rtf's comments

At UC Santa Cruz there is a Livejournal community with an end-of-quarter "post anonymous secrets" thread. Exactly what is described here, and very popular. I think other campus LJ communities did the same as well.

I'm surprised at the critical attitudes -- that there are two competitors is reason for encouragement and indicates that the market you're targeting is no illusion. All you have to do is make your site better and better-known than the other guys.

I have no plans to learn new languages for the time being. I've been exposed to most of the big concepts, so I feel a creeping sense of diminishing returns as I have to invest time in increasingly different syntaxes to learn anything really different.

That is time I could spend building out more productive libraries and architecture for my real goals.

This blog smells fake.

I had a thought re: site quality -- which is that a community ends up with a focus whether it likes it or not, as the community hardens and desires a regular feedback loop -- so while Digg and Reddit opened themselves to a "lowest common denominator" and reaped what they've sown....YC started with a focus on hacking and startups. Which is good for YC content, since it means the people who are interested in it are predominantly optimistic, thoughtful, or both.

Lambda the Ultimate is another good example of this; even as it's gained popularity, it's preserved an agenda that avoids language wars and other noisy content. I would say that because of its narrow focus, its quality is even higher than news.YC!

One online community which has imposed some standard of quality from above, without topical limitations, is the Something Awful forums. The strategy there is to use fee-gating and heavy moderation with frequent and somewhat inconsistent punishment. The results are dubious - for some posters it becomes a game to see what one can get away with, and the overall quality is only increased in that a larger percentage of posters take time for spelling and grammar, and obvious trolls get banned, but clever ones do not. Basically, moderation treats only some symptoms of an underlying problem: people treating the online world as if they were sitting down at the bar with 30,000 of their best friends.

That said, the worst elements of YC in the long term will probably correlate to the worst elements of the startup world.

I already have a working urban transport. I regularly ride a Xootr scooter (http://www.xootr.com/) for a working commute of about 2.5 miles, mostly on flat terrain. It takes 20-30 minutes. I can take it into the gym and fit it in a half-height locker.

Caveat: It reacts poorly against upward elevation - parallel cracks like those between the gutter and the bike lane are likely to throw you. I got a stitch in my knee from exactly that situation. I stay on the sidewalk now.

Flash is an open specification: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/

I suggest looking at the "Worse Is Better"/"Right Thing" discussion, as it maps perfectly to your situation: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Worse Is Better gives you fast results with tradeoffs that you already knew of, while Right Thing approaches will allow you to discover hidden problems as you attempt to write the ideal program. So you learn more when you start from scratch, and that is a worthy goal.

The JVM should be acceptable for client apps, but its implementation footprint is bulky in most respects(download, memory consumption and startup times) and it has never attained the kind of first-class browser integration and bundling that Flash has.

OTOH Flash performance is quite good now, and I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. The bottleneck for most apps is in software rendering, not code performance.

I'm still waiting on the type system.

Yesterday I was riding my kick scooter home and the front wheel caught on a crack and I fell and got one stitch in my left knee and some minor cuts and bruises on the face and hand.

My lesson: one can't be overprepared for an accident. Also: having huge crowds of people come to your aid is awesome.

I use Mint. It's Ubuntu plus a better initial configuration and some custom desktop tools. My first impression of it, some years ago, was that it was the first distro I had used that correctly played back all my movies out of the box.

It's something in our society that makes us feel obligated to save the world. But it's not as if our lives can be played like a video game where whoever does the most for others gets a high score. We just live in the world, and pursue our goals as best we can.

Put another way: In general, you are probably effecting a positive change if you are making money and are not in trouble for doing so.

This is good advice. Founding a business takes skills, desire, and vision. Knowing what people actually need(rather than guessing) is part of the vision.

Things that have worked for me:

-Stop using a mouse. Use a trackball or a trackpad or anything else. I have a death grip on mice and I bet others do too.

-If you have to use a mouse switch your mousing hand. Deal with the fumbling and inaccuracy. You'll figure it out.

-Lean farr back in your chair(legs propped up) and rest your keyboard in your lap. Shift position occasionally.

