Hacker News: jamie

New comment by jamie in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

jamie — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:00:51 +0000

(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman):

"This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980

New comment by jamie in "Apple Acquires FoundationDB"

jamie — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 23:04:11 +0000

Worth following the development of cockroachdb https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

The long term goals of that project seem to align.

New comment by jamie in "Weary of ‘Fruit Fly’ Consumer Startups, Andreessen Horowitz Raises Series A Bar"

jamie — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 01:30:37 +0000

Interesting when read right after this from another z16z partner: http://bhorowitz.com/2013/10/08/cash-flow-and-destiny/

New comment by jamie in "Effective Django"

jamie — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:06:21 +0000

The folks behind this project know Django really well - I've recommended this to people a number of times.

New comment by jamie in "Ask HN: I’m not cut out to be a programmer. What are my alternatives?"

jamie — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:45:31 +0000

That's true; there are lots of different paths people can take into PM, and you'll find all types.

Like engineers, there is such a thing as a 10x product manager. I hope everyone at some point gets to work with an outstanding product manager.

Maybe the original poster will make an outstanding product manager. It's certainly worth exploring.

New comment by jamie in "Ask HN: I’m not cut out to be a programmer. What are my alternatives?"

jamie — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:06:31 +0000

+1 on this one. The best product managers I've ever met were former engineers who were good developers, but wanted something broader. That background (and a true love of technology) will make you a stellar product manager. But, be sure you really love the technology industry and are ready to give up day-to-day coding.

Product management, when done right, complements development and is a great career path for well-rounded individuals.

New comment by jamie in "Cisco Acquires Enterprise Wi-Fi Startup Meraki For $1.2 Billion In Cash"

jamie — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 05:27:27 +0000

Inflation since 1999 should easily tip you over the $1B mark :-)

New comment by jamie in "Cisco Acquires Enterprise Wi-Fi Startup Meraki For $1.2 Billion In Cash"

jamie — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 05:10:34 +0000

It's even worse than that:

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2005/corp_011205.html

Airespace wireless for $450MM.

New comment by jamie in "If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down"

jamie — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:01:26 +0000

Same here - I'll never recommend them, and have actively discouraged people from using or investigating them.

They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.

New comment by jamie in "The Mounting Minuses at Google+"

jamie — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:48:11 +0000

That sound you hear is a giant checkbook opening in the direction of Pintrest. The parallels with Google Video and Youtube shouldn't be lost on anyone.

New comment by jamie in "Does Facebook Have a Secret Paper Fetish?"

jamie — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:20:57 +0000

FB has been doing cool type/print related projects for awhile. They've been showing up on For Print Only for a couple of years. Very cool stuff:

http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2009/12/faceb... http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2011/05/presi...

New comment by jamie in "Django Advice"

jamie — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:21:48 +0000

You might like tastypie: https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie

New comment by jamie in "Inside Facebook Messages' Application Server"

jamie — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:13:31 +0000

I think that's a different project; probably this: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919

I think you're thinking of this: http://haystacksearch.org/

New comment by jamie in "Magical Block Store: Why EBS Can't Work"

jamie — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:04:04 +0000

I think both of these links illustrate that errors happen, mistakes happen, software has bugs, and murphy's law always strikes. The question is, when it strikes, do you have enough control to fix the problem? If you've outsourced the solution, does the provider have enough control/knowledge to fix the problem?

These things will get much worse before they get better, and it's best to think of all these abstractions as being a double edge sword.

New comment by jamie in "Magical Block Store: Why EBS Can't Work"

jamie — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 21:57:20 +0000

Don't forget about this: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/15/joyen...

New comment by jamie in "New Andreesen Horowitz Hire Keeps Focus On Entrepreneurs"

jamie — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:13:38 +0000

This is fantastic news. I worked at IronPort prior to the Cisco acquisition, and Scott was a very effective CEO. IronPort was a significantly under-reported success story in the Valley, and a tremendous place to work. There was a huge emphasis on building out not just a great technology company, but a great company culture.

This sounds like an excellent addition to AH!

New comment by jamie in "Android 3.0 Platform Preview and Updated SDK Tools "

jamie — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:36:48 +0000

Slow is being charitable. It's molasses.

This is what the docs say:

About emulator performance

Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer and the WXGA screen is significantly larger than what the emulator normally handles, emulator performance is much slower than usual.

In particular, initializing the emulator can be slow and can take several minutes, depending on your hardware. When the emulator is booting there is limited user feedback, so please be patient and continue waiting until you see the home screen appear.

We're working hard to resolve the performance issues in the emulator and it will improve in future releases. In the meantime, we wanted to give developers access to new APIs and an basic test environment as early as possible.

Keeping in mind that performance on the emulator does not reflect the speed or performance of apps on actual devices running Android 3.0, developing and testing on the emulator is still an important tool in evaluating your application's appearance and functionality on the new platform.

New comment by jamie in "Could Kinect be Microsoft's iPod?"

jamie — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 06:20:22 +0000

I actually think there's quite a bit of potential for the Kinect, but it's really hampered by one giant bug:

It's an xbox.

The whole experience still screams "I'm a hardcore game device". Hell, it's called an "XBOX" for crying out loud. That doesn't sound warm and fuzzy. When you unbox it, you still need to use the xbox controller with it's intimidating array of input buttons, pads, triggers, and sticks. Most people are going to be scared and intimidated by that.

If you power it up, you're going to be confused by xbox live. You're going to be confused by how many accounts you need to create. You're going to be confused by the number of options.

You're going to be intimidated by ads for Call Of Duty.

You're going to be confused what is an arcade game and what is a demo.

In short, as much polish there is on the Kinect, it can't overcome the fact that it's a bolt-on product for an Xbox. If it was a brand-new, $199 device it would fly off the shelves. What it needs is a 60 second demo: when you have a friend over, you need to be able to turn on the device and be playing Kinect 60 seconds later without ever seeing the xbox controller.

New comment by jamie in "Groupware Bad (2005)"

jamie — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 20:10:27 +0000

  build software that people want to use instead of 
  software that managers want to buy

It seems that people have learned this lesson. Marketing folks even have a term for it: The Consumerization of IT. Spend some time around Gartner reading folk, and you'll hear it incessantly. http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_138285_11.html

Of course, now we have real success stories to point to. The iPhone's enterprise adoption is generally driven by normal folks, and the blackberry driven by managers.

New comment by jamie in "Makani Power, a Google funded wind energy startup, comes out of stealth"

jamie — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:13:27 +0000

I thought this was Saul Griffith's startup, but I see no mention of him on the about page. At his Long Now talk last year, I recall him talking about Makani as being his new effort.

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

Saul seems totally awesome; his Long Now talk "Climate Change Revisited" was a fantastic survey of alternative energy solutions, and how no one was the answer, but that a cocktail of solutions is. His ability to put big numbers in context was stunning, especially his equating of industrial output in the US pre-WWII to the effort required to build wind turbines to cover half the usage of the current US electricity grid.

Here's the video of the talk: http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...