carpal

I wouldn’t necessarily say this has anything to do with students or school. I’ve been out of school for a couple of years now and have been working as a developer for about 5 years.

One incident, in particular, drove most of the hatred for my original (and now replaced) rant. It involved an M.B.A. recruiting me to work for “his idea”, promising a bunch of money and a sizable stake in equity (~35%). However, once the boss-employee relationship set in, the money evaporated and the equity shrank to 5%. In the end, I wasted 6 weeks of incredibly hard work and came away with a chip on my shoulder.

The argument doesn’t really have much to do with Hackers and Business types. As he points out, it simply has to do with the fact that in a small group of people (2 or 3), there is no room for pure leaders. At that group size they merely become bullies, and the whole group is less powerful because of it.

There are a lot of discussions that need to be had concerning filtering, vote weighing, etc. We just have to have them earlier now.

It had to do with the weird way I switched out the post. It should be fixed now.

I never expected it to get this high. The post was a rant and, as most rants do, turned out to be a bad idea.

I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.

Atlanta's startup weekend company is apparently in the clear. Not sure what the difference is between the two.

In Atlanta's, the actual startup was an C-corp owned in part by Startup Weekend, LLC, in part by Atlanta Startup Weekend LLC, and the rest by the "core team" that existed after the weekend. People who participated in the weekend were given shares in Atlanta Startup Weekend, LLC, and not the C-corp. I think this was done to avoid any complications with the SEC, since LLCs are governed far less strictly.

I went a bit more in-depth here:

http://subwindow.com/articles/12

It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.

There are two main differences:

1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie).

2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.

Well, funding is a different matter. If a beef-headed M.B.A. actually has some funding, they might actually be worth listening to.

However, 99% of the time they don't have funding, they've (at best) got "strong interest from investors" or some such.

Pretty much any solid rant sounds like a Zed Shaw rant.

I was on the Index BBS in Atlanta, as well as gobs of smaller ones. I was a L.O.R.D. addict, so I'd run out my turns on one BBS and then hop to the next.

I used to pass by that area every day. The problem is not that the shelter is there, but that the bums are always hanging out outside the shelter. 24 hours a day, there are bums hanging out there harassing people.

I have no problem with homeless people in shelters. But when they're out in the street making people's lives miserable, you have to do something. A robot isn't the best solution, but when the city won't do anything, it might suffice.

If you want to learn lessons, work at the big company.

If you want to learn skills, work at the small company.

(In case someone is late to the party, most of the crazy downvoting and weird crap has since been edited out)

Good point.

Personally, I'd love to have a robotic centaur helping me around the house.

What the hell is going on with comments on this topic?

Well, not necessarily. Those devices aren't biped specific- they're specific to thing with grasping mechanisms.

Who's to say a quadruped robot can't have 4 feet + 1 or 2 grapsing mechanisms? Or have two front feet that are also capable of grasping?

There are only two real advantages to bipeds:

1) Height 2) Use of spare limbs for tools

Height doesn't seem to be much of an advantage for robots at this stage, and I think that robots could have 6 limbs with no problem. Therefore, biped robots are really only a novelty.

Zynga?

Maybe it is time to expand the size of the editor base. "Articles" like this should be killed.

I've been using editdns: http://www.editdns.net/

Its free, and has worked very well for me over the past year.

For us, yes. We spend about as much per month on Salesforce as a developer's salary. Might as well devote 2 or 3 months of developer time and come up with something that actually fits our needs.

(sorry for the late response)

Salesforce.com at the moment. It is pretty awful and kind of expensive, so we're developing our own.

What if you did a word count of the linked article, and used that for the weight? It might be good to strip out links from the count, but other than that it seems a pretty sold way of judging complexity.

"Real-world app ideas"

Elaborate?

24 living in Atlanta. Working on an accounting suite for small businesses called Aloe. Very very raw pre-alpha quality build up at http://aloe-acct.com

Looking for someone who can kick ass and take names. A Rails developer would be great, but I'm also looking for someone who has business chops and a good understanding of accounting principles.

I'd go with MySQL. There are better tools, it is less expensive and easier to scale. I don't have any straight-up "speed" evidence other than what is anecdotal.

If you're worried about the MySQL license, you should try PostgreSQL. I've been using it for three years and have had nothing but extremely positive results. Version 8.3 is stupidly fast.

An acronym of a common accounting equation.

1) I don't think so. The real win is for an ERP is not processes, it is reporting. Being able to examine every aspect of the business in ONE place in a real-time fashion is an amazingly huge boon for businesses. Businesses succeed not because of good processes, but because of constant improvement. You can't improve if you don't know what to improve. A good ERP implementation will solve this with good reports.

2) For a startup, small businesses might actually be better. They might still be able to spend a decent chunk of change (.25-1M) on an ERP system, but have much lower requirements making an easier implementation that is less likely to fail.

3) ERPs aren't really modular, that is true. I'm not sure there is a win to a real "modular" ERP system. The who idea behind an ERP is that everything in a business is connected, so the systems should be connected too. Sales people are connected to orders are connected to finished goods are connected to build processes are connected to inventory are connected to purchase orders. Removing one "module" in that chain defeats the purpose of the ERP.

That is exactly what I'm doing for my day job. We evaluated a ton of ERP/MRP providers, and they were all A) Extremely expensive, and B) Awful. So I lobbied them to have it be made in-house.

It is currently being done with only one developer. We're 6 months into the implementation, and are piloting in several of the modules. It is going pretty well so far.

If it continues to go well, we're considering spinning it out into its own company. A well-designed and user-friendly ERP system is a killer asset to have, and being able to resell it is an even bigger one.

I've come to pretty much the same conclusion as you, about customizing. I figured we'd have a "standard" set of modules, which would either be completely replaced or slightly modified as necessary to fit the client company. Certain things like maintenance, receiving, purchase orders and sales teams probably don't vary much between companies. Other things like manufacturing routers and change orders probably do. This would allow us to be flexible where it is necessary, and to reuse code where it is not.

As a side note, we're hiring another developer to work on this system. IC to start. Let me know if you're interested.