tldr: limit your GPUs to about 2/3rd of maximum power draw for the least Joules consumed per token generated without speed penalty.
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Why run an LLM yourself in the first place? The llama.cpp software suite is a very impressive piece of work. It is a key element in some of the stuff that I’m playing around with on my home systems, which for good reasons I will never be able to use in conjunction with a paid offering from an online provider.
CNC Lasers for cutting and engraving Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned here other than that I’m a reasonably satisfied customer of some of them.
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with creation. But creating anything at all on a smartphone or a laptop, where the competition is insane, and the toolchains super complex is going to be an uphill battle.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously. Russia, a major supplier of gas to the EU has been sanctioned heavily, buying natural gas from Russia effectively pays for them to wage war on Ukraine and the price of electricity is tied to the price of natural gas, which has been going up and down like a jo-jo, but far more up than down.
In 1989 I got a call from a friend to come along to visit a studio in Landsmeer, near Amsterdam, where something quite amazing was being constructed, a circus with nothing but eggs, both as the performers and as the audience. I was - and still am - a huge Jim Henson fan and immediately felt an interest to see what was going on.
We were received by Jacques Meijer and his wife in their house in Landsmeer, attached to which was a large workshop.
Dit is een antwoord op de Tweet thread van @Inge_v, die een hele berg redenen aangaf waarom ze vond dat Kernenergie de enige optie is in plaats van zon, wind en andere renewables.
Het begon met:
Ik ben tegen wind en zonne energie, en voor kernenergie. Dat is duurzamer en ik heb er vertrouwen in dat we een manier vinden om het afval goed te verwerken. De hoofdmotivatie was dat het duurzamer is en dat ze vertrouwen heeft in dat we een manier vinden om het afval goed te verwerken.
Electric cars are fantastic compared to ICE vehicles, but E-Bikes are even better. Much lower environmental impact and far more suited to medium range travel such as commuting. Here in NL they sell in huge numbers, far faster than electric cars. But they also have their limitations: a regular e-bike tops out at 25 Kph, and will do a very limited distance on a single charge. What powers your average e-bike are Lithium-Ion cells, usually of the 18650 variety, capacities vary but the very best cells you can get at the moment that are still affordable top out at about 3400 mAh per cell.
More than a year ago already I posted a fictional COVID19 retrospective, reading it back today it is pretty eerie to see how many of the predictions made in it have come true or are about to become true.
Because I didn’t actually dare to write it down as predictive I figured I should improve on this, after all, what use is it to predict stuff without attaching the label prediction to it?
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the piano software (or to play piano, for that matter).
I have friends from all walks of life. Most of them are smart and skilled. Some of them believe the most outrageous things. For instance, there is this one couple that I know that refuse to believe in 9⁄11 on odd days and on even days they will go to great lengths to push their theories that it was all make believe, that it never happened and that if it did happen it was all special effects.
I’m pretty sure that the hardest choice in my life to date has been the one between my two loves: music on the hand and computer programming on the other. The programming won out, I figured it would be a much more lucrative field to pursue a career in, besides it was a much better match for my talents. From the age of 5-8 I did violin lessons and hated every moment of it.
If you’ve been following the news you probably are aware that the number of people that test positive for COVID-19 is rapidly rising. As most people that know a bit about historical pandemics have warned about. The ‘second wave’ is a fairly typical thing with respiratory diseases because during the summer month these are usually at a disadvantage. People are at the peak of their resistance, more outdoors and the moisture conditions in the air do not favor transmission.
Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects this site and many 100’s of millions besides. The advantages are that in-flight data can no longer be easily snooped and that injection of data into pages is made either much harder or even impossible.
Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of computing hardware to adapt it to different problems. This was soon followed by papertape, then the punched card deck, a stack of paper cards that contained the program code in a series of holes punched into the paper.
After seeing some of the weirdest stuff ever show up in my Twitter timeline I decided to dig in and see for myself what is going on in the underbelly of the beast. Someone I follow had just re-tweeted a bit of information that at face value seemed too outrageous to even consider and I wondered what made that happen. In short, the original tweet mentioned that COVID-19 is a hoax, that the virus isn’t real and that this whole pandemonium is just an excuse by ‘them’ to get us all under control if not to outright murder us using a vaccine.
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are certain passages that ring as though the data does not support them but all in all it did open my eyes to how much damage I’ve been doing to my body over the years.
As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no difference between the best digitally sampled pianos but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel as much alive as an actual instrument. Unfortunately, this limits you to what you can actually play and this is where I’m still very much behind where I would like to be.
The Netherlands is one of the wealthiest and most favored countries when it comes to dealing with nature. If it weren’t for our continuous watchful eye on nature this country would - in the most literal sense of the word - simply not exist. A very large part of our land area was won back from the sea over the centuries, and without continous maintenance the sea would reclaim it within a generation.
It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were made before and after. People shake hands and hug complete strangers with abandon, something that today, even with the virus mostly under control still feels extremely un-natural and would immediately result in people freaking out or at a minimum speaking up and indicating the fact that they are unconformtable.
There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they really don’t and are just looking for the cash to make a run for it.
For the last three months I’ve been working on a project that combines my twin passions: music and computer programming. The problem is an interesting one, the formal name for it is ‘automatic music transcription’ and it is much harder than I ever thought it would be. I’m slowly getting a grip on the problem space, after a ton of exploratory programming. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? You just listen to music you hear piano, voice, guitar and a hundred other optional instruments collapsed into a single variable: a 16 bit value that indicates the volume at that particular point in time sampled at a high enough rate (say CD grade, 44100 Hz) for high fidelity playback.
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy little aliens all these devices phoning home are breaching the privacy of their owners, the guests of those owners and anybody else that comes within WiFi or sensor range.
Have you ever wondered what causes large teams of search and rescue people including all their gear to magically spring into action within hours of a plane crash, no matter where in the world it has happened? Meet UK company Kenyon, a company that is one of the best in the world when it comes to rapid response to disasters.
I came across them while talking to a friend who is partner at a large PE firm, we do technical due diligence for them and the subject turned to IT disasters and what can be done to deal with them.
Long ago, in the mid 80’s I worked for a bank in the IT department on the Western side of Amsterdam. I lived in the east part and moved around town by bicycle, most because it is by far the fastest way of getting around, even if the weather is miserable it is still the nicest form of inner city transportation. Being on a bike you also see a lot more than in some vehicle, including public transport.
According to Bloomberg Microsoft is said to have agreed to buy GitHub. GitHub which reportedly has been losing money being acquired is a major development because of its central role in the development of many open and closed source projects.
For the uninitiated here is what GitHub does in a nutshell: GitHub allows computer programmers from around the world to conveniently collaborate on projects, share bug reports and fix those bugs and allows the administration of some project documentation.
Apologies for the typo in the url…
Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is simple: the GDPR serves a legitimate need but by decreasing the signal:noise ratio handcrafted requests from users with a legitimate concern can get drowned in these ‘just because we can’ letters. It’s the legal equivalent of an exploit toolkit.
Part I of this is here, if you haven’t read it yet please do so before reading this installment, it will help to establish context.
So, after geting the most repeated fallacies about the GDPR out of the way let’s take a long look at the real life impact of the GDPR and why it is worded the way it is, after that we’ll look at some of the more important ‘nuts and bolts’ that will help you to decide what to do.
In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
This post is an attempt to calm the nerves of those that feel that the(ir) world is about to come to an end, the important first principle when it comes to dealing with any laws, including this one is Don’t Panic.
I love cycling. Sometimes I think I love it just a little bit too much. Such as the day two years ago that I took my Zephyr Lowracer for a spin and ended up in the hospital with my right leg broken in way too many pieces. It was a pretty harsh experience, one second you’re fine, the next you are flying through the air (speedbumps work on bicycles too…) and before I’d landed I already realized this was going to be a bad one.
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest.
Since we are supposedly required to consent to giving up our privacy there has developed a cottage industry of entities doing everythign they can to obey the letter of the law while at the same time ignoring the spirit of it, or in fact turning the law on its head.
Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software.
But it isn’t always like that. Plenty of computer software has the capability of causing material damage, bodily harm or even death. Which is why the software industry has always been very quick to disavow any kind of warranty for the product it creates and - strangely enough - society seems to accept this.
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing to submit to either one of two remaining overlords these servers sit traffic less and mostly idle (load average: 0.
For part 1, see here. For part 2, see here
Reliability The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up with solutions for them.
One of my favorite writers of all time, Douglas Adams has a neat little plot device in that wholly remarkable book ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, called the Babel Fish.
Let me quote the master himself to explain the concept of the Babel Fish to you if you’re not already aware of it:
“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it.
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of IT.
What bugs me about this is that anything you make or do has a political dimension, and that hackers, more than any other profession, create the tools and the means with which vast changes in the political landscape are effected.
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out of sync with what is presently keeping the company afloat.
Your job: get us out of this mess.
For part 1, see here.
Overview of the software components All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called Anaconda which takes the sting out of maintaining a working python setup.
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in general had a great time until I discovered electronics and computers.
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of that ever mattered. But being good with computers is something that sooner or later also is something that you realize can be used for bad.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Facing a sizable fraction of his own party that wanted to secede from the EU David Cameron made the gambit of the century: Let’s have a referendum and get this behind us once and for all. He never for one second thought that the ‘leave’ faction would be able to win that referendum and the end result would be to cement his own position for at least another election cycle to come.
About a week ago I bought a really nice solid wooden table for a song in a second hand store. Hauling it home was quite the job, the thing weighs a ton. Fortunately the legs came off otherwise I’d still be standing in front of the staircase with it. After two days of working I noticed that the pinky and ring finger on my left hand felt numb and wouldn’t move the way they normally do.
Ycombinator has decided to move forward on their ‘Basic Income’ experiment. That’s a pretty bold step and I absoltely commend them on doing this, experiments like this are a lot more valuable than hot air.
The one thing I really don’t get is why they start off with time-limiting it. If the outcome of a basic income experiment is going to be used then it had better be as realistic as possible.
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days. They’re wicked fast off the mark, they are nearly silent at low speeds and they are perceived as ‘green’, what better way to make yourself feel good than to get an Electric Vehicle as your next car.
Now, as much as I like ‘greentech’ I see a whole pile of issues with EVs that won’t be easily wiped off the table using appeals to emotion (such as acceleration speed of ‘fun’ of driving) or a (somewhat misplaced) sense of improving the environment.
If there is one story of a persistant nature that seems to pervade the start-up world it is that VCs as a rule are evil, they’re out to get you, will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. Some people that are very visible in the start-up world are perpetrating this to the point of being irresponsible. In Three Roads To The Top Of The Mountain I’ve already pointed out that dealing with VCs is a choice, and that that choice comes with both advantages and disadvantages.
For many years in the beginning of my career I’d been more than happy to work for free or even at a loss as long as the work was interesting. I was so totally in love with computer programming and the feeling I got from making something work and then seeing that creation be used by other people that I completely lost sight of the value that I was creating.
Imagine a contest in which we are going to pit man against machine. But instead of measuring who is best in playing the game of ‘Go’ we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human, all of 175 pounds of extremely well trained runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1 racecar with a remote control running down a straight track.
Nonsense, you’d say, that’s not a fair comparison, the car uses much more instantaneous power, and will use a much larger amount of energy during the race, you should handicap that car somehow to make the race a fair one.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than mine).
So, you’re about to be hired by that hot new startup. Great, congratulations. But wait, congratulations may be a little bit too early. Young companies can - and do - have all kinds of problems and you need to be fully aware of the risks and the potential issues that such a company has before you decide to sign on the dotted line.
Below a short list of questions that you should be able to ask of any company that is younger than 2 years or that is still clearly in a mode where the income does not exceed the expenses.
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope is that this will somehow help save a few companies by causing you - the CEO - to change direction before it is too late to do so.
For a very brief (way too brief) time the world was a much better place. A very large publisher (Springer) probably inadvertently decided to sell all their books online for the low price of $0. Silly me, I actually believed this was some kind of masterstroke of try-before-you-buy marketing, where only after you read the book you would decide whether or not you wanted to own the paper version. I imagined myself reading for the next year or so with complete abandon on all the subjects that interest me, and then ordering those books that I felt would stand the test of time.
There lots of products that came to market in the recent past and that will come to market in the near future that use some kind of cloud hosted component. In many cases these products rightly use some kind of off-device service in order to provide you with features that would otherwise not be possible. Sometimes these features are so much part of the core product that the whole idea would be dead in the water without it.
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order to try to do damage control?
A nice sample of The VW reality distortion field at work is here.
My credentials in the wind industry are just about ‘0’, the only reason I’m writing this is because I’ve been a life-long wind power enthusiast, I’ve built (a prototype 2.5 KW 5 meter wind turbine and have a basic understanding of how wind power works and what the limitations and engineering elements are that go into a typical wind power setup. I also live in a country that has a very long history when it comes to using wind power and have a pretty good understanding of the kind of obstacles wind power deployments tend to run into.
A while ago I received an invitation to a high-school reunion. I didn’t go and I probably will never go to a thing like that. I’m trying very hard to forget that period.
I love to learn, but it wasn’t always so.
