pelle

I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself.

It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America.

I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model.

I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years.

It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma.

AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista.

People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it.

The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority.

I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.

Git blame is one of the best tools for understanding the history and archeology of a large legacy code base.

There is nothing worse when you're trying to do solve some problem that you discover a giant reformatting commit typically instituted by a youngish developer.

It obviously doesn't remove the history, it just makes it so much harder to actually find out why the code was written as is.

It explains the reasons why the community should not do this. Also the community has generally updated and followed whatever the "leadership" has done so far and for good reason.

If the "leadership" decides to go this way as it appears they do, the community will likely follow them as they have done in the past.

This is a big test for Ethereum. The DAO holders were warned clearly about these kind of issues before hand, yet some sort of collective mania made very smart people go deaf.

Very cool. I'm a lisp programmer now, but this reminded me that as a teenager I was learning how to do games programming on my C64 using an incredible Forth compiler and games framework called White Lightening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8609Pel_RU

http://www.forth.org/lightning.html

There are many things that keeps Nicaragua poor, this is hardly the most important one. Similar low level corruption is found all over Latin America except for perhaps Chile. It disappears once countries have been middle class for a while.

We implemented the first USSD bitcoin wallet in Kenya a couple of years ago.

USSD as a technology is good, but the biggest problem is access to the networks. If you think its hard dealing with App Stores you haven't tried dealing with MTOs.

In some countries you can deploy it nationwide, but in many in particular developing countries you need to make deals with every single MTO.

If they think you are competing with one of their services such as Mobile Money they will not let you on their network. In many other cases you will need to have a physical server in their server room.

It is said often that the police in many cities in the US are mainly focused on revenue generation. Whether this is true or not I don't know. But if it is, it is no more honest than when a police officer earning $250/m asks $4 for an on the spot fine instead of the $20 and half a day lost trying to pay it officially.

Crime is lower. The few gangs that are here don't really spread outside their barrios like they do in just about every other country in Central America.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/10/28/359612148/w...

You say: "If the prices seem reasonable to you, it's only because your aren't being outbid by someone significantly wealthier."

Thats not what Nicaragua is like. It's not the wild west. It's a pretty quiet traditional country with a fair amount of trust. Again compared to other countries in the region, not with say Denmark or Sweden.

There was recently a police killing of an innocent family in a botched drug raid. It became a really big deal and the police, president bowed over to try to make things better. Not that that excuses things, but it's a hell of a lot better than what happens in the US.

It is very difficult to view normal life in the second poorest country in the western hemisphere with the moral compass or glasses of middle-class US. Things are very different here.

It's a great museum. Also checkout the fascinating book Path Between the Seas http://www.amazon.com/The-Path-Between-Seas-1870-1914/dp/067...

If they succeed in building it, it will no doubt have a strong economic effect on the country.

Right now there is a lot of tourist investment in the same area that the he mentions in the article. An ecological disaster could hurt the growth in that area, but it might open up the whole Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, which is very difficult to get to now.

Most educated people here are doubtful about the success of it. The majority of the country is not very well educated and buy most of the Sandinista propaganda about the canal. The main exception are poor farmers in the affected areas who have been demonstrating against it.

Nicaraguans are normally very open to foreigners, but even I've heard many mostly poor people worried by the headlines of 10,000 Chinese workers being needed.

The official money man behind the project Wang Jing lost a huge chunk of his fortune after the Chinese stock crash. The Nicaraguan government says it won't affect the project. But most people I talk to down here think the success of the project as being more doubtful than ever now.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-02/china-bill...

There are so many conspiracy theories about the project. One of them is that it's secretly being funded by the Chinese government with Wang Jing only being a front. This doesn't make much sense to me as the Chinese government is already pretty well invested in the Panama Canal operation, but who knows.

I live in Nicaragua. While this is strictly speaking corruption, it is a very democratic form of corruption. In the US corruption is a sport mainly enjoyed by the rich.

I like the term malleable as it describes it much better than the black and white world of corrupt or not.

Here in Nicaragua it is part of what makes the country work and prices are at a level that most people can be part of it.

Living police salaries are luxuries for rich countries. Nicaraguan police are pretty honest and effective, just look at our crime rates that are well below the region.

If they charge someone an "on the spot" negotiable fine it is something most people accept as long as it's not outrageous. Is it ideal? No. But it's probably better than most other alternatives for a country at this level of economic development.