sctechie

Can we at least agree here that complexity implies a larger cognitive burden? I think that's a pretty benign statement to begin from regardless of the domain (programming, cooking, games, etc).

A complex recipe rewards a chef with exceptional results if they follow it perfectly, but also presents more opportunities to fail. A simple recipe might not offer the results but it should be easier to produce with a lower chance to mess up.

I think the concept generalizes here.

For various meanings of 'learn'. My point is that you can be writing useful programs in c in a weekend.

Obviously said person would not be an expert, but I've watched competent programmers try to learn complex languages like Haskell and Scala; there is a far more complex mental model that one needs to build before they can use those languages specifically because of all the automagic that happens in the background.

The 'magic' that you seem to pine for like is found in lets say Ruby, places a far larger mental burden on the programmer than a language like c or go.

Sure, language like Haskell or Rust have a ton of great features and automagical things but I disagree that they are easier to use. One has to keep far more in your head writing Haskell than Go, a clear indicator of this is the difficulty in learning the language. Like c, you can learn Go in a weekend easily.

I am not saying those others types of languages don't have their own strengths, just that I disagree with your assessment that their features provide a lower mental load.

'Industry Best Practice' in this case amounts to 'we will hand all of your data over to the government' if required.

Abdicating responsibility for personal security to ANY 3rd party makes one less secure, period.

Now, when the government comes knocking, instead of handing over some files or access records, you'll be able turn over the user entire computer. That's the exact opposite of security to me.

Stop charging for your time and start charging for the value you are providing to the business.

If you implement a system that will increase revenues, you should be charging based on that value. Just because you're implementing some back-end system does not mean you're not having an impact on the bottom line. Sounds like you've gotten stuck into thinking your old clients are your friends. Do you not have the confidence to pursue / win new clients if you're 'key' clients disappear?

How is this even possible? All it takes is a clogged router buffer 'somewhere' along your network path and that <30ms web request is gonna get blown away. Am I missing something here?

I'm probably just being ignorant lol. Can you point me to an example company offering a service like this?

Thanks.

I recommend buying a piece-of-shit Dell and putting an aftermarket SSD + memory in there. Personally, I develop on cheap Dell slammed full of RAM running a Linux VM inside of Windows. I know the 'cool' kids aren't into Dell and Windows and all that but you can get a faster machine for less money if you stay away from Apple.

Unless you are running a server, there is no reason to be running Linux directly on your hardware. You can, of course, but it's not a good idea.

I'm not a Mac fanboy so take that for what you will. I look at these fanboy 'bro' developers running around with overpriced hardware and laugh. You might not have the same reaction.

Look well-made. I've never seen that brand in any US stores unfortunately. There were a few US distributors listed but most were tiny shops.

Let me just get this in before the cries of JUST INSTALL OPENWRT come raining down.

Your mother / father / grandmother / etc are not installing openWRT on their routers. Installing one of these CISCO home routers is pretty much hacking yourself. And, just update the firmware is not gonna work.

Try it one day, go up like 10 people and ask them what's a firmware. If the user isn't technical, you're going to get a 0/10 correct responses.

I'm old enough to remember DHTML, it was terrible.

It's quite remarkable how far front and back-end JS development has come since then.

Great post. People should stop and read this.

Your lack of ability to google or search on your own is a bit worrisome, but I spent a few minutes doing your work for you. =)

There 18k+ open source repos on github for c#: https://github.com/search?l=C%23&q=c&type=Repositori...

There are 44k+ open source repos on github for java: https://github.com/search?l=Java&q=c&type=Repositori...

I'm not even gonna bother for Asp.Net.

Now, for some real advice. 'Open Source' and microsoft don't exactly go together like peanut butter and jelly. Yes, there are some open source projects for the MS ecosystem but it's just not in the culture.

If you don't want to transfer your current skills to the Linux world, you should find a large, open source c# project and just run with it.

Good luck.

I haven't installed Reddit from scratch in quite some time.

I just looked at the reddit github source. You can get to it from www.reddit.com/r/redditdev

There appears to be an installer script now along with upstart scripts to launch the services. This is vastly simpler than it was when I was using the code. I had to manually install all of the dependencies; looks like they have taken care of that.

