mtabini

Cost follows complexity, even if it's not always immediately obvious.

A 1TB RAM server is more expensive than 10x 100GB RAM servers, but the hardware cost is often small compared to the business and technical cost of getting a solution to scale across a cluster.

Of course, generalizations are always dangerous—the take-home point here is perhaps that before going to a cluster because “that's the way big data is handled,” it's a good idea to do a proper cost-benefit analysis.

> Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest was a masterful move.

It would have been if you assume that Twitter could thrive on its own. Since they have historically relied on third parties to push their product forward, and then cut them off at the knee, they should have been prepared for the inevitable stagnation that followed, and perhaps they weren't.

The masterful move would have been to carefully augment the base functionality offered by Twitter while encouraging the third-party ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive.

You can see, for example, Apple do this with iOS (albeit at times with a ham-fisted approach) by incorporating some—but by no means all—of the features that third parties come up with into the base OS.

This encourages third parties to continue to participate in the ecosystem while gently nudging them towards innovating instead of stagnating, because that's the only way they will be able to compete with the “free” Apple-provided software and make money.

Twitter was in the somewhat unfortunate position that it was born as a wide-open system that had little in the way of walls, leaving the new management with few options to gain more control over their product but to start restricting what could be done with it.

Instead of recognizing the value of third-parties and commoditizing their complements, though, they went all-out and systematically alienated anyone who wanted to share in their good fortunes. They placed their focus on attracting celebrities and brands (remember when Ev was “excited” that Oprah was joining?) and attempted to create a friendly environment for the average consumer by tightly controlling the user experience.

In itself, I don't think that this is a bad idea—Facebook has done it quite successfully, for example. Twitter's problem is simply that they are about to run out of innovation to acquire because there are no more small timers left who are willing and capable to take a risk on their platform and come up with some unexpected new feature that could later be integrated into product proper.

I would only go to your competitor if you have a really good relationship with them, and you know that your report won't be taken as a threat.

If you don't, you're exposing yourself to many problems for very little upside, and my experience is that, when cornered, most people don't tend to react in a reasonable and logical manner (or even in a manner that caters to their own interests). For example, the competitor could accuse you to have came across this information illegally (whether you did or not in the eyes of the law is irrelevant: once you're faced with a lawsuit, your best likely outcome is that you will only have to pay your lawyer's bills); or, they could think you're preemptively covering your ass before starting a smear campaign against them, and beat you to the punch with accusations and threats of their own, and so on.

On the other hand, as some have pointed out, this is a good marketing opportunity for you—you just need to be careful how you use the information. I would, however, avoid making _any_ references to competitors (even indirectly by referring to “our competitors”), because you don't want to be petty, and you also don't want to ever have to answer the question “Who are these competitors of yours?” in front of a court stenographer.

You do not mention if the PCI violations could flow through to your competitor's clients; are the credit cards those that customers use to pay for the competitor's SaaS, or are they stored on behalf of customers to provide the service itself (e.g.: the way, say, Stripe stores your customers card data for you)? A breach that leaks credit card data in this case would be catastrophic not just for you, but for your customers as well—and these are consequences that have a material impact on the quality of your product over your competitors'.

From a marketing viewpoint, keep in mind that the value this piece of intel is also likely to be proportional to the sophistication of a prospective customer. A potential large client that could is more likely to be sensitive to something like PCI than small fish, and knowing that you can plant the bug in their ear that your competitors might not be as up-to-date on PCI as you are could make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity.

Nice app—congrats! FWIW, we mentioned it in Macworld's app roundup[0] last week.

[0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/2854235/the-week-in-mac-apps...

I reviewed one of these a couple years ago for Macworld, and ended up buying one to take on my camping trips.

You don't actually need to charge the power unit in order to use the stove; even if you start with a completely run-down battery, the unit will eventually generate enough electricity to start the fan and achieve maximum efficiency.

Also, it's always seemed to me that the Biolite is designed primarily as a reasonably efficient biomass stove—a role that, in my experience, it fulfills really well, even with wet wood. I've cooked plenty of meals on it, and it's much more convenient to carry around than a propane or white gas stove (as a bonus, you also don't walk around with explosives in your backpack).

