Most 10x coders deal with it by not using 3rd party libraries, except for ones that are very highly regarded and trusted. These tend to avoid most of the configuration headaches because everyone uses them, so the maintainers get lots of practice in making them easily installable.

It's funny how common wisdom in the software industry is "reuse, don't rebuild", but if you look at projects that are actually successful and developers that are highly regarded, they all have a massive case of NIH syndrome. Google and Microsoft both build all their own software. Mozilla completely reimplemented COM for Gecko. John Resig just got criticized recently because TestSwarm duplicates a lot of the functionality of Selenium Grid. Linus Torvalds wrote his own OS instead of hacking MINIX, and then wrote his own VCS rather than use Subversion or CVS. Chuck Moore wrote everything himself, down to the hardware, which he designed with CAD software he wrote himself in Forth, a language he wrote himself.

If you look at it by numbers, this makes perfect sense. The average library is, by definition, average, so a coder who is way above average can undoubtedly write something better given enough attention to the problem. Plus, many of these super-coders got their reputation by writing lots of code in the first place, which you don't do if you just reuse third-party libraries.

Unfortunately, everyone thinks they're above average, which is why we get such a profusion of libraries in the first place. ;-)

Despite the generally frivolous answers, this is an interesting question and one I often wonder about. What turns out to take up all the time if we want to reproduce where we are now? Presumably the optimal plan is to spend practically all your effort on machine tools.

It would be interesting to be able to figure out what would be the best benchmark of progress. Would it be the precision with which you could machine metal? That might do up to about 1900.

It might turn out that most of the time was spent on something nontechnical, like moving stuff from place to place before you'd developed fast ways of doing that. So maybe in practice the most important benchmark would be how fast you could move stuff.

Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was. E.g. the most accessible coal and mineral deposits used to be sitting right on the surface, but now those are gone.

This is yet another post about stereotypical employees/coworkers. I don't like to think of people as hollow stereotypes that someone online can precisely nail down so as to dispense wisdom on dealing with them. Yes, I've worked with lots of people who sort of resemble the stereotypes and I'm sure all of you have, hence the popularity of such posts.

However, I urge everyone to please remember that stereotypes are templates and nobody fits the stereotype exactly. Everyone has something special about them that is worth considering. Just imagine if you do have a "mr. know-it-all" at your work who gets a bit frustrated when you ask him to do important but "boring" things like documentation or protocol compliance. Advice like this will suddenly put this person in your view as negative, despite the fact that "mr. know-it-all" is a very hardworking employee who is extremely loyal to your company. Nobody is perfect and thanks to this new stereotype that you just read about, you cannot help but compare him to the guy that "one everyone has to tiptoe around." Oh how you hate that stereotype and look, this "mr know-it-all" totally fits the description!

You could solve your documentation problem in some other way but once you fire this guy, you got two problems - you don't have a loyal, hardworking, "mr. know-it-all" anymore and you don't have the documentation on what he did and how he did it I'm no managerial-guru but I sure hope nobody starts firing their top tech people because of random posts on the Internet.

Of course, the hypocrisy here among most of us is that when a large company does fire key tech people from their staff, we all come in rallying for support of the tech folks, arguing "how can a company survive if they fire their lead tech!" Well, companies can survive. And yours could too despite the fact that you fired your key tech person as long as you have a good infrastructure in place. However, that doesn't mean your competition won't welcome them with open arms and now you got a third problem.

Cut your losses. At some point you have to admit to yourself that you've been had and you won't get any kind of compensation. You're just wasting resources. Next time you'll be more apt at heeding the red flags.

I don't get this article at all.

If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve, massively?

It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something, so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot.

There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from that too much.

But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's supposed to cover everything.

No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone know someone who doesn't own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to print. Is that just for nerds?

When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print. Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time - will be built. How is that not going to be popular?

It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable. This guy needs to think more long-term.

Google Checkout has no customer service, not for merchants at least. No phone number, no email address, just a knowledge base and a forum where GC merchants vent their frustration by making threats and typing in all caps:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants/lab...

In addition to the rate hike which now puts them in the same fee range as Paypal, Google Checkout is missing basic functionality.

True story: you can't download your complete transaction history. You can download one day of transactions at a time, but if you want something to give to your accountant at the end of the year, you've got to download 365 .csv files and combine them yourself.

Congratulations, now you understand who benefited when the media created the pedophilia scare.

I confess to being a total conspiracy theory nut on this topic, and go out of my way to defend "sex offenders" in any online discussion I come across. Sadly this is not enough. We're up against a monstrous evil machine made up of mostly good and well-intentioned humans and there's no apparent way to defeat it.

Think about it: who should we blame for the persecution and near ostracism of the article's author? The journalist who honestly warns the public about pedophiles? The media executives? The lawmakers? The police? The whole chain is structured to remove accountability, letting both idea creators and executives sleep peacefully with a clear conscience. The end result is the poor person facing a giant senseless Machine, thankful to be alive after narrowly avoiding its grinding gears. It doesn't have to be this way, people.

Well, apart from the fact that you got your math wrong (its $5k + $5k per founder) I'll give you a few other reasons why YC is worthwhile.

1) Introductions to prominent VC's/Angels if you want to obtain further funding

2) As a result of the process of getting into YC, it can somewhat validate your idea

3) Having to pull it off in 3 months can really light fires under people's asses

4) PG seems like a genuine bloke who really wants to help people. The mentoring aspect would be worthwhile.

5) Constant feedback. You'd be surrounded by a lot of other YC alums who are very switched on people... Good things to be learned all round

I'm sure there are other reasons I failed to mention, but I think I covered the basics.

EDIT - also, read PG's essay on the subject.

http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html

It may be emotionally hard to cut your losses, but it may be economically sound.

There's a concept in economics called "sunk costs". You can't recover your investment, so whatever your choice, the money's gone. The only choice you have at this point is: do you continue or do you stop?

Since it looks like you have to pay more for continuing (and maybe even more after that) you should contrast that to the costs of starting over. It may be better to stop and try again if that's cheaper. It feels terrible, but it can be the best choice.

Ad Block Plus. Once Chrome has it, I'm switching full time. I realize there's other ways to block ads with chrome, but they don't seem as efficient as ABP

Blogspam, flagged.

Original: http://calumog.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/why-you-need-balls-o...

Simple...sue him.

Dude I'm in your exact situation...hired someone to do a project, and he is now a year late. I gave the guy concession after concession just to get him to finish...hell I cut about 70% of the features just to have him finish quicker. And told him...as long as he finish quickly I'd waive the late fees.

You can't work with these people...even after all my concessions the guy still gave me major attitude when I demanded that he hurry up or I'll sue him.

So Monday I'm getting the lawyers involved. Not sure about your situation, but I had my guy sign a contract that specified late fees. So its a little easier to sue him, since the late fees will more than cover lawyer fees. Of course since you have a smaller amount, you can try your luck at small claims court.

You don't need a lawyer for small claims court. You just pay the small fee(something like 20 bucks) and you get to present your case in front of a judge. And the small claims court case really won't take that much time. Chances are, you'll be presenting your case within 3-4 weeks.

I would give your guy the ultimatum right now. If your experience is anything like mine, it'll be faster for you to hire a replacement(who'll be paid upon completion) to finish the site from scratch, than it'll take your current guy to finish.