megaduck

10 ms·

31.
by megaduck 16y ago
That's darned good advice. Right now it feels like our biggest problem is avoiding starvation, but I can see how distraction would be a bigger risk long-term.
32.
Ask HN: Consulting while bootstrapping?
8 points by megaduck 16y ago|8 comments
33.
by megaduck 16y ago
It doesn't matter that he's wrong. What matters is that the media has gotten a hold of this, and isn't going to let go any time soon. Facebook is rapidly losing control of the narrative. They need to do some PR damage control quickly, or t
34.
by megaduck 16y ago
At this point, it looks like a consensus is emerging: The death of the general purpose computer is greatly exaggerated. The iPad is a great tool for consuming information, but not so good at communications or creation. A month in, I've ne
35.
An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg (2006)(blog.facebook.com)
3 points by megaduck 16y ago|1 comments
36.
by megaduck 16y ago
As moe has pointed out, you're not going to instantly displace entrenched software, especially in businesses. So, you need a migration path. People already have bucketloads of documents, and many of them are locked up in bizarre proprieta
37.
by megaduck 16y ago
...achieve ramen profitability.
38.
by megaduck 16y ago
My startup is currently developing a new ticket tracking system named Tracker, and it might be exactly what you're looking for. Tracker's focus is helping you do email support for external customers, but it also works well for internal com
39.
by megaduck 16y ago
Asana. It's a little noisy, but otherwise fantastic.
40.
by megaduck 16y ago
We're currently bootstrapping, so I do work wherever I can grab power and wi-fi. Today it's a teahouse in downtown Santa Cruz: http://i.imgur.com/fYBKA.jpg
41.
by megaduck 16y ago
Palm shot video of everything at the Developer Day, and should be posting it online soon at http://developer.palm.com . If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to
42.
by megaduck 16y ago
HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight. Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico.
43.
by megaduck 16y ago
I think you just proved my point. While Beijing definitely has advantages, there are other places in China where you can do business for a heck of a lot cheaper. An order of magnitude cheaper. Even in Beijing, you don't have to get a massi
44.
by megaduck 16y ago
$2 million is an astounding amount of money in China. You can get engineers for $10-15K a year, and designers, sales, and marketing people for a lot less. Equipment can be a little more expensive than the U.S., but office space is drama
45.
by megaduck 16y ago
I think it's worth pointing out here that the most successful (largest) companies are full-stack vendors that have as few external dependencies as possible. Look at the histories of Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Adobe, IBM, HP, etc
46.
by megaduck 16y ago
I think you've just proved the point. I never use the form helpers, and do most form-like things through custom javascript and AJAX calls. Including form helpers is a waste of space for me. Not everybody builds Rails apps the same way. I
47.
by megaduck 16y ago
I've been using a Dell Mini 9 as my primary development machine for over a year now. There's more than enough power to fire up emacs, chrome, and a jvm (we're a JRuby shop). I love the amazing portability, and the ergonomics are adequate.
48.
by megaduck 17y ago
JWZ had a Pre when WebOS was kind of half-baked. They've made significant gains in responsiveness since then, and solved most (all?) of the things he complained about. That being said, the system doesn't feel as 'instant' as the iPhone or
49.
by megaduck 17y ago
Whoever buys Palm is getting a real prize. First of all, they get the entire Palm patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon. Palm's been doing the smartphone thing longer than almost anybody, and they've built up quite a bi
50.
by megaduck 17y ago
Basically this boils down to "don't build apps with similar functionality to twitter.com". While that may sting some developers, at least it's a pretty clear and unambiguous signal. One nice thing is that they're spending time and effort t
51.
by megaduck 17y ago
If you view the iPad as a replacement for a laptop, then it falls short. Text entry is difficult, you can't print, can't use USB devices, can't use flash, can't videochat, etc. People who have extremely limited computer needs will find it
52.
by megaduck 17y ago
I'd like to call a moratorium on iPad speculation until the damned things actually ship. You know, wait for some concrete data, rather than bullshit hypotheticals. Our imagined use-cases are usually wrong . Telephones were going to be a
53.
by megaduck 17y ago
I'm eagerly awaiting my copy. Brooks' previous work, 'The Mythical Man-Month', is still one of the best books ever written about building software. I re-read it every few years, just to keep those lessons fresh. For those of you who are
54.
by megaduck 17y ago
My company (Mad Wombat Software) is building software that would be perfect for you. All customer mails go to a single mail address, and you can manage it from there. Every 'ticket' is owned by someone, but you can set up custom views to
55.
by megaduck 17y ago
As somebody who has lived in both countries, I don't think this argument holds any water. While the U.S. government does indeed engage in propaganda, it's like comparing a candle to a forest fire. The Chinese government controls every news
56.
by megaduck 17y ago
We chose our company name (Mad Wombat Software) because it's easy to spell, easy to remember, and the domain name was available. I can't tell you how many other names we had to discard because we couldn't get the domain. I now feel quite s
57.
by megaduck 17y ago
I wonder about this, given that other non-primate species seem to have an innate sense of fairness. Culture almost definitely plays a part, but it's probably not the whole story. Here's another study, showing that dogs have a sense of fair
58.
by megaduck 17y ago
It's interesting that he called out Medvedev as a voice of reason. Outside of Russia, Medvedev is often seen as a simple puppet of Putin. I'm reminded of a joke I heard a few years ago: One day, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev went out
59.
by megaduck 17y ago
It's true, they've still got massive market-share and piles of cash. If you're competing in the enterprise software space, they're a major contender. However, it used to be that every new technology venture had to consider 'the Microsoft p
60.
by megaduck 17y ago
Google and Apple used to be bound together in a common goal: break the Microsoft hegemony. However, they had two fundamentally different reasons for doing so. Google wanted a free and open web, where they could develop awesome server-based

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