As a small kid, up to the age of 12 I definitely did. During the summer holidays that I would spend with my paternal grandmother in Arnhem I’d eat my way through the public library technology section, and when I was done with that I made a deal with a second hand bookstore called ‘de Slegte’ that if I could read a book I bought in the morning before closing time I could trade it in for free on another book, and if I could read that one before morning I could do it again.
One of the hotter topics of discussion at the moment is ‘The Right To Be Forgotten’. The basic idea is that individuals should have control over their online image.
Because ‘Google’ is now the front door to the web, for once the European Union got something right and concentrated not so much on the websites that may post items about a person but on the search services providers that caused the information to be found.
It seems to be the only thing that web millionaire wanna-be’s care about is growth. It’s true that growth matters but it isn’t always obvious how you can grow a business without either sooner or later imploding it by running out of funds or what to do when growth inevitably plateaus.
When a company is just founded growing is easy. After all, from 1 user to 2 users is 100% growth and you should be able to do that in a day or so, maybe even a couple of hours.
Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length. Then they’d draft up a document describing the problem they intended to solve and the protocol layer they came up with to address this problem. That document would then be sent out to various parties that might have an interest in using this protocol who then would supply their feedback and as a result of that a more complete version of the original document would be released.
Update: James Hague, aka Dadgum was inspired by this to do some work on his blog and I’m happy to report that now his blog is the fastest blog in the world, 4K transferred and 1 request per page, load time < 75 ms. If you have a blog that’s even faster than that let me know.
– Read on for the original post –
I positively hate bloat in all its forms.
Divide and Conquer is a name given to a group of algorithms that take a problem and then solves it recursively (recursion is a programming concept where a program uses a simpler version of itself, a bit like those Matroshka dolls). For instance, there is a very elegant algorithm that sorts lists of elements like this named Quicksort.
But that’s definitely not the only interpretation of those words. Historically they came from ‘divide and rule’, the concept of getting the locals to fight with each other which allowed a common enemy to rule them.
Computer programmers are a weird bunch. They go around telling the rest of the world who can and can’t be a programmer. There are even studies on the subject to prove that there are ‘two kinds of people, those that can program and those that can never learn it no matter how much effort they put into it’.
But that’s total nonsense. It’s like saying that there are only two kinds of people when it comes to swimming, those that can learn how to swim and those that can’t.
There’s a war going on and your head has been designated the battleground. For every battle there are simple objectives: switch your loyalty from one brand to another, make you vote for a certain group or person, join a religion, a certain school or pursue a career etc.
Many such battles are waged with simultaneous campaigns. The weapons used are such as images, videos, text, print, music, television programming, product placement and many other strategies.
Of all the privacy violating tracking methods on the web there are two that are particularly bad, the first one is called ‘evercookies’ for being particularly hard to get rid of, the other is called Browser Fingerprinting and is impossible to detect.
Evercookies are to regular browser cookies just as superglue is to cellotape. Evercookies work by storing cookies on your computer using a large number of different techniques and upon refresh re-creating all of the cookies if you have tried to delete them.
It started a couple of years ago, became fashionable last year and it’s become just about unavoidable now: the plague of the ‘customer satisfaction survey’. I can’t order a ball-point pen online without being mailed a link to a questionnaire to give feedback. Either from the company directly or - worse - from some third party they outsourced the survey process to. These outsourcing companies tend to outsource everything else as well, which is one of the reasons they need the survey in the first place: it’s the only way they’re going to find out what happened between you and their various subcontractors, who can’t be trusted to accurately report their dealings and so the company relies on you, the customer to ‘close the loop’ and do their QA work for them.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve run some analysis on the one million most popular sites on the web.
External resources, risky business What started off as a simple question (how many sites use externally hosted resources) turned into an ever expanding project to answer questions about websites engaging in risky behavior. The reason this interested me is that I believe that every externally hosted javascript is essentially a huge gaping hole in a website.
In the how to sell your company article I wrote at length on the process of how to go about selling your company once you’re ready for that. Which makes it seem as if there is no choice, either you sell your company, or you don’t. Simple as that.
But every now and then a founder comes up with the exceedingly clever idea that he or she can have their cake and eat it too: Why not hire someone reliable to run the company, either find a qualified person externally or promote one of the employees to general manager, take off to Ibiza and watch the money roll in while lying on the beach.
What you see is what you get was a way to distinguish between word processors and layout software that used ‘markup’ and those that allowed you to interactively manipulate your documents in an on-screen representation of what the final output would look like. HTML editors started out as mark-up aids and rapidly moved to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach where the visual representation was the final product.
Unfortunately, the final product as presented to the user these days has another aspect to it that means that what you see really is no longer what you get, you get much more than what you see and not everything that you get is desirable or even good.
The Past Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
Which undoubtedly well meaning civil servant long before World War II came up with the brilliant idea of registering religious affiliation during the census is lost in the mists of time.
I’m not a gmail customer in the normal sense. While I do have a gmail address that I use for access to some old spreadsheets in google docs (that I need to migrate away from there to Open Office but still haven’t had the time for) I don’t use it for email.
But I am a gmail customer in another sense. I communicate a lot with people using email and a very large fraction of those people now uses gmail either directly or by having google handle their email under some other domain.
According to this article in ‘Der Spiegel (German)’ Deutsche Telekom (the largest German telecommunications infrastructure operator) aided the BND (the German intelligence service, the ‘Bundes Nachrichten Dienst’) in tapping internet connections to Austria, France and the Netherlands (and most likely others), apparently in collaboration with the NSA which also gained access to the data, which carried traffic from many other countries besides those that the connections led to.
Because of the strength of the German internet backbone and its central location any international traffic involving one of its neighbouring countries is likely to pass through Germany on the way to its destination.
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the product’ meme was even remotely true it is when you are dealing with a recruiter.
So, it has finally happened. I just turned 50 and I can’t say it was something I was looking forward to. First the good news: today seems to be a day like any other so if you’re younger than I am, from the far side of the great divide, I’m happy to inform you that there is nothing that feels abruptly different. The bad news is that even though nothing feels abruptly different plenty of things feel as if they’ve been changing subtly over time and not all are for the better.
The lever, the transistor, the vacuum tube and the computer all have something in common. They’re amplifiers, they allow a relatively small change or capability in a domain to have a much larger effect.
Let me give you some examples: The crowbar is an instance of the lever concept, using a crowbar a relatively puny human can lift enormous weights simply by trading the distance that one end of the lever moved by how much the other will move.
Hard to believe, but the most frequently encountered ‘to-fix’ during due-diligence has to do with what you’d think would be a formality: having proper backups.
On an annual basis I see quite a few companies from the inside and it is (still!) a total surprise to me how many companies have a pretty good IT operation and still manage to get the basics wrong when it comes to something as as simpel as having backed up the data and software that is critical to running their business.
Almost every first world country has them: A legion of newly minted companies with just one person active in the company. They’re called 1099’ers, ZZPers, Freie Dienstnehmer and so on depending on the location but other than that the situations are quite comparable.
For many of these newly minted independent contractors their decision to go that route was born out of necessity rather than a choice made freely. One day they showed up at work, decided what to have for lunch that day and before they could consume their lunch they were out on the kerb with their box of personal belongings under their arm and the local equivalent of a pink slip in their pocket.
This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to. The main reason for the re-write was this post by Martin Wedge. Originally I planned to scrap the whole thing but maybe having a different perspective will help, I’ve deleted those parts that he covers and have tried to massage the rest into something resembling a continuous whole but there are still big gaps, apologies for that.
Programmers tend to loathe writing bookkeeping software. Just thinking about doing something so mundane and un-sexy as writing a double-entry bookkeeping system is probably enough to make a whole raft of programmers contemplate switching careers in earnest.
This is interesting because at heart all programming is bookkeeping. If a program works well that means that all the results come out exactly as expected, there is no room at all for even a little bit of uncertainty in the result.
Paul Simon has a song called ‘One Trick Pony’ with a bit in it that goes like this:
He’s a one trick pony One trick is all that horse can do he does one trick only It’s the principal source of his revenue
In the world of programming being a one-trick-pony is not an option. What it means is that when that one technology that you’re currently married to becomes obsolete you’ll be instantaneously out of a job or out of customers.
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.
Recently I got called in on a project that had gone off the rails. The system (a relatively low traffic website with a few simple pages) was built using Angular and Symfony2 used postgres and redis for its back-end, centos as the operating system for the unix portion of the system, 8 HP blades with 128 G RAM each in two blade enclosures and a very large HP 3par storage array underneath all that as well as some exotic hardware related windows machines and one special purpose application server running a java app.
Bad consultants make money off their customers, good consultants make money for their customers. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
If you make money for your customers you can basically write your own ticket (within reason, but reason translates into ‘more than you can spend reasonably’). Bad consultants typically enter a job at some hourly rate, pull in their buddies (also at hourly rates), start ordering hardware with kick-backs (unknown to the customer) and leave right around delivery time (or are kicked out) because what they deliver is either not cost effective or simply does not work.
Disclaimer: the cancer analogy is in no way meant to cause mental grief to anybody, I’ve lost enough family members to it that I realise such an analogy may be a step too far for some, but I feel that in this case its use is justified. If you do feel offended by this in any way then my apologies.
One of my favorite VC bloggers wrote an article that I’m pretty sure was meant to be serious but that had me in stitches.
When telephones were still solidly connected to the wall, either by being bolted on to it or by an umbilical (sometimes consisting of one or more phone extension cords) it was pretty clear who owned them, the phone company did. And bad things (such as disconnection) would happen to you if you connected something to the network that wasn’t authorized.
When computers were still unconnected to each other using networks it was pretty clear who owned them too, the company or person that paid for it did.
After looking over many advertisements for all kinds of super nice looking vehicles I’ve decided to go with this baby:
It was custom built for me by my eldest son, he spent a ton of time on it and the result is really quite nice. I had a whole pile of weird requests so buying a bike off-the-rack was out (I did quite a bit of shopping around but I could not find anything with these specs).
One of the oldest business sayings that stuck into my head was ‘Time is Money.’. It’s deceptive in its simplicity, it generates in the mind of the beholder of this simple 3 word adage that there is a direct equivalent between time and money, and that that equivalence runs both ways.
Ways in which you see this at work in every days life are people working (spending their time) in order to get some money.
In case you’re tuning in late, the previous installment in this series is here. This is an absolutely ridiculously long blog post, feel free to either totally ignore it or to read only the top portion, it will likely contain all you need or want to know to keep up to date with what’s happening here. The rest is more of a detailed log of what I did to be able to get back into it quickly if I decide that ‘Ruby Is the One’.
For many years I was a ‘bulkregister’ customer, I landed there after Network Solutions went mad. Then Bulkregister was bought by enom.com and it went from good to bad to worse in a very short time. I called around to my colleagues to see where they were registering their domains and they pointed me to a small but scrappy upstart registrar called Moniker, the brainchild of one Monte Cahn. Monte was awesome, he worked like a demon and rightfully claimed never to have lost a customers domain.
In case you landed here without any context and have no idea who I am or what this article is about this article should give you some background.
For years we were skating on very thin ice. Our only advantage that we had over competitors is that we had figured something out that they had not. Which is that Netscape, Microsoft and pretty much every other browser vendor had made a small but crucial mistake in implementing HTTP.
A recent comment on Hacker News gives a little bit of insight into how charities and non-profits determine who to target for donations and how they deal with requests for removal from marketing lists.
I’m more than a little shocked at the contents. The author, Tom van Antwerp goes into some detail about how his employer, the Ayn Rand Institute operates. (Surprising that such a bastion of capitalism isn’t able to turn a profit because of the useful services it provides for which it commands a fee, rather than to rely on donations to survive, but let’s leave that aside, there’s probably a joke in there somewhere.
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users. It’s not exactly the most advertised feature (you won’t find it in your profile page) to begin with, but once you do find it (it’s on the history page, you have to click the little ‘gear’ on the top right and then click the button to switch it off) there is no guarantee whatsoever that google does anything except for changing what they display to you.
After creating a short-list of languages and frameworks to be evaluated (see here for the first installment in this series) the next step is going to be a lot harder. It involves getting my hands dirty and at a minimum going through the website of the framework, looking at each in turn to see if they actually match the criteria and then to decide whether or not to build a ‘toy’ application in that framework or not.
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
User bernardom prompted me to tell this story, so here it goes (I’ve slept on it and I don’t think it will do any harm, even though all the participants are alive (and well)).
I got my driving license in 1986. My dad and his wife were looking to buy a new car and were going to trade in their old Citroen 2CV.
Disruption is something that you can usually only establish after the fact. A decade later or so you can look back and say ‘x’ disrupted ‘y’. Microsoft did it to IBM.
Disruption usually plays on a larger scale, for instance, the semi-conductor industry all but destroyed the vacuum tube industry (for certain purposes though vacuum tubes had hard-to-beat advantages potentially good enough for a niche revival).
On the web disruption takes place at a smaller scale.
Learning Romanian is rapidly turning into a huge exercise in Yak-Shaving.
You often see the question “What stack should I use to develop my application on?” posed but rarely do you get any insight in the actual process once someone decides to answer it specifically, so both as an analogy to rubber-ducking this and showing you what went on while I made my choice I’ve decided to document the whole process.
I currently find myself living in Romania for a bit. One thing that bothers me is that if I spend time in a place where I don’t speak the language and make the locals speak English to me all the time (provided they can!) is that it feels like I’m rude and not making an effort to meet them halfway. Why should (many) be the ones to adapt rather than me (one)?
