Why Atlassian is to Software as Apple is to Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2012/05/04/why-atlassian-is-to-software-as-apple-is-to-design/

<comment><USER3> I appreciate Atlassian tools. I'm a long time JIRA user, and I've been a Confluence and Bamboo user in the past. They're all decent tools. I have no problem with a nice article about a pretty neat company that makes pretty neat enterprise tools (an industry riddled with stuff that's mostly worse).

It's really just the article's title that's completely fucking bananas. Apple's relationship to design is profound. Write a book that covers the last half century of consumer product design, and Apple deserves a chapter. Do the same for Software and does Atlassian get a chapter? Probly not. Ironically, Apple probly does.

<comment><USER4> "It's really just the article's title that's completely fucking bananas"

You could say that a lot about Forbes online content these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We (25 people company) use Confluence, and we all truly hate it. The design is attrocious. It's ugly beyond the pinnacle of ugliness. We tried to use some custom styling to ease the pain, but Confluence uses so many badly designed elements that we had to capitulate.

If this incredibly crappy product sells itself, then it's only because there is nothing better. If you don't know what your next company should do - <USER2> consider creating a better corporate wiki. Confluence is truly an abomination.

<comment><USER6> Do you think there's demand for a "corporate wiki"? I've been toying with the idea of that on the side for months, but I'm unsure of the demand for it. It seems like wikis are something that people don't enjoy using and don't have a need for. What are your experiences? Where does Confluence fall short?

<comment><USER5> To sell a successful corporate wiki, you need hundreds of plug-ins to handle all those special cases that each company inevitably has. That would be your biggest stumbling block, because creating those takes time, and that's where Confluence trumps all others.

Where it falls short? Basically everywhere else. There is no taste.

If you want our business, create a wiki that puts the content front and center, and remove everything else by default. Then let us add our 3 extension wishes, while still staying minimalist. It's not that difficult.

Unfortunately, it seems that either the chief software architect at Confluence is not up to the task, or that the company values quick crappy changes in favor of good design.

Good luck with your endeavor!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Forbes author has never used JIRA.

I'd say Valve is to software as Apple is to design, but there are probably far better examples. And I'm not a gamer (but I do use JIRA and SourceTree).

<comment><USER8> You haven't used Crucible. After using it you'll love jira...

<comment><USER9> Or fisheye, that is a extremely bad copy of github.

<comment><USER10> Are you suggesting time travel is possible now? Fisheye is a _much_ older product than github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real story should be how they put the Confluence back-ups on the same raid disk as everything else. Yeah, thankfully we had back-ups when their server went down. Or maybe how sub-tasks on JIRA can't have sub-tasks. Or that any other thing I've seen that tries to compete with it looks better/feels better/gives a better user experience. Or... should I continue?

</comment><comment><USER12> Write a title that includes a reference to Apple, then write some body text without doing to much research, keep the contributor count low so you don't have to spend time editing, then post on well known website. profit.

Seriously though there is nothing in that article that makes me think it is based on any type of truth or real world user feedback.

</comment><comment><USER13> The real title should be: "How many Atlassian PR people have called you to pitch you a story on their company? You guessed it - more than zero."

</comment><comment><USER14> JIRA (And other Atlassian tools) are notoriously bad at scaling. In a previous life, I spent a week pulling a 2,000 user JIRA/Confluence/Bamboo stack off to my then employer's stack -- the site couldn't handle more than 40 concurrent users, and this was when the software was on a beefy box with tomcat and a high-perf MySQL Instance. Saying that Atlassian is enterprise is a stretch -- it might be great for small teams (personally, I'm a fan of request tracker and mediawiki), but, I'd never stick it in the enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER15> They recently removed wiki formatting from their wiki in JIRA. If you want to edit a page you have to use their in-browser rich-text editor.

This (on top of a bunch of other friction I have with JIRA) makes it clear to me that JIRA is not a product they're building for hackers. It must be for program managers, or for check writers at enterprise companies.

</comment><comment><USER16> I quite like Atlassian's software from a functional level but installing it and keeping it running is a real ball ache.

</comment><comment> why-el Anybody can link to me a post about Atlassian's core software architecture? Like tools they use and their overall design choices?

<comment><USER17> It varies wildly from product to product. When I worked there, every product was written in Java. From what I hear, these days, it's a little different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is shockingly bad, from the very first sentence:

> There are only 3 enterprise-grade technology products I've ever seen that > sell themselves. Two of them are from Apple

Huh? What "enterprise-grade" Apple product? XServe? Apple is nowhere in the enterprise, and thank god for that.

Here's some enterprise software that sells itself: Exchange. BES (well, used to). ProCurve. DRAC. Symantec Ghost. Did you see iTunes Group Policy Server anywhere in that list?

The article starts off stupid and only goes downhill from there. This guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.</comment>


The future of agriculture - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh <comment><USER2> While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to industrialized agriculture:

1\. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them.

2\. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system.

3\. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet.

4\. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address.

Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the article is very much about agriculture, and all its attendant woes.

But we're not likely to see any story about a permaculture robot soon. Several years ago I started to (on paper) design a system to merely plan and track a permaculture-style farm/environment - and then abandoned it due to complexity beyond my capacity to model.

Monocultures in comparison are painfully simple things to manage - part of why they're so successful (commercially, at least).

<comment><USER4> All I want to do is design robots for sustainable small and medium scale agriculture. I've been working on robotics my whole life, and am very interested in 3D printed robotics. I've designed a proof of concept 3D printed remote control car [1] and I think it could be possible to design a good robot for agricultural applications that people can build and repair themselves. I design open source electronics for robotics and think we'd all be better off if we owned shares in a community farm, and I want to make that kind of thing possible.

3.5 billion people on this Earth are poor farmers. If we can design functional open source agricultural robots that can be built by anyone with access to a $300 3D printer (and I think we can) we could have a bigger impact on the world than every new Silicon Valley startup from 2016.

There is a serious issue with the fact that capitalists don't make things for poor people, because they can't afford to buy the solutions. [2] I don't want that to stop me though, so I'm working hard to figure out ways of funding this project that are functional even in our capitalist world. I think I spend more time thinking about economics and social systems than I do about robotics, since the technical solutions are trivial compared to the problem of getting people to fund valuable non-profitable work. But I think that is possible too.

Right now I am working at a robotics startup and solving problems like 3D perception, behavior, team management, handling my own bullshit, etc. My 10 year plan is to have a functioning system for homesteading with robots.

I'm really trying to make this happen.

[1] [http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race- car/](http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/) [2] [http://tlalexander.com/restless/](http://tlalexander.com/restless/)

<comment><USER5> How are you finding the efforts? I'd be interested in knowing more about how you intend on pushing it forward.

Do you need funding, ideas, people?

<comment><USER4> Currently I'm funding development from my company [1], which was originally funded off of Kickstarter and is now funded out of pocket until I can achieve profitability.

In the future I intend to tap in to crowd funding again, probably with a full robot as a development platform, and will check out grants and other sources of traditional investment.

I could use people, ideas, and funding, in that order. Funding is forever useful but I'm not willing to accept anything with strings attached at this point. I think I'm at a stage now where I've fleshed out a good enough basic plan that I need more people to work on it. I don't currently have bandwidth to organize much but I figure I will some time in 2017. For now I'd love to get a core group of people together to discuss the ideas, and see how we can develop it further.

The general idea is a zero marginal cost society. That is, one more day of society's needs can be serviced or produced at zero marginal cost. This would eliminate the need to work for survival as there would be nothing anyone strictly had to pay for. This requires that some technology be developed, and that a good reduced-consumption culture is fostered that values true freedom over endless consumption. The first incarnation would be an open source farming robot project that would allow small farms all over the world to support themselves with less of their labor devoted to farming. Millions of people could be freed up by open source automation they built themselves or purchased locally. Longer term this would be used to tell a story about how automation and openness can free all of us from the need to work.

If you want to chat more about this, my email is in my profile and on my website, below.

[1] FlutterWireless.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading clay (mitigate soil erosion).

All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed.

Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture.

[0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers - [https://hectare.ag/nooka](https://hectare.ag/nooka)

<comment><USER7> I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.

