fmw
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
225
Submissions
98
Member since
Mar 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
The terminal is a excellent abstraction layer to work around the limitations of LLMs. Tools like grep, the composability of commands through UNIX piping, for example.
You can develop something like that from scratch and make it available to an LLM, but why not reuse a proven technology that provides a perfect framework for the LLM to interact with?
Comment · 2 years ago
The Netherlands has the Highly Skilled Migrant (HSM) visum:
https://ind.nl/en/residence-permits/work/highly-skilled-migr...
In summary, it requires:
- a company willing to apply for the visum for you, and,
- a minimum salary that varies on age and education level (this is how we measure how sought after your skillset is in our market).
In your case the salary requirement would be 5331 euros/month because you are over 30 and don't have a recognized master's degree.
If you have the Turkish nationality there are some more relaxed requirements (e.g. you can apply for the visum yourself, you don't need to company to do the paperwork, although in practice it will be faster and easier if the company is an official HSM sponsor).
Apart from the HSM visum you can also pursue a Startup Visum or a Self-employed visum, see https://www.netherlandspointofentry.nl/start-a-business/ for more information. If you don't want to work for someone else I suppose you can also set up a Dutch company and hire yourself as a HSM, but I don't have direct experience or knowledge about that.
If you can get a job that meets the salary requirements the highly-skilled migrant visum is very straightforward. The Netherlands is a good place to live and we also offer tax facilities to highly skilled migrants (https://business.gov.nl/running-your-business/staff/terms-of...).
There is a path to citizenship. If you qualify for the HSM visum that means you'll be getting a salary that will allow you to build a good life here, including getting a mortgage and buying a house, for example.
The difficulty of finding a job like that and an employer willing to sponsor you depends on your skillset. Once you get here, it can also be difficult to find a place to live, especially if you insist on living in crowded places like Amsterdam.
I would recommend doing your own research or getting advice from people qualified to talk about immigration law, which I am not. If you have questions that I can answer from the perspective of an employer that sponsors these visa and helps colleagues move here my email is in my profile.
Comment · 10 years ago
Floyd & Hamilton | http://www.floydhamilton.nl/EN/Home | Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Onsite)
Floyd & Hamilton builds recruitment software that is used by some of the best companies in the Netherlands. We're looking for people that want to help redefine the way people look for jobs. Our interview process consists of two in-person interviews, as well as a small, practical project to give insight in your capabilities and the way you approach challenges.
We use JavaScript and Node.js and are looking for people with a strong interest in functional programming and languages (e.g. Clojure, Scala, Haskell or functional programming in JavaScript). We are looking for a full-time software developer (front-end or full-stack).
You can contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions.
Comment · 13 years ago
SEEKING WORK. Remote. Based in the Netherlands (CET), but able to conform to US timezones if necessary.
Clojure & Clojurescript developer with a lot of experience in web development and search (e.g. Apache Lucene and web scraping; see https://github.com/fmw/alida for a link to a video of a talk in London on that subject).
Willing to travel if necessary. My contact information is in my HN profile.
Comment · 13 years ago
Beware of people suggesting their personal favorite language. There are many languages worth knowing. My personal favorite is the Lisp family and particularly Clojure. Pick up a book like SICP or any of the Clojure books. It can really give you a new perspective.
I suggest buying the Seven Languages book by Bruce Tate. There is no wrong choice, because learning any language will make you better.
Comment · 14 years ago
SEEKING WORK. Remote. Based in the Netherlands (CET), but able to conform to US timezones if necessary.
Clojure & Clojurescript developer with a lot of experience in web development and search (e.g. Apache Lucene and web scraping; see https://github.com/fmw/alida for a link to a video of a talk in London on that subject).
Willing to travel if necessary. My contact information is in my HN profile.
Comment · 14 years ago
SEEKING WORK. Remote. Based in the Netherlands (CET), but able to conform to US timezones if necessary.
Clojure & Clojurescript developer with a lot of experience in web development and search (see https://github.com/fmw/alida for a link to a video of a talk in London on that subject).
Willing to travel if necessary. My contact information is in my HN profile.
Comment · 14 years ago
I suggest buying the books. They are excellent. If you have to pick two, I would suggest the O'Reilly book[0] and the Joy of Clojure[1]. The first is an excellent primer and the latter is really great at explaining the thinking behind the language. I also enjoyed Amit Rahore's Clojure in Action, as well as Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway. I haven't read Practical Clojure.
The books are the best resources if you're trying to learn the language at a fast pace, but there is plenty of information to be found through Google as well. In the end the best way to learn is by doing.
Good luck and welcome to the Clojure community!
Comment · 14 years ago
The consumer market for GNU/Linux desktop application is tough, although there are some niche markets that can be viable. Wikipedia has a list of proprietary GNU/Linux applications that provides several examples[0]. If you want to charge in the consumer market and aren't interested in game development, solving boring, but relatively complicated problems (e.g. tax software) seems like a good bet financially. Open source developers are less likely to sustainably work on boring applications. People that generally prefer free software are also more likely to set aside their principles if you can somehow lessen some kind of significant pain for them (again, like doing taxes).
The business market is much more viable. There all sorts of viable markets, like:
- compatibility glue for either server-side or client-side open source alternatives to the Microsoft stack that solves certain headaches (e.g. arcane file formats, better conversion for scripted Excel sheets),
- GUI (system) management tools (such as CPanel and Plesk for budget webhosting, but for less saturated markets like managing thin-clients or virtual machines that are still a moving target),
- hardware + software (e.g. building things like portable barcode scanners for inventory management, security/surveillance hardware or VoIP boxes using the Raspberry Pi),
- et cetera.
