pfarrell

Don’t forget your investors and your board.

It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.

“New Kids on the Blech” is spot on.

Thanks for sharing your work. I too have the problems you’re attempting to address. Makes me think of LabView (which I would recommend checking out for inspiration if you’re unaware of it).

Yeah, that original iPhone launch keynote is something I like to watch every so often. It really emphasized we’re only doing this because we see what’s wrong with smartphones and this is our vision. They didn’t go “we made the best stylus you can have”.

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos

Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.

I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.

I’ve had this same thought but was unsure what the licensing for the data would be.

I have a daily updated dataset that has the HN data split out by months. I've published it on my web page, but it’s served from my home server so I don’t want to link to it directly. Each month is about 30mb of compressed csv. I’ve wanted to torrent it, but don’t know how to get enough seeders since each month will produce a new torrent file (unless I’m mistaken). If you’re interested, send me a message. My email is mrpatfarrell. Use gmail for the domain.

A few are dated but number 74 is one I think about a lot when programming.

  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

Important to remember this was written in the early ‘80’s at the end of Perlis’s long career. For most of these to stay relevant and humorous 50 years later is pretty impressive.

If you are distributing software to an audience who want to use your thing without having to build it, then something like this is much more appealing than virtualenv.

And not every optimization is worth the effort.

Let’s not forget sl