There is also a vm floating around with an already installed reddit. I'm not going to track it down but it should be able to get you up and running in a few minutes.

True shame. Regardless of your opinion of his actions concerning JSTOR, it's undeniable he made a positive contribution to the web.

You should learn to program FIRST. It will take you 6 weeks to learn how to programming, let alone trying to build a website while doing it.

There are a ton of resources online these days. I'd suggest you mainly stick to MIT OCW but many schools have online resources for programming these days. Khan academy is decent but I personally recommend you stick to official college lectures and try to work as many homework / project problems you can find.

Once you establish a solid foundation of programming, it will not take you but a week or two to build the requisite knowledge to put together professional-ish looking websites.

You need to learn javascript. You need to learn javascript. You need to learn javascript.

HTML is not a programming language, you can learn the basics in an afternoon.

CSS is a bit more difficult but you can learn it in a day or two.

Without knowing javascript, you will be hopelessly lost.

I didn't want to let your comment stand as it suggests the fault was mine due to using an incorrect link. So, I followed the link you posted. I clicked on the navigation items, rapidly but not unreasonably so, it took me 2 seconds for it to throw another exception.

Looks great! I've been using yeoman for a while now and this looks like a fantastic replacement / alternative. Are you looking for contributions or just releasing this for people to use?

Links to it are plastered all over this thread claiming to point to the current demo. No, I didn't share anything.

For instance, here is one: https://demo2.openerp.com/#action=114 that was posted a few comments up.

I've tried pretty much all of them listed in this thread. They all take me to the same interface that crashes.

Technically, you got more than I did. =)

Hey there. I get that you seem to like this product. I'm not even knocking it. I'm just telling HN what I experienced with the demo they posted.

As far as the product not being released... The guy is advertising a huge "SUCK IT SAP" website bragging about the new version of their software being released in 9 days. Not exactly an alpha version here.

I fail to see what the size of 'your' specific company has to do with anything. Anecdotal evidence is just that. 'Your' company might have the technical resources to fix bugs in open-source software, but that can't be a serious suggestion. That's like saying every enterprise out there should keep technical staff on-hand to patch the linux kernel. That's silly.

I posted a screenshot in another reply but in case you care, here's the bug that basic, and I stress that word, testing would have caught.

http://imgur.com/fp8oW

Easily reproducible in two seconds by simply using the interface.

Hi. I'm on HN. I'm running the latest google chrome.

I'm not going to go back and open up the developer tools to see which part of the buggy javascript UI crashed. I will say again though that the UI was throwing 'unhandled exceptions'. Do I really need to defend myself here? When is it ever a good idea for a user of a piece of software; especially ERP software which by it's very nature will interact with non-technical users constantly, to ever see an unhandled exception. Come on.

Just for fun. I went back to their website: demo1.openerp.com. It takes 2 seconds to crash their websites by interacting with it. Just click on their navigation links on the top of the page quickly.

Here is a link: http://imgur.com/fp8oW

This is an easily reproducible problem. Come on.

Hi there, took a look at the site, here's some feedback:

I liked the overall look, it's a fairly clean design. The #1 issue I have is that the boxes around each deal are scaling in size with the number of lines of text in the item description. This throws off the next element below so that nothing lines up. It might be an OCD issue on my part but I think it is distracting.

Next big thing I noticed is that your first row of deals is rather stale. The first couple I clicked on were both 2 weeks old. They were both in your highlighted section of the first row. That gives me the impression there isn't a reason to come back any soon. Maybe I just need to refresh a few times....

You should always check out your competition so....

For comparison, slickdeals.net has daily deals and pictures for each of their items, local deals on the sidebar, and a huge variety of items. I think your site needs a better 'hook' than just a 'visual UI for deal discovery'.

Your site seems to be a bit more focused on the social aspect of shopping.(sharing deals with friends) That brings up the old chicken-and-egg problem of socially based websites. You need users for a compelling product but you can't get those users without a compelling product.

I suggest you follow the founders of reddit and fake it.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/reddit-founders-made...

