HN user

dstorrs

936 karma

Full name: David Storrs

Gmail address: david.storrs

Software guy, serial entrepreneur, rationalist, occasional stand-up comedian, fulltime stand-up guy.

Posts27
Comments288
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www.dailymail.co.uk 13y ago

Starry-eyed lover melts meteorite into engagement ring

dstorrs
1pts0
www.latimes.com 13y ago

Oil-funded climate change skeptic reverses self

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3pts0
insidechannelmeter.wordpress.com 15y ago

Advice to developers on managing MySQL

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www.slideshare.net 15y ago

Graphs in the Database: Rdbms In The Social Networks Age (2010)

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3pts1
www.theregister.co.uk 15y ago

Mac daddy predicts all-knowing, all-seeing UI

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Best way to introduce a young girl to computers?

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35pts19
www.bbc.co.uk 15y ago

"Gun Thumball" : UK toy promotes school discussion of guns

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www.technologyreview.com 15y ago

Google-funded startup builds search engine + API for predicting the future

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www.technologyreview.com 15y ago

Cell phones let touchscreens know who you are

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask YC: Why do you disproportionately invest in younger founders?

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39pts57
www.liveleak.com 16y ago

Oil leak crisis...scarily familiar?

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18pts16
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Hosting in the cloud

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6pts5
lifethunder.com 16y ago

Please review the alpha of our startup: LifeThunder.com

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5pts24
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

PayPal Ripe For A Fall; Here's How To Topple Them

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5pts2
machineslikeus.com 16y ago

Religion Survives Only Due To Atheists

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1pts0
machineslikeus.com 16y ago

Magnetic monopoles produced in lab--or, at least, their equivalent

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: How do you explain closures?

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69pts64
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask Y Combinator: Notification information for W2010?

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10pts3
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Email for Startups?

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2pts6
www.nytimes.com 16y ago

Ares-1X Rocket To Launch But Program in Question

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1pts0
machineslikeus.com 16y ago

Reversing Aging: Interview with Aubrey de Grey, CSO of SENS Foundation

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1pts0
machineslikeus.com 16y ago

Gene Therapy Helps Blind Children See

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news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Real Time Web Considered Harmful...Or Not

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1pts0
machineslikeus.com 16y ago

Antidepressants Target the Wrong Thing, and Only Work 50% of the Time

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22pts11
www.psychologytoday.com 16y ago

It's the "Age of the Specialist", even in highschool sports

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1pts0
www.reddit.com 16y ago

Scheme: Good or Bad for Freshman CS?

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5pts6
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Working Hours of Actual Startups?

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6pts7

I gave up on reading newspapers and watching TV news over a decade ago and I can't point to a single way that it's ever harmed me. My basic theory is as follows:

- I miss out on the fearmongering

- I save a tremendous amount of time

- If anything important IS happening, everyone will be talking about it, so I'll hear about it

- Even if I do miss hearing about an important issue, what does it matter? What can I actually do to prevent e.g. the fiscal cliff, or the failure of Lehman Brothers, or etc?

- When it comes time to vote, I talk with my friends who actually care about news / politics and, if use their information (plus a bit of research if needed) to decide my vote

- I read Hacker news or other sites like it because the news that geeks want to know about is far more likely to be interesting / relevant.

Aside from some occasional mild embarrassment when someone asks me an opinion on something I'm not aware of -- which can usually be deflected simply by saying something innocuous and then turning the conversation back to them -- this has worked excellently for me.

What you're talking about is a great example of good-faith communication. Unfortunately, it relies on both parties dealing in good faith, and I've had too much experience with people who won't do that -- they won't give an honest assessment of what happens if their request isn't met. I wish I knew how to handle that.

As a developer, I'd just like to say: thank you for doing this. A good PM is literally worth their weight in silver (at today's price, anyway).

Ok, tell me if I have this correct:

  module Foo
    def hello
      puts "Hello World"
    end
  end

  ...in a different file...

  foo = Foo.new.msg
Q: What does that print? A: There is no way to tell. It depends on what the 'using' line (not shown) is, and whether anything has refined 'Foo'.