The employer of one of my coding heroes, John Carmack is currently being sued by ZeniMax over unspecified IP that he may or may not have taken with him to his new spot.
He responded to the suit and inquiries by the general public with tweets here:
Oculus uses zero lines of code that I wrote while under contract to Zenimax.
And a slightly older one:
No work I have ever done has been patented.
One of the most interesting architectures to come out of the 1980’s was the Inmos Transputer. The idea behind it is that you string together a large number of CPU’s each with their own memory and connections to neighbouring transputers (using a series of ‘links’) into a computing fabric.
A recent comment on HN suggested using a cpu-per-process as a means of achieving very high degrees of security. This made me wonder if you couldn’t use a Raspberry-Pi Compute Module to achieve this goal, and that in turn led to researching the kind of buses that would be suitable to hook up a large number of processors.
In January I came up with a weird idea, to go and visit total strangers in return for ‘food and board’ in order to do useful work for them. (see: Will Work For Food And Lodging for how and why this started).
They say no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, and in a slight variation on the theme, in this case the battle plan did not survive first contact with the audience.
In the past, the various professions were organized as guilds. If you wanted to become a cabinet maker you’d enter into an apprenticeship arrangement with a ‘master’ cabinetmaker and you’d be taught the tricks of the trade over a several year period. As your final examination you would be required to make a masterpiece (that’s where that word comes from) and then, if the master accepted your work you could call yourself a cabinetmaker.
I’ve read a number of articles recently on ‘nomadic techies’, people that live as sparse as possible while moving from place to place every few days, weeks or months and how this impacted their lives, a backpack, a laptop and an online business or consultancy seem to be the main ingredients.
This spate of articles has caused me to look at my own life to date in a new light and I think I too have been bitten by the nomadic bug only with me it seems to last on average five years before I reboot my existence, and I have a rather large backpack.
I started my first business (a computer programming consultancy) when I was pretty young (21), in 1986. At the time I had worked for a little over a year and a half for the application programming department of a dutch bank. The department had 100 employees divided into several teams and about 35 people hired from companies such as BSO and Volmac (loosely termed ‘body shops’, not a very nice term).
Today marks the 22nd birthday of the world wide web. At 21, a very short year ago, the WWW became of the age of majority in just about every country in the world. For a person to go from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ usually means losing a few illusions and getting more in touch with the real world. It wasn’t any different with the World Wide Web.
From an age of exuberance and endless possibilities in its formative years through unruly teens we now reach the age where adult matters take over, and the WWW finds itself drafted into service.
The NSA apparently has the capabilities to eavesdrop on just about anything you do on the web or on the internet in general. If you haven’t read that article yet please do, it’s quite a bit of insight into the capabilities of the spying agencies. Of course, as a dirty foreigner I’m a bit more pissed of at this than a US citizen would be (they are technically exempt from such monitoring which makes it a-ok).
A while ago I received an invitation to a high-school reunion. I didn’t go and I probably will never go to a thing like that. I’m trying hard to forget that period.
I love to learn, but it wasn’t always so.
As a small kid, up to the age of 12 I definitely did. In the summer holidays that I would spend with my grandmother in Arnhem I’d eat my way through the public library technology section, and when I was done with that I made a deal with a second hand bookstore called ‘de Slegte’ that if I could read a book I bought in the morning before closing time I could trade it in for free on another book, and if I could read that one before morning I could do it again.
Search engine spam was invented the moment search engines started to be good enough to send significant volumes of traffic to websites based on keyword searches.
Before the days of Google search engines used strictly ‘on page’ factors to figure out how important a page was for a certain subject or keyword. This led to all kinds of pollution on the page, such as people filling out their pages with 1000’s of copies of the keywords they wanted to rank high for.
Since about 6 days now, I’ve been almost completely deaf in my right ear. The reason behind it is as trivial as can be but for some reason or other it seems as though it isn’t going to clear by itself. All I did wrong was to clear my throat while lying on my side and this in one smooth movement underpressured my ear and allowed the Eustacian tube on that side to become clogged.
This is most likely the most disturbing video I have ever seen, and just to make sure that you can’t just click through I’ll make you work for it. Please take my hint and Don’t watch this video, instead, just read the text, it is disturbing enough and it will tell you all you need to know and a little bit more besides.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GiHE9cItsE
The original title for the video is “Chinese Workers accidentally touched High Voltage Electricity Wire, and Catch Fire”.
It’s fairly rare that I can write about the jobs I take on, this one is an exception to that rule and there are some lessons here that can help any entrepreneur, even the ones that are doing well. This is a tale about trust and growth, it has a very unfortunate ending.
Going bankrupt is exceptionally easy if you go down one particular route. You simply buy something for about the same or more than you’re selling it for and you forget to factor in all your variable costs and/or overhead.
My lucky break was not finishing my education. It’s probably hard for an outsider to see the upside in having your home situation implode just when school starts to get serious, to go to work for a boss doing some menial job in your teens, no diploma, no future as far as anybody could see. But this helped me in so many ways that I really should be grateful for it.
APIs are great, they allow companies to expose parts of their engine for inclusion into the products of others to increase adoption and to facilitate the development of features and products around a common set of data.
In theory APIs are a win-win, both for the party that exposes the API as well as for the party that uses it and since the mid 90’s APIs have become more and more common.
In a heartfelt appeal to Apple from AppGratis founder Simon Dawlat we gain insight into the ridiculous situation around Apple’s appstore review proces.
Seemingly on a whim Apple decided to toss AppGratis’ app from the appstore. A new reviewer is apparently all it takes to endanger the jobs of 45 employees and to kill a product that clearly filled a niche, both on the consumers side (with millions of happy users downloading the application) and on the side of the apps that are being promoted.
A couple of years ago I got wind of the fact that geocities was about to die and along with many others I did my bit to save geocities, the site now lives on (or as much as I could save of it) as reocities.com.
At the time I didn’t think too much of it, a small thing to do really. But over the years, after many thousands of emails from people that are insanely happy that their old webpages, photos of loved ones (sometimes deceased) and tons of other memorabilia have not been lost it became clear to me that this really was something that had to be done.
I hope this post will save some lives.
With some regularity I read articles about some amiable, accomplished and brilliant young kid that decides to end their life in the start-up scene. Invariably they’ve managed to come a very long way along some perceived curve of success and then there is a snag. Either they plateau in their growth, the start-up tanks or there is some other hiccup that causes trouble.
I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this. Acquiring domain knowledge is an essential component in the development of software that really works well for its users. A programmer that has to automate a warehouse but that has never picked an order and doesn’t have a clue about actual logistics is going to be writing far less effective software than someone that has done a few shifts on the floor.
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
QnX was a pretty interesting development for me, it was the first time that I used an OS that used message passing for its internals and that ran the file system, the network system, the scheduler and all other i/o as separate processes. Quirky, but interesting and an opportunity to learn.
Looking at the site earlier today I suddenly noticed a couple of links to sites that I would never ever think of endorsing through my blog.
A ‘what is this’ link explained that this was disqus’ way to thank me for using their comment system, a chunk of my webpage in between the comments section and the article body was claimed in order to attend visitors to my website to interesting content which they claim I ‘recommend’.
Over the years I’ve owned quite a few computers. An endless series of PC compatibles that mostly differed from each other in CPU speed or memory capacity. But before the PC era computers were a bit different in that they differed vastly from each other. The advent of the PC homogenized personal computing to a large extent, this is now due to the proliferation of mobile platforms and various tinkerer devices (Raspi, Arduino, etc) changing again but for the longest time it seemed as though x86 was what computing was all about.
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working off-and-on on a little side project. The idea is that there are lots of people that are not in a position to visit a university or that don't have a public library with 'access' at their disposal but that do need to be able to read scientific papers. Ever since the advent of the world-wide-web the funding for public libraries has slowly but surely dried up.
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
I’ve earned a good part of my life’s income to date taking other people’s C code, cleaning it up, making it work and then making it work better.
The 14th of August, 2003 was an interesting day in many ways. I’d just taken the family down to Toronto to spend a day there and pick up our newly minted passports at the Dutch embassy. We had some fun in the city seeing the sights, visited Niagara Falls and were on the way back on a sunny August thursday afternoon. What could possibly go wrong? We pulled into a gas station just outside of Barrie.
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on the planet at the moment and there isn’t a week that I do not come across some bit of information that re-inforces that view.
Hello again, Hackernews.
I tried to post this on HN but the limit is 2000 characters.
Two weeks ago to the day I asked for your help in finding a lawyer for a HN’er that was about to be arraigned in front of a Delhi judge.
The original thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739649
To say that the results were overwhelming would be an understatement but I don’t have more superlative words in my vocabulary.
After moving to ‘the Island’, a place I won’t make too obvious here to protect the innocent and the guilty alike we settled down and built a house. We got to know a lot of people and were quite happy to employ a few of the people there to help run our various businesses.
We had money in the bank and a very positive outlook on life, the breathtaking nature and some hard earned time-off had renewed the store of energy that I had come to rely on over the years.
There are lots of bad things that you can insert into your system through various ways that all seem to be represented in physical form as white powder. Heroin, Cocaine, various other chemicals that people will consume in order to alter their state of consciousness. I hate drugs, with a passion. I’ve seen up close in many people during my years in Amsterdam what drugs can do to a healthy human body and it isn’t pretty.
Yesterday I wrote up a post that I had on my list of the last couple of years but never got around to. My all time favorite project, building a windmill and some of the stories behind it.
I made a promise to open source the design, and today I finally hope to make good on that promise. This comes with a word of warning though, I am flooded with work at the moment so I do not have the time to make this a picture perfect release.
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they look like simplicity incarnate, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I’m not actually a citizen of this country, I’m a subscriber.
I was born on a rainy morning, the 20th of March 1965, 3:15 am on the outskirts of a big European city. There wasn’t much to do for me other than to drink my milk so I’m kind of surprised that I don’t remember the man with the contract that I signed within a few hours of being born. Stupid me.
In the early days of computing, computers were physical monsters, occupying large rooms or even whole buildings. Acess to them was closely guarded, you were lucky if you had access at all, let alone close-up and personal access. That was reserved for the system operators, the people tasked with the relatively boring job of babysitting the machinery, fixing it when it broke and shunting jobs in and out of the queues.
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a cgi script to get them out to the browser by refreshing the page but this was horribly slow, on the order of one frame every 10 seconds on a very good day, with an annoying flash in between the frames.
There are lots of different things that you use each and every day. Tons of sounds that you hear every day and lots of things that you can see for yourself.
But there is also a class of sounds, views and utensils that once were so common that every person (in the developed world at least) came into contact with them almost every day of their lives. And in spite of that those things are gone, pretty much forever except for maybe the time when you view and old movie.
A while ago I was in Germany on a business trip, to strike a deal over licensing a bunch of software that I wrote with a German company that was operating in a related field and that wanted to branch out. We weren’t established in the German market at the time and I figured that it is better to have a chunk of the profits without the work than to have nothing at all.
When one business sues another to protect their income stream for the most part this is an admission of failure.
Failure to realize that the market never stops moving and that as a consequence there is no such thing as a guaranteed income stream is a mistake that can cost you dearly. Savvy business owners realize this early on and plan for the future, even when it looks as if their product lines will have indefinite life and that the competition is asleep at the switch.
With some regularity the question of whether or not anyone can program comes up. It irks me that this is positioned as a black-and-white matter, as if there is some kind of bit that flips that determines whether or not someone can program or not.
Of course it isn’t that simple. The question of how good someone can theoretically learn how to program is almost entirely divorced from how well they actually can.
Being acquired is one if the positive outcomes of starting a company, it means that some other - presumably larger - company agrees with the vision and the product created by the smaller entity and has decided to express this agreement with an offer that was substantial enough that the owners of the smaller company thought that it was good enough. It turned their risky venture into a much less risky one and gave them compensation for the risks taken into a account weighed against the possible future payouts multiplied by the risk of continuing to run the business.
There is an old proverb that says that “Those that can do, those that can’t teach.”. Now, I don’t really agree with that proverb at all. In fact, some of the people that had the most profound impact on my life were my teachers, from my school days and then later those that took time out from their professional life to spend it on me to transfer some of their wealth of knowledge.
There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years, a bit higher in the developed world, lower in other parts (with Angola a shocking low at 40 years!).
So in the next 67.5 years a very large fraction of 7 billion people and possibly even more will die (more than half of those alive today + half of those that have not yet been born), and not that long afterwards the rest, with a few outliers to get older than 100 or so.
Apple just won in their case against Samsung and Tim Cook has posted a memo to Apple employees. I’m not one of those but I feel pretty upset about the stupidity of this lawsuit, the verdict and patents in general. Here is the text of the memo with my comments: Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators everywhere. Yes, it was a very important day. Innovators - real innovators - were given a chance to show that there is a huge difference between minor features, interface elements and true innovation, as well as between obvious solutions to simple problems and non-obvious ones.
One of the most tiring memes that float around free services is that if you are not paying for them you must be the product, as in you are ‘sold’ to advertisers.
Being ‘sold’ to advertisers is not unique to free online services - insofar as this actually happens. There are companies that specialize in selling your ‘profile’, these are called credit bureaus and direct marketing bureaus. Most online services do not operate like that (though, for sure some of them do).
