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This is the story you mention, I believe...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2...

The problem is not that the MC founders never intended to sell, then changed their mind after they reached an interesting sum. The problem is just that they were so certain they will never sell and talked about it so many times, that (some of) their employees now feel betrayed.

I am certain they never wanted to screw anyone and they identified with their "bootstrapping, never sell" culture. I am guilty of the raising bootstrapping to pedestal for many years and understand their values.

Learning from this, it may be good not to a) identify with current beliefs as we might change priorities and learn new things in the future, and b) talk in length about our current beliefs. Perhaps "we don't think we will ever sell and have optimized our business for that, but who knows what future will bring" might have worked better.

It's not only about skills - it's about focus.

At one point I (as a bootstrapped solopreneur, profitable for a long time) decided the bottleneck in my career is not technical ability or features. I sorely lacked business depth, marketing and sales skills. In shifting my focus, I read a ton of books and learned about SEO, email marketing, PPC, lean startup, etc.

It turned out that I managed to fare even worse than before. Instead of having stellar products with lousy marketing - I spread myself thin by adding marketing on top of development, customer support, website maintenance etc. If I were able to find a cofounder I like, someone with deep knowledge of the niche we are in (databases), with great work ethics and presence in database communities, it might well be one of the best things for the business. I would focus on the technical side, that person would be the bridge to the community.

It's hard to find someone with deep database knowledge who wants to be a marketing and community building cofounder. These people are paid a lot for their expertise. With more money now, I am focusing on being the architect and write more, with my team handling the development more and more.

So yes, it would be good to have a cofounder. It may simply be too hard to find a person with complementary skillset to join, so we developers have to keep paddling until we reach a point where we have enough time to focus on marketing. Or, simply hire a great marketer with good track record in our industry. Money fixes many problems.

With iPhone 12 Pro Max I expected a ton of difference compared to 12 Pro with that much larger sensor. Reviews were mostly in the "meh" area - I guess their software is just so good.

So I expect no big real-world improvement in this generational jump.

The reason Apple keeps forcing us to use lightning cable while everybody else uses USB-C is, well, money. Apple gets paid for every lightning cable sold and would leave a lot of money on the table if we could simply use any of the USB-C ones available everywhere.

Life would be easier with USB-C, and that day will come, but Apple will certainly put it off as long as they can.

AFAIK it works exactly as Oracle. Doing something barely similar would probably introduce some very expensive bugs in production.

DB2 LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows), DB2 iSeries, and DB2 z/OS are three different databases. With the same name - I guess for branding.

Low-code is all the rage these days, and such tools are nice, for a while.

But let's look at my use cases:

1) There is no way you can build a very large and complex ERP in low-code tools. First, you would hit a performance wall quickly, or need something these tools absolutely can't support as not many companies need it. Delphi is alive for 20+ years. How many products do you know that are successful and keeping up with the times for 20 years, and are built with low-code tools? And finally, betting your company's fate on a specific tool made by some other company is asking for trouble down the road.

2) I make database migration tools so I need the best performance and a ton of native database drivers. This means going low-level, querying database metadata, working with primitives of the specific drivers. Which tools can even begin to support these requirements exactly?

Perhaps we have the same glasses :)

Delphi did use to crash, but not that much. It had its quirks and we knew which ones they were and it didn't impede us.

We now use .NET5 and in some products. WPF for GUI, but new stuff is all made in Blazor.

Being on the bleeding edge means that lot of things in .NET was constantly crashing and not working exactly right, that tooling was broken.

You would think Microsoft would have more resources for something like Blazor. I have learned since that new tech is made by very small teams and accepted that as a fact of life.

Borland really could have saved Delphi, but I guess corporate types started treating their own company as a product, selling it around a few times, and vision was lost.

Delphi is nowadays mostly dead and used to maintain legacy software. It's a terrible shame.

To understand why, we need to remember what Delphi was at the time it was made. It directly competed with VB6, an interpreted crap that needed dozens of files in a time when disks were slow. Delphi, on the other hand, compiled large products (we had dozens of modules) in 2 seconds, producing optimized native single file executable. On large forms you could see VB6 controls being painted one by one. Huge Delphi forms were shown instantly.

The development experience was stellar (I guess it still is). I worked for a guy who made DOS software and wanted to move into Windows space (20 years ago). Two of us made a full-blown ERP with over 800 forms and 600 database tables in a year and a half. It was at a time when companies didn't have full-time Internet connections, so we synced the database between customers' branches over ISDN connections using our custom algorithm. This software is still in wide use today and my code is still in there.

My side project was made in Delphi and quickly surpassed my full-time salary, so I formed my own company. The only reason I moved away from Delphi years later was that the database drivers were far less available than in .NET ecosystem (and I make database migration software and need many drivers) Moving to .NET was a pain, but it was obvious that without Anders Hejlsberg Delphi is going to wither down, and .NET is going to thrive and evolve.

Delphi today is a cash cow for enterprise software. Looking at this release, first thing mention is HiDPI support. In 2021.

But I do miss the incredible productivity I had while working in Delphi. A friend once passed by and saw me working. He said "screens are changing so quickly I can't even track what you are doing". We need that development experience again.

Edit: formatting.

Postgres has Oracle layer, available as a commercial variant by EnterpriseDB. I don't think MariaDB implementation can compete, but EDB Postgres is solid. Basically a native implementation of Oracle in Postgres.

Rider is incredibly fast and superior to VS in all aspects but one - its debugger is terribly broken. VS will break on my line of code that crashes. Rider will crash somewhere completely unrelated. My code is very much async, that might be what kills it. I ended up doing everything in Rider, but debugging in VS.

