dfranke

129 ms·

1261.
by dfranke 19y ago
I don't call Facebook a startup. They were once, but they're an established company now. Once your first product is earning a profit (and I mean your real product, not Reddit T-shirts), you're out of the startup phase.
1262.
by dfranke 19y ago
It would be easier and more accurate simply to define a startup as a company which intends to derive its profits from a product which it has not yet finished building.
1263.
by dfranke 19y ago
Our startup is right in Downtown Crossing around the corner from the T entrance. We got a ridiculously good deal on rent. Once our lease expires we'll probably have to move, because there's no way it's getting renewed at the same rate.
1264.
by dfranke 19y ago
I'd take this a step further and say that syntactically-significant case, a la Haskell, is a good idea. You already use case to disambiguate to human readers, so why should the compiler be oblivious to the distinction?
1265.
by dfranke 19y ago
We have 15 of these. Is that bad?
1266.
by dfranke 19y ago
I don't think that's the case. Due to exponential population growth, the majority of humans that have ever lived are still alive, so it would seem to be a natural hypothesis that most of the progress that has ever been made has been made i
1267.
by dfranke 19y ago
I don't think I would have survived high school if I hadn't read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular".
1268.
by dfranke 19y ago
Maybe at MIT and its ilk. But this was at the University of Florida, which, while not in the same league, is by no means a backwater.
1269.
by dfranke 19y ago
Neither do the professors. As an undergrad I did as many assignments in Lisp as I was allowed to, but I found that to all but two professors (one specialized in AI, the other in PL), Lisp was just "that weird 70's language with all the par
1270.
by dfranke 19y ago
I solve that just by having one centered and the other to the side. Soon I'm getting a third screen. You can get 4-5 22" LCDs for the price of one 30".
1271.
by dfranke 19y ago
I think it's become acceptable to use it as singular, at least in certain contexts. How often do you hear "Are your data backed up?"
1272.
by dfranke 19y ago
Reddit didn't even have comments from the very beginning :-). Ah, the nostalgia...
1273.
by dfranke 19y ago
Hrmph. I'm around Diesel a lot. I had no idea that it was a YC hangout. Y'all need to make yourselves visible somehow.
1274.
by dfranke 19y ago
I think that's all you need for version 1.0. All the bleeding-edge concurrency abstractions like software transactional memory are only that: abstractions. Henning is right that they're going to become increasingly important in the future
1275.
by dfranke 19y ago
Arc, Befunge, C++, Delphi, ECMAScript, FORTH, Guile, Hugo, IDL, J#, Ksh, Lex, Maple, nroff, Octave, PHP, QLISP, RPAL, SQL, TrueBasic, Unlambda, VHDL, WEB, XUL, yacc, ZZT-OOP.
1276.
by dfranke 19y ago
A couple interface suggestions: 1. Let me disable live preview. It seems to slow down my entire system. 2. Show me a list of all questions I've answered, not just those I've asked or that I'm specifically monitoring.
1277.
by dfranke 19y ago
Go with Debian stable. It's rock-solid. I've done very poorly with Ubuntu. I've tried installing it twice. The first time, it installed successfully but then when I rebooted it trashed my RAID configuration and dropped into single-user m
1278.
by dfranke 19y ago
The article ought to have mentioned HP's "you make what you measure" quote. This is a corollary.
1279.
by dfranke 19y ago
INTJ. The INT is strong and consistent, but I occasionally come out as an INTP.
1280.
by dfranke 19y ago
On Linux: Firefox, mutt, emacs, xchat, gaim, amarok, skype, gimp, LaTeX, Mathematica, VMWare. On 'doze: Firefox, Visual Studio, Quicken, OpenOffice. The only one of these that I'd like to replace with a web app is Quicken. Buxfer looks pr
1281.
by dfranke 19y ago
I accidentally read that as "Google Paper is a good read..."
1282.
by dfranke 19y ago
I don't think this is a valid argument. When startup employees lose their jobs it's usually because the entire company has gone under. Motorola may be doing massive layoffs, but they're still around and they still have plenty of employees
1283.
by dfranke 19y ago
"Hacker" is somewhat special, though. I tend to use "programmer", "developer", and "coder" almost[1] interchangably, and I don't mind using them to describe someone whose only language is COBOL. "Hacker" confers greater respect, and I wou
1284.
by dfranke 19y ago
You only really need to do enough accounting in order to pay your taxes correctly. You might need more than that if you want to try to go public, but the rest can be repaired retroactively. And if you just sit down with the relevant IRS p
1285.
by dfranke 19y ago
"But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right." Has it occured to you that that might be because it's wrong ?
1286.
by dfranke 19y ago
Then run them as one company so you can spend half as much time talking to VCs.
1287.
by dfranke 19y ago
Spam is a worse crime than murder. Big spammers like Ralsky send enough spam to waste many lifetimes' worth of people's time. Just because the damage is spread out over a large number of people doesn't make that fact any less heinous.
1288.
by dfranke 19y ago
You do need a license of some sort. BSD, MIT, and similar are about as minimal as is advisable. You need a disclaimer of warranty so that you're not liable if your software breaks someone's system, and the user's right to use your softwar
1289.
by dfranke 19y ago
Anyone know of one of these in Cambridge/Somerville? Or want to start one?
1290.
by dfranke 19y ago
Well, most languages use C for their FFI so you're almost stuck with that. You can still use D, since it can call C functions transparently. Though, if I were designing a high-level language and wanted it to be able to call a fast lower-l

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