Readit Newszebra commented on Ask HN: Must you have no life, at least early on, to run a successful startup? · Posted by u/jimsojim
I was co-founder of a (YC-backed) startup for 4 years until we were forced to close, so I don't know if you can define us as "successful".
Anecdotally speaking, I started off working with no life. There is a lot to be said for time periods where you shut out all else and just focus on your business, in fact the YC programme gave good impetus to only "write code, speak to customers or exercise". However doing this for extended periods is a great way to burn out.
Initially any time I took off I felt incredibly guilty about. I however came to the realisation that stepping away, even just for an evening to see friends, allowed me to recharge my batteries and I was able to recoup the lost time and then some.
A company is only really the sum of its people, and if those people aren't firing on all cylinders then it will become apparent. In short, lead a balanced life.
As I like to say, building medium to big project is like running marathon and not a sprint, because at the moment when you have no air and you are exhausted you will have to stop. And a half-build project is useless opposed to a late project that works. Better late than never.
"Friendly" is not the word I would use. Powerful, sure. But IDEA breaks quite a few universal GUI concepts and that takes a bit to get used to.
For example, Ctrl-w is a very important keybinding on IDEA, one that I use all the time (it expands the selection to the enclosing expression). It's literally wired in my brain now. To the point that I now use it in Eclipse as well and I even started using it in other places (Sublime, etc...) and... closing the window as a result. Very annoying.
Another one is that Ctrl-n sometimes creates a new file (expected) and sometimes... something completely different depending on your current window. Again, not friendly. Optimized for development and a life saver on the long run, for sure, but it's fairly user hostile.
Sister IDE - PhpStorm comes with keymaps from Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs and others
zebra commented on Congress finally showed it's willing to fight the FBI on encryption theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/magoghm
I also watched most of the hearing[1], and Comey was very practiced at sticking to his story. However, one bit in particular stood out as something I haven't heard before: he seemed to criticize Apple for trying to protect people. He went off on a brief tangent at one point where he said things like[2]:
"It's not Apple's job to protect the American people."
"They sell phones, they don't sell public safety. That's our business to worry about."
He spent a minute or two saying things like that. This almost sounds like Comey sees this as some sort of turf war, with Apple infringing on his responsibilities. I'm not sure how to interpret that - isn't it the job of any manufacturer to make sure their product is safe? Wouldn't any kind of courier have a duty to protect what that which they carry?
[1] side note: I'm actually very impressed by most of Representatives understanding of the issue and the fairness of their questions.
[2] These may not be exact quotes! This is what I remember, I'll see if I can find the spot in the video later.
> They sell phones, they don't sell public safety
No, they don't, but they sell personal data safety.
zebra commented on If You Build It, They Will Complain techvibes.com/blog/if-you... · Posted by u/ohjeez
"n McKinsey & Company’s 2012 report entitled Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value, the report describes one example of a large bank that wanted to create a central data warehouse to overcome inconsistencies in their data. In this particular example, the end goal was never properly defined and the IT department embarked on building a solution that never considered the actual business objectives, resulting in ‘huge amounts of unnecessary complexity’ and significant cost overruns. After 18 months of missed deadlines, nearly $10 million in sunk costs, and no working solution, the bank decided to stop the bleeding and cancel the project altogether."
I don't see how the bank could have got a solution to this from a SAAS vendor... they would still have had to pipe the data to the warehouse, build the reports and management scripts and so on - setting up the data store is a task, true, but so is initialising your store on a cloud provider.
The SAAS vendor will be used for its build expertise only. After the build the bank will deploy inner cloud. And the provider will be payed well for the build and for support.
zebra commented on NSA knew about Juniper backdoors and kept quiet about them thenextweb.com/us/2015/12... · Posted by u/us0r
"The ability to exploit Juniper servers and firewalls will pay many dividends over the years." - NSA [1]
This is the first time I have seen any snowden document. I am stunned, they talk like black hat hackers, only caring about themselves and not the people using that tech.
1. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2653542-Juniper-Oppo...
NSA doesn't care about the Constitution, why should they care about lesser entities.
zebra commented on Ask HN: Pivoting my startup, how should I submit to AngelList? · Posted by u/pupeno
Describe your company in detail in https://Glycast.com/AuboutUs and do not put link to CarouselApps.com.
Or redesign CarouselApps.com and spread your new product on the homepage and move older stuff in some archive type page.
zebra commented on Show HN: Rentolize – Become your own property manager rentolize.com/... · Posted by u/mwharrison
So, I just bought 3 rental properties and laid out my "landlord stack" in a recent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10727238
I'm not sure this tool is compelling enough to get me to switch away from my existing tools. My biggest issue is that you don't have any big screenshots or a demo account to play with. I would suggest you fix that RIGHT NOW.
Beyond that, some other thoughts:
- "Watch your properties get paid off" sounds like watching paint dry. Even though I paid cash for my properties, I can't imagine a several years process like this being something people would check in on. That's not to say there aren't many valuable analytics you could provide.
- 7 day support turnaround for a paid plan? You might as well say "We're going to treat you the same way Comcast does" I'd remove this right away and raise the price of that $10 plan.
Overall, it's hard to see the value-add beyond trying to replace my accounting tools and address book. There definitely are some needs I see as a landlord, but I can't tell if you offer them. Feel free to email me if you want more feedback.
The only screenshot that is visible on the site is from the demo of Metronic Theme - HTML5 theme for sale. My gut feeling is that this is just test for demand and there is no real product behind.
Edit: I was wrong - there is a product. But it looks so fluffy at first glance.
Yes, you are right that Linux has its merits. But I don't want Windows to become so bad that the people move to Linux because of this. I want people to move to Linux because it has become better than Windows.