Your thinking very closely reflects mine. I actually did build a C# parser generator producing strongly typed AST from base ANSI grammar and inherited Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres grammars. We are using it in our database migration products and will soon use it for Resharper style intelligence in a very lightweight and fast database manager. It never occurred to me to publish the parser generator, though. It's our secret sauce.

I think 11 months is absolutely crazy, and the context for that is that I earn for living by selling my database migration software [1]. They could have used my software to copy up to 16 tables in parallel for a mere $3k. They could have copied a few hundred tables at a time, compare source and target to make sure everything is fine, then drop and compact. As more disk space frees up, they could have moved more and more data in one go. If the data needed to be transformed much, they could have wrote views to pull the data in a proper format and creating tables on the target with that data as they go. True, spinning drives would kill performance, but my tool is easily reaching 50MB/s on SSDs and spinning drives wouldn't add months. I mean, when you have off the shelf products doing what you need, spending so much time fighting with custom scripts is and odd choice. This is really not meant to advertise, I'm just baffled by how much effort was needed for this project.

[1] https://www.spectralcore.com/fullconvert

I can give you a glimpse into the past. Amiga had a very slow CPU (7 MHz) and each instruction took between 4 and 40-ish cycles. However, it had 3 special purpose co-processors. For these demos, Blitter (very fast bit copy and memory fill functionality) and Copper (change palette and even resolution on a specific vertical scan location) were essential. The technique is the same one we used to make 3D games - you would draw an outline (taking care to write a exactly single pixel on boundaries, your line-drawing routines had to be written to take that into account) and let Blitter fill this. Amiga had 6 overlay planes you could use for up to 64 colors (well, it was actually up to 4096 colors with caveats, but let's ignore that for a moment). So, if you write a filled outlines (time shifted) in those 6 planes, you'd get this nice blurred effect. My guess is they manually wrote pixel coordinates for the images, connected them with lines, filled with Blitter, repeated for each frame. It's how things were done back then. Without Internet we had a lot of free time (I was a kid in high school). Those special purpose chips were magical. At the time of IBM XT and its green on black terminals, Amiga was a space shuttle in comparison. For example, my game used to have upper part of the screen in lower resolution (where we painted vector graphics), lower part in higher (where we had game stats).

Congratulations, Paras! I was one of the very early customers and am so glad you came this far.

She does SEM in 6 languages (Google/Bing Ads, FB PPC), helps with SEO, regularly finds broken things on clients' sites, deals with developers etc. I'll send you her profile link privately.

My wife is a very successful marketer on upwork. However, she's been on the platform for maybe even 10 years now, way back when it was odesk and elance. She has flawless work history and over a hundred clients - and she told me that recently the number of job invitations she gets are way down and that the 90%+ of the invitations are very fishy. My guess is that platform is now so popular that the quality of its audience is very low on average.

I may be able to offer you a similar solution (remote job so you can live in Europe) as I have a UK company and my whole team is remote. You write beautifully and thoughtfully, which is what I need. Please shoot me an email to dbulic at my username dot eu - let's see if we can work together.

In a few months, it's not so far away. If you can share your database code (data is not important), we can make sure that our parsers and translation layer work with all the code constructs you use from day 1.

Yep, we built SQL Tran to do exactly that. https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran. Finishing the rewrite right now which allows us to make changes much faster.

Actually, they are not making a cross platform GUI. They're simply supporting in NET Core what they have done so far in NET Framework - but only if you build for Windows.

I love it, thanks. One suggestion, though - make it mobile friendly.

He probably meant 3.8GHz, the standard turbo speed of that cpu (speed under high load if cpu is not overheating).

I have a Linode VPS and am happy to fire up another VPS to handle email exclusively. In fact, I already did and installed Mail in a Box as mail.mydomain.com. I have to say (being a developer with enough Linux knowledge to handle hosting and simple stuff) that nameserver setup is completely confusing. I should stop using Linode nameservers? If so, I should set up glue records and place that into NameCheap domain specification instead? And then set up www CNAME to point to original website server? Very confusing... Why not having a section in the guide titled something along: "Adding Mail-in-a-Box as additional server to your existing website"? I am not sure if that defeats security/reliability, as External DNS section message is kind of scary:

"Although your box is configured to serve its own DNS, it is possible to host your DNS elsewhere. We do not recommend this.

If you do so, you are responsible for keeping your DNS entries up to date. In particular DNSSEC entries must be re-signed periodically. Do not set a DS record at your registrar or publish DNSSEC entries in your DNS zones if you do not intend to keep them up to date."

It's interesting, but there is surprisingly little (next to no) details. Are you using map/reduce or Aggregation framework? Is the data out to be consumed by say Ruby client or are you just displaying results on the web? Looks like a pure landing page just to test to see if there is interest. If that's your intention, I don't like baiting HNers instead of just asking. If not, I recommend to put some examples, use cases and more information before posting here.

Stripe allows you to charge customer on your site instead of redirecting her to other domain to fill out the purchase form. So, you lose track of your website visitor in a very important moment. If purchase never occurs, you have no idea why. On the other hand, with Stripe you have full control of complete purchasing experience, can experiment with various designs and flows - and measure everything. That enables huge gains with rigorous A/B testing, as Patrick explained.

Those servers are not tested at the same time. Storm was tested a week ago, but Linode 2 years ago - not a fair comparison, as servers do get upgraded continuously. I tested Linode, EC2 and Slicehost few years ago and Linode was twice as fast than others in I/O. Though, I was testing smallest instances available, while benchmark above used large instances.

I would appreciate feedback for my new startup.

Me too. Major changes tend to have higher impact and provide more/faster learning. What exactly do I learn if I find that one color gives me 0.4% more conversions?