rams

Can you please let go of this topic and that person ? I'm pretty sure most people don't want to see a respected HN member sink to his level.Thanks.

BTW, Check out smem ( http://www.selenic.com/smem/ ) for a more accurate reporting of memory usage - saves you from having to make the RSS correction, etc. It's from kernel hacker and the main author of Mercurial, Matt MacKall.

I asked him the HN comment thread. He hasn't replied so far.

"they're looking to fund companies with IPO potential" - Is that correct ? Difficult to make that out from PG's essays, maybe some founders can clarify.

"Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers? Fitzpatrick: Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach."

"an x86 based Unix well ahead of Linux, an IP concentrator/router for ISPs in early, to quote two examples"

Any links ?

Other than the distortions that 'easy money' introduced, the few startups that tried valiantly to make products never even made it even to the foot notes. Some of these guys were so idealistic that they committed themselves to a non-existent "Indian market". But there is easy money to be made in the US as well.Dharmesh'sixth point about cultural factors might make people uncomfortable, but it's generally true of the IT folks of the last two decades:

"I’ve found Indians to be almost overly practical (in the short-term sense) and not passionate about some of the softer things (like user experience, marketing, branding and other things) which in today’s world are large contributors to future outcomes of software startups. "

"Yet C++ is also frequently reviled both by those who never use and by those who use it all the time."

I was once listening to RMS speak at a conference. One guy got up and said that this was one of the n great talks he had been to.He mentioned that Stroustrup as another speaker who had impressed him upon which RMS said "You need to get your head checked".

Sometimes a great hacker community can help overcome the shortcomings of a language. Trevor Blackwell makes that point here: http://www.tlb.org/faq.html.

"Besides their intrinsic characteristics, languages define commmunities of programmers. You want to choose one that lets you communicate with good programmers, because you'll learn from them. They tend to prefer powerful languages like Python, Lisp, and C++. So for example, although Visual Basic is actually a powerful and complete language, few good programmers use it. C++, on the other hand, is a rather poorly designed language, but for historical reasons a lot of smart people use it so at least you'll be in good company."

The Sauce labs guys assume you have already recorded the script. With go-test.it you have a firefox extension that does the recording and uploading of scripts. Jason Huggins doesn't have a good opinion about recorders/IDEs. Selenium is very developer focussed (As JH himself said at one of his talks),but most testers don't code. Go-test.it seems to be based on Selenium and focussed on the average tester. I know for a fact that there are large companies that are willing to pay for this kind of product.

Update #1: Saucelabs records the video of tests which go-test.it currently doesn't seem to do.

Competence is not fungible.

There was an IIM guy at the last proto.in in Bangalore who gave one of the most hilarious presentations ever that included lots of digs at the incestuous nature of the IIM incubator (not sure if this is the same one). I thought that guy was being very forthright. It's not just IIT/IIMs. There is a cascade of snobbery that starts from HBS/Stanford educated Indians and goes right down to the local college educated ones.

Related, "Linux Kernel Development Stats from Greg Kroah Hartman": http://bit.ly/1rutJD

Fred Brooks' on COBOL's success: http://bit.ly/jrnXp

At one time the Twisted guys were accused of walking away instead of trying to improve Python's async module. History repeats.

What are the other YC companies that have released code under a open source / free software license ?

The author Vivek Wadhwa, iirc, used to be a very prominent H1B critic. Wonder what's made him change his mind ?

Sridhar, What does Zoho mean ? Folks here in Thiruvanmiyur don't seem to know.:-)

"I do not believe in college" - Wow that's refereshing to hear from the founder of an Indian startup/company. I seriously believe the degree/pedigree obsession is dragging down business in India. What's even better is to wake up and read something like this about a company that is short drive from my home.

vaksel, Do you work for TechCrunch ? You seem to regularly submit TC articles. Just curious. thx.

"Your idea is great, but we'll wait for someone with a better pedigree to work on it" - Did the rejection letter/mail explicitly indicate that ? Or is that your own conclusion ?

I made a pathetic attempt at 15 secs of fame with a Rams' Law of Enterprise Software Sales:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by corruption."

http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2009/05/rams-law-of-enterprise...

Dharmesh is rather polite.

The mission has not exactly covered itself in glory. To quote from an editorial in 'The Hindu' recently:

"But why did ISRO choose to draw a veil on the problems the Moon mission was facing? Information now available with this newspaper suggests that the first major subsystem failure occurred a few weeks after the spacecraft was launched. An official press release issued when the spacecraft’s orbit was raised two months ago gave no hint of any malfunction. Had the problems not been reported in the journal Science and the Indian media, ISRO would probably have chosen not to disclose them. The people of India have unstintingly supported the space programme. ISRO needs to repay that trust with openness and transparency."

http://www.hindu.com/2009/07/20/stories/2009072055480800.htm

Norvig in his essay 'Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years':

"If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

The things attributed to the regular Indian folks appears very "made up" ...

I had predicted here ( http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2009/06/all-honourable-men.htm... ):

"As the good old days of inflated head counts and billing rates comes to an end for Indian outsourcing companies, the big outsourcing companies will bid for, and push for huge local government projects."

It's amazing how uncritically such huge projects are treated by the press in India - privacy issues, potential conflict of interest for the person leading this effort (Nilekani). Public discussion in India in general is very worshipful of proposals like this or the usage of voting machines - there is little to no discussion of the meta issues like privacy, corruption, etc.

Douban uses a lightweight python framework called Quixote. http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/

Here's the mail sent about two years back to the quixote users list: http://mail.mems-exchange.org/durusmail/quixote-users/5657/

What's innovative about WebDAV ? It's basically a design by committee standard pushed by Rational to web enable clearcase; it's a very verbose protocol and there was an entry in Sussman's blog about replacing WebDAV with a better wire protocol like Mercurial's. Getting WebDAV into SVN was basically Greg Stein's idea - he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well - a move that was not well thought out. WebDAV is not very popular even with some of the SVN hackers.

Berkeley DB was certainly old when it was adopted by the SVN project. It's not like the NFS issues with BDB were unknown.

"Real progress begins once people are bigger than their jobs."

Interesting, care to elaborate ? thx.

The title is not fair at all. Slashdot introduced me to PG via "Beating the Averages" many years ago.

Before I could complete saying "Just because you can doesn't ..." I read your comment. Voted up.

I honestly don't understand how a back-room deal that results in a sale like this going to help. Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil, though it sounds a bit luddite is worth a read. There are problems that deserve far more attention like basic hygiene and access to primary education.