Hacker News Reader

sovandeon Mechanics of a Small Acquisition

Interesting read, but for my part, I'm much more interested to learn _how_ to start the process. That is, tips on how to position your company to make it a candidate for acquisition. (Apart from a great product and name of course - got that). Ways to flag potential suitors? And ways to make it clear that you are looking for buyers? etc. Any pointers or text to look at would be much appreciated.

sovandeon Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

[..] cost of around 40 cents per watt, about half the cost of panels currently coming out of China (where the vast majority of solar panels are made)

To me, this is the second cool part of the story. It shows that we can still do industrial enterprises in the west by applying technology. Sooner or later the production and assembly industry will have no more cheap labor forces to "exploit" on the globe and production, assembly and automaton technology may (again) be an industrial game changer for the west as it was with "spinning jenny".

sovandeon Judy Arrays

Judy arrays are implemented as a trie and one of the cool things is that arrays can be sparse or dense. As a sparse array it is (almost) as fast as a hash table. As a dense array it basically works as a bit map which is one of, if not, the fastest data structure around.

sovandeon [dead]

If anything is sailing up to be the new IE6 it is Google's Chrome. Like MS advocated vbscript instead of javascript, Google is trying to replace javascript with a non-standard language called dart. Instead of supporting H.264 for video, Google pushes WebM which is not so open after all and no-one support.

sovandeon How Not To Sell Software in 2012

Some sellers may have a bureaucratic sales process, but there are examples the other way around also, with customers having a long and windy buying process which is hardly worth a sale. Last year we sold our on-click download and try-before-buy product to a large US company and we had to fill out X forms and send them by hardcopy to become a "supplier". After 6 months we are still waiting for the payment.

sovandeon Amon - server monitoring, simplified logging and error tracking for web apps

Monit is a bit more than that. You can also use Monit to check remote hosts. Not only can it check http, but ftp, ssh smtp and more. You can use Monit to test your web-application via the HTTP protocol (404 or 50x) and use regex to check if certain content exist (or not) on a web-page. Monit is free, open source and does alerts for free.

sovandeon Apple seeds devs with Safari 5.2 for Lion, Xcode 4.4 with new LLVM compiler

Finally, Safari also has a unified address bar

sovandeon Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

Allow me to add to your list.

people who makes incomplete and faulty lists of what good leadership consists of = someone we should take serious

sovandeon Can't solve a quintic? Galois Theory in 1500 words

Samuel Johnson: ''Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging'' Or in Galois case a duel.

sovandeon TextMate 2 (Public) Alpha

Sublime Text 2 is like Java AWT - awful. Cross platform means mediocre. Literarily, because one will have to choose a common denominator. I have tried ST2 several times on OSX and never liked it. Even if TM2 is only an alpha release it feels much better than ST2. I've been using TM2 all day and I really like it. The new stuff comes to light when you start working with the text. Auto-complete, indentation, parsing, highlighting and find/replace are so much better and there are also lots of small nuggets such as multi-selection. It is apparent that the editor/engine part is much improved, more solid and snappy. I think TM2 will be great once it is released.

sovandeon TextMate 2 (Public) Alpha

Textmate 2 comes with rmate which may be an alternative. IMHO it is better to be great on one platform instead of mediocre on many.

sovandeon Make your STDERR red

The slow point mainly refers to allocating and copy into a new buffer. The naive points refers to that you use 1) alloca to allocate an unknown amount of memory on the stack and 2) assume that write is atomic, never fails and will write the whole buffer (you return count). Instead you should return what write actually wrote or not. There are also a whole can of worms with regards to what happens during (signal) interrupt or if write failed to write the whole buffer. In which case the reset color code may not be sent etc etc. Solutions to this require some fine-thinking, but for the slow stuff, you can simply replace all the allocation and copy with something like this

  struct iovec iov[3] = {{STDERR_COLOR, STDERR_COLOR_SIZE},{buf, count},{COL_RESET, COL_RESET_SIZE}};
  ssize_t n = 0;
  do { n = writev(2, iov, 3);} while (n == -1 && errno == EINTR);
  return n;

sovandeon Make your STDERR red

The concept may be useful for someone, but the implementation is just slow, naive and definitely not something you want to interpose your libc write function with. If the author is reading this; 'man (2) writev' for a quick code and efficiency improvement.

sovandeon How Doctors Die

"terminal illness" is the keyword here and what "no code" is associated with in medical terms. A heart attack, a stroke and similar acute traumas should definitely be treated. These patients may live a close to a 100% life afterwards.

sovandeon John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers

> Everyone who thinks "I should be developing for platform X" is thinking far too small.

I started to develop for the web and the browser "platform" in the late '90 and it is still going strong. Maybe it is _you_ who are thinking too small? Back in the '90 we knew that the next big thing would be mobile, but it never happened. It was first when Apple introduced the iPhone, iOS SDK and the AppStore that we got a breakthrough and everyone could develop and get their app on a mobile device. Before Apple, only a select few, anointed by telecom operators and for a step price could get their app on a mobile set. I say that Apple paved the way for making development for the mobile platform accessible for "everyone" and now finally, mobile might just be the next big thing. What is interesting is that the browser "platform" still is a strong alternative for mobile and native apps.

sovandeon Bootstrapping: How I Doubled My Workweek Productivity

Yes, stop eating 14 hours before you plan to get up. It is a life hack and explained here http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep-cycle...

sovandeon Google confirms Android 4.0 ICS is open source

The source code is used to produce the "resultant binaries" so unless you have a very strange definition of "quality" the OP has a very valid question.

sovandeon Growl 1.3 only available from the Mac App Store

The popular open source project, Growl seems to make some income. They are at number 34 in the top-grossing list on MAS. Growl is only distributed via MAS and cost $2. Previously you could download and install it for free under an open source license. According to the lead developer; "our [software repository] is [currently] locked down but once 1.3 is out, we’ll open it up." I wonder.

sovandeon I want to pay for TextMate 2

> Hate these elitist comments <blabla> >I have been on and off for a while,I missed when Jersey Shore hit HN.

Shoot yourself in the foot much?

sovandeon Textmate 2 - Alpha this year

> I really sincerely hope that they'll open source the 1.x version

Why? So you can use 6 years fixing it, for free? Or did you have someone else in mind doing that for you?

sovandeon Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

> Oswald Spengler made a similar argument in 1918

Not really, his main argument was that the western society has lost control of its technology. We (the west) are like a horse carriage where the driver has been thrown of and the horses (technology) are driving the carriage (us) in a wild ride towards the cliff. [An updated version of this philosophical thinking is Bill Joy's Grey Goo article "Why the future doesn't need us." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html]

sovandeon The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

A C string is a convention, not a type and I don't know why we still cannot get a string type in C that can live side by side with 'char *'. I mean we got wchar_t duct-taped to C so why did the C99 guys not introduce a 'string' type (add/len)?

sovandeon Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

See the GPL FAQ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

The last paragraph describe the gray area; i.e. if a proprietary program depends on- and combine a GPL program to perform its functionality it can be argued that the two parts are a combined work and hence the whole work must be licensed under the GPL.

sovandeon Oracle removes former Sun CEO's blog

I think the consensus at the time was that SUN's CEO did not understand that Google would _not_ use SUN's own VM and Java implementation.

sovandeon Nginx established as a company

The number of syscalls most definitely matters. Syscalls define what the application actually does on the system. Whenever an application opens a file, write or read it is a syscall. Syscalls are expensive and if you want to write a fast server you want to minimize these calls as much as possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syscall

The author of gwan sits behind his closed source application and use benchmarks "authoritatively" to criticize open source competitors. This is very bad form as there is no way for these authors to investigate and criticize the gwan code in return.

However, one can use trace to investigate the number of syscalls gwan uses for a known operation (e.g. serving a small static file). If gwan was the fastest server out there one would of course expect that it uses the fewest and absolute minimum number of syscalls of all servers. When it turns out that it doesn't, the author of gwan has a explanation problem.

Add to the above premise that gwan does not implement HTTP/1.1 and hardly does HTTP/1.0.

Before we conclude, lets look at what a web-server or application server does. The following abstract loop basically define such a server:

   while true
         read request
         <process>
         write response
   end

If you skip or minimize the <process> part, any newbie programmer can write a server that can handle a large amount of requests per second. And this is exactly what gwan does, while the other servers implements the full HTTP/1.1 state machine. It is in the <process> part that the work of a server, skills and excellence can be found.

Gwan is a classic example of "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" and the so-called benchmarks are a joke as it compares a naked gwan with a magnificent clothed emperor such as nginx.

sovandeon Nginx established as a company

He come across as a fruit basket if you ask me; Conspiracy theories aside, when he dissed libevent and libev[1] on his own forum [2], the author of libev took time to reply and it became pretty apparent that this guy does not know a whole of lot of what he is talking about. He has also taken several stabs at Igor and Nginx and when Igor politely pointed out that g-wan actually use more syscalls than nginx for the same request - meaning that g-wan user-land code basically does nothing since it apparently is faster than nginx, he went on a crazy rampant trying to explain away the fact.

[1] Libev is the event engine used by node.js.

[2] http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/151/libevent-a...

sovandeon 1 in 6 Russian entrepreneurs are in jail, 1 in 3 prisoners are businessmen

I think it is the other way around; You have no idea what you are talking about. How can you draw that conclusion from such a premise?

sovandeon Apple Tells Lodsys Patent Troll to Back Off

Probably the old fashion way, via a javascript ad. I use adblock and saw nothing which strengthen the ad-hypothesis.

sovandeon news:yc (iPhone HN client) finally accepted into the App Store

> I just want to make as much as people want to give me

The usual way to do this is to release the app for free and put a (PayPal) donate button on your page...

sovandeon Fetch.io Downloads Your Torrents For You Insanely Fast, Then Streams Them to You

Not to mention that they navigate in a minefield of copyright and IP issues.