<comment><USER8> Anyway you can point me towards more information about your company and its instrumentation?

I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.

<comment><USER7> we sell our soil moisture monitoring through...

[http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/](http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter 's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind._

This is a passage from Wendell Berry's _The Unsettling of America_. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity.

akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?"

We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.

<comment><USER10> We can verbalize the problem: our population growth has outpaced our investment in agricultural technology and infrastructure such that in order to even try to feed everyone, we have to turn to ever more drastic measures that are unsustainable or carry worrying existential risks. It is only in the last decade or so that farmers are finally going full force in with tech that was standard factory equipment thirty or even fifty years ago except now designed for farmers. There is no technological breakthrough coming, we already have all of the technology and the rate at which its costs are dropping is monumental. Finally the low margin businesses that feed the human race are able to afford it.

As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria, breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an ecological catastrophe.

<comment><USER11> No, automating stuff and using technology to protect crop from "the vagaries of nature" (what a ridiculous idea!) will not solve the main problems of modern non sustainable agriculture, namely soil erosion, contamination and monoculture vulnerability.

Despite constant technological progress, agriculture sadly remains one of the top contributors to global warming. Unless the whole concept changes I really don't see how we can avoid a global catastrophe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Agriculture is set for the next big revolution in the next few decades. Many thousands of years ago, developments like horticulture, domestication, the wheel, roads, and non-nomadic life styles collided together and built upon each other exponentially, ushering the first agricultural revolution. Then we had breakthroughs in trains, synthetic fertilizer, refrigerated cars, and all of the other industrialization technologies in the 19th century, which again changed the face of food and how it was grown and distributed. I'm sure I missed a few eras but these are the two big ones.

Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and ecological impact of industrialized farming.

This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control. Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of good.

<comment><USER6> "..have to borrow before every planting" This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).

<comment><USER10> I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt the domestic farms as well.

It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought)

[2] [http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister- de...](http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-declares-end- of-drought-20120427-1xpgi.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of interesting work has been done by the Israeli hydroponics industry around water conservation like some of the stuff in this article (as they grow their food in very high temperatures).

<comment><AUTHOR> As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> FTA:

>RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape

Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stopped at second sentence: "fortunately" Authors bias. Is this another techno-utopian rant extolling the virtues of everything unsustainable in modern society in prescriptive format for agriculture by urban white collar workers who never touched soil in their life but take gadget buying advice from Wired.com?

<comment><USER15> The Economist is a publication that has always taken an editorial stance.

<comment><USER16> And conceals the identity of that editor.</comment></comment></comment>


Blazing Fast REST APIs with Node.js and the Fastify Framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/majikarp/node-rest-api-template <comment><USER2> I tried these certain APIs, indeed they are fast but take a look at the spaghetti codebase. The guys who wrote this must be in a real hurry, I personally get stressed only by reading the code.</comment>


Popcorntime for Your Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.popcornchill.com/ <comment><USER2> Why does it need a plugin when there is webtorrent? [https://webtorrent.io](https://webtorrent.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Webtorrent clients only connect to other webtorrent clients (unless you put a hybrid client somewhere) which basically are quite less. So its can't connect to normal peers .. well atleast for now

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a rate from 1 to Guantanamo, how illegal is this?

<comment><USER4> I don't believe there has ever been a case of someone being prosecuted for watching streamed content.</comment></comment>


Plan 9 public grid - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.9gridchan.org/public_grid/index.html <comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, it's services provided over Plan9's '9P' protocol. The 'grid' word makes me think there's some level of decentralization involved, though it's somewhat unclear exactly how much.

I find it amusing and somewhat strange how many of the modern-day Plan 9 enthusiasts come from 4chan's /g/ board, this project included. Maybe it takes a certain level of eccentricity to value the elegance over most measures of practicality. Either way, I fully support it.

<comment><USER3> The decentralization enters in a couple different ways. First, the set of services is made from several different machines - I didn't make every single service a separate vps, but there are 4 different nodes that provide the different 9p fses that are used, and it would be possible to run each service on a separate vps, but at the moment that would be a bit unnecessary because load isn't that heavy. The other decentralized aspect is that if people want to, they can announce their own services to one of the registries that is being exported, so people could build their grid environment from more resources than just the ones exported from 9gridchan. That is still mostly theoretical right now, people are still exploring the possibilities of the set of 'default' services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, I wasn't really expecting this to show up here, but I guess people have been paying some attention to plan 9 things around here lately. Hi everybody! I can try to answer some questions to those who are interested. I've been working on this kind of thing for a long time and it is interesting to see this version of things getting some traction.

<comment><USER4> I'm excited about this because it's about Plan 9 but I have no idea what it is or why I should be excited. Please tell me more.

I read the description but I'm not sure if it's a time sharing system on plan 9 that the public can log into or another internet or... something else.

<comment><USER3> It's a collaborative environment build from 9p services. If you add the scripts to use it to your plan 9 machine/vm (or use the ANTS iso images), it will create a grid workspace with a chat, shared filesystems, ability to send links and images and documents to other connected users, and access to a registry for adding your own services if you choose. It currently has a small user community but it seems people are finding it fun and useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tangential-ish question:

It's often claimed that the Linux /proc virtual filesystem has roots in Plan 9's design, and it's certainly a very powerful abstraction that allows, at the cost of some _expressiveness_ , near-universal _interoperability_ with some of Linux's internal state.

However, many BSDs do not support it out of the box, and I've heard it claimed that they're deprecating/have no plans to keep /proc around, favoring sysctls which return structs instead.

Assuming that both are true (/proc came from plan9 and BSDs are moving away from it), why is this the case?

Why abandon a universally-interoperable, so-simple-a-child-can-interface-with- it interface to what is otherwise a very hard-to-work-with type of system state?

<comment><USER6> Exposing kernel bits via the filesystem makes less sense the more you think about it:

* You have to build a state machine inside the kernel to handle cases like applications reading a file one byte at a time.

* If the API is complex, you get to build parsers (aka, the easiest way to introduce buffer overflows in C) in kernel-mode.

* Programs now have to deal with malicious applications capable of managing mountpoints giving fake results via the filesystem. I could link to /dev/random to /dev/zero, how many programs are going to check for that?

* You can't let the program go into a chroot jail if it needs to read the kernel's magic filesystem.

* You have to mingle filesystem access bits with kernel security checks for process capabilities and the like.

It's definitely not a simple interface for the kernel to implement, and, quite frankly, it's much more complex for a security-minded application to poke at the kernel through a filesystem than it is through a syscall.

<comment><USER7> None of these should actually be a problem in practice.

> * You have to build a state machine inside the kernel to handle cases like > applications reading a file one byte at a time.

You need to have this anyway, because regular files exist. Also, the logic is very simple.

> * Programs now have to deal with malicious applications capable of managing > mountpoints giving fake results via the filesystem. I could link to > /dev/random to /dev/zero, how many programs are going to check for that?

Only root could do that. If an attacker has root, there are many more realistic attacks.

> * You can't let the program go into a chroot jail if it needs to read the > kernel's magic filesystem.

You can add the magic filesystem to a choot jail.

> * You have to mingle filesystem access bits with kernel security checks for > process capabilities and the like.

I'm really not sure what this means.

<comment><USER5> > > * You have to build a state machine inside the kernel to handle cases like > applications reading a file one byte at a time.

> You need to have this anyway, because regular files exist. Also, the logic > is very simple.

"State machine" is a bit of a weird term here; it's more to do with "transactional state". This doesn't exist for regular files. If you read a regular file one byte at a time and something else is changing it, there's no transactional guarantee. You might get corrupted data. For that matter, you might get corrupted/half-changed data if you're reading >1 byte at a time. This is fundamental to the Unix file model (as distinct from, say, Windows), and is also the reason that file locking facilities exist.

I think GP was emphasizing the difficulty of having to bind the code that generates the _contents_ of files in /proc with the status of any code _reading_ those files. The reader needs a guarantee that it'll get a "snapshot" of the /proc pseudo-file as of some time (the start of the read? The end of the read? This is arguable.) Without that, there's no race-free way to ensure that all readers don't get corrupted data that's changed during the read.