Every now and then I get really weird ideas. This is one of them :)
How about a startup game? Not unlike monopoly, but with a lot more realism to it.
The game would start off with a (possibly faily high) number of people being given a fixed amount of savings, say $5000 (play money).
After that they’d be given several opportunities: take an idea from a stack of predefined ideas that are ‘open’ by bidding for them, or a random idea from a blind pile.
If you’re good at what you’re doing and you have friends in the start-up scene then there is a chance that at some point you will be offered the chance to join a newly minted company. Imagine two guys, one has the idea for a product, the second can sell it. They incorporate, maybe they have a bit of savings, maybe they have a third guy with some money as an initial investor.
When you’re in ticket-closing mode it is all too easy to find the cause of some issue, fix it, close the ticket and move on.
But that’s a little bit too fast. You’re missing out on three things when you go about it that way!
The first is relatively easy, that bug that you just fixed was not caught in testing, so before you actually fix it you need to write a test that fails, if only to prove that the issue really goes away after you’ve applied your fix.
Some ideas are so tempting, would be so unbelievably great if they were true that they will never die out.
And investors, especially the non-technical ones typically have very little in terms of defenses when it comes to evaluating these when they land on their desks in the form of an investment memo. Especially if they’re nice people, angel investors looking to help out a fellow would-be entrepreneur.
What drives this cycle of recurring nonsense (other than greed or hope) I’ll never know, but recur it does and even though I see only a very small fraction of all the proposals sent to all investors I have still seen some of these repeated over the last 20 years or so.
Apple is suing Samsung and has successfully obtained an injunction because of a novel interpretation of the term ‘irrepairable harm’.
Tough luck for Samsung it seems. Apple had their patent filed December 1, 2004.
At the time for almost 13 years I had a program out there with a bunch of customers that they used to search their own internal documents collected in chunks of data called ‘books’.
The reader for MS-DOS, titled book.
Every now and then someone hits the jackpot. An easy concept, maybe an app or a small website that makes a ton of money. Or one of those 10 year overnight successes.
Congratulations! Seriously! I’m really happy for you and I hope that it will last you for a long long time to come.
One thing you probably don’t want to do (edit: if your ‘trick’ can be easily cloned) is to brag about it in an open forum.
Best practice has it that when you move content around for whatever good reasons you have that you should do it using a 301 redirect.
If you’ve done this in the past and it looks like it works the way you intended then good for you.
What you probably didn’t realize is that browsers cache 301 redirects agressively and there is nothing short of a complete cache wipe by the user that you can do to re-vive a url that has been redirected.
In the early days, even if the fruits of the labour of programmers could be used for destruction (for instance, to compute the trajectory of a missile) the work itself was as far as I can see always creative.
Codebreaking, a long time programmer pastime is all about reading or at least being able to read, and so not about destruction. Even if it may appear that way on the surface, especially with the word ‘breaking’ in there.
An industry is dying.
That’s should be sad thing but this time around it is actually a good thing.
That industry is the media industry, the companies that got insanely wealthy by playing both ends - their consumers and the providers of their merchandise, the artists they pretend to represent - against the middle.
They are not going to go without a fight, that’s for sure. To date we’ve only seen the warmup, if that, and we’re headed for the real showdown.
Most of sales is concentrated on getting to ‘yes’, in fact there is a book with that exact title and many more that aim to achieve the same goal.
Over the years I’ve found that for many customers my job is not to get to ‘yes’ but to get to ‘no’. For some reason or other I discover during the pre-contract phase talks about some job or other that the fit between what they need and what I have to offer is sub-optimal.
And I used to think that was all there was to it. Sure, I would test my code but typically that was limited to testing whether expected input produced expected output.
Since about a year I’ve become a convert in the school of testing. Test, test, test. Only after all the edge cases have been tried and code coverage is as high as I can get it without contortions I’ll say that code actually works.
It could easily be the title of a Peter Greenaway movie.
Every software project that is remotely successful needs all four of these. If you can embody all of them in one person in the same project then all I can say is ‘lucky you’. But over the years I’ve found that depending on the project that can be four or more people. I know people that are great at starting projects, they are always on to something new and great.
When you submit a sample for genetic analysis you are not just making a decision for yourself.
You are also making a decision for all of your children, their offspring and all of your ancestors, your brothers and your sisters and their offspring.
In fact, you’re making a decision for everybody that is a blood relative.
With the number of bits present in a typical genetic sample this is still more than sufficient to identify people that have not consented (or that might not even exist yet, or any more) to having their genetic data analyzed if you did not submit your sample in an anonymous way.
I’ve been wondering for a long time what exactly the added value of Google+ is to Google, and why it is that they are pushing it as hard as they do. After all Google has tried ‘social’ before and many voices have been raised effectively saying that Google should concentrate on their core business, search and leave social to others. But what if they had no choice? What if they actually needed social, and needed it badly?
Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they’ll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C.
The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful.
How powerful is usually best described as ‘just too little’ and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do.
The second part of this mini guide. the first part is here: http://jacquesmattheij.com/Due+Diligence+survival+guide .
What I’ve done is to analyze the lists of questions and main subjects from past due diligences to give you an idea of the areas that are generally touched on.
Note that this is not a ‘full’ list by any stretch of the imagination, every company is different and I spend a fair amount of time customizing the process to the target company.
If you plan to go and do your own company, or a company together with a bunch of buddies or some other wild thing you plan then I want you to realize this to the core of your being or you probably should not even start until you do: you very likely will fail but it doesn’t matter one bit.
The only thing that really matters is that you try and not succeeding is already much much better than never starting
As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial. One of the more painful ones was the fact that the Dropping out is probably not for you post gave people the impression that I’m against studying the arts, literature or any other non-hard science.
I guess it was to be expected the way I phrased things there so let me take a moment to correct this perception.
If you came in to information technology from the ‘soft’ side and you view a computer as a chunk of black magic that allows your screen, keyboard and network connection to function and you are curious about what goes on inside then this article is for you.
We’ll start off with some very simple concepts and slowly expand to more complicated stuff, I’ll try to write this in such a way that a minimum of prior knowledge is required.
Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because ‘software engineers’ are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I’m a programmer. It’s what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is.
The following piece pre-supposes that if you are in school or university you’re doing so to learn something that is:
a) useful
b) a marketable skill
c) does not put you in debt for the next 50 years even if you do graduate
d) is something that you actually wish to master
If those conditions are not met, please ignore the rest of this post, you have already made some bad decisions and the question of staying in or dropping out is the least of your problems.
Me, I blame the IDEs.
Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70’s and 80’s sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun.
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
It’s a funny thing, because plenty of those applications would have stood a fighting chance if their builders were not that worried. Worries like these lead to premature optimization, and premature optimization is a huge timesink. It also makes it harder to change your application once you become aware of what it was that you should have been building (as opposed to what you actually built).
A while ago I got into an argument about ‘heroes’. Whether I look up to Steve Jobs more than Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or something to that effect.
The funny thing is that I look up to none of them.
Sure, they’ve created wealth beyond belief and they’ve been very influential in their own right, I even use some of their products. But they’re not my heroes.
My heroes are a pretty odd list, it contains names that may not even ring a bell to most people.
Recently I came upon a post on hacker news about a man that had quit his job and that recounted his failure, after a full six months. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102143
First of all, I’d like to thank the author for having the guts to write this out, some of it is really painful and he’s quite the man to stand up like this in front of large community and speak his mind. That alone marks him as someone that will one day make it big.
On http://www.takethislollipop.com/ there is a nice little movie that shows you what the implications of enabling a facebook app could be in a way that is hard to ignore.
I sent the link to my s.o. and a bunch of friends and extended family and the responses I’m getting are interesting to put it mildly.
Of course being the messenger is a pretty sure way to get shot at but it certainly seems that this video is a way to break the ice and get people to think a bit more about their online privacy.
Until I was 30 the word ‘headache’ didn’t even exist for me. I never really understood what other people were going on about. But that changed. From mild and short ones it went to longer and worse ones rapidly.
I’m not the kind of person that complains about health issues but it got to the point where I couldn’t sit behind the screen for any length of time without my eyes wanting to close themselves without permission because of the splitting headache I would develop.
Since a day or so the google cache links are gone. They’ve moved into the ‘instant preview’ non-feature. If they’re there at all (and in plenty of cases they seem to be missing).
Now that’s a pretty dumb move. If it isn’t broken please don’t fix it.
For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use. Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don’t need and stuff that you do need gets removed.
I love reading papers and books about computer science. Anything at all that I can learn from how to be better at my chosen profession (I’m still mostly a programmer, even if I do other stuff as well) is great.
That said, I have a handicap. It takes me an hour or more to get my head wrapped around a bunch of mathematical expressions, when I could probably digest the code in a few minutes.
For many business people that go ‘the long way to success’ with a software development background (see http://jacquesmattheij.com/three+roads+to+the+top+of+the+mountain)) there is a natural progression of advancement:
being employed
consulting
product development
developing a service
I’m not saying it’s a law and that you have to follow all these steps, but I’ve seen enough people make it that way and also enough people that got stuck to identify a fairly common pattern.
With some astonishment I’ve been reading through the terms of service of the google wallet system, which is rumored to launch today.
http://www.google.com/wallet/privacy.html
The basic idea here is that google will have access to your full payment history, associated with your google account, so right next to your search history, and if you use gmail next to your emails as well. Already there are a lot of data protection agencies worried about the amount of data that google has at its disposal.
Of all the publicly aired dirty laundry slugfests the message by Paul Carr in his resignation last week was one of the worst ever. Really, the level couldn’t possibly get any lower.
Or so I thought.
I don’t think I’ve ever linked to a TechCrunch article from this blog, but this time I’ll make an exception: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/paul-i-accept-your-resignation/ sets an improbable new low for a new editor to an online publication. Way to go to keep the moral high ground on this one, not only is the new editor willing to lower himself to the level of those slinging mud, he’s happy to descend a little further down and shows that he cares less about the publication he works for than he cares about his own ego.
Over the years I’ve read in quite a few places that programmers are somehow ‘special’, that there is something unique about the ability to program, and that if you haven’t got that (whatever it is) that you won’t make the cut.
It is rumored to be genetic, and it is just too bad if you don’t have it, better forget about becoming a programmer. Just what it is is something that we unfortunately can’t tell you, let’s call it the programmers gene.
For a start-up one of the most critical single numbers is ‘cash on hand’ (well, that goes for most companies but for a start-up it is even more critical because there is no income stream yet to match expenses in the pre-launch phase).
Typically the amount of cash-on hand divided by your fixed expenses gives you your remaining runway (the amount of time that you have before you have to take off).
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ The Official FAQ is here: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of this stuff has been gleaned from observing HN closely over a long period of time and various little bits of information that were dropped by PG in HN threads.
When Acorn won the contract to produce the ‘BBC Micro computer’ I’m fairly sure they never knew what influence their creation would have on the generation of kids that had these as their first computer, either at home, a friends place or in school.
History is about to repeat itself, but on a much larger scale.
The BBC Micros sold for a whopping 2000 guilders when I was a kid, it took me months and months of really hard work to be able to afford one, sans disk drives (that took a bit longer still).
When you are running a successful start-up company and you have the choice between attracting outside capital and growing organically there are lots of things to consider.
One thing many people presented with this choice will fail to notice is that the simple act of going after funding (even if successful) has costs associated with it that you will need to recover in the funding round itself. And if the funding round is not successful then you will be in a worse position than if you had never attempted to find funding in the first place!
What is due diligence? If you’re running a company and you are doing something that either requires an investment or attracts the attention of competitors or other parties interested in buying a part or all of your stock or your business then sooner or later you’ll run into the words ‘Due Diligence’.
The response to those words ranges from indifference to fear or even hostility, mostly based in a lack of understanding or familiarity with the process.
A friend of mine in the Dutch small town of IJmuiden (on the coast, mostly known for its huge steel mills) asked me if I wanted to relieve him of an old player piano sitting on the first floor. I didn’t have any use for such a device but I found a man that did, the owner of the Dutch pianola museum. A whole day of work with pulleys and rope (and lots of swearing) later I’d managed to maneuver the pianola out over the staircase hole and slowly down the two flights of stairs.
Developers tend to like their machines as big and as fast as they can get them. Who would blame you if you spent all day with your tools that you’d get the best tools possible?
Nobody will, but there is a problem inherent in owning the latest and the greatest hardware and software in order to develop mainstream applications.
The problem is that the majority of your users will be one or even two generations behind the machine that you develop with and most likely test on.
Sometimes I can’t sleep at night with silly questions keeping me up. Last night it was this: if there is such a thing as a Planck length (1.6 x 10^-35), and there is such a thing as a ‘speed limit’ for the universe as we know it (c, the speed of light, or 300,000,000 meters per second), then there should be such a thing as the ‘Clock Frequency of our universe’, the maximum distance you can travel per second / the smallest possible distance.
I decided to see if I could sell some of my domains, and picked SEDO because they are pretty visible.
While setting up the domain I noticed they do ‘domain parking’ as well, which will take the traffic on unused domains and monetize it via ads associated with keywords that you tag the domains with.
So I figured that maybe instead of just using the service to sell domains I could also use it to generate a bit of income offsetting the annual cost of the domains.
