aminuit

When you find a really good site on HN, add it to your RSS reader. Check out proggit. If you have an industry you're interested in or a problem you're trying to solve, start googling and keep track of all the interesting sites you come across. There's a wealth of good stuff out there, though it isn't going to be TC style (linkbait titles, unnecessarily effusive prose, etc).

Selection bias much? He's complaining about an over abundance of consumer facing web businesses at an event sponsored by a blog that focuses almost exclusively on consumer facing web businesses.

There is lots of real computer science going on in the world, and there's a bunch of money being thrown at it. It's just that you won't hear about any of it by reading TechCrunch all day.

Just wanted to apologize again for sniping at you yesterday. It was uncalled for. Glad to see you've been able to incorporate it into a proper discussion.

I worked at a cool little company where we built a useful product. We just built it. We didn't use waterfall, agile, or any real process. We just made sure to communicate and only hired people with good judgement and critical thinking skills. A big (very big) company decided they liked our product and bought the company.

After acquisition, our new overlords decided that our process, i.e. using our brains, wasn't compliant with whatever standards they had for development. In came the agile consultants, scrum masters, TDD, CI, etc. All the things you hear these blog posts evangelize about. It brought development to a total halt as all these assholes put in their $0.02 about how we needed scrums, sprints, user stories, and story points. Developers couldn't work on the features they knew were important without cutting through miles of red tape (finding a "customer" to make a story, breaking that story down into the actual work that needed to be done, moving the story through the backlog, estimating points for the stories, etc).

Like I said above. It ruined my software department. I wouldn't wish agile on my worst enemy.

Ever notice that virtually all Agile success stories are written by Agile consultants and not by developers? Ever notice that nobody actually claims to have built anything from scratch with Agile?

The stories all read the same. Product has already been built. Developers stuck bike shedding over some piddly detail, when lo and behold the Agile consultant arrives to cut through the Gordian knot by placing the developers on a strict regimen of myopic thinking and inattention to detail.

Agile is bullshit.

(disclaimer: Agile consultants ruined the software group I work in.)

Making good software is hard, and anyone claiming to have a magical process that guarantees good software is selling snake oil. I can appreciate your wanting to make a buck, but would also seriously appreciate it if you could find some other industry besides software development to go screw up.

FYI apt-get update does not update any packages. It just downloads the current list of packages and their versions from the repository.

In summary, hard work is hard.

I know HN is targeted towards the startup crowd, but do we constantly have to vote up these self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating posts about how it takes some kind of special breed of human to work hard for a year or two?

> This is where you hire a copywriter for your website and he or she fills the pages with cleverly crafted, delightfully delectable prose that oh-so-playfully sing and dance.

Prose is singular. The plural of prose is proses, though it's not frequently used. If you're going to chide authors on style, make sure you've got the grammar correct first. Also as a counterexample, I'd like to point out that woot.com typically exhibits playful prose to great effect. Honestly, I probably visit more for the excellent ad copy than any other reason.

Google is going to have to build (or outsource) a lot of what Verizon already has. He may be considering those costs when he does the per household numbers. Consider that Verizon has an army of trained field technicians, fiber trucks, call centers, easement rights, and so forth.

FYI the term 'corporate welfare' typically refers to governments giving special treatment to corporations, not corporations tolerating unproductive hangers-on.

Not in the article, but worth mentioning: Wattvision is a YC Winter 09 company.

I get where you're going, but the toaster analogy doesn't work. If you want to sell toasters (or basically anything that takes mains voltage) en masse in Western markets, you'll have to fork over several large to Underwriters Laboratories and go through their approval process.

An article about a report from the "International Boys' Schools Coalition" suggesting that all boys schools are advantageous to mixed sex schools. This is on the front page of HN?

So long and thanks for all the fish.