This is required even if you can assume (which you can't) that all readers will use a buffer/chunk size larger than the contents of the file, and that the kernel's updates to the data backing the file are atomic.

A state machine is a common way to implement such snapshot/tx guarantees, but the fundamental desired property is a _transaction_ , which, while I disagree with GP on some other points, is absolutely a needed and likely hard-to-get- right feature in this area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h "This time, though, we actually have some fucking clue what we are doing."

There's confident, and then there's crazy;)

Best of luck to them:)

</comment><comment><USER8> (sorta offtopic) Does anyone remember a cloud storage service based on 9p? At least I think it was based on 9p. Or written by plan9 (fossil, venti) enthusiasts.

It's name was Rangoon. (I think). It even pre-dated Dropbox.

<comment><USER9> That was Rangboom from 9netics[1]. Archive link because the site now serves a very narrowly-focused photographic art installation.

Their later effort was called "9p cloud."[2]

1 - [https://web.archive.org/web/20170311182215/http://www.9netic...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170311182215/http://www.9netics.com/)

2 - [https://www.9pcloud.net/](https://www.9pcloud.net/)

<comment><USER10> Wasn't that brucee's gig for a while? I remember they had written a windows 9p client which is hen's teeth now, but I remember it working well.

<comment><USER8> Yep, brucee has (or had) a 9netics email address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We aren't expecting abuse to be a major problem."

Oh ... dear.

<comment><USER12> Coming from 4chan, you'd think they would know better.

<comment><USER3> It's amazing what an incredible filter "you have to use plan 9" is for things. I have been doing public plan 9 services on and off for a long time, and although I'm sure someone will be a jerk eventually, I have yet to see any deliberately malicious behavior. On the grid right now, things are pretty open and the user community is all cooperative and constructive. So far as I can tell, the venn diagram of "people looking for trolling and malicious lulz" and "people interested in using plan 9" has approximately zero overlap.

<comment><USER11> That's an awful lot like security-by-obscurity.

In fact, I'm fairly confident it's pretty much the same exact thing.

If you _don 't_ build a system with defences against abuse, you will see abuse. It's a matter of scale and time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The grid is back up, a VPS host issue occurred and a fix is underway.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems to be down right now, so not sure what services are implemented, but... someone should port this stuff to upspin. :)

<comment><USER3> My vps host picked the most inconvenient time possible to reboot the root node for the grid. Things should all be working again now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After a bunch of reading, I still have no idea what this is. Some Linux variant?

<comment><USER16> Plan 9 is an amazing, inspirational, and futuristic operating system from the past: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs)

One of the things that Plan 9 can do is seamlessly treat remote resources as if they were local. From what I can tell, this is a remote grid that you can connect a local Plan 9 instance to.

<comment><USER17> Do these i/o interfaces tell you their expected latency and throughput numbers? I could see some fairly silly code being written because they didn't realize that file was actually a a bad cell phone connection.

<comment><USER18> The main author of Plan 9 was Rob Pike. He knows a little bit about networked software.

I actually had Plan 9 working on some Sun 3/50s at one point. You could use it over a 2400 baud modem... a kind of broken one where I had to listen to the connection noises and twiddle the wires at the right moment to make it connect. A bad cell phone connection would have been nice.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Incident Response Documentation - <AUTHOR> https://response.pagerduty.com/ <comment><USER2> This is wonderful, especially the section on what didn't work ("Anti patterns," bottom of page).

This one in particular feels like good advice to startup founders as their company grows:

> Trying to take on multiple roles.# In past PagerDuty incidents, we've had > instances where the Incident Commander has started to assume the Subject > Matter Expert role and attempted to solve the problem themselves. This > usually happens when the IC is an engineer in their day-to-day role. They > are in an incident where the cause appears to be a system they know very > well and have the requisite knowledge to fix. Wanting to solve the incident > quickly, the IC will start to try and solve the problem. Sometimes you might > get lucky and it will resolve the incident, but most of the time the > immediately visible issue isn't necessarily the underlying cause of the > incident. By the time that becomes apparent, you have an Incident Commander > who is not paying attention to the other systems and is just focussed on the > one problem in front of them. This effectively means there's no incident > commander, as they would be busy trying to fix the problem. Inevitably, the > problem turns out to be much bigger than anticipated and the response has > become completely derailed.

<comment><USER3> An officer does not fire their weapon, they assess and respond to the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's interesting it seems to assume there is no 24/7 ops coverage on site who triage before escalating the call to actual on call staff.

This is from being the lead on call for the UK's tymnet billing system normally if I got called some initial triage

<comment><USER5> Yea pretty much from my experience now in the US, most private companies use their salaried employees and wake them up multiple times a night as sometimes with customer directly on the other end of the line. Pagerduty enables this to work. This is considered now normal for smallish private orgs, shit my spot just got bought by a billions dollar defense contractor I still get woken up at 3am with a end user having printer issues.. and I work as a devops engineer.

<comment><USER6> As long as it's managed properly, I don't see how this is a problem in general. Small to medium sized companies simply don't have the resources to have a full time 24 hour operations center. That's at least two shifts, with at least two people each, so 4 salaried engineers just to cover after hours ops. If you have 10 engineers in your company, you're not going to put 40% of your engineering resources into after hours operations, and that doesn't even account for when a subject matter expert is required to help respond.

Where I work, there's an on call roster, that people volunteer to be on, and you're paid extra for being there. We also have a good post-mortem culture, so after hours pages also track down steadily over time. Unless the company happens to be geographically distributed just right to avoid needing this, I really don't see the problem with these kinds of arrangements.

<comment><USER7> You need _one_ extra person to cover the night hours, and you need to alternate weekends between your staff.

Of course, you can't have only one person on the position, you need at least two (but then, you would need people testing your operations anyway). Optimally, you will alternate them between night and day hours so they integrate with the rest of the team.

I don't understand how US companies are allowed to not do that.

<comment><USER8> Have you tried that before? Theres the obvious, that "night" is longer than business hours. Then theres the squishy people problems of things like sick time, meal breaks, using the WC, holiday, or PTO. And ignoring all that what do you do when there are two discrete problems at the same time? Varying shift times is _terrible_ for humans.

In short, no 1 headcount does not 24/7 coverage make. I dont even believe the grandparents 2 per rota is enough to be sustainable. I have seen as small as 4 work acceptably.

<comment><USER9> It requires four heads to cover even "20/365" (half the night "closed") and four is, in fact, short for true 24/7/365 = 8760 hrs, while a person works 2,000 hr/yr x 4 = 8,000.

If you try it with less, you're lying to yourself and everyone else.

(me: worked rotating shifts in a 24/7 operation for years)

<comment><USER8> Oh I was thinking of 4 minimum for the off business hours coverage. Actual 24/7/365 id put at 7-8 heads.

(Me: a guy whos been on oncall rotas for 15 years, worked swing shift for 4, and whos current org runs "follow the sun" support)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing I've been wondering about is how smaller organizations handle on call. Looking at the roles laid out [1] and assuming an on-call schedule of 4 weeks off, 1 week secondary, and 1 week primary, that's a team of at least 25 people.

For an organization of just a handful of engineers, how do they make on call work? A single on-call rotation would stretch the team to its limits, and it's likely that certain domains would only have a single Subject Matter Expert.

[1] [https://response.pagerduty.com/before/different_roles/](https://response.pagerduty.com/before/different_roles/)

<comment><USER11> Do everything you can to eliminate the need for on-call support. It sucks, your engineers will quickly grow to hate it and will start looking for new jobs.

<comment><USER10> Certainly everything should be done to reduce the number of incidents, but you can't eliminate the need for on call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome. Will be reading these in short order. Can anyone recommend other good incident response resources (that are relevant in 2019)?

<comment><USER13> There are some good additional resources referenced in the docs here: [https://response.pagerduty.com/resources/reading/](https://response.pagerduty.com/resources/reading/)

Specifically, Google's SRE books are particularly useful ([https://landing.google.com/sre/books/](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/)) along with the book "Incident Management for Operations" ([http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036159.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036159.do)) and Etsy's Debriefing Facilitation Guide ([http://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf](http://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf)).

