heretohelp's comments

>How do you know grove.io was dropped for the new hot thing?

Because that's what happened to her last six projects?

Are you completely incapable of inductive reasoning or are you being obtuse so that you can make the total unaccountability of SV founders a moral crusade?

The track record of everyone else is very poor :)

Hosted IRC is an awkward place to be.

Those that don't give a fuck are using Campfire/HipChat.

Those that do give a fuck are usually hosting their own IRC.

Find a way to squeeze out both and you have a potentially nice business model. (Hosted IRC + nice web clients for paying customers?)

>Sentry is also open source, but for very different reasons than what you describe. I treat it like part of the business value, but that also means that many people can simply run their own

Then there's no issue in the hypothetical scenario I laid out.

I'm a Sentry user (of the hosted service) because it's open sourced. I wouldn't have given you a seconds notice otherwise and I doubt I'm alone in that.

Why be so defensive when you're clearly not in a position to be guilty of leaving all your customers up the creek?

Only if they demand I make them my sole source of food and stop cooking for myself while I'm their customer.

Google is notoriously bad about this by now, though. There isn't much excuse anymore after the last 3-4 years.

What's with the hagiography? Culver made things people came to depend on, then those things disappeared.

I don't see how this is any different than picking up women and telling them you think they're serious girlfriend material in a context (business services) where that's the expected standard, then dropping them for the new hot thing.

Why is it suddenly acceptable to do this just because they called themselves a startup?

We should take bets on how far the, "we're gone, but here's our new thing!" chain will go.

>If they open sourced it, they'd likely feel obligated to support it.

That's their psychological bugaboo, not mine.

The Google API I was using had a 6 month lead time, no recommendations for graceful transition, no offer of data dumps, and the final shutdown date was never communicated.

I don't demand anything of them, but they won't create a dependency where I previously had none and expect to be rewarded with money for it.

I am making founders aware of this attitude so that they can

1. Realize that there's a problem

2. Distinguish themselves among their competitors by addressing this concern

I'm not aiming to prescribe solutions, just describing the heuristics I presently rely on to determine if a service is likely to become a liability. I always do a fluid cost-benefit analysis beyond the black-and-white I described in my top comment.

That you believed what I said had anything to do with "demanding" free labor of anyone is telling and indicates a defensive posture on the subject.

Not a surprising reaction to have, given that Sentry (your errors-as-a-service project) depends on people trusting you not to just shut it down tomorrow.

>I really meant my point to be a counter to its parent.

I don't believe I've ever seen you do anything else on HN. I know you to be a reliable person, no reason to think you'd suddenly get fickle and take something I said seriously.

Do you mean to tell me that if somebody rolled up with a check written out for your price you wouldn't light the servers on fire and run for the hills? Realistically the only people who are cared after in any acquisition are the investors so that no bad-blood is in the water for the next acqui-hire. Customers are always left in the dark.

If you want any credibility to the contrary, you'd better start presenting your customers with an SLA that guarantees a detailed transition with a timeline in the case of company failure/acquisition.

Or you can just play PR games. Whatever bare minimum your sense of honesty necessitates.

I'd rather just sit on a happy customer base, but I never thought I'd become a millionaire anyway.

I just want to help people.

I already have IRC for our company.

The fact that nobody's happy with a profitable, but modest bootstrapped company is causing them to abandon these smaller companies.

The abandonment feeds into the consumer mistrust and makes it that much harder to bootstrap the next company.

A good example of an industry that was utterly destroyed by a crisis of consumer confidence was the video game industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

>Revenues that had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,[1] fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).

It would be extremely unwise to believe the startup industry couldn't be subject to the same problem. VCs are getting uncomfortable with the valuations, the constant buyouts and abandonment are burning out consumers.

Were I not working on a startup of my own, I'd be happy to take upon somebody's profitable but small red-headed stepchild business.

I am in the middle of moving an API over from a Google one that got shutdown recently. This has cost me a substantial chunk of time, more than it likely has cost you.

I'm viscerally aware of inverterate corporate capacity for volatility.

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech.

Even in this moment, they still don't seem to be bothering to open source any of it.

There's a lesson to be learnt here in terms of gaining buyer trust when you're small.

I continue to use our own setup for IRC.

I'm familiar with Ken Thompson, so I'm more puzzled than someone who isn't familiar with his work might be.

What exactly is his unique insight? Do you know any specifics or are you just speaking on behalf of the fact that he's a famous programmer?

I say this as someone whose Planetside2 character is named: "KenThompsonHackerExtraordinaire"

>I think Hadoop really wants every compute node to be on the same LAN.

Fucking a-right it does. You should see the labyrinthine depths people descend to in order to scale Hadoop. Sub-clusters of sub-clusters, rack-local clusters, Zookeeper nodes all over the place.

It's like fuckin' 'Nam all over again man.

He's got an angle, alright.

*you're

And I agree completely. Varnish is goddamn magical and a fascinating exercise in a principled approach to kernel-oriented memory management (a mindset I don't normally undertake).