A couple of years ago, one sweltering hot afternoon in Toronto I was visiting a friend, a long time internet entrepreneur named Richard.
Richard and I got to talking about our businesses and at one point he asked me how much I was charging for the product on my website. I gave him the figure, it was $4.95. He started laughing. “Double it!”.
Right. Double it. My inner skeptic said ‘no way’, but it kept nagging.
This is nice example of how not to deal with feedback on your software:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=52725
An end user that gives a very detailed and complete report about a major issue in a piece of software gets given the runaround to produce ‘test code’ whereas the example given is perfectly clear without any test code.
Proof that it does not affect just ‘one user’ and that people run in to this with some regularity: http://bugs.
Introduction
With more and more people getting on the online start-up bandwagon and with greater numbers of them than ever before doing this for the very first time I feel there is a need for a ‘code of conduct and ethics’, to make sure that people and companies signing up for these new services will not be left hanging at some point in the future if circumstances that were unforeseen at the start come to pass.
Just today while reading some code I came upon the following little gem:
assert(someinitialization() == FALSE);
In code that has been in production for a long time but that exhibited subtle bugs, which mysteriously vanished whenever someone tried to debug it, so they left the debugging on (with a considerable performance penalty) just to avoid having to fix the problem. I figured I’d take a crack at the issue and started to simply read the code looking for anything out of the ordinary having to do with debugging.
When I was a kid and for the first time interested in electronics (to me that meant anything that did not involve just wires, switches, batteries and lamps) we were just coming out of the ‘tube’ era in to the solid state era.
So naturally, ‘tube’ hardware was to be found left, right and center, and any clever big city kid knew the garbage collection days for the whole place by heart.
Every now and then technology makes a quantum leap while you’re not paying attention and then it seems as though you’re living in the future when you finally ‘get the news’.
Augmented reality is a thing that everybody has been thinking about and toying with but besides Layar I’ve yet to see examples of it that didn’t strike me as either frivolous, contrived, stupid or a combination of all of the above.
For the last two months I’ve been working on re-factoring a big chunk of C code. It’s a fun job and I really like doing it but I felt that I wasn’t putting in as much time as I would have liked.
I am very easily distracted and it takes me a long time to get going again after a distraction occurs so I figured I’d have to do something about it or I would end up feeling bad about taking on this job because even if the pay is by the hour they would of course like to have the job done at some point.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog. If you’re wondering why, read on:
In the start-up business, people are always telling each other what it is that you need most: co-founders, a minimum viable product, you’ve got to be agile, and who knows what else.
But an overlooked factor is that of a solid network of long time friends.
The value of such a network may not be readily apparent, it’s not going to show up on your balance sheet, when you get an investment nobody will do due diligence on your business related friendships.
Education is one of the most important things that we as a society are engaging in, in part because it ensures the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, but also because it sets the direction for all possible future paths for our society.
Recently I came upon this quite amazing talk by Sir Ken Robinson, with an equally amazing animation to go with it. If you have 11 minutes to spare and you think education is an important subject or simply if you have children then please watch the video below.
Today it is exactly 12 1⁄2 years ago that one of the great leaders of our world died.
I’m not thinking of some president or other official lording it over a stretch of land, but I’m thinking about one of the most humble and benevolent rulers the world has ever had, a person without whom you’d likely never be reading this, and he’d be the first to frown at the term ‘ruler’ being used in association with his name.
Living with a programmer must be a pretty frustrating experience. For example, programmers speak about this mystical place called ‘the zone’, where they hang out when they’re at their most productive.
The Zone is real. At least, it is for me, and probably you are familiar with some variation of it. The best I can compare it with for non-programmers is the feeling you get when you’re totally immersed in a book or a movie, when the world around you seems to disappear and the only thing that remains is that which you are concentrating on.
Interesting developments on Hacker News, the comment scores are no longer visible and there is a concerted effort at trying to preserve the perceived quality and the atmosphere of the place in spite of very rapid growth.
Whilst I very much appreciate these efforts and hope sincerely that they succeed (HN is still my favorite haunt, even if I stopped contributing it is the best place to stop off for a bit of ‘light reading’ on a variety of subjects that interest me after a couple of hours of hard work) I’m somewhat pessimistic on whether that’s even possible.
In this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438564 thread HN user ‘Icey’ points out that PG has said that “HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.” (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403868)..)
I’m aware of the name ‘Hacker News’ and that it tends to suggest that the focus should be on hacking, but the original name of the site was ‘startup news’ and it looks as though I’ve been advising lots of people to join HN for all the wrong reasons.
I’m a data junkie, I have to confess to that.
Hi, my name is Jacques and I have a problem. Whenever I see a large chunk of structured (or even unstructured!) data pass by I just have to have a copy. It’s not that I’m a packrat, it’s just that large gobs of data are always inspirational in some way or other.
What could you do with that data, in what new ways could you slice and dice it to get new insights, in what ways can you combine it with data that you already have to enable you to do new things.
When MSX and Atari ST were still ‘hot’, I contracted for a short while for a game company in the Netherlands, called Aackosoft, in Leiderdorp, a small town near The Hague. The reason it was only short was because the company failed spectacularly (the financial director came in one night and started shredding documents, I just packed my bag and left). Other than the management, the people working there were great.
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} [img 00:24] Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Brian Chesky - Founder, Airbnb Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383
[img 00:40] Brian Chesky: Hey, guys, can you hear me? Alright. Thank you for waiting it out, and today I’m basically going to talk about the first thousand days of Airbnb. When I got the e-mail from Paul Graham, he asked me to speak, and I said, alright, what should I talk about, and Paul said, you should talk about when you were powerless and obscure.
Apologies for the tone of this piece but I’m pretty angry right now.
GoDaddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons, went out of his way to do his bit for the community. He traveled all the way across the world to Zimbabwe to rid a local village of a troublesome elephant, and got the locals to slaughter the animal wearing GoDaddy hats. Way to go, what a great guy.
There isn’t a snowballs’ chance in hell that this whole thing was scripted from the start, of course.
Meet the Myriad Group. 3.7 Billion apps shipped to over 2.2 billion phones.
The Myriad group brings social networking and other applications to a vast range of devices from the lowest of the lowly phones to the most advanced smartphones, but they concentrate on the low end phones and for a good reason.
They’ve got a software product that allows android apps to be run on non-android devices and their whole strategy seems to be that any application should be available to any phone through a series of very clever hacks.
With all the attention shifting to freemium and charging directly for the product, I think it’s time to make the case for advertising as a valid way of creating or augmenting the income you make from a web property.
Over the years, I’ve shifted ‘models’ several times. Initially, it was all advertising, then we moved to subscriptions, and now we have a mix of both. Typically, the ads bring in about 40%, while the subscribers the remainder.
The hallmarks of a bubble in tech are many, but in general, it is agreed upon that:
high valuations without corresponding track records, an increase in the number of deals, lots of hype, media frenzy, turnover and profits no longer matter, the prices of 'subject' domains going through the roof, everybody trying to get in on the action, are all good indicators of a bubble in progress.
Right now, I think it is safe to conclude we’re in a bubble, even if some experts are pretty outspoken in stating the opposite.
In the lifetime of any business there will be at least one, and possibly several crises that are ‘life threatening’. In other words, if you deal with them in the wrong way, your business may cease to exist.
During the decade+ that I’ve been running ww.com, we’ve had several such crisis situations, and even though each of those probably aged me a year or so in a few weeks’ time, we somehow managed to stay alive through all of them.
I’ve seen more than a few people comparing record labels to venture capitalists recently and this is not a nice comparison to make. Let me try to explain why I think that comparison is (a) false and (b) not nice.
True, there are some similarities:
Both VC's and record labels invest money in risky ventures Both VC's and record labels tend to have more legal experience than the parties they deal with Both VC's and record labels hope that by scoring the occasional hit that they can offset the losses from those ventures that did not work out Both VC's and record labels have a revolving door where 'hopefuls' pitch (or send in demo tapes) in order to get a chance at being 'funded' But that’s as far as any comparison should go.
If you post this to Hacker-News I’ll flag it! Hello there. Today is my birthday, and like any self-respecting nerd the best birthday present you could give to me is a ‘geek toy’. Tablets are all the rage, but I just received something better than that. It runs Unix, it runs indefinitely on a single charge, it works in bright daylight and as far as I can see it functions in spite of subtle bugs in the code.
This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in that direction, but I’ll do my best to keep it general, and to make it ‘location independent’.
Today ww.com celebrates its 13th birthday. Since the day that it first started it has had quite a bit of effect, in spite of only being a ‘lifestyle’ business. We never set out to change the world, we simply set out to make something useful and we wanted to do so by writing our own ticket. In spite of that we managed to have quite a bit of impact. Here is a short rundown of the things that stand out for me as having changed the world for the better:
Make something people want, the new mantra of starter-upper types all over the world seems to have taken root. It’s a great little soundbite, and it’s the essence of the reason behind many start-ups that failed, they were making something but not something that people wanted.
You could do a lot worse than to have that tacked to the wall above your monitor. It beats ‘build it and they will come’ by a considerably margin.
For the first couple of years of my career (for want of a better description), whenever the words ‘you can’t do that’ were used I took them literally. It meant to me that whatever it was that I had set my head to was not possible. So I turned the other way to study some other problem, one that presumably was solvable.
Then one fine summer afternoon I got hired by a guy that wanted to create a random code based on microscopic glass beads.
Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety.
This happened long ago, at a (fair sized) company that shall remain nameless. The software was a chunk of code that had been maintained by a single guy that had been fired recently and was a core component of a commercial system.
A while ago an anonymous HN user wrote an ‘Ask HN’ titled: “HN: Just received an offer for our company, what now?” That thread contained some of the best advice that I’ve seen on HN and with the thread now deleted (for good reasons, which is why I’m not linking to it here) and my promise to summarize it, I felt I should do as good a job as possible to organize the advice in that thread in a more structured form, which is why it took quite long to do the job.
Improving your financial situation substantially compared to where you are today can be done in many different ways, here I’ll outline three of them and one of those three in a lot of detail.
Of course there are many more roads, think of this article as a general map. In the end, money is a tool, not a goal in and of itself, but by temporarily declaring money the goal the discussion gets simplified to the point where you can measure your headway in a very straightforward manner.
It’s always fun to review these ideas a few weeks after I first had them, usually the majority looks bad on this second ‘review’ and they don’t make the cut.
Sometimes I feel pretty bad about that, especially if someone goes and makes one of the ones that didn’t make the cut into a killer :)
I’ve been asked a few times now why I do this, John Graham-Cummings started this whole thing with his 1000 bad ideas post, and I followed up with post of my own.
What a programmer does for a living is best illustrated by writing a program yourself.
So, today, you’ll write your first program!
“But I don’t know how to!”
Don’t worry, you’ll manage, it is not all that hard. The program is going to be in a language called “English”.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you already know English, so that will make it a bit easier than if you had to learn a new language for this.
I just read some bozo’s claim that programmers don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 / day and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Of course we get out of bed for less than 10,000 dollars per day, and I’m pretty sure that the author would be right there lining up for $5K per day, no questions asked. And probably substantially less than that, just to be able to finance another year of freewheeling travel in a few days of hard work.
The other day I wrote a bit about how I got in to programming and the most common criticism was ‘but you are some kind of gray bearded guru, and I’m not so I can’t relate’. Pretending that there is no gray in my beard no longer fools anybody, however ‘gray beard’ usually does not refer to someone in their 40’s but to the likes of Postel, Woz and Ritchie. So, to be lumped in with them is flattering but really does not do justice to the gap between the gods and mere mortals like myself.
Technology people are without a doubt the most inept group when it comes to negotiating for compensation. There are two major problems that dog them. The first is that they usually actually like their jobs. As long as they get to work with the cool tech and the neat toys, they’ll sleep under their desks if they have to.
The second is that they are spectacularly bad at estimating their own market value.
When I was 17 and a high school drop-out I went to work for a bank. My mom was ecstatic, I had a job, in spite of my failure to ‘get an education’. Never mind that the job that I got was mailroom gofer. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a mail runner for a bank. And run I did. So fast that people complained about it because I made them look lazy :)
My government has gone nuts. It’s tough to admit it, but they’ve enacted laws here that would have made the former Stasi, the VoPo’s, KGB, and other secret services in the former SovBloc countries drool with envy.
And if those countries had adopted laws such as these we’d have condemned them roundly for the privacy violations against their citizens, and we would have pitied those citizens for having to live under such regimes.
Computer programming is one of those things that I’ve never managed to stop doing for long enough that anybody noticed. Once, I took a two year break because I was tired of the kind of code that I was writing, but as soon as an opportunity presented itself, I got back into it.
It’s scary. If you add up the number of hours that I’ve spent in conversation with editors, compilers, and debuggers over the years, I don’t doubt that they add up to more time than I’ve spent in conversation with human beings.
Open source is, in my opinion, the way of the future. Sites like GitHub and competitors make it extremely easy to collaborate with people from all over the world on projects, and with a click of the mouse you can take an existing project and ‘fork’ it to adapt it whichever way you want.
This is a very quick way to get started on something new. After all, most software projects have a lot in common with other projects, and if you are aiming to producing another open source project anyway, you might as well build on the foundation of already written and debugged code produced by the efforts of others.