The book "Comparative Emergency Management" ([https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/aemrc/booksdownload/compemmg...](https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/aemrc/booksdownload/compemmgmtbookproject/)) is also quite interesting, as it compares the emergency management practices of about 30 different countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> let me guess...it includes getting paged as a very important step. j/k, this is very well written. Good for sharing to those whom have not been on call at a good org before.

</comment><comment><USER15> Curious how PagerDuty handles incident response when PagerDuty itself is down.

<comment><USER16> I used to work at PD. When I was there, they followed a lot of (all?) of these guidelines.

The app's ownership was spread across teams, so depending which section was affected would page certain teams. If it was SEV-2 or higher, that would page an IC and the group of primary on-calls to begin triage. Other SMEs were looped in as necessary.

The anti patterns section is quite authentic. PD had very healthy discussions internally about the topics covered (eg, when it made sense to stop paging everyone, how to make people feel it was OK to drop off the call if they weren't adding anything).

In terms of the actual "how do they page people if PD is down?", they had some backup monitoring systems that could SMS / phone on-calls directly. As a piece of software though, PD is pretty resilient, so it was rare to have an outage that affected everything so badly that they had to rely on these secondary systems.

<comment><USER17> I can verify this as well. I worked on a separate team from Ken, but while we were there, we faced a lot of issues that led the team to decide upon and codify these rules. They are pretty tried and true, if only because they came out of a lot of iteration and testing.

Hope you are doing well, Ken!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "A guide to being on-call... we all have lives which might get in the way of > on-call time"

How dare those engineers live a life. They're on-call goddammit.

<comment><USER19> is it possible to work in software and not be on call? it feels like its not

<comment><USER20> I worked for a state agency that hosted a data archive and real-time collection of hydrology data. It was not considered "mission critical", and as such there was no on-call.

It was pretty cool, since they practiced 8-hr work days. My only issue was that they were way more focused on ass-in-chair time than productive time, and weren't flexible. At that time, I commuted via bus, and it wasn't uncommon for the bus to be delayed by 15-30 minutes if there were traffic incidents along the route. I wasn't allowed to clock in early if my bus arrived early, and was penalized and documented if the bus was late. So there wasn't a chance in hell I was going to catch the earlier route and arrive 45 minutes before my shift, but they sure were pissy when that bus was late.

<comment><USER21> I knew a guy who worked for the local rail transit despots. He used to take their service into work until they told him he had to stop being late and that delays in their own service was not an excuse. At least they weren't in denial about their quality of service.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup stopped paying my salary - <AUTHOR> My first job out of college was for an "internet media" startup right across the street from school.  Long story short, after a few years they started running out of cash. Salary started coming a few days late, then weeks, then a month. At the point when they owed me 2 months of salary, I quit and started looking for a new job full-time (which I found after a couple months, thank God).
Whenever I talk to the founder, he typically says they have "potential investors" and the money should be coming in a few months.  I'm not as stupid as I was, and I'm sure that no money is coming in.  Who wants to invest in a startup that hasn't been profitable for 5+ years and has back salary obligations to multiple employees?
I can survive without the money, but it's still a pretty good chunk for me so it's worth it to me to put in effort to retrieve it. Problem is, I don't really know how to approach it.  I see my options as being: 1. Go to the law; 2. Approach them aggressively; 3. Forget about it.
I've been thinking about filing a wage claim with the state (California), but I would rather settle directly with the company rather than go through the state.  I can't really forget about it because it's a decent chunk of change.
There is a little twist, and that is that my experience with the founders and officers was very good up until the point they stopped paying me.  They took us out to nice lunches and bought us the first iPhones on launch day (even bought me a new one when I dropped mine).  They sent me all-expenses paid to WWDC, Google I/O, OSCON, and SIGGRAPH. I essentially got my career started at that company. It was my first job as a developer, and when my boss left I got promoted to "CTO" and got to hire my own small team. This is one of the main reasons I haven't really "gone after them". I don't really want to screw them over, I just want my money.
Any advice would be welcome. Thanks! <comment><USER5> You're not going to get the money back. 'grellas may hop on and set me straight on that, but what I expect will happen in the best case is that by pursuing a wage claim you start the machinery that finally puts your employer into bankruptcy, whereupon you become a creditor, lining up with all the rest of the creditors who aren't going to get paid either.

Don't let my belief here imply that you shouldn't do anything; all three of your options are valid. However, in each of them, before you (a) get emotional, (b) burn any potential bridges (even treacherous, slippery ones), or (c) contemplate investing serious time or any money in this process, keep in mind that your outlook on this probably isn't good.

<comment><USER6> > You're not going to get the money back.

Indeed, that's my read too, but he shouldn't just shrug his shoulders and give up.

An option: Call them up, tell them you're short on cash and really need the money, and offer to take 1/4th of the salary you're owed if they can pay you shortly and it'd be a huge favor to you and you'd appreciate it.

This removes the small chance of getting the full amount, but it gives the very-important closure and gets the pay off the top idea on your mind - <http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html>

The cost to thinking about bullshit like this isn't considered enough. Offer to take two weeks pay and sign away the rest. Then be very, very grateful about it, thank them and say it's a big favor to you and you're rooting for them. You lose the small chance of getting full pay, but you get something and can move on with your life and devote your mental energy to other things.

Edit: The other nice thing about this route is that after going through that process, you're no longer a creditor to them and can call them up more freely without them tensing up and feeling the pressure. Depending on how valuable the contact/reference is for you, that could be better than going more hostile. If you did want to go hostile, small claims court might be a better bet than the wage board, depending on what the cap is in California. Small claims doesn't require a lawyer and is pretty straightforward to navigate on your own.

<comment><USER7> Why would they give him 1/4th the salary? Could he sign away his right to demand the full salary, or would any such agreement be unenforceable if he decided to come after them later?

I'd support the legal system allowing him to sign an agreement accepting a lower amount and making that final, but I wonder if it works like the minimum wage, where workers can't sign away their right to be paid at least the minimum wage.

<comment><USER8> (IANAL, but my business law professor was...) Contract law says that if you say you'll take X paid "shortly" instead of the full amount Y in a situation like the OP describes, it does not prohibit you from collecting the remaining amount later. Even if you sign a contract that agrees to settle the debt, that contract isn't valid because the employer is not providing any consideration in that instance.

Having said that, I was in a similar situation and basically just gave up ever seeing the money for the same reasons others have already given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Screw _them_ over? Look at it another way. They shafted you, and others. They're in the habit of it now. They're going to keep on shafting until one day they shaft someone who really can't afford it. They could cause someone some real life tragedy, all in the cause of keeping a non-viable business going.

If you did start them on the chain of bankruptcy, you're doing a favour to all the people they'll screw down the line.

And if they're lying about money woes, you get something.

Better to kill the company before they cause some serious damage to a real person. I understand your reluctance, you probably put some of your heart and soul into it, but in the end it's just a company. You tried, they tried, but it just didn't work out.

Then again, having said all that, if I could detach my emotions from it I'd be a bit more selfish and take the advice elsewhere in the thread to negotiate a partial payment. It's probably your best chance of getting some money. But then again I wouldn't be able to detach my emotions, I'd go after the whole amount on principle and I certainly wouldn't have waited this long.

And the little twist, them buying you iPhones and sending you everywhere? That's people pretending to run a business. That's people being the big men, who think that's what a business should be when it's not. They pissed your paycheck away on frivolities. That was their choice.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am going to have to go against the grain on this one. Yes you are owed money that is rightfully yours. But you wanted to be part of a startup with all the associated glory and rewards. That means you also assumed some risk and realized you might have to be flexible based on the circumstances handed to the startup. Remember, Amazon _almost_ went under.

The founders are not jerks. They spent what they had on you and treated you well. Now they have nothing but your loyalty and goodwill. They probably want to pay you (maybe even before they pay themselves!) but they can't. Yes they are trying to keep plastic smiles so every one doesn't jump ship and you can live to fight another day. Perhaps, at this point they should be more honest, but I imagine they are afraid to see the dream vaporized.

