work in fact. In a free market involuntary unemployment should be zero because someone would always be willing to pay something for a given amount of work. I have work I need done now that I just do not have time for. I also know finding someone to do that job for what I'm willing to pay is very hard since people seem to get by without working via means I do not fully understand. I'm at home today caring for my family who are basically all sick and I'm seeing a lot of men just wandering around doing nothing. I'm going to guess that the incentive to work is absent in their life for one reason or another.

Not sure libertarian means that you want people left out of the system and starving though. I am a libertarian and I've spent 90% of my time post college life running or helping to run a food pantry in my spare time. Seems silly to suggest that libertarians don't care about such things.

I would say don't do it. I'm in a similar position (profitable company with an interesting back-story) and it seems like a bad idea to start giving out your personal financial details to the world.

Right but in many cases the companies don't really want to share their revenue numbers. It's sort of saying to people who would like to compete here is how little it cost to build, how much people have been willing to pay, and how big of a win starting this business would be.

I don't really see myself talking about revenue numbers for my company. Not sure how I benefit from it besides the ego and status boost which isn't interesting to me.

I'd rather government not even try to understand startups or business in general. That way they wouldn't try craft policies to stimulate business which are invariably misguided. It'd be better to just lower taxes and reduce regulatory burdens and just let things happen on their own. Even if they did make policies that they thought would help the lack of knowledge would make their ideas nothing more than guesswork and they wouldn't defend as being based on science or research or whatever.

I'm not sure a society needs more startups and I have no way to know so I wouldn't think to make a policy to help create startups. It seems to me that the presumption that society cannot produce the things it values is very arrogant. The whole point of the price system is to allow society to communicate to entrepreneurs what is valued and what isn't. Let others in society (not in government) communicate to the entrepreneurs what they should be building.

I thought I was sick until all my coworkers started complaining.

I found this to be pretty interesting. I know someone with a little girl who has CF. The whole situation is just sad all around.

There is a long history of selling dietary advice in book and newsletter form. Hard to say without knowing the details but if you feel like you have something to share it's worth seeing if anyone cares to find out about it. I'd be willing to try just about anything if one of my daughters had CF. Price isn't really a factor to people in that frame of mind.

A blog, forum, and one on one advice site for this seems like it could work assuming your results are real and repeatable (not saying they are or aren't just saying really). Seems like that'd be worth a monthly subscription.

Liquidate bad debt. Let banks fail. Let's have one or two shitty years instead of 10-20 years of pain.

Historically the US federal government has never collected more than 20% of GDP in taxes. Doesn't really matter what the tax rates are. The US needs to get out of debt and I think ending wars is the way to do that.

Jobs are a means not an end. I've never worked at a job to work at a job. I work at a job to provide for my family and for my other goals in life.

This sort of top down thinking is just toxic. It seems so great and tidy until you actually try to implement it and then you realize that your level of ignorance was greater than you could have possibly imagined. You can't solve a debt problem with more debt and you can't solve a jobs problem by just creating meaningless jobs. The only jobs that are sustainable are the jobs that produce something that other people actually want.

The whole idea of the price system is that we're given signals about the best ways to serve other people in society. The price system in financial and real estate markets is completely insane and basically non-functioning. We're all suffering with these zombie banks we've created for ourselves.

The real question shouldn't be how to create jobs but rather how to create a society where needs can be met by entrepreneurs and businesses. We've all seen that when people are having their needs met then jobs end up being created by the businesses that form in the process of meeting those needs.

I think the only piece that's missing for me is a way to bring chat logs into my application so people can review them later. My usage will be for users to answer questions so the content will be highly relevant to users who come along when a chat isn't active.

No I have had 1 and 2 though. I haven't really met anyone who tried to convince me they knew anything other than programming and databases to be honest. I'm also not sure how that would come up.

Yes. It has happened many times. I talk to people who rate themselves highly in all things MySQL and can barely write a join and can't really explain anything about how it works.

Yeah but if you've been building websites using MySQL for ten years and can't tell me what InnoDB is then all the domain knowledge in the world won't help you in an interview with me. My standards aren't really that high but I expect some depth.

You can also decide to be less ignorant today than you were yesterday and just let that work itself out. If that's your attitude and you stick with it you'll do well.

I interviewed one guy recently who seemed smart and if he stopped playing Warhammer and Starcraft 2 he might have a decent career. As it stands now he did terrible in the interview and showed no signs of being interested in not being ignorant. If he picked up a book or two he might be good.

You're right to be suspicious of the whole system. As a stockholder you are basically last in line to get compensation from a bankruptcy proceeding. The bondholders will get paid well before you will.

Investing without a dividend is just speculation.