When I saw that burning platform memo last week, I thought “ohoh, this is setting the stage for Nokia development being halted, and Windows Mobile to be brought in as the rescuer.”
So, I’m not at all surprised at the announcement made today. After all, when you describe the situation as one in which desperate moves are to be expected, what is the most desperate move you could possibly come up with?
With mounting amazement I read the story of Daniel Kish (The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See).
Becoming blind pretty much sums up my biggest fear, I find it hard to even begin to imagine what that must be like, and closing your eyes for a few minutes and trying to get around in a room is not quite the same because you know that you can open them at any moment and resume your normal life.
In the period of 2003-2005 I was suffering from a fairly serious case of burn-out. I had pretty much all the symptoms even if I didn’t know about them (I only learned about the clinical side of burn out afterward) and didn’t feel like being near a computer, or thinking about, or doing any kind of business. I wasn’t suicidal, and if I was, I’m not sure I care to remember or admit to it, there are limits to what I’ll put out here for the world to see.
Hi there! As you’ve probably gathered from the URL, my name is Jacques Mattheij.
Born in 1965, just in time for the PC revolution to get underway, I’ve been playing with technology since I was old enough to hold a screwdriver (my dad gave me an old typewriter to demolish, I don’t think he foresaw that his would be next).
First it was mechanical stuff, then electrical, then electronics, and pretty soon thereafter software.
I’m going to try to not rehash any of the points that have already been made ad nauseum in the tech press elsewhere, instead I’ll try to lift out some things that so far stood out for me that I think have not had any attention at all. Both of these have to do with the only piece of numerical data that we have about this whole thing.
The first centers around the ‘gameability’ of Bing and the success rate that Google claims to have had with their purposeful injections of gamed pages in to the Bing index.
Not many ideas this month, too busy writing code, and for the first time an idea sent in by someone else. If you want an idea to appear in next months dump, either anonymously or with your name attached to it feel free to mail me (jacques@mattheij.com).
Coming up with these is always lots of fun.
(68) BigEye
BigEye is an idea about a field that I know just about nothing about, so chances are that it’s already been done.
If you try the following query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A.bing.com%2Fsearch
Note that that does not search for ‘Bing’, it searches for pages indexed from Bing.
You get about 20,500 search results from Bing. This would not be such a big problem normally but it seems that Google is incorporating Bing search results and crawling Bing search pages, which seems rather odd for a company that has just accused its competitor of doing just that (never mind that Bing only used its toolbar as a url discovery device, including all the context available at the moment of discovery, not to ‘copy search results’ but that sounds a lot better in the press).
Startup School 2010 has just finished and the speakers were, in a word, amazing.
I so much enjoyed listening to some of them, that I’ve asked PG if there was a transcript available somewhere, and if there wasn’t, if he would give me permission to make one.
No transcript existed and permission was granted, so here they are:
(this is a lot of work and it will likely be a while before the job is complete).
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Andrew Mason - Founder, Groupon Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180613
[applause]
Andrew Mason: Hi, everybody. I’m Andrew. I asked Paul and Jessica what they thought I should talk about, and they thought the most useful thing, which I can totally understand, is kind of like talking about all the ways I screwed up and the failures, since a lot of you are probably struggling with the same sort of thing right now.
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Mark Zuckerberg - Founder, Facebook Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178321
Jessica Livingston: So, we’re going to do some Q&A and then we’ll open it up to the audience. Someone time-, keep us on track for time over there. So, as you know, I like to talk about the early days ((of when startups have)) started.
For some reason there seems to be the impression amongst ‘programmers’ (those that program a computer at various levels of competence) that they think somehow ‘differently’ as compared to ordinary mortals.
At the same time this myth has been repeated so often by now that even non-programmers are starting to buy into it.
As far as I know, there is absolutely nothing unique about the way programmers think (and I’m saying that as a programmer, so my perspective is probably slightly skewed but I’m trying hard to keep an even keel here).
I’m going to try to do this every month, you can find older editions of this elsewhere in the blog, the numbering continues from the previous installment.
(64) OnlyUsers
A system that manages a database of netblocks belonging to ISPs and the major search engines and blocks accesses from everywhere else. Included in the blocklists would be zombie nodes and other machines known to be used for things like comment spam and so on.
The last couple of days have been quite a roller-coaster ride for those following the news, I just read an article about a 16 year old kid that got arrested and that’s what is prompting me to write this article.
I understand the sentiments about ‘cablegate’, Assanges arrest and the way governments deal with those they deem to be thorns in their sides are running very high, possibly to the boiling point.
A rough translation of http://tweakers.net/nieuws/71263/anonymous-legt-site-openbaar-ministerie-plat-na-arrestatie.html (Dutch) :
“A group of people operating under the moniker ‘Anonymous’ has successfully attacked the website of the Dutch public prosecutors office as well as the site of the dutch police which was running on the same server.
This was apparently in response the arrest of the 16 year old boy from Zoetermeer in response to the attack on Mastercard.com.
In the meantime the site is sporadically accessible again.
For a long long time people have been complaining about the inability to downvote articles on HackerNews, which means that articles can only be voted ‘up’, and no amount of karma gave you the option to counter an upvote.
It looks like that has changed. A controlled experiment shows that the ‘flag’ option is now counted as a component in the ranking of articles on the front page, effectively allowing you to vote an article down.
This post is top on HN right now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967058 , comments have been switched off so I will have to write this here rather than on HN, but I think that if you’ve been rejected by any angel/incubator or VC you should not take that as a rejection that should cause you to become employee #x in a company that has been funded by that very same angel/incubator.
After all, if you were looking for a job then you would not have been applying with your fledgling startup for funding and / or contacts and expertise.
I’m continuing the numbering system from the previous thread.
(63) Chattical
A forum that is based on chat rather than posts, where the conversation happens in real-time.
Someone posts a subject, which can be voted on as usual, but the page with the subject then becomes a chatroom where the original poster is the moderator. When the moderator steps out for more than an X amount of time the conversation is closed and archived.
This posting really should be labeled ‘turning around the titanic’, part #2, but I feel the current title about actually covers the payload better.
Since July 10th I’ve been working hard at reviving camarades.com, and since September 1st I have a partner in business, a young Englishman named Charles who is a pleasure to work with and whose skills in using modern tools far outweigh mine.
In that time we have accomplished 9% compound growth monthly, rebuilt the entire website from the ground up and added lots of new features.
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Ron Conway - Partner, SV Angel Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178470
Ron Conway: The timer is working. I have a hard job right now, because I have to keep you awake after consuming pizza. But if I fail, I have a backup plan, my good friend MC Hammer is here, and if I see enough people dozing off, Hammer is going to come up and dance to get the adrenalin going.
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Paul Graham - Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180509
[applause] Paul Graham: Hey guys! Thank you, thank you, Andy! That was a really good talk. I wasn’t in the audience, I was walking back and forth behind that curtain there, listening to it. It was very distracting, I don’t even remember what I’m going to talk about [laughter] because I couldn’t concentrate on my own talk, because yours was so much more interesting.
img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em} Startup School Transcript October 16 2010 Dalton Caldwell - Founder, Picplz; Founder, Imeem Link to video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178844
Jessica Livingston: The next speaker is Dalton Caldwell. He was one of the founders of Imeem and now he is the founder of a new company that is working on a new iPhone [edit: and now, Android] app called Picplz.
Running a freemium website is probably best compared with taking water from the sea to some point inland in a very leaky bucket. Every step you make, you lose valuable water, and by the time you reach your destination your bucket will be almost empty, with some luck it is still slightly wet.
The water in the sea in the analogy represents the masses of people that might visit your website.
To reduce the amount of loss you can attack each of the points in the funnel where users abandon the road to the goal. Analyze them, AB-test potential solutions to figure out what works and what does not. Plugging a hole typically involves trying to state a testable hypothesis as to why your users are abandoning you, setting up a test case and running an AB test with the ‘original’ as the A and the new situation as the B.
More buckets is a way of saying that you could do the same thing in parallel. Some interpret this as ‘more websites’, which could be of a different sort. Others read it as affiliates, multiple people that are all carrying water from the sea. Which ever interpretation you give to it, the idea is that by doing things in parallel, you can increase the total turnover in a given amount of time.
Every hole in the bucket causes a loss, so one obvious strategy to reduce the loss is to reduce the number of holes.
The most blunt sites have a ‘free’ product that is paper thin and a single step from the homepage to sales. Other sites take a more gradual approach.
Personally I’m a big fan of a very simple, but useful, free product with an extremely feature complete up-sell that you present at every possible turn.
Using a larger bucket is analogous to getting more traffic in at the top of the funnel. You can achieve this in many ways, for instance, through media buys, user participation, and so on.
What’s very important is that you make it possible to track conversion end-to-end from a certain source all the way to sales related to that source. Like that you can make informed decisions about which traffic works well for you, and which traffic does not.
One thing that has bitten more than one freemium company is to forget to reserve taxes. Typically wherever you’re incorporated you pay sales tax (VAT, BTW, MwST whatever it is called where you live) over the sales to the inhabitants of that same economic zone.
You need to reserve for this because if you get found out to be in arrears this can be levied until many years after with huge fines attached, so best make sure you get this done right.
Most of the parties in the freemium business sell subscriptions, aka as recurring billing.
This means that you will sign up for a payment on a regular basis until you cancel. There is a number of good reasons why you want to use this model as opposed to ‘one shot’ sales:
it lowers the price point to what a user will pay every month instead of what they will pay over time.
How much money can you make with the freemium model ?
Well, it all depends, typically on those two key values, conversion and retention.
Let’s take a very conservative example to give you an idea of what you can achieve with relative ease. If you’ve got 100,000 uniques per day in your ‘free’ bin and you convert at a lousy 0.01% that’s only 10 sales every day. Sounds bad right ?
Web businesses reach the ‘freemium’ stage through many different avenues, but they all have the same ending, somebody needs to pay for the running of the business and there’s profit to be made. It is one ‘monetization strategy’ that you could follow to earn a living on the web.
Some web businesses started out with something simple and developed unexpected traction for their product, then found out they needed to pay their bills somehow.
In the light of the ‘Offer HN’ meme that suddenly sprang up (and which seems to have died down, including the ‘offer’ and ‘offerless’ sections), I wondered how I could contribute myself. This little booklet is the outcome of that, it is the result of me realizing that the most concrete thing I have to ‘offer’ is some experience and a chunk of my time.
A lot of companies on the web use the ‘freemium’ model.
Contrary to the words in the introduction, that only a very small number of users become customers and end up paying, you should strive to find a way to get everybody involved (guests, users, customers) to pay in some way for their use of the service.
Typically, guests contribute eyeballs, and they pay with their time. Eyeballs can be used to get advertisers to pay for the guests and users in stead of them paying their own way.
Affiliates are people or companies that use the access they have to people to help both you and them to make money.
In practice it’s a lot harder than it seems though.
Affiliates and you don’t have your goals aligned. You intend to make money off your paying customers, but an affiliates primary motivation to join in a relationship with you is to make money, period.
And this opens the door to some very nasty tactics, many failed companies can attest to how hard it really is to run a successful affiliate program.
Respect is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot without people actually slowing down and meaning it.
Respect in the context of the freemium model to me means that it can only work if there is respect all around, from users to the people that run the company, between users and from the people that run to the company to the users.
If any of those is not present you are in for a very rough time.
Like just about every other item in the universe, accounts in a freemium product have a life cycle.
If you ever hear a freshly minted freemium product owner say ‘we’re growing at 50% monthly, we will be rich!!‘, you know they haven’t yet worked out what their product life cycle is.
And - make no mistake - that life cycle is always there and when you hit the inflection point where sales no longer outstrip deletions it can cause a world of trouble if you are not very well prepared.
As you progress towards optimal conversion you may find that you’ve made a mistake in the past.
Mistakes that have happened in a traditional business are usually easy to correct, sales have been done or not, and those that haven’t can be done under different conditions.
But in the freemium model, once subscribers are on board they expect to be given that level of service, support and other forms of attention at the pricepoint agreed upon for an indefinite period of time.
Communication is a key ingredient in the freemium business. It is important to know when to communicate with your customers, and what is the right venue to do so.
Typically, email is only used at the two ends of the freemium cycle, on account creation to confirm the details and to make sure the credentials supplied are legit, and upon account termination to make sure that the person really intends to terminate the agreement.
When I saw jgc’s 1,000 (bad) ideas post I was hoping that it would actually have 1,000 ideas in it. Sadly not, but I can imagine he did not want to throw all his ‘good stuff’ out there for the world to see.
Since I have more ideas than I have time, here is my list.
Plenty of the ideas below are bad or even ridiculous, but there is some good stuff in there too.
The last couple of weeks there has been this amazing development on HN, where people are offering goods, services and lodging completely for free!
Typically the header will be “Offer HN: [something]”
The whole thing reminds me of the movie pay it forward (if you haven’t seen then please go and do so).
Because threads on HN tend to disappear just as fast or faster as they come I’ve decided to put them all together here so they’re easy to find in the future.
Having a co-founder is, like everything else a mixed blessing of benefits and disadvantages. I think it’s time to enumerate them so that you have a little guide to decide if you should actively pursue having a co-founder or not, and if you do what kind of qualities to look for and which to avoid.