Obviously, if you worked there for some time you at least kind of believe in what you are doing. Now is an opportunity to gain more control/equity and maybe even help steer the company to profitability. On the other hand if you are sure it is going nowhere, even if everyone tightened their belts and rolled up their sleeves then it is time to let go and write it off.

Yes you are entitled to the money. But you are probably not going to get it. You are only going to destroy relationships. Be up front with the founders. Either leverage your position to change your circumstances or walk away in good faith.

<comment><USER11> _"But you wanted to be part of a startup with all the associated glory and rewards. That means you also assumed some risk..."_

I disagree with that. This person is an employee not a founder. Therefore the risk they assume should be different. At worst, it should be that of losing their job at short notice. The flexibility you also refer to should not extend to working for long periods with no idea when you'll get paid.

Although we can only hear one side of the story here, I feel the founders were negligent in their duties to their employees. They should have made the company's situation clearer to the staff and gone over the options.

Like others in the thread, I doubt the OP will get all the money he is rightfully owed. However, simply walking away in 'good faith' seems weak (esp when that faith has already been abused).

<comment><AUTHOR> You could say that I assumed the general risk of dealing with people, but amirmc is correct that I did not assume any formal business risk. I.e., I did not receive stock options or any other compensation that is normally given to risk-bearing stakeholders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Go for 2, then 1. Have a polite, but firm discussion with the CEO. Tell him that you can't wait anymore for what it's rightfully yours. Give them 30 days to get your money or you'll be forced to go through the state. If they don't pay up, file a claim (you gave them ample time and a fair warning). And remember, they are the assholes, not you for wanting your money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that confirms what's been stewing in my mind.

<comment><USER13> "And remember, they are the assholes..."

When you start to see the people _as_ the problem, instead of the people _in_ the problem, it can hinder your social problem solving. And this is as much a social problem as it is a financial one.

There is a chance that this can be resolved with (1) you getting your money back and (2) you still being on friendly terms, but probably not if you label them "assholes" in your head. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you hit the nail there in that I'm really curious on how to solve the social problem in more of a win-win way as you described. I would probably break down and rank the problem like this:

1\. Character - how do I carry myself with justice, mercy, and compassion, yet not get pushed around and maintain self-respect? 2\. Social - how do I maintain relationships? 3\. Financial - how do I get my money?

<comment><USER14> Most people know what's fair, somewhere deep down. You know it, and they know it.

Go to them confidently, tell them "You didn't pay me. I know your company's having problems, but that doesn't get you out of your debt to me, we both know this. How can we make this right without destroying our friendship and the company?"

If they don't give you anything to work with (you should accept either money or a solid explanation of why they can't pay you now, and a concrete, explainable timeline showing exactly when they'll be able to), then either they're clearly disrespecting you and their social contract, or they actually are completely bankrupt and have no hope of getting out of it, and in either case, it's perfectly within reason to start them down the bankruptcy path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was in their shoes once, and it was a horrible experience. I had paychecks bouncing at the end, some tempers flaring, and overall was about as miserable as could be. I'd suggested that people start looking for other jobs - <USER2> was no turnaround in sight. This was just a group of 5 of us - not some huge office, so we were closer (physically, if nothing else) than some other larger orgs that have gone through this. To their credit, they stayed as long as possible, later than was probably prudent. That may have been partially due to the fact that few others in the area were hiring at the time.

Answer, you can try to sue, but there's probably very little chance you'll get your money any time soon. Whether you want to pursue this or not depends on a few things. Do you feel they mislead you? Do you think they really _have_ money and are just lying to you?

The flipside of my experiences was about 4 years after that scenario above, I did some contracting with a company - remotely (unfortunately) and they didn't pay. I found out from discussions that the PM on my project quit soon after I started, another developer on the project quit as well. He'd told me he'd quit because he was tired of the contractors bitching to him they weren't getting paid - apparently this was a habit company X had. I had other contractors seek me out and tell me they'd been shafted on payments too - one for $700, and another for $3500. Mine was to the tune of close to $9000. (never again!). So... I drove up to his state and filed a lawsuit. It's been > 2 years, and it's still in the system. Will probably take another year, and at that point, I'd still have to collect. At this point, it's a matter of principal - <USER3> company's whole MO was to farm out work to contractors in various states, then not send payment. That's a whole other level of evil, imo.

But maybe I'm biased and I really was as scammy as the guy who didn't pay me? I don't think so. I was honest with people - there's no money coming in - <USER4> another job if you can get one. That's not what happened to me a few years later, though perhaps some might see it as divine retribution?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you can at least take some credit for telling your employees to look for other jobs.

Our CEO would come into our office and say, "I just had a meeting with a potential investor and he's committed $25k!" He always had our hopes up, but our CFO would paint a different picture. Even our president told me he was starting to pick up work on the side.

<comment><USER15> We'd had a not bad year - our first six figure project was earlier that year. However, the sales cycle was proving to be much longer than we'd anticipated (selling to higher ed) and then we had a couple of projects cancel (mid-late 2003). Everything became too much.

Later, I went back to working for others for a while. I smelled a bad burn rate at this company, but only after I'd sold my house and moved states. :/ We were supposed to be impressed with announcements of $x projects and $y investments, but it wasn't that hard to see that 20+ people at a company, being paid full time, would eat up those $x and $y in just a couple months, but the $x was for a 9 month project.

I ended up being extremely cynical and distrustful of others (as I'm sure a few people ended up distrusting me earlier) and it's taken years to get back a modicum of faith/optimism again. Working for myself seemed about the only way I could have a degree of control and not be left in the dark on finances. Yeah, my boss is a jerk, but I'm sleeping with his wife. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tptacek is right that your prospects may be slim if the company is truly on the verge of bankruptcy. But if it's treading water, or up-trending, or captures a new opportunity or investment in the near future, your odds go way up.

So be sure to communicate that you still expect to be paid, and keep documentation on the amount owed -- ideally also a confirmation from them of the amounts. Making an official complaint to state employment authorities should be a consideration -- but one you neither rush to nor wait too long to pursue. Ask an employment lawyer about your rights and any deadlines for asserting them that may apply.

So my overall suggestion would be: (2), with increasingly aggressive nagging that gets them on the record with excuses/acknowledgments, and makes them realize you'll eventually go (1), so they might as well pay you as soon as they can.

I'd also be open to a settlement for less, but not be first to mention the possibility. If their fortunes improve, and you then assert your legal rights before they expire, you might get the original amount plus penalties/interest. So you have leverage unless it's a blood-from-a-stone situation.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, they owe you SOMETHING, either cash or if they don't have it, equity. Demand what is yours.

First off, you have a right to know the state of the company's finances. If they say they don't have the money, tell them to prove it and show you their bank account balance.

Second, you can be aggressive without getting personal, as long as everyone stays honest. If they're lying to you, then they're douchebags and it is personal.

Third, another way you could do this is to setup a formal loan and repayment plan with set interest rates, payment schedule and penalties. You could probably do this yourself.

Setting up a formal, high interest-bearing loan seems like a great way to incentivize them to pay your money back. If they don't want to play ball, then take them to court.

However, I definitely agree that the solution is NOT to bend over and take it in the ass.

<comment><USER18> "Well, they owe you SOMETHING, either cash or if they don't have it, equity."

Who would want equity in a failing company? If I were the OP and they offered me equity, I'd be insulted.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct, sir. Equity in this company would be worthless to me, just a token of their appreciation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These guys are scum for letting you work blindly without 1) having any idea how or when they would pay what they committed to and 2) warning you they're circling the drain. They deserve to get nailed for it.

That said, it doesn't sound like you have a long employment history, so a cordial relationship and good references from them might be worth more than the money they're unlikely ever to be _able_ to pay, no matter how you go after them. Consider hanging tight at least until you risk losing the right to claim your due (I have no idea if there's anything like a statute of limitations on wage claims or suits).

Good luck. I've been through "oops, we're about out of money, guys", but I was fortunate they were honest and ethical about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a 3-year statute of limitations in California on wage claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "It was my first job as a developer, and when my boss left I got promoted to "CTO" and got to hire my own small team. This is one of the main reasons I haven't really "gone after them". I don't really want to screw them over, I just want my money."