Are you serious? Sorry, I work for a company with actual revenue and profit. We make actual products, not 'social engagement'. Yes, if I brought that product demo to my management and shareholders (because they're the ones that okayed our huge investment in ERP) and it crashed 30 seconds into the demo, I would be in the shit. I see no reason why it shouldn't roll down-hill to OpenERP.

Took me all of 30 seconds to break your demo website. Started throwing unhandled 'get_title' javascript exceptions at me non-stop.

You honestly expect me to make a professional recommendation for software I can't even show the demo for? SAP sucks, we all know but I fail to see how your product sucks any less except for the price tag. Is that your pitch? We suck just like SAP but for less money.

I got a 'real' job. =)

My first startup was back in 2002 or so. We were doing a sort-of ebay for contractors. Today, you have similar services like Angie's List but we were creating a marketplace for contractors and sub-contractors to bid on jobs.

We had meetings with a large (back-then) communications company, had a functioning and viable product with revenues, and were weeks away from securing a large investment. I'm not mentioning names but you can pretty easily figure it out if you know your early 21st century phone tech combined with the fact we were targeting contractors.

In my honest opinion, it was a great idea. The company didn't fail because of a technical issue or bad idea. We failed because of personal issues between myself and the other founder. He decided to pursue other opportunities in his personal life and took most of the equity and product with him.

That being said, I would not trade the experience for anything.

Lessons learned:

1) Having multiple founders is not a boon. It's much better (for you personally) to be a sole founder and then bring on employees or 'co-founders' after you have the company started.

2) Leave yourself options. I put 110% of myself for over a year into this startup. My total compensation for all of my effort was under 10k. I literally put all of my eggs in that one basket of 'this is going to be a success'. Not having a plan for failure was a huge mistake on my part. This could be as simple as maintaining your contacts while working on your startup or even as complicated as looking for other jobs while working on your startup.

3) Get back to work! Failing does not make you weak, unintelligent, incompetent or anything like that. It simply means your idea and / or execution was not good enough. There's only one way to fix that, get back to work.

Well, that will teach me to argue with an Econ professor! And I also find myself hungry after staring at pictures of bread on google for the past 10 minutes. Thanks for the interesting discussion. =)

My apologies, I'm only an amateur statistician. I'll defer to your knowledge in that area. =) (and I'm joking here, I'm decent with the stats, just wanted to focus on the broader issue).

I don't want to get bogged down in the stats discussion because I was making a broader point and don't claim to be an expert in statistics. We could extend the example to any area where one person has more technical expertise in any certain subject than the people they are communicating with.

So, let's step outside the arena of statistics for a second. If you were teaching someone to cook, would you really explain the process using terms like a 'pinch' or a 'dash' of salt. Sure, to an expert chef or grandmother, a pinch of salt is a perfectly reasonable quantity to add to the recipe. The student just learning to cook can only guess at what that term means. That's why most recipes come with specific amounts or weights of ingredients to add, because we need a common terminology to correctly express the recipe.

Taken totally as an argument for teaching or explaining statistics, I see your point. It's far more important to discuss and quantify the significance of the change rather than simply noting that something did change and by how much.

And yeah, irony went right over my head. I blame Friday. =)

I posted this comment to your blog as well:

"I've had positive and negative experiences with pair programming. Your blog post only contains the positives. What are some of the negatives that braintree has experienced with your heavy emphasis on pair programming?"

I'm sorry but I have to interact with non-technical managers on a regular basis. I consider it part of my job responsibilities to ensure that we are communicating using the same terminology. When I tell a client his conversions are up 35% because of some change we made before A/B testing, I need to know that he understands what that means.

I didn't mean toxic as a personal slight, sorry if you took it that way.

If the other person 'calls it the wrong thing', then how do you know they understand what you're talking about? I think it's worthwhile in that situation, if not necessary, to take a few minutes and define, specifically, what the terms you're using mean.

I simply disagree that communication is not as important as I claim. The value you bring as a statistician is not running a z-test. Any high-school kid with a computer can go to Wikipedia and be running a z-test on some data 10 minutes later. The value comes from being able to understand the results and communicate them effectively to your clients.

"Data science" is a hot thing right now. If your technical / design abilities match your stats knowledge, you could pull 6 figures easily depending on the market you're in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_science