Seems like bad action at a distance, to me. Or am I missing something? The example about the effects of refining 'each' is also pretty disconcerting.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm actually pretty much onboard with a lot of the Libertarian policies that I've heard. Like anything, of course, I think it can be taken too far. So, when you ask for a "very specific example", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind:

- City governments have health inspectors that check local restaurants, and food-product companies to ensure they are using good ingredients, that the equipment is clean, etc. In a libertarian world (at least, certain versions of one) this practice would not exist. Now think what happens when a Monsanto executive realizes that paying the occasional legal suit is cheaper than keeping their packing plants clean and disease-free.

After a marriage and a divorce I can expand on this (marital lessons reframed for business though).

There's a second question to ask: how often do you fight?

If you are generally in alignment but disagree sometimes / occasionally, that's good. If you seem to disagree most of the time, that's a problem.

Other specifics I'd look at:

- are you aligned on the fundamentals? (e.g. B2C vs B2B)

- do you fight the same way? If one of you prefers rational discussion and the other prefers combative, whoever-sticks-longest-wins then it's going to go poorly

- how do the fights end? "ok, after thinking about it, I think you were right about XYZ" is very different from "fine, whatever. I'm tired of arguing."

- do you resolve issues and come to agreement or do the same topics come up again and again?

- after a conclusion is reached and a plan is put together, do both parties fulfill their pieces of it reliably and on time?

One very simple way to avoid issues during fights is the 'I statement': "I feel my opinions get ignored a lot..." is a lot less escalation-inducing than "You always ignore my opinions".

The kindest thing I can say here is that I find your interpretation odd and that it contains some substantial And unusual interpretation of the text.

Melanie said she tried the standard (accellerator leading presumably to VC) route, it didn't work, she tried another, nonstandard route, it did. Now she is sharing the lesson that alternatives exist.

I consider Zuckerberg to be rich. As far as I can tell from his and FB's public-facing personas, he's a failure at the things that really matter -- integrity, positive impact on others, respect of peers for anything other than wealth acquisition.

"I am doing a startup because...."

So, to you, it's not a startup unless it's what the OP calls the "go big or go home" approach. The OP asserts that that is not a critical element of starting up a business, nor a healthy one, nor necessarily one that will increase your odds of success.

Honestly your argument seems odd. If you were able to do a successful company ($2mm / year rev, $3mm exit after 10 years by OP definition) at 19, why didn't you? Why not use that money to fund your "bigger is better" startup instead of taking VC? Or did you?

Hey yakshaving,

I like the idea and you've got an interesting internal page, but your front page ("What if deploying your code...") is literally unusable on an iPhone and probably on other mobile platforms -- the button is not visible, nothing is clickable, and it can't be scrolled or resized. You might want to rethink that so as to capture the people who are browsing HN / TechCrunch / whatever while surfing on the bus on the go.

They aren't happy. They are drugged. Any time anyone starts to have any questions or qualm of any kind, they have been trained to drug themselves into insensibility rather than think about it. Anyone desiring individuality is a pariah.

Furthermore, the siciety is completely static -- it's designed that way. It cannot grow or adapt in the face of new opportunities or needs (eg climate shift, resource depletion). Would you want to live like that?

Sure it exists. Have a services that is free to use but includes charges for one particular highly desirable function. One example is a game with in-app purchasing of new levels, character wardrobe, etc.

You do realize that Tit For Tat is the dominant strategy of PD, right? [1]

[1] Ok, not strictly true. Other strategies can dominate under certain conditions (finite and pre-known number of iterations, possibility of signal error, etc) but I don't feel that those conditions apply in this case.

FTA:

"...I decided to migrate the existing system into a single table setup."

"Alternative Proposed Solutions: MySQL Partitioning and Redis"

I'm surprised he didn't consider at Mongo, Couch, etc.

It's a fork of MySQL that provides substantially better durability, admin tools, an easy hot-backup solution, better instrumentation of your DB, etc etc.

Deploying is it a question of "stop db, replace mysql server binary with percona server binary, start db".

My personal opinion is that unless you have a support contract with MySQL AB, there is very little reason not to use Percona.

You get more for fixing the thread dispatcher:

"Everyone in the company sees [your] plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that [you] did an awesome job."

The only person who will be impressed by you helping Bob upload to SharePoint is Bob. Total score: 1-3 unicorns.

Every engineer will be impressed that you fixed the thread dispatcher. Total score: 1-3 unicorns * # of engineers.