Did you deserve the job of CTO? If so, then you also deserved the paycheck. If not, then be happy with the fact that you got a cushy job that will look good on your resume and leave it at that.

Seriously, this is business. It's good to be happy about the time you worked there, but don't let it cloud your judgement. I'm not saying you _should_ go after them. I'm just saying not to hold back because you feel you owe them something that you don't.

<comment><USER7> Another thing about being CTO: are any other employees that have been shafted mad at _him_? In most companies that have the title, _CTO_ is a leadership position.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the other employees that have beef are taking it up with the CEO. I wasn't a real "CTO" as you one might think. But as far as that small company was concerned, I was responsible technology direction, although I didn't have my own budget for hiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They're about to go under if I'm any judge of this.

I wouldn't count on it going anywhere unless you become very blunt. They might be afraid to file for bankruptcy, you might get paid a bit if you threaten to sue, rinse, repeat as long as they pay up bits and pieces.

Until they go bust (which sounds like it is weeks or at most months away).

</comment><comment><USER21> Two issues from my point of view:

1) You're owed the money legally. No question about it. You can probably even get it. California takes a very hard line on unpaid wages.

2) In the grand scheme of the situation do you feel good about fighting them over the unpaid wages?

#1 is easy. You file a claim. You have a decent chance of getting your money.

#2 is harder and it's impossible to know from the outside. I think it's perfectly reasonable to let people off the hook in some _rare_ circumstances. Only you can make the call if this is one of those times. It doesn't make you weak or a fool to treat people better than they strictly deserve.

It sounds though, like you've already made up your mind that you want to go after the unpaid wages. So give them a final warning (written, certified mail, return receipt) and then file a claim.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't feel good about fighting them over the money. This may sound weird, but I do want the company to succeed. However, I might feel worse if they flat out got away with it. There are several of us employees who are owed back salary and it was very unprofessional and un-courteous for them to keep us on the hook the way they did.

I think it would be a weak move to avoid it completely, but maybe not weak to at least confront them and then show mercy.

But I think you're absolutely right, nobody here can really decide for me.

<comment><USER22> Do you think you were paid a "fair" salary to begin with? If you worked somewhere for 40 months and didn't get paid for 2 of those months then it's like you were paid 5% less than the agreed salary (I realize this isn't totally accurate in that the last 2 months you were probably paid more than the first 2 months). If they took you out for nice lunches and sent you to conferences then maybe they also overpaid you by 5% compared to other jobs?

I've lost out on a month's earnings before and it really sucks, but if you had a good relationship with them and learned a lot then maybe it isn't so bad.

Definitely keep up the pressure and hopefully you'll get some of the money you are owed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Forget about it, move on. In the future, when salary starts coming in late is the time to start looking for a job. Better yet, always keep your network open.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually did start looking for a job right a little bit before the salary starting coming late. From the time I sent my first official "hey guys I'm looking for a job" email until the time I signed the contract for my next job was about 6 months. The operations of the company started smelling weird to me the longer I was there, plus I felt like I needed to be in a different type of position, so did start looking before things started falling apart.

While I was still getting paid, I didn't want to quit until I had secured a new job. When they were 1 month late with pay, that pretty much drew the line for me so I gave them 1 month notice at that point.

And yes, now I'm regularly updating my resume and keeping my eyes and ears open for other opportunities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would advise you follow the wage claim route with the state since you were an employee. If you were a contractor you'd have to sue in small claims court, you'd undoubtedly win a judgement, and then it would be up to you to enforce the judgement by getting a lien on the company's property or such. With the wage claim you'll still probably not get anything, but it might prevent him from running more scams in the future unless he settles up.

I strongly advise you emotionally disconnect from them. It sounds like you like them and don't want to cause troubles for them, and they like it that way. You may find they are not the nice sweet people you thought they were as soon as you require them to pay you the money that they owe you. They are not doing you a favor paying your wages, that is money you earned. They are not your friends, they are thieves who stole your hard earned money from you. Don't allow the fact that they did this while smiling and patting you on the back to distract you from your goal - to get paid what you are rightfully and legally owed.

</comment><comment><USER25> I worked for a company that did exactly the same thing. I didn't take them to court. They jerked around my friends who kept working there for years. They wouldn't pay them for months, fire them, rehire them with promises of giving them their backpay... all sorts of financial abuse. My friends were on the "creative" side of things, so they didn't have as many other options for employment, which is why they took the abuse. About a year after I quit I met someone who had worked with the CEO a long time ago, and said pre-startup the CEO was notorious for not paying bills, stiffing employees, was in estate lawsuits with his own sister, ex-wife and so on.

You should take them to court. Part of being a CEO/founder is taking care of your people. If you don't do that, you're really just using them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ballpark, what's a 'decent chunk of change?'. In my other comment, I mentioned I got stiffed for about $9k. Perhaps your situation is more? or less? I realize everyone's perception of 'decent change' is different, but I can tell you that at that point, for me, $9k was huge. I'd passed on other work for that contract, and then not getting paid was a pretty big hit. However, I managed to scrape through it (barely), have diversified, and am multiple times better off than just 2 years ago. I suspect now that you have a new job, you _did_ get through it, or are starting to. Should you forget about it? That's up to you. _Can_ you forget about it? I'd suggest if you're through the worst of things, you indeed _can_.

<comment><AUTHOR> The amount owed me is roughly the same as yours. I have positive cash flow in my personal finances so I'm above water, but if someone gave me that much right now it would almost feel like winning the lottery.

What do you mean when you say you have diversified?

<comment><USER15> I'm doing multiple things - I didn't want to have all my eggs in one basket, revenue-wise. I'm getting to the point where I may want to refocus on just one avenue again, but the issue of having all income dependent on just one source, then getting shafted, was painful. Diversification was a reaction to that.

I know what you mean about $9k feeling like a lottery win. As I said, I ended up suing, but it's likely going to be years before you get a trial, and assuming you get a judgement, you still have to collect.

One bit of advice might be to file in small claims court for whatever California's limit in small claims. In the state I filed in, it was $5k, but I wanted to go after the full $9k (technically, $8800 IIRC). It will probably get handled faster than a traditional court/arbitration process.

Get your documentation (emails, whatever) bundled together, file your claim, then move on in life (if you choose a legal route). If they're still operating (on a shoestring I guess?) there's still a chance you'll get a judgement, but it'll likely be years before you actually see a dime. So, don't think you'll be getting $9k any time soon.

I've planned my life around never collecting, but have put a process in place which might let me collect. But I have to operate financially like it's gone. Once you get to that point, and you're living without it, it might become easier to make the decision to not sue. In my case the company had a habit of operating this way, and I'm suing on the principal of it. In your case, if you were friendly with the guys, and you believe them to still be decent people, adding a lawsuit to their misery might not be the karmic thing to do.

Good luck either way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much for your advice and sharing your story, it is really helping me think through this situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Talk to a lawyer.

In some states, corporate officers can be _personally_ liable for the unpaid wages of an employee. From my casual Googling, I'm not sure if California is such a state, but you should know how much leverage you have, even if you ultimately decide you don't want to apply it.

Also note that if the company goes through bankruptcy, unpaid wages are fairly high up in the chain of priority for creditors.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like they burned cash wastefully, too fast, too early, and then they ran out of it for salaries. Foolish. But people make mistakes, hey, live and learn.

</comment><comment><USER28> Any way you can deduct the loss against taxes?</comment>


Show HN: Scrape any webpage using proxy API - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, just launched scrapingdog.com over the weekend and got my first few customers, it's a tool that handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so you can easily build scalable web scrapers. I'd love any feedback on the landing page or the product itself! <comment><USER2> I noticed the other travel related aggregation APIs on your site.

Have you ever thought about making a shopping aggregator API? Surprisingly there are not many of them.</comment>


Linux System Administration Basics - <AUTHOR> http://library.linode.com/using-linux/administration-basics <comment><USER2> I disagree about nginx being more difficult to configure than Apache. Apache's config file was terrifyingly complex to me when I first started using it.

<comment><USER3> It's really only more difficult because people are not used to it. I find nginx's documentation to be great and easy to understand.