The ability to charge devices is a happy byproduct. It's handy when you're cooking up some food and want to power up your phone or GPS receiver. It's probably not as efficient as a solar charges but (a) a solar charger won't cook food, so the Biolite is a convenient multitasker that requires less backpack room, and (b) the solar charger doesn't work at night, when it's cloudy, and so forth.

EDIT: FWIW, I also have a PowerPot, which is mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It's pretty cool, and works well; it's also my preferred charging method when I am not cooking, since I can just fill it with water and leave it on the campfire for as long as I need (the Biolite, on the other hand, needs constant feeding of fuel to continue running).

At Telemetry[1] (disclaimer -- I work there), we have a feature called “virtual channels” that allows you to model a dashboard layout that can be then populated with independent sets of data using a simple REST API. This would allow you to design a dashboard and then provide each of your customers with a customized version that contains only the information relevant to their accounts.

You can embed our dashboards in a web page, or they can be viewed through a variety of methods (native iOS apps, mobile browser, big-screen TV, Chromecast, and so on).

My e-mail is in my profile if you want to drop me a note.

[1] http://telemetryapp.com

I think Apple has been clear that much of the underlying mechanics of Swift remain tightly coupled with the ObjC runtime, which makes sense if you think that Swift code must interoperate with all the existing Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and third-party code written in Objective-C (thus also allowing Apple to hedge its bet in case Swift tanks with developers).

What's _really_ going to be interesting going forward is whether Apple introduces new features in the runtime that are only available to Swift code, or whether it starts making change to the runtime that favour Swift over Objective-C—and that's probably going to tell us when the latter is to be considered a legacy language.

What do you want out of this?

Unless you can answer this question, any advice is essentially pointless. In my experience, you can imagine up all the scenarios in the world (I know I have many times), but reality depends on so many factors outside your control that things are likely to go in a direction you do not expect anyway.

Regardless of whether you want be acquired or not, you should take that meeting. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain: Even if nothing comes of it, it will be an opportunity to gather valuable information, create useful connections that could be useful later on, or lead to other business opportunities that aren't even on your radar right now.

Most importantly, you need to look at this and every other meeting you take as the beginning of a negotiation—even if you never discuss an actual business opportunity. And the trick with being a good negotiator is not necessarily to win, because nobody wins all the time. Instead, the trick is to stay in control of the process. Talk to these folks, and see what they want. A company that is serious about acquiring you will want to get to know you first, understand your strengths and weaknesses, and so on. Your job is to steer the discussion in a direction that's worthwhile to you and never, ever, ever, ever (ever!) let it take more of your time than it deserves.

So many of the other folks who have commented seem to worry about this being a waste of time, or the other company attempting to steal your ideas and businesses through the due diligence process. But how else are you ever going to get a deal done if you don't interact? In my experience, due diligence is the last step of an M&A exercise: after the parties have agreed on all the terms, its role is to simply make sure that neither party is trying to pull one over the other. And it's an expensive process, so no-one really wants to do it until they're sure they want to go ahead with the deal.

So, nobody is going to start a serious negotiation by asking to look at your financials or read through your source code (and, if they do, you should probably walk away) until they are willing to put a commitment of their own on the table. In the meantime, just let the discussion take its course and push back, firmly but politely, every time you feel that the process asks more of your involvement than you feel is warranted at that particular time. Again, any serious businessperson won't mind—heck, they may even try to measure up your worth by seeing how far you're willing to be pushed before you start pushing back.

Oh, and you should run—_run_—and find a good advisor. This is the kind of discussion you want to sound off with someone who can help you examine your specific situation… which is hard to do in a public forum like HN :-)

I think “widowmakers” doesn't refer to spiders, but things to watch out for, like falling trees, slippery ledges, sharp rocks, and so on.

They're one of the “five Ws”—a mnemonic list of things you need (or need to keep away from) to survive in the wilderness: water, weather, wigglies (which would include spiders), widowmakers, and wood.

In an ideal world, in which any one language can be used for all tasks, I'd agree. In practice, however, practically every complex system I know of uses multiple technologies. I don't think there's a way around that.

Good point on the language vs. platform distinction.