Maybe we shouldn't replace cancer with cancer, and should simply get rid of it.
Edit: I honestly don't think it's hard. Delete your facebook, stop using it and don't replace it with something else. People lived without being used by social media services for a very long time.
Dunno. I just deleted mine, was sort of annoying not being able to find mobile phone numbers or emails for people I'd like to stay in touch with. I think that it'd be good to have a script that scrapes facebook id's, names, mobile numbers etc from your friends list, or some automation to prepare for deleting your account.
I clicked that yesterday and got a notification telling me that it would take a while to get the copy of the data. Still waiting. In the meantime, a user who clicks that button has to guess whether it's safe to delete their facebook while facebook is getting the data.
However, the facebook data isn't good enough because I found that most of my friends didn't put in their contact information. So whether you download a copy of the facebook data or not, you're going to lose contacts (you decide whether it matters) and the rest you're going to need to call friends of friends and find the contact info you need, or ask people directly on facebook for their information.
I would love to see more recruiting at state schools and community colleges etc from tech companies. There are a lot of hard working people who could be great to work with but didn't have the family background they needed to be noticed.
I've never felt comfortable answering questions like those, because the designs are owned by the business. Even if I made it, I don't feel like I have the right to hand a design for my current employer to my next employer.
I don't think drawing just a block diagram of system means giving away the trade secrets of your product. I didn't ask him to draw flow charts of algorithms and business logic. And I don't even do that.
I have seen many interviews purposefully conducted by rival companies where interviewers are specifically asked by company's marketing team to drill down interviewee on particular functionality and get details of business algorithms, system performance etc. Offcourse this happens when there is cut-throat competition and few players.
Thats disappointing, because Datomic is not and will not be adopted. No one wants to revolutionize data back to postgres when cognitect goes out of business. Stable solutions are found in cloud hosting from too big to fail companies and self-management. However, maybe they have found a niche through people taking on risk for major technical debt.
I would only make a closed-source solution a centerpiece of my business if:
* The thing is known to work for a number of other people, and uniquely solves my urgent problem, while no open solution can't do anything comparable. This is probably the Datomic niche.
* The thing was around for ages, and is a cash cow of a major and reliable software maker, and is also significantly better than open software in some important area. This is how MS or IBM sell their databases; Datomic doesn't have nearly enough mindshare to compete here.
* I'm hastily building an MVP that I plan to scrap anyway when the growth hits / the startup is acquired. Datomic is likely too expensive for that.
By necessity, the first case holds for a small number of businesses.
It probably pays the bills, I guess they're happy with it if that's still a thing after 5 years (?).
It's not helping clojure grow as much as it could though and it's a bit a chicken/egg problem, more clojure users could be more datomic users and vis-versa.
Fortunately, at least if Cognitect does go out of business, the Clojure language would survive fine. Hence why Clojure with Postgres (a very common pairing) is by far the safest bet.
It's been popping up lately. It's meant as a smear on dynamically typed languages, because dynamic has a positive connotation and untyped is decidedly negative. Pretty similar in intention to uni-typed.
Uni-typed is actually a very specific technical term. Mathematically you can prove type theorems about languages regardless of whether they implement types as language features. Dynamic languages are thus modelable like this and when you do so the first approximation is to say that a dynamic language is a language with a single type (uni-typed).
The reason this is valuable is it opens up directly the techniques for "hybrid typing" such as PHP->Hack and Javascript->Typescript. It also is the basis for the compiler using type inference to accelerate certain portions of the code.
I think he's trying to take the same approach that mobile game developers do - generate lots of smaller titles instead of one big one so you have more chances of hitting it big.
I think that game a month challenge was primary meant to be for fun, learning and to motivate rapid prototyping. It has nothing to do with generating big hits.
I am planning to run a similar challenge, and I have been struggling with correctly naming it, since I won't actually be creating startups (no actual business plan, no nothing).
I think 12 sideprojects in 12 months would be more appropriate, at least to the approach I'm planning to take.
Regarding this project, I follow the creator on Twitter and he announced it yesterday I believe, and today I was thinking about it and ran into the same question "does the money go to the website or to the friend?".
Logistically, I don't think paying the friend would be something easy to do (does Stripe even allow for something like that?). Going 100% to a non-profit would leave no room for profit, so I would personally go with 80/90% to a non-profit of choice and keep the remainder as a fee.
That's actually utterly idiotic; as in “12 songs in 12 months” or “52 paintings in 52 weeks”. One does not routinely come up with good ideas or get inspired.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin. Your comment is also blatantly ignorant of the high output of artistic work that was produced "on spec" during the renaissance and other artistic periods.
52 paintings in a year was not uncommon for painters that are now revered as old masters.
Good ideas and inspiration are, despite your opinion, largely a product of routine.
The routine of capturing thoughts and directions followed by the routine of planning, implementation and possibly review.
The idea of a tortured artist throwing a smattering of paint at a canvas in frustration because his "spark" is gone is largely a figment of the modern imagination.
Art has been made to order on demand for most of history.
EDIT TO ADD: Downvoting without a response? Thanks for proving my point.
As you can prove to yourself by rereading the parent comment of mine, I have stated not that “good ideas and inspiration are not a product of routine”, but that “good ideas and inspiration do not come up routinely”. To further explain my thoughts, let me add that one need not be inspired or have a good idea to train themselves (training is what the kind of routine we're talking about ultimately is), but need be wishing to train and have some idea, which need not be good.
It is a fine method of developing one's art/science/etc... skills to regularly practise, but not a fine method when it comes to startups and founding companies, think I; for such things happen to have consumers, people who may be favouring the product and incorporating it to their daily lives, which will be disrupted when the founder loses their interest in that product and proceeds to the next month's startup.
They may have had a goal of building 12 web sites in 12 months, or 12 blog posts in 12 days, but this person chose to launch 12 startups each month, and launch those to press. Launching companies regularly is dissimilar to painting regularly. (TBH, I did not double check if this serial founder is referring to some ordinary web application as startup)
It is also the basis of the Lean Startup Machine weekend (phenomenally popular).
You can train yourself to have ideas. Good is just an evaluation system.
People may indeed be incorporating a new product into their lives and the Founder will need to manage customer expectations and fallout. A high likelihood of discontinuance does not disqualify his attempts from being a startup.
The truth is, from a validation perspective the OP may have stumbled onto a supremely successful model of idea validation. Build it, tweak it, pump it for 11 months. The next project has 10 months. The next 9. Etc. Compare the metrics after one year and choose the most successful.
However, the statement that good ideas do not come up routinely and is false. They may just not be routine for you
come up: (Of an issue, situation, or problem) occur or present itself, especially unexpectedly [1]
inspiration: A sudden brilliant or timely idea [2]
If an entrepreneur trains via founding companies, then, should an architect train via filling the city up with half-arsed buildings? Nowhere in the pg article does occur something like “build random ideas into companies routinely”. Also, in that write-up is writ:
> If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.
Although it should be obvious, this extreme attitude is not shared by many programmers. I'll also mention that I've found Clojure programmers to be as friendly as any in irc and on the google groups.
Edit: I honestly don't think it's hard. Delete your facebook, stop using it and don't replace it with something else. People lived without being used by social media services for a very long time.