If you feel I should add more items or flesh them out (or if there are mistakes in here) mail me: jacques@modularcompany.
URL shorteners are a plague on the web. They serve no purpose other than to create a short link to be able to send a longer url via some limited channel (email, chat, sms, twitter, other mobile services) to a recipient.
Partly to blame are CMSs that output urls that are simply way too long.
But URL shorteners are not a solution, they’re a problem in their own right.
If a url shortener goes down (see vb.
According to this article from the German financial times:
http://www.ftd.de/auto/:autonomes-auto-pkw-schlaengelt-sich-fahrerlos-durch-stadtverkehr/50180284.html (in German)
The development of such driver-less vehicles has been under way for a considerable time (for instance the Darpa challenges), and has been part and parcel of science fiction pretty much as long as the genre has been around (for instance in the American popular TV series ‘Knight Rider’).
So far however the actual implementations lagged considerably, but this is as far as I know the first time that a car was able to successfully navigate city traffic without any modifications to the infrastructure, it behaved just like any other car on the road.
AB testing is testing several ways of doing the same thing side-by-side in order to optimize some variable that you measure during the testing period.
For instance, you could try two forms side-by-side, and this will tell you which one of the two ‘converts’ better.
Now almost everybody assumes that when you increase all these variables that you will find the global maximum for your business, but it is extremely easy to throw the baby right out with the bathwater when doing short term tests like this.
The title is to be read in one of those scary voices.
The Pit of Despair is a term that comes from a very cruel animal experiment that was designed to make a model of clinical depression.
In the jargon of World Wide Web start-ups it refers to the period just after a successful launch.
When you launch, for a very brief moment, sometimes only a few hours, if you’re lucky a few days or even weeks you are ‘newsworthy’.
Note: before cutting and pasting through to ww.com to see what the site is all about, please read this: ww.com is a webcam site with 100’s of live streams at any time of the day, we do our best to separate out the SFW and NSFW content but this process is not 100% perfect so if you are at work please do not visit the site unless you are sure that you want to take that risk.
People like Patrick McKenzie have set news standards for openness about your corporate well-being, complete with pie charts of turnover and costs.
But being too open about your new idea may be a mistake.
Recently Zachary Burt (zackattack) launched a website called awesomenessreminders. It didn’t take long for the first imitations to appear, by the hands of none other than mr. ‘Enso’ himself, Alberto Amandi. Grounded in the negative attitude these could be seen as parodies of the original, after all, jerkness and fail are only going to get you so far.
For a long long time I’ve been wondering what to do with ww.com, the site that has been my bread and butter for the last decade.
I’ve tired of the concept of webcams, that happened about 5 years ago or so, and since then I’ve found it hard to get motivated to work on the site. On top of that there was still an issue with the shares to be resolved, which essentially meant that if I worked on it I would have to probably pay more for it.
When you’re a system administrator, and not one of the ‘BOFH’ variety, you have at your disposal all the tools that you need in order to snoop on your users.
A certain SRE (search reliability engineer) working for google had all that power, and then he decided to abuse it.
http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats
Now of course, it is inevitable that google employs people that have access to your data, but like every other person that has access to sensitive information good system administrators are ‘blind’.
There is a book called ‘the selling starts when the customer says no’. It’s been both lauded and trampled for a variety of reasons, but the core, that selling is a job that has a clear starting point, the point where you encounter an obstacle, is one that I believe is very true.
Plenty of times you come across people that have a great product and that have the potential to do very well for themselves but for some reason it does not take off.
Over the past year and a bit I’ve been trying to really ‘grok’ the functional way of programming computers. I’ve been doing it the ‘other’ (imperative) way for over 30 years and I figured it’s time for a change, not because I expect to become suddenly super productive but simply to keep life interesting. I also hope that it will change my perspective on programming. Think of this piece as an intermediary report, a postcard from a nice village in functional programming land.
The start-up from hell. True story.
That ‘true story’ is mandatory here, some of the stuff that you are about to read will sound so outrageous that you might think that this is a work of fiction. That, sadly, is not the case.
To protect the guilty I’ve changed some of the names, they arguably do not warrant such protection but I don’t feel like fending off lawsuits.
This story starts somewhere in 1987, I’d been working for an architectural company in the city of Delft on a cad program to design structural components and after the contract ended I was looking for a new gig.
A couple of years ago, when I was still firmly in the ‘advertising is not a revenue model’ camp I had a pretty heated discussion about what you could achieve with income sources like adsense.
I always was of the opinion that advertising should be treated like the icing on top of the cake, and that it never should be your primary source of income.
There are several reasons for this.
Web servers do their work by advancing a connection through several states.
The first thing that happens is that a new connection is ‘accepted’ from a client that wishes to connect to the server.
Then the server will be a delay until the client sends the request followed by the server reading the request from the client. Requests may span more than one read, so you may have to wait for a bit before the next part of the request becomes available, this is repeated until the request is complete.
Introduction If you’re reading this blog with some regularity and you’re not a technology person, specifically a systems level programmer with a working knowledge of C and what goes on in the guts of webservers this may not be for you. If you’re curious or you are part of that category by all means read on.
Apologies about the formatting of this post, I’m doing al this on a tiny little screen, I’ll try to fix it.
I’ve been involved with the web pretty much since Trumpet Winsock (Thanks, Peter!) was the way to connect your PC to the net and mosaic was the way to browse this new things called ‘web pages’.
It didn’t take long before someone asked me if I could make some software using a technology called CGI to process the data typed in to a form by a user.
Since then a lot has changed.
I’m no fan of Julian Assange, I think the way wikileaks has in recent times converted their ultra clean reputation in to a part of the propaganda machine was less than elegant and will hurt wikileaks in the long run.
BUT…
The concerted effort that is taking place to label wikileaks a threat to security, to suggest that wikileaks (and by extension Assange) have blood on their hands because of the leaking of documents that contain the names of Afghan informers is absolutely dishonest and you shouldn’t fall for it.
I have something of a reputation for fixing obscure bugs. At some point in time you could probably call this a weird kind of hobby, the idea was that if you really had tried everything and you still didn’t find your problem, that I would take a wager for a dinner, either I find and fix the bug and you buy me dinner or I buy you dinner. It was a fun thing to do.
With some regularity people on HN are wondering if they are burnt-out or the suggestion is made that someone is burnt-out.
To make it a little easier to see if you may be suffering from burn-out or not you may need an outside reference. The reason why this matters is that burn-out is a serious condition, and ignoring it when you are suffering from it may cause longer term problems of an even more serious nature, including heart trouble and mental health issues.
If there ever is going to be a tool-freaks anonymous I’ll probably be a founding member.
This started when I was very young, at the ripe old age of three I came in to the possession of a screwdriver (and a garbage found typewriter, which I both got from my dad for my 3rd birthday).
Pretty soon other tools followed, pliers, a small hammer and a universal wrench. By the time I turned five there wasn’t much that I couldn’t demolish!
Resdirector on Hacker News asked a very interesting question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511104, how did your life change after fuck-you money?
For the jargon challenged, fuck-you money is defined as the amount of money that allows you to maintain your lifestyle at some desired level.
Technically, I’m not currently in the posession of ‘fuck you’ money, but I do have an asset that allows me to ‘maintain my lifestyle’ and it has been doing so for more than a decade.
I’ve been trying very hard to enumerate my shortcomings so I can work on reducing or eliminating them. Of course you can only know yourself so much, so in order to get a better grip on this I decided to ask the people nearest to me to be frank and to tell me what I should improve.
One thing stuck out, not because it was a ‘big thing’ but because it was mentioned several times.
When you’re a small company and you get a large competitor in your niche that starts to go after your customers it can look pretty scary. Goliath approaching is an awesome sight, and some people tend to give up right there and then in order to avoid the confrontation.
But that’s a mistake, in my opinion.
One of the sentences that used to be bandied around to describe the ‘worst case scenario’ for a start-up company is the ‘what if microsoft enters our niche’, today most of the times when you hear someone say that sort of thing microsoft has been replaced with google.
In a recent hacker news thread a person asks for some advice on how to fix the underperforming sales division of a newly created start-up ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380381 ).
At some point in the thread he writes: “We are working on that now. It might give us more breathing air but still will keep us with a CEO (him) that I cannot trust professionaly.”
I practically fell off my chair when I read that.
Getting better at estimating is hard, but first, a word of warning.
Before the estimation can even begin you have to have at least a limited draft of a specification that both you and your customer are willing to sign off on, you because you are confident that you can build it and your customer because having that implemented will make them a happy customer. Happy customers are repeat customers, repeat customers is where you will make in time the most of your money.
When you’re a techie founder of a start-up, one day you wake up and you realize that starting a business is great, but that the more successful a business gets the more mundane the work that needs to be done.
In the end, the biggest pay-off is not in the initial idea, the spark of genius that drives the company forward initially, but in the enormous machinery, the life-support system that brings that spark to market and that makes it profitable.
According to this article (dutch) scientists working for the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have succeeded in showing physical evidence of the presence of burn-out symptoms in patients.
For those that don’t read dutch, a rough translation:
“The universities call this a break-through because so far there are plenty of countries where burn-out is not recognized as a real phenomenon, one of those countries is the United States.
By showing through objective means that burn-out is real the door is open to recognizing it as a real issue instead of a purely mental one and makes possible diagnosis and treatment.
The question ‘is programming art or engineering?’ has caused a lot of people to get quite upset with each other. I’d like to answer the question in a way that will hopefully put it to rest once and for all, but even if that doesn’t happen I hope it will give some perspective to those ‘dug in’ on either side of the argument and unable to appreciate that the other side may in fact have a point.
René Sommer is no longer. I got the message rather late, a few days ago I was exchanging some email with an associate at Logitech, and asked him to pass my regards to René, and to my surprise the answer came back that our friend had passed away.
René had died last year, October the 5th of 2009, way too young at 58. We were never close friends, but we did meet on several occasions and it made me appreciate him very much, read on to see why.
I think the ideal mobile computer interface is not a series of buttons, or a touch screen, multi-touch or single touch doesn’t really matter, that’s just a detail.
Computers are here to do work for us, media consumption is great but it is also an activity that for the most part is exclusive (unless you’re talking about background music), but there are plenty of times when you are in the need of some information and not simply looking at some movie or browsing the web.
The European Union is usually heralded as a place where privacy still has some meaning, with the exception of England, which people seem to see in a different light because of the prevalence of surveilance cameras.
Today, while searching for something else I ran in to this page: (dutch) http://www.security.nl/artikel/30389/1/Overzicht_anti-privacy_maatregelen_Nederlandse_overheid.html , which enumerates a series of anti-privacy measures that have been taken in the Netherlands since 2001.
tapping requirement for internet traffic
I’ve been running my own companies since 1986. That’s 24 years now, with some brief stints of employment if a contract was so time consuming that the dutch regulators took it as being equivalent to employment (they do that here to stop employers that try to avoid paying in to social security by hiring all their employees as free-lancers). At the high point of running ‘TrueTech’ we had about 20 full timers and partners, and a bunch of free-lancers.
A chair needs three legs to be stable. On two (or less) it can’t stand by itself, and it’s funny but the same seems to hold true for businesses.
When you’re relying on only one ‘line of business’, or even worse, just a single or only two big customers for your survival then the first hickup will immediately bowl you over.
It’s possible to survive a hit to your income stream, but how much of a hit you can survive depends on how much cash you have in the bank and how big a portion of your total income that hit represents.
Technology gatherings seem to have a disproportional number of people that are true believers when it comes to anti-aging and ‘uploading’ your brain to a computer. One of these is to cheat death by increments, the other the technological equivalent of an afterlife. The first through direct intervention, reversing the normal process of aging, the second by decoupling the mind from the body and letting it continue to function in some kind of substitute substrate, usually presented as a computer.
This post on HN:
http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/how-to-become-a-spammer-as-a-programmer-regardless-of-people-following-you-on-twitter/
And the one that it refers to have me thinking about what SEO, spam and other tactics really are about and how you can draw the line between what really qualifies as ‘spam’ and what is still ‘clean’.
It’s a surprisingly hard problem, it seems that everybody has their own definition of what qualifies as spam and what does not.
Let me outline a bunch of commonly used (and imo very spammy) SEO techniques to illustrate what this is all about:
I’m wondering if this has happened to others on the HN leaderboard.
Jan 11th I was approached by Dana Oshiro from ‘readwriteweb’.
Initially it was just some friendly banter but after the third email it was pretty much an open door that the idea is that I post or write about the stuff that is sent to me.
So I stopped responding at that point because I definitely do not think it isn’t ok to try to game HN in this way, if you want your stuff posted simply make an account and post it yourself, the community will decide either way, you don’t need me for that.
After talking to ‘david927’ and more recently ‘morphle’ my interest in a longtime dormant project called ‘softbricks’ has woken up again.
The idea behind softbricks is a computing fabric that you can create out of simple building blocks connected to each other in two or three dimensions.
Think ‘lego’ but make it calculate.
The question then becomes how simple can you make a brick, how many ‘gates’ do you need to make it all work.
Programmers can usually agree on whether the answer to a given problem posed is ‘correct’ or not.
For instance, in most languages there is an equivalent to the program:
print 3+4 And we expect the output of the program to be ‘7’.