<comment><USER4> "It's really only more difficult because people don't know how to do it"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's nice to see linode's library finally catch up to slicehost's articles. For a while it was really bare but now I prefer it over slicehost as slicehost articles is starting to become cluttered with all the old distro specific categories. One thing that is still missing from linode's library is nginx.

<comment><USER6> One thing that I have noticed about slicehosts articles is that they really just cater to two markets, the rails market and the php market and what they do is lump rails/nginx together and php/apache together.

While this is generally okay they really don't need 7 different articles on how to configure Ubuntu 8.04 9.04 9.10 and Debian to do the same thing, linode at least dumps ubuntu and debian together.

<comment><USER7> What I wanted to see was a current comprehensive guide on going beyond the single server setup and things like nginx + PHP using PHP-FPM.

I also wanted to see guides for HAProxy, stunnel, NFS and anything to help make iptables easier.

It's not that I can't forge on and and figure it all out, it's that I want to be able to quickly repeat what I do and to spend less time on server admin and more time on application development.

As I've moved to Linode only this week (their London datacenter finally convinced me) I've now written stubs of those articles that I felt were missing, so if anyone wants a high availability, load-balanced and SSL capable solution with a shared static file backend then these might put you on the path I'm walking: <http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/07/nfs-static-ports/> [http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/07/installing-haproxy- load...](http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/07/installing-haproxy-load-balance- http-and-https/) [http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/08/installing- configserver...](http://www.buro9.com/blog/2009/12/08/installing-configserver- security-firewall/)

I also found this incredibly useful... make HAProxy your virtual hosting manager (I serve 10 sites off of 4 web servers and each site is just identified by a different port number on the backend web servers): <http://www.techrawr.com/tag/virtual-hosts/>

And this one on MySql replication is pretty comprehensive: [http://aciddrop.com/2008/01/10/step-by-step-how-to-setup- mys...](http://aciddrop.com/2008/01/10/step-by-step-how-to-setup-mysql- database-replication/)

Failover IP config is a bit thin on the ground too... I used this guide: [https://wiki.edubuntu.org/UbuntuHighAvailabilityTeam/Pacemak...](https://wiki.edubuntu.org/UbuntuHighAvailabilityTeam/PacemakerHeartbeat)

<comment><USER8> I agree we need easier-to-use documentation on this stuff, but have you considered documenting what you've done yourself? I started keeping a notebook of helpful tricks back in the 90s. By the mid-90s I was publishing some of the info, and by the late 90s I had friends working with me to create articles. This was when the e-Zine was still pseudo-popular as a channel of self- publishing. We later went on to blog format, but the results are the same:

Your brain forgets little, but loses references to information it hasn't needed to use in a while. Documenting things (which includes proofreading and maybe even testing your documentation), uses repetition to solidify those references. Some people learn by repetition better than others, but even if it's just penciling apache config tips or iptables examples into a Moleskine journal, writing is often one of the best ways to memorize things.

The things I've written down are the things I remember best or at least they're the things I find easiest to come back to. It goes for the awk recipes I've jotted down, database tuning parameters, and even automotive repair tips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a wealth of info for a newbie linux vps-admin like myself. Awesome awesome awesome.

<comment><USER10> Checkout the slicehost documents too if you want a different approach. They are equally good and maybe better.

Edit link: <http://articles.slicehost.com/>

<comment><USER9> I am currently a slicehost member, their articles are very nice. Thanks for the link though.

I just like how linode starts for the VERY beginning. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I voted this up because I expected lots of references to more complete articles. (The last decade I have only handled my own desktops/laptops.)

Come on now, give an old atheist some xmas presents! :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> From a quick look, I can say that at least half the things listed on the article can be done on Windows Server through an intuitive GUI interface.

The simple fact that newbs and admins alike will never have to lookup the man pages for arcane commands to accomplish simple tasks like setting the timezone (dpkg-reconfigure tzdata) is a big difference in terms of usability.

<comment><USER13> the other side of the coin is I can administer a server over a text based connection with linux, and I need a bandwidth heavy and low latency connection to do remote GUI admin for windows. Not that anyone would any more but you can fairly easily administer a unix server over a 56K modem still. Windows, not so much. And once you get it, the console has a lot of expressive power that isn't as easy to reproduce graphically.

<comment><USER14> Actually, having a bandwidth efficient channel for managing your machines still matters. I've fixed servers using an ssh client on my phone, and while it's obnoxious and not my preferred mode, it's not as bad as having to find a place with a decent internet connection when you're on the road.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I've fixed servers using my iPhone whilst on the train a couple of times now. That's a pretty big win for linux/cmdline.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good News For The Innovation Economy: The Tide's Turning Against Patent Trolls - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/10/20/good-news-for-the-innovation-economy-the-tides-turning-againt-patent-trolls/

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the "smallest scalable unit" principle the judge used. Ruled that the troll could charge 9.56 cents per chip, down from the thousands of dollars they were trying to charge small businesses. Need more of this!</comment>


If something happens to us key parts of CableGate will be released automatically - <AUTHOR> http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2010/12/assange-if-something-happens-to-us-key.html <comment><USER2> This is the classical issue when you have only one big bomb: you may be able to scare people but you can only do so if they believe you are going to trigger it, but if you do so, you can on longer scare them.</comment>


When Art Meets Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/08/when-art-meets-power-russia-revolution/ <comment><USER2> Art meeting Power is the rule, not the exception.

Art at best is critique, and as with the street art, art finished behind closed walls once it got bankable, and for rap, punk, comics, even worse emasculated.

And NY books forget all these country like France where like in the USSR, IIIrd Reich, mussolinian Italy there are still a minister of the Culture to tell the people what is the right Culture for them. To be an artist, don't piss the government else you lose funding and possibility to expose/sing/dance/perform.

And modern website design, is looking like the Nazi propaganda with their always clean looking smiling workers thinking of a brighter future shaped in the form of the ideal society.

It is creepy how we can see what was wrong in the past but suffer short sight.

<comment><USER3> Are you saying art is best when it is a critique? Or are you saying art is, at best, merely a critique instead of a creation?

Either way, I disagree. It's inappropriate to impose a single continuum of quality onto all art.

<comment><USER2> Art is in the form we know, at least a critique of the form of art preceding it.

Else, art would be encrusted with either a stochastic form, or a fixed point that would never be evolving.

Art being related to craftsman like building where technique are evolving I see nothing shocking in my assertion. Art is like progress in craftsmanship it always questions the past best practices.

Hence, coding is pure Art!

<comment><USER3> > a critique of the form of art preceding it.

That's a very generous definition of "critique". I hung a little bit of cloth from Guatemala on my wall. Is that a critique of centuries of textiles?

I suppose we can make a distinction between fine arts and decorative arts. I find that boundary line very difficult to draw.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scott Hanselman's 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

<comment><USER2> Wow, needs to trim down the list a little bit.

3 feed readers? 3 different boot CDs? 5 different launchers? Powershell, cygwin, _and_ grep and tail replacements 'BareGrep' and 'BareTail'?

How many of these does he actually use?

</comment><comment><USER3> "7-Zip - You'll typically get between 2% and 10% better compression than ZIP."

Does anyone really care about compression rates? And what about the fact that noone you send your .7zip's to has 7zip installed?

<comment><USER4> All depends on what you're using it for. We use 7zip all the time at work and it is invaluable and I often see better compression rates depending on the data involved.

I just zipped up an Eclipse workspace .zip using 7zip = 27mb .7zip using 7zip = 6.5mb

We have a VPN to a customer over a dedicated ADSL link (max 300k upload) and daily we are transferring new builds / files. Which would you prefer?

Edit: you can also create a self-extracting 7zip as an executable as well with a very minimal payload (couple of 100k)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Notepad2 or Notepad++ or E-TextEditor_ Just because there are two code editors that have every feature you could possibly imagine (and many many many more) doesn't mean you can't write another one (or three) and be successful.

So, next time a market looks full....

BTW: anyone remember that HN article about a guy who was interested in search, but thought he was too late because altavista had it covered? And then he iterates about 10 of the following successive leaders in search, up to Google, then concludes with: and of course now it really is too late.

<comment><USER6> Along the same lines, the article offers "It's over and 7zip won."

