codyguy

Hey Walter, What were your "salesman" lessons from Empire? What would you do differently today?

Thank you for sharing the details.

Hi, How did you manage to get them to pay you hourly to create a project plan? What did you propose? I also need to do this for my venture but never clicks. Please share some advice. Thank you.

even if it's explicitly stated in the contract and the employee has agreed to it? Why would it get thrown out?

Thanks for sharing that.

Did you promote/share it somewhere? How did the customer find you?

Welcome back Walter! Which is your favourite D compiler? Do you ever play around with other compilers too and compare the executables?

Could you enlighten on how you managed to take those to market after the rejections?

I was just looking at your classicempire site and stumbled upon the rejection letters!!

Did you take up Sirius's offer to act as broker for 30% cut on deal?

I was a bit surprised by the inclusion of lesser languages and the omission of D !!

Please share the secret of your tenacity and inspiration in the face of such "setbacks". How do you do it on a day to day basis?

> "Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?"

You are an inspiration Walter !!

Dear Walter,

Thank you for the great work you are doing.

If you could get people to include D in the benchmarks / shootouts that get published it would help improve the popularity of D.

FYI - Thatneedle.com already uses it for part of the backend data processing workflow.

(a) In the short run, a good job generally gives much better financial returns than a startup. From the overall vibe of your post, I would say don't startup unless you have a compelling drive to startup.

(b) Stay sharp. Don't depend on "bigco" to manage your career/skills for you.

(c) Spend wisely, Save wisely. There's no silver bullet there. Of course all the savings might not be enough for certain cases, but that holds true for both bigco and small biz. Don't become a slave of your lifestyle while the going is good for you whether it is a small-biz or a bigco job.

I have tried D, loved the language but I feel the ecosystem and environment issues need to be addressed asap. Here are a few inputs (1) setting up env different operating systems eg GNU/linux variants. Compilers ldc, etc are not really easy to setup on all systems.

(2) Memory usage during compile can get out of control resulting in mid-build crashes if sufficient memory is not available.

(3) Setting up of a simple http server should be made simple. (ideally the way Go allows to convert any regular Go program to a http server)

outsourcing search to Bing certainly didn't help. Not sure they had much to lose in search.

They could have been serious contender in semantic search. I remember trying to reach out to some yahoos regarding an ambitious, yet serious proposal on semantic search using ThatNeedle.com. we could have made an impact. I could not get to the right audience even for a demo or a proposal. I guess they have too many silos built on top of an ivory tower. Nonetheless, it would be sad to see them fade away.

Here's a Specific case: A classifier to bucket input text(email body containing 1 or more sentences) into booking, refund, other (3 buckets).

This question would be on the lines of :

* If you are so smart why aren't you so rich

* If your product is so great, why aren't you the market leader already

You are welcome!

I agree there. Plenty to be done still.

I agree with Shostack. He is talking about removing friction, easing out the learning curve.

The command line make command on GNU/Linux is an example of something that "dumbs down"/makes easy a quick start , as opposed to editing and configuring the Makefile yourself. Similarly, yum/apt-get take this "dumb down" one step further.

Nothing wrong with removing friction. Infact this is an idea for a startup right here, remove friction from machine learning/NLP/API.

That is why I responded to shostack in the first place. The response was specific to his question and I got plenty of downvotes on my karma. No worries there :)

Yay!! An open sourced voice engine in the future? That would really shake things up.

Hi shostack, You can try out ThatNeedle API. http://www.thatneedle.com/nlp-api.html . While it is only catering to retail for now. The underlying capability is broader and generic. If you have specific needs, let's get in touch and discuss. You should at least take a look at the gif demo on the site.

I shared http://www.thatneedle.com/nlp-api.html, didn't get the kind of feedback I was expecting on HN. I guess the forum is not what it used to be.

Soliciting feedback on this HNers!