-Move your monitor so that you look in different directions. Laptops are great for this and that compensates for their other ergonomic problems. You can usually find a way to move them higher or lower and correspondingly shift the strain.

I've studied the ideas around Subtext for a while. It's worth reiterating(if the videos and papers don't make it clear enough) that Subtext is really focused on exploiting the benefits of decision tables by expanding upon them and adding the complete set of constructs in addition to logic.

Decision tables, by the way, _work_. If you haven't tried them, it will only take a brief perusal of Wikipedia to get the concept. Their benefit is that all logic is represented in a single table: if every entry in the table has been filled, all cases are covered. Much easier to read than linear code, much less prone to error.

You can write your own decision table by hand in a spreadsheet program. But above a certain level of complexity(the point where you really, really want correct logic the first time) a complete decision table becomes very time-consuming to write by hand. By design it will still give more correct results than just hacking away, but automated approaches become very appealing. Decision tables were researched for a while in the 60s and early 70s, but were abandoned presumably as the field moved on to more prestigious topics.

Subtext's so-called "schematic table" does much to add the necessary automation - the next step in making it production-worthy would be to port such a system to output code in existing languages.

The internet is built on free-or-nearly-free operation. That's the beauty of it and I don't think Web 2.0 is likely to fall apart any time soon because of it. As the author says, the VC-funded "get big fast" sites will face some major challenges going forward, since the market has proven itself transient and eager to move on when things take a wrong turn(the growth of news.yc is attributable mostly to refugees of other sites moving in), but those companies are really a sideshow to the main event, which is happening in little fits and starts and niches.

I feel that the real stars are usually operating fairly quietly, building on a primarily-open model rather than a walled garden, and creating strong businesses in a highly traditional fashion: by being the best around. (cue the Joe Esposio song)

You can still build a stable foundation on an open model if your company holds the expertise in the technology; your immediate competition is likely to be arrogant and compete in the sprint for the walled garden, rather than the marathon for the open model. (other companies working towards an open model are collaborators toward a standard, but competitors in services. Hardly an unusual situation.)

If the competition gets a lot of momentum in an inelastic product(for example, operating systems or instant messaging), that can kill you early on, but over the long term the most-open player usually becomes disruptive and causes the marketplace to expand with a new set of services. That is my observation of most such situations in technology.

My diet principles:

1. Eat a variety, particularly with respect to fruits, nuts, and vegetables. If you can't get them in natural forms then at least go for processed combinations. Uniformity of diet is a symptom of agricultural society and should be avoided.

2. Make eating a priority after you wake up. Eat a few hours before bed so that you wake up when you're hungry.

3. Rely on protein to make a meal filling - in whatever form it takes, milk, soy, whey, meat, fish...

There is an interesting catch in the C/C++ part of that comment.

Why is the game industry using C/C++?

"Because they need the highest possible performance."

Why do they need that performance?

"To look better than the competition."

Why is looking better than the competition important?

"It sells better."

Why not do other things to sell better and get a better time-to-market with a slower language?

"Too risky."

And the entirety of console gaming has bought into ideologies of low risk, top-to-bottom. The systems are either underpowered or just plain difficult to develop for, the publishers impose boneheaded ideas, and the additional manufacturer requirements increase the costs, but the perceived benefits of a system with low piracy and high retail impact make everyone buy in, again and again. The burden always falls on the developer to suck up the worst excesses and ship something workable. And this in turn encourages a dogmatic developer ideology where one accepts "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" type stuff because of perceived risk. C/C++ is just one of those things.

I'm inside this system now... and while I like the company and am satisfied with the job, I would love to see it all break apart. It's a nasty system and we get the short end of it.

I don't really see a need for this; I can use haXe to get the additional interoperability Yegge refers to with Rhino/Javascript, and I won't have to use the JVM to get it.

That he pooh-poohs all static languages by pointing to some excess of Scala and using a slippery-slope argument from there doesn't really help.

Plus the verbosity.

I integrated Lua once for a project of my own. But on this project the choice wasn't mine - we ported over existing technology to a new console to meet a five-month ship deadline.

Also, Lua is imperfect for games: Squirrel is considerably more attractive because it is designed to work in real-time situations(no GC interference). I also had issues with Lua's error-handling.