But when you look at cellular automata the concept of ‘correct’ output is more complicated.
For instance, take ‘life’, by Conway.
I assume that everybody is familiar with the game of ‘life’, but in case you’re not, in a nutshell the ‘cells’ on an infinite grid are governed by a few very simple rules:
HN has grown since the time that it was launched, but how much it has grown is dependent on which metric you use.
For the purpose of this analysis I’ve only looked at the users that actually contribute to HN, so that’s people that post and / or comment.
As far as I could resist the temptation I’ve tried not to analyze the graphs but to simply present them with some explanation of what you are looking at, I’m curious what kind of non-numerical trends you can pick out.
Today on HN someone posted this link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7016266/Man-arrested-under-Terrorism-Act-for-Doncaster-airport-Twitter-joke.html
About an English man that got himself arrested for - get this - a tweet.
It’s gotten to the point where you can apparently spend a night in the slammer for tweeting about stuff.
If that isn’t a sign that ‘the terrorists have won’ then I don’t know what is.
What’s next ? Thinking ? Writing ?
So, here I’m going to have to confess… I’m a terrorist too.
This is a terrible mangling of a piece of code by Eric Lavigne (thanks!), I take full responsibility for any lines starting with and the afterword.
I’m a total newbie when it comes to clojure, so when I got my hands on a little clojure program to play the game of ‘island-wari’ I went and dissected it bit by bit, clojure manual in hand to see how it works.
I took the feedback on the original posting to heart, specifically the following items:
there was an error in the graph, I misspelled a tag which caused ‘technology’ to be there twice
dead links were not visibe, this skewed the graph, this was remarked several times.
the legend was less than legible
I’ve corrected those elements in the graph and have put a new version of it in the place of the old one.
HN visitors are generally worried that HN is changing, and most of the worries center (obviously) around whether or not it is changing for the worse.
I thought it would be nice to either know that it really is changing or lay the matter to rest, so I sampled a bunch of postings done since HN was started and tagged them with a number of categories.
Of course I can’t go through all of the items that have been posted through the years but it will give some insight.
I’ve set my mind on learning a functional programming language this year, and after long reading and puzzling I’ve decided that it is going to be clojure. Other contenders were Erlang, Haskell, common lisp and scheme.
Clojure seems to have a lot of direct application to the kind of stuff I’m likely to do and it looks like it is gathering a fair amount of steam.
Hga on Hacker news posted this http://news.
With some regularity articles are being penned about the shortcomings of language x,y or z.
It doesn’t matter which language has it’s turn, be it Perl, PHP, Python or something else, they all seem to get their share of trash heaped on them from time to time.
Invariably these articles become very popular and get linked from all over the web because they appeal to a very human instinct, the fear of the ‘other’ and the group against the individual.
I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the Lambda Calculus because I want to get a more thorough understanding of functional programming. Through the years there have been many times when I thought it is high time to learn ‘lisp’, a little while ago I had a long look at the source of ‘news.arc’ and it started to become a bit clearer how lisp and other functional languages achieve real work, but to say that I fully grok it would be a serious overstatement.
With some reluctance I welcome the coming of the cloud. It’s the logical next step, to offer services to a large number of users should be cheaper than to set them up for yourself due to economies of scale. We should all be better off.
But for now the prices aren’t that competitive, only in very specific use cases (I need 10,000 servers tomorrow and then I won’t be needing them for the next year or so) is there a very clear economic advantage.
The title really says it all, choosing is painful.
I’ve been reading ‘Coders at work’, and this line jumped out at me, from the ‘Joe Armstrong’ chapter.
When I learned how to code, the mid 70’s to early 80’s, on small machines, you had exactly one choice of language, it was ‘BASIC’. The only difference was which dialect (and those dialects had so much in common that if you were proficient in one you could switch to another one in a matter of days).
Occasionally you’ll find that you can land a job that is too big just for you.
At this point you can do one of several things. You can refuse the job because it is too big, accept only part of the job, or accept the whole job and farm out the bits that you can not do.
The latter is interesting, because it allows you to put a margin on the work that you contract out, but that comes at a price, the fact that you are now responsible for other peoples work.
Estimating is part art, part science and a small amount of voodoo thrown in for good measure.
The art of estimating The art part is to be able to look at a specification and to get 'within the ballpark' of what a job is going to cost you in time and hence roughly what it should cost. The science of estimating The science part is in the feedback loop between your past estimates and reality as reported by your time registration system.
What price to pick ? This is a tough one, even for seasoned consultants. There is a joke that a price is never right, if something gets bought it was too cheap and if it sits on the shelf it was too expensive.
Hourly rates Your price should be a reflectance of your skills level and your reputation. In the beginning of your consultancy career I would suggest to lowball the price, but not too much.
Everybody knows what an invoice should look like. Or do they ? On the off chance that you don’t know, here is what goes in to a typical invoice:
your name, address and contact information, logo if you have one the customers name, purchase order number if any, and address, if known contact person the date the invoice is sent line items containing: count, description (can be extended over the next lines), unit price, total price a sub total with all the line item total prices added up any discounts that apply the applicable taxes over the total the grand total payment terms (such as 'payable within 7 days) payment information, such as your bank account number, international routing information and your bank branch id optional in some places, required in others, tax id, chambers of commerce registration id When an invoice is sent, make a todo item to verify that it actually got paid.
Insurance companies make a great play about selling you all kinds of insurance for all kinds of mishaps.
The short version of my advice here is: Don’t, except for liability. The longer version:
If you are the kind of person that wants to have certainty about everything in life then probably freelancing is not for you. It is not without risk and some of those risks are so expensive to insure against that if you did it you’d effectively be working for the insurance companies.
Contracting means that in stead of being paid by the hour you get paid by the job.
Small difference in principle, huge difference in practice!
If you get paid by the hour there is an unwritten contact between you and the customer that you will do your best to make those hours count, but there is no actual agreement on how many hours a certain job is going to cost.
Plenty of skills lend themselves to an independent or freelance work method. Whether yours is one of those is of course the big question, but in general the skills required should be reasonably hard to come by, should allow you to create a relationship with your customers that is repetitive in nature, and should have a remuneration high enough to justify the overhead of running a small company.
Though it is technically possible to do just about any job as a freelancer being an assembly line worker or something like that is not normally done.
Politics is one of the worst aspects of being in business for yourself, at least, it is to me.
There are plenty of people that seem to enjoy the game and that relish the thought of using their skills at politics to establish a position that they would not be able to achieve on merit alone. I’m not one of them.
Chances are that you are also not one of them, but politics, alas are a fact of business life.
Intellectual Property is a tricky matter. Lots of lawsuits every year simply because people are either mistaken about their rights or confused. Or both.
When you work for a boss the situation is clear-cut, you are employed, they own the product of your work.
When you work as a free-lancer the situation is much less clear cut. If you work for hourly rates and your work is ‘transient’, in other words you do not create a product such as a book, a piece of software or a design then there is no issue.
Finding and keeping customers is hard. The problem with describing this part of running a small business is that every small business is different in this respect.
Customers will establish your reputation, which will bring other customers, but how do you get your first batch, it’s the proverbial chicken and egg problem.
Instead of giving you a set of ‘must-dos’ I’m simply going to list those things that seem to work for me, you’ll have to modify them to suit your own situation.
In order to run your consultancy business you will need several tools, I’ve tried to make an exhaustive list here:
A computer
Something good enough to do wordprocessing and spreadsheets on, if you are a creative person (such as a programmer or a designer) that uses a computer to generate the product make sure that it can run the software that you need for your work comfortably.
A place to work
Taxes are unavoidable. In fact, I hope you’ll pay lots of tax! That means you are doing a half decent turnover and that you have a good profit margin.
Joking aside, I’m sure you’ll want to pay your taxes, but not too much. That’s where that bookkeeper comes in. Ultimately though, the responsibility to pay your taxes is yours, not your bookkeepers, and you should be diligent in making sure that you can pay your taxes when they are due.
Self Discipline is the art of motivating yourself and keeping at the job when nobody else is around to tell you what to do.
Being your own ‘boss’ literally means that you have nobody that make sure you are in the office at 8:30, that you put in a productive 8 to 10 hours and that you take your breaks.
You are in total control. That is a great feeling, but not everybody can handle that freedom with the same ease, though I’m fairly sure that given enough time everbody can learn how to do this.
Presentation has everything to do with how you come across to (potential) customers.
If you look sloppy you will be assumed to be sloppy, and this will reflect on your work.
On the other hand if you look like a fashion model then people will assume that you spend time that you should be working on grooming yourself or that you are too expensive.
Somewhere in the middle lies common sense.
Incorporation is the act of creating an entity that has a life outside yourself. The connection between a corporation (a legal person) and real people is usually in the form of shares.
There are several reasons why incorporation is usually a good idea, and not many why it isn’t, so most people that go the consultancy route will at some point incorporate.
Depending on your geographical location your choices will be more or less varied, but in general almost every country has a general palette of choices:
Business ethics is something you get an opportunity to practice almost every day.
Ethics is about two things:
Professional integrity (your reputation) This means amongst other things that you say it like it is, and that you bill for the work done (and not for what you can get away with). It means that if someone asks your opinion on something that you haven't a clue about that you say that it is outside your expertise, instead of making up an answer on the hoof and hoping you get it right.
Dependencies are both comforting and terribly dangerous for a small business.
If all or most of your work is coming from a single customer you are setting yourself up for a painful episode.
Best to minimize these situations, even if the temptation to work for that one huge customer that always pays on time is tremendous.
What will happen is this: as you work for that one customer all your other customers are finding other ways to satisfy your needs.
Customers are your most precious resource. It takes a long time to build up a portfolio of good customers that you have a long-lasting relationship with.
Ideally your customers know what they want, are able and willing to pay for it and value your contribution.
In practice though, it is not always that clear cut. Plenty of customers do not know exactly what they want, but hopefully they have a good idea, and together you can fill in the blanks.
Conflicts are bound to arise sooner or later. There are several kinds of conflicts:
financial
A financial conflict can be initiated by you, the consultant, for instance because a bill has not been paid. There are several ways to deal with this, it depends very much on your relation with the customer to date and your expectations of your future with this customer.
You really do not want to be in this position to begin with, so the assumption is that something has changed, or there is some genuine oversight.
As soon as you can afford it, which should be within several months of launching your fledgling business, get yourself a bookkeeper.
You could save a few bucks by doing your bookkeeping yourself, but in my opinion that’s wasted money. Unless of course you are running a bookkeeping consultancy!
For everybody else it is better to stick to the thing they can do best and spend a little bit of money on a professional bookkeeper.
Banks are great tools, but you have to make sure, like with any tool, that you are in control.
It’s very easy to come to the conclusion that you are at the mercy of the bank and that you have to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to please them.
This is not true, even though it may feel like that at times.
Banks are there to serve you, and you are their customer.
Notes on getting started with the NVidia CUDA architecture. this is in ‘sh’ script format so that you can copy and paste including the comments, but be sure to go step by step, your machine may not match mine (ubuntu 9.0.4), and you will have switch users and exit X windows at some point. Uninstall any existing NVidia drivers that you have or you might run into trouble later. First, you have to get the CUDA implementation and toolkit for your machine: http://www.
This is all done from memory without any fact checking, chances are I’m misremembering stuff or leaving out important pieces, in that case please forgive me, it’s late!
I may revisit this at some point to correct and revise it.
Personal note, I’m a high school drop-out, have been coding since roughly 1978 (when I was 13 or so) and if it weren’t for a few very nice people would have never ever gotten where I am today.
In the dark and distant past of personal computers, before widespread use of networks and data carriers (for a personal computer your choice was cassette tape or, if you were really really rich a floppy disk but no distribution net existed), if you wanted the latest game, here is how it went:
You took your money to the local newspaper stand to pick up a copy of one of those glossy games magazines, took it home and you TYPED in the code that made up the program.
There is a large amount of DNA that does not ‘code’ for any known proteins, this DNA has been labelled ‘junk DNA’, reminiscent of garbage bags and messy basements carrying the leftovers of evolutionary dead-ends.
I don’t believe any of it. Nature is much too frugal to use 90% of our most precious molecules as a garbage dump, I think it is functional, and probably all of it rather than just some of it.
Over the last two decades more and more manufacturing has moved ‘offshore’, in other words to Asia. This is strange, if you really think about it. People have traditionally made and consumed items locally, quality was high and even if stuff wasn’t cheap you could afford what you needed.
That’s all gone out the window now. Container ships carrying just about everything (clothing, shoes, furniture, toys and so on) ply the seas with goods manufactured thousands of miles away from the point of consumption.
Music has always been a very important part of my life. As long as I can remember back (about to age 5, I can’t see much beyond that except snatches of images) there are tones around me that colour my life. Sometimes bright, sometimes darker but they’re always there.
Music is a very special art to me. Paintings, statues and other works of art perish with time, get lost or destroyed.
Information has value, and the value of information is like any other commodity a measure of its scarcity, so as we have access to more and more information the value decreases, eventually approaching 0, but never quite getting there.
From today, when we are overloaded with almost free bits of information travelling backwards in time:
the cost of mobile communications, per minute airtime charges the cost of landline communications up to the mobile phone era the cost of a telegram the cost of a single message relayed by messenger Similar curve: