The "tech Surge" will be no doubt meet resistance by the "Talebug" terrorists. This war will not be won in our lifetime (or the lifetime of this thread at any rate).
Darn you sound like you work with me. And I swear to almighty god it is never my fault. A bunch of idiots get together and promise that I will deliver this piece of software at this date, without inviting me along to the meeting. Then, they write the specs (shouldn't it be the other way round at this point?). In most cases, the specs are incomplete and they want me to start while they are still finalizing stuff. I go tell them about a roadblock, and that they should revise the deadline and they tell me I should go ask someone else how to do it as if I am incompetent. And they always think bringing in more developers would make things go faster. Damn I am beginning to lose my cool just writing this.
I am going to make a stand for all the developers working furiously on this, although I don't know any of them. I blame it all on management, and they have the worst kind - politicians. I write this as I am certain it is very similar to what happened here in Brisbane Australia with the Queensland Health payroll system fiasco. Under severe pressure from politicians, they pushed out a system without thoroughly testing it first.
Edit: The Queensland health Payroll system was quoted at $6.19 million, latest revised cost is $1.2 billion.
For me, I cannot yet quit my day job. So everything is done through Basecamp. There are three people in the team. I am the developer. We have discussions, work out a to-do and post it on the calendar. When I come home from work I work on the to-do. I do this from ~6pm to ~10pm, 4 days a week. I work as a developer at my day job up to 10 hours a day. When I get home I can barely look at the screen I am so tired. This start-up thing is no fun.
I hear ya. And you know, I've come across a few morons who insinuated to me that I am anti-social and have Aspergers' because of my resistance to using Facebook.
Go all the way! Tune the traffic signals preferentially for these electric taxis. Configure them to pick up multiple fares going the same direction. To use train tracks for long distance.
I used to fear that also, until I made a conscious effort to learn (Pharo) Smalltalk and (Racket Scheme) Lisp. I spent so much time and energy on these two. I practised and practised and practised. And then practised some more. After what seemed like an eternity, I looked at other people's code (Java, C#, PHP) and could instantly identify deficiencies and ways to improve them. So my advice: learn Smalltalk and Lisp, and then practise till your gums bleed.
I am undergoing a somewhat similar experience, although my products is much less developed than yours. I am going to do a survey for my target market, and at the end of the survey I am going to put some messages like this:
"When the product launches, you will get free blah blah blah", and "Please forward this link to someone you think may benefit from this service". So I have some sort of market out there already, I hope.
Damn! This sounds just like my situation! It is fairly chaotic here, no specifications or documentation for work I must do, and no one understands what I do. So I use this to my advantage by learning new skills. Because no one asks me what tools I use (they all think I use C#, I think), I find tools that interest me and learn them by using them in my work. So far I have learned R and Pandas for data, although I am lucky to get a 10M file to use. I have built a desktop app with Ada. I am trying to created LaTeX files from a script. I want to improve my Racket/F#/GIMP/Scribus/Inkscape/Blender/Node.js skills and knowledge, but cannot yet come up with appropriate tasks. But I keep looking! So basically I keep motivated by learning new stuff all the time at their expense.
I would love to hear from an ex-Knight tech. Wouldn't be surprised if they wrote something along the lines of: "Management just wanted this thing in ASAP!", or perhaps "Tests weren't part of the kpi's". I may sound biased against non-techs, but I have seen this time and time again. Testing is a barrier to quick deployment, and "How much money are we losing while doing all that stoopid testing?".
And of course it cures cancer, diabetes, bad-breath and increases your virility and success with the ladies. They haven't tried it yet, but it should also increase your mileage if you put them in your gas tank.
The return he quotes is an average over an aggregate of course. But if you do proper research, you can beat that average substantially, and many people do.
Well in that case, I am eagerly waiting for when this is generally available to deliver my order from the local Indian or Vietnamese restaurant. I will even build a landing platform for it and register its coordinates for efficient and fast delivery of my rogan josh or pork rice noodle soup.
Power lines, objects like cars and people and pets on the ground, pools - I wonder how these things will avoid doing damage. Frankly I would be pissed if they drop things on my head or my car.
"Smalltalk is that extremely rare case of software that it makes coding just flow, with no interruptions and no small annoyances. We call this style of coding "Live Coding" and its definetly the biggest reason to try smalltalk and even more try Pharo."
These couple of sentences give the reason that made me persist with Smalltalk (Pharo mostly). For those of you who come from, say Python, Java, C#..., this may be unsettling at first. The way you use the debugger to point you in the right direction and keep working without stopping. It feels all wrong in other, more pedestrian languages.
HN attracts some highly intelligent and resourceful people who do things that are radical and can change the way all other people do things. And I think these are the very people who can help to fix these sorts of real world problems.
This is what I am going to buy my 4-yr old son when he turns 5. The look of wonder in his eyes, the thoughts that must be buzzing in his head when I explain things he cannot see. Buy him a microscope.
But also get him something he can socialize with - like a rugby ball or cricket bat, whatever for whatever sport you play in your area.
Sounds ideal, until you realize that building and operating proper encryption is too hard for some of these organizations (PirateBay, FSF). For the rest, they are only mutually hostile on the surface. I am sure when it suits them they will get together and sell all our asses to each other.
Yes, they want things that "just work", but not against them. Most people realize that security is not perfect, but then most probably did not expect that that meant extensive and chronic surveillance.
You could be an NSA sleeper-sleeper agent, using HN to launch false-false-flag propaganda operations. Go ahead and prove otherwise, if you can. Until then I'm going to treat everything you say and do as an attempt to spy on me.
Somehow, I think foreign organisations have always known or at least suspected and taken appropriate measures to guard against NSA/GHCB/Echelon/ASIO whatever evesdropping. Even terrorist organisations. Its just the you and me everyday saps that have just found out. And there's not much we can do about it.