If you target business users open source or dual licensing becomes much more viable too. It isn't economical for most companies to dedicate a lot of resources to IT internally, so they will still pay for e.g. support, training or a managed version of your application. The latter is especially attractive with web applications, of course, because you can sell a managed SaaS version of your application (this is exactly my business model with http://www.vixu.com [1]).
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proprietary_software_fo...
1: Based on an Apache licensed application you can find at https://github.com/fmw/vix).
Comment · 14 years ago
You're wrong. Religion in antiquity was different. It was our first attempt at philosophy, even though many of the best Greek thinkers stopped believing as they slowly built their own sphere of knowledge as a real form of (natural) philosophy. As to your example, the Roman era: religion is, of course, a great way to justify an absolutist regime. Why is someone king? Because god wants it. This is one of the reasons why the surviving monarchies are still strongly tied to religion. They receive (in part) both their legitimacy and mission from the idea that they have a divine task as the monarch. It can be a great political tool in general, too, as anyone who is following American politics can confirm. The Romans were actually relatively tolerant, but there were limits. The problem with Christianity was that the early Christians were a rabble-rousing sect that was creating problems for the empire. Their claims were not only farfetched from the viewpoint of a Roman aristocrat, but also challenged the Roman way of life. Ironically, they marketed their faith to slaves, offering them the hope of a better life after death despite the numerous calls for slavery in particularly the old testament[0]. Despite the whole "render unto Caesar" story, they also refused to recognize the "divinity" of the emperor [1]. This wasn't a problem per se. You could be critical of the divinity of the Caesars privately, but the Christian sect went too far in their zeal in their almost revolutionary and anarchistic spirit. Remember, Jesus preached that (assuming the sources we have are historically accurate on this point) the world was going to end. Most probably in the lifetime of his early followers ("Take therefore no thought of the morrow [...]", Matthew 6:34). Jesus is just the only one we remember from a long line of fanatical, rabble-rousing preachers from Palestine[2] that created problems for the Romans by instigating revolts.
The Roman ruling class objected to Christianity because of its politics, not because it wasn't the "state religion". It absorbed many other cults (e.g. Serapis, Isis, Mithras, see the Wikipedia article on "Religion in Ancient Rome"[3]).
Of course, intolerance goes hand in hand with religious fanaticism in any time, but the monotheistic religions are inherently more intolerant because of their rejection of anything other than their singular god. For the Romans, religion wasn't necessarily a fanatical pursuit, but a way to honor their ancestors and part of their politics. They were open to new religious ideas, as long as it didn't mock their way of life, and often adopted foreign cults as their own. In a way, very much alike to many modern believers, who take a little bit of everything in order to create their own, vague interpretation of spirituality.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery
[1]: The divinity of the emperor was a complicated subject that can't really be compared to current religious worship in monotheism. Unlike the uneducated impression I have of Japan, for example, virtually no Romans actually believed that the emperor was a god in the modern sense of the word. It was mostly a honorific title, going back to Alexander the Great who was the first in a line of Greek/Roman rulers to explicitly compare himself with a mythical figure (Heracles in his case, who was not a god). In terms of absolute power over a major part of the human population at the time, however, the Roman emperor (and his Chinese equivalent) were almost like gods.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Messiah_claimants.
Comment · 14 years ago
Here is a shameless plug:
http://www.vixu.com (my startup) is based on open source Clojure/ClojureScript CMS (and soon webshop) software. See https://github.com/fmw/vix for the code (planning some refactoring over the summer before the first official release). Also doing search related stuff in Clojure (see https://github.com/fmw/alida for demo code I wrote for my EuroClojure presentation).
Clojure brought the fun back to software development for me and made me a better developer in general. It is also a very pragmatic choice, with the expressiveness of Lisp and plenty of reusable Java code being available.
Comment · 14 years ago
Obviously, a single founder gets more when and if a payday happens. Most startups fail, however. If attracting a co-founder increases the odds of success it is surely worth it. The article points out that you can also attract a co-founder in return for a smaller stake after you get traction. This could be the best of both worlds, unless it leads to envy and friction within the team.
Comment · 15 years ago
This is something the British actually did during World War II in order to confuse possible invading forces and spies[0].
[0]: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205019014
Comment · 15 years ago
Microsoft offers good deals to startups[1], so cost is less of a factor than you may think. However, most people start programming as a hobby before they start a company, so it wouldn't surprise me if the cost issue mainly factors in earlier in the chain (at the point where people learn e.g. MySQL instead of MSSQL because of pricing). Of course, Microsoft is doing its utmost to push their products to students and schools, because they are well aware of this issue. Hackers, on the other hand, like to experiment, so they will come across alternatives to MS products sooner or later.
There are plenty of successful startups on the Microsoft stack. Everybody knows about the Stack Overflow story, but there are a lot more examples under the radar. Especially little ventures started by business people (who sometimes seem to prefer the Microsoft stack) that do quite well financially, but may not be very innovative on a technical level. It is just as viable in terms of getting things done and that is the only thing that matters. Admittedly, it may be harder to find good hackers with .NET experience, but the same goes for Java these days and Facebook is even successful in hiring smart people that are willing to work with PHP. Java and .NET are obviously popular with uninspired "bread programmers" because they are the path of least resistance to a safe 9-to-5 job, but that doesn't mean that all Java or .NET work is boring (consider e.g. Java at Google or Twitter).
I wouldn't want to personally depend on the likes of Microsoft or Apple for my development stack because I wouldn't bet my company on anything that isn't free as in freedom, but from my point of view as a casual observer the .NET platform is a pretty impressive piece of technology. Just like some other initiatives by Microsoft, like MSSQL things that come out of Microsft Research (e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones is employed there).
Feel free to email me at [email protected]