Wasn't over once before, and PKZip won? And later it was over again, and WinZIP won?

<comment><USER5> I noticed that one, too. But I think "winning" would really be if MS bought you and incorporated you into the OS (which it has done with an awful lot of stuff).

BTW: there was also one before, that PKZip was based on (actually infringing on its copyright, and ended up being very upsetting to the originator).

<comment><USER7> Yep, that was arc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Needs more vim.

<comment><USER7> Windows has plenty of programmatic text editors that offer most of the features of vim _, with better discoverability.

_ except reliably being installed, which vim isn't on Windows anyway.

<comment><USER9> > Windows has plenty of programmatic text editors that offer most of the > features of vim

profound disbelief.

<comment><USER7> Your post has no content. Perhaps you'd like to read the Hacker News guidelines, then make a reasonable, polite argument?

<comment><USER9> Interestingly, neither does yours. You make a claim, I express that I don't believe that claim. I'm pretty sure that makes it your move...

ps. sorry for the lateness of the reply, I don't know how to receive any kind of notification that I've been replied to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He left out my absolute favorite, Expandrive. Lets you map any Linux host as a drive letter via sftp. If your box has SSH, it is good to go: <http://www.expandrive.com/windows>

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm missing a tool like FARR "Find And Run Robot", to start any program. But I guess Windows Vista and 7 have that now in the start menu. Still FARR has a lot more features.

Also, AutoHotkey changed my life!

<http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/>

<comment><USER12> He refers to these as launchers and lists several.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given the title there's a surprising amount there that are websites, webapps, Firefox extensions etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fiddler is awesome. Does anyone know of a similar mac tool? I have little snitch, but it doesn't actually let you sniff what contents get sent back and forth. Fiddler killer feature is being able to sniff SSL content as well and decode it (provided you give it the key).

</comment><comment><USER15> Hackers use a Unix. Ask PG

<comment><USER16> Argh...again with the questions.

Yes, "hackers" use Unix-based operating systems. Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control. Good hackers insist on control. This is part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to fix it.[1]

[1] I copied this from my essay, "Great Hackers" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>).

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Sarah Harlin for reading earlier versions of this comment.

<comment><USER15> Hey I was just complaining, because I have to a Windows maschine at work. I try to make it behave like a Unix with Cygwin and Emacs, but there are limits. Actually I think the Hanselman List is pretty useless. To use 3 different editors is BS. Get to know one, for every kind of editing.

<comment><USER17> I think your problem is that you are trying to make it behave like a Linux machine. If you're going to live in Rome, you'll have a better time of it if you learn to speak Italian.

And the fact that the list has multiple editors isn't saying that you need to use all of them. It means that there are several very good editors and that you should choose one based on your needs / preferences.

I agree that you should choose one, use for all your editing and learn it inside and out. Personally, I just use Visual Studio for everything.

<comment><USER15> But I don't want to live in Rome (actually i would like). And I need a car that works the same in Rome AND in Paris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You only need one: <http://andLinux.org/></comment>


Uber investor Shervin Pishevar quits Sherpa Capital amid sexual harassment claim - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/14/uber-investor-departs-shervin-pishevar-sherpa-capital-amid-sexual-harassment-claims/ <comment><USER2> Wondering at the writer's choice to put "Uber investor" in the title, since the matter doesn't seem to have anything to do with Uber

<comment><USER3> It's not just in the title, it's in the first sentence:

> _(Reuters) — Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar, known for his early > bet on Uber Technologies Inc, said on Thursday that he would sever ties with > his venture capital company, Sherpa Capital, after being accused of sexual > misconduct._

Is it controversial to note that Pishevar's fame -- which presumably allowed him the runway to create his own VC firm -- came from his early big move on Uber? He was also an Uber board member and very public defender of Kalanick: [https://www.wired.com/story/uber-shervin-pishevar- kalanick-l...](https://www.wired.com/story/uber-shervin-pishevar-kalanick- letter/)

<comment><USER2> IIRC he built his wealth before Uber

<comment><USER4> True but adding Uber to the title enhances the clickability of the story.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Develop skills, or "dive in" and start a startup? - <AUTHOR> There seems to be evidence (https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one) that programmer productivity varies by at least an order of magnitude. My subjective sense is that I can become a lot more productive than I currently am.
Conventional wisdom says that it's important to build and iterate quickly. Technical skills (amongst other things) are necessary if you want to build and iterate quickly. So then, it seems worthwhile to develop your technical skills before pursuing a startup. To what extent is this true?
Furthermore, domain expertise seems to be important:
>> You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
> I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.
- http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
> The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you're solving for them.
- http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
> So one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology—to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future."
- http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
So then, if your goal is to start a successful startup, how much time should you spend developing some sort of domain expertise before diving in? <comment><USER2> If you want to be _productive_ it's less about technical skills (though they do matter) than about how you approach problem solving. You need to ask _why_ , understand _goals_ , and execute in a way that achieves those goals with minimal effort. More at [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)

"Creating a startup" actually means two different things.

1\. Create a VC-funded startup. This is all about making _investors_ happy. AFAICT this is mostly about luck, in that you're being set up to fail and 5% of people happen to succeed. This is what Paul Graham writes about from his perspective as a VC, which is to say someone who wants a liquidity event. A liquidity event is not the same as business success, and having a large-scale liquidity event as a goal typically impedes your ability to create a successful business (e.g. you can't say "let's pursue this small, profitable niche" because it's too small for a VC to make money off of.)

2\. Create a real business. In this case you need to _identify an actual problem someone has_. Then you need to solve it, and make sure people know about it (marketing). This is quite different than technical skills. It has some overlap with the productivity skills mentioned above (identifying problems and coming up with solutions) plus a whole additional set of skills (marketing, sales, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > If you want to be productive it's less about technical skills (though they > do matter) than about how you approach problem solving. You need to ask why, > understand goals, and execute in a way that achieves those goals with > minimal effort. More at > [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)

I get that being a 0.1x programmer helps with productivity. But don't technical skills _also_ help with productivity?

<comment><USER3> Alot depends on what your trying to do. I wouldn't try and start an AI company without at least one founder having a strong understanding of AI. If you're building some kind of social/mobile/marketplace (ie. crud app) just get it working first. The marketing and business side of that business is way more important.

<comment><USER2> Right, that. Most businesses don't require particularly advanced technical skills, once you've reached a certain level of competence all the other skills are much more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First off, the goal of starting a successful startup is not a goal that I would recommend to anyone. Startups are hard. They require painstaking work, large amounts of risk, mental and emotional fortitude. Not to mention that the idea of focusing on creating a startup seems back asswards to begin with. You don't focus on creating a startup. You feel a need or see a problem and you focus on fixing it. If you feel like you have a solution that works then you consider going the startup route so you can fix your problem on a larger scale (startup is not the only option though).

My point is that the motivation shouldn't be a startup for startup's sake. It should be a problem you want to solve and a problem that you think you're the one who's going to solve it best. If you go about it like that, then there's no need to "develop domain expertise" because you likely already have that (but you can dive deeper depending on the exact scenario).

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. become an expert at something

2\. Focus on finding the right team:

[https://foundrmag.com/founding-team/](https://foundrmag.com/founding-team/)</comment>


Is This the World's First Ever Android PC? - tefo-mohapi http://www.iafrikan.com/2016/04/28/remix-mini-is-this-the-worlds-first-ever-android-pc/ <comment><AUTHOR> My co worker bought this last week and he brought to work and we were testing it out. Few thoughts

1\. We tried Apps like Netfix, Youtube and twitch. The device plays does 1080p really good, however, there were some moments where we can see some sluggish behavior.

2\. The Chrome browser experience was not that good. I tried it myself, there is no zoom?! I went to hacker news and I usually zoom, I couldn't do it. First every site opens in mobile format. Why? I thought this a Desktop? I request a desktop website for mlg.tv and video streaming was terrible. Firefox couldn't even load the video.

3\. File explorer thingy is nice.

4\. Installing an App was really smooth.

5\. Needs a better desktop window manager. In case of twitch I had to like click on precise hidden location to get full screen working, otherwise you can see a back button toolbar on top of screen.</comment>