Selection bias much? He's complaining about an over abundance of consumer facing web businesses at an event sponsored by a blog that focuses almost exclusively on consumer facing web businesses.
There is lots of real computer science going on in the world, and there's a bunch of money being thrown at it. It's just that you won't hear about any of it by reading TechCrunch all day.
It's not going to show up popular websites much because CS research, like most research, is not a popular topic. But if you want to know what's going on, a great place to start is to start reading the proceedings of recent ACM conferences: http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?linked=1&part=series...
Yes, it's behind a pay-wall. Not much I can do about that [1]. And yes, you will have to read academic papers. But that's where people talk about real computer science.
[1] Although, if you find a title and abstract that sounds interesting, you can usually just Google for the title and find a copy on the author's site. All of my papers, for instance, are also on my webpage. And, yes, this is explicitly allowed by the copyright transfer agreement.
In some specific areas (like mine: graphics and vision), there are compiled lists of recent papers from the best conferences, along with links to the papers, project pages, etc.:
I have been a member of ACM for the last 2 years, but just let my membership lapse. Their site is nearly useless for anyone who is not already at least an advanced undergraduate in CS or IT. The parent post is looking for resources for learning CS, not advanced study (or so I understood it).
When you find a really good site on HN, add it to your RSS reader. Check out proggit. If you have an industry you're interested in or a problem you're trying to solve, start googling and keep track of all the interesting sites you come across. There's a wealth of good stuff out there, though it isn't going to be TC style (linkbait titles, unnecessarily effusive prose, etc).
Just wanted to apologize again for sniping at you yesterday. It was uncalled for. Glad to see you've been able to incorporate it into a proper discussion.
(disclaimer: Agile consultants ruined the software group I work in.)
Making good software is hard, and anyone claiming to have a magical process that guarantees good software is selling snake oil. I can appreciate your wanting to make a buck, but would also seriously appreciate it if you could find some other industry besides software development to go screw up.
Ever notice that virtually all Agile success stories are written by Agile consultants and not by developers? Ever notice that nobody actually claims to have built anything from scratch with Agile?
The stories all read the same. Product has already been built. Developers stuck bike shedding over some piddly detail, when lo and behold the Agile consultant arrives to cut through the Gordian knot by placing the developers on a strict regimen of myopic thinking and inattention to detail.
I was a team lead/architect for a project, we built an online booking engine and fare quoting system for an Airline. They pull in ~$1.5bn a year through this channel. We delivered under budget, with almost zero known issues, 1 day late (due to some internal infrastructure).
ALL DONE USING AN AGILE METHOD!
Today that original team of 6 is now a department of 70. They still use Agile/Lean methods (FDD & KanBan), continuously deliver successful projects and win numerous awards etc...
I worked at a cool little company where we built a useful product. We just built it. We didn't use waterfall, agile, or any real process. We just made sure to communicate and only hired people with good judgement and critical thinking skills. A big (very big) company decided they liked our product and bought the company.
After acquisition, our new overlords decided that our process, i.e. using our brains, wasn't compliant with whatever standards they had for development. In came the agile consultants, scrum masters, TDD, CI, etc. All the things you hear these blog posts evangelize about. It brought development to a total halt as all these assholes put in their $0.02 about how we needed scrums, sprints, user stories, and story points. Developers couldn't work on the features they knew were important without cutting through miles of red tape (finding a "customer" to make a story, breaking that story down into the actual work that needed to be done, moving the story through the backlog, estimating points for the stories, etc).
Like I said above. It ruined my software department. I wouldn't wish agile on my worst enemy.
Ahhh it actually sounds like your team was originally being Agile
This statement is unfalsifiable; this kind of retroactive defense makes Agile out to be an ever-moving goalpost. If any effective, basically "good," organic team behaviour was "Agile" to begin with, there is no identifiable differentiating criterion of Agile methodology from any other mode of small-scale collaboration.
Interesting point. The thing is, any Agile method is supposed to evolve with the team. Long running Agile teams are often not following any one methodology but rather using the best bits of a bunch of them, in a way that works for the team.
This stuff is mostly common sense so you will find that many small teams are often Agile even if they don't know it. Modern software dev is really more about effective communication and collaboration then technology and tools.
My take on it is: If what you are doing aligns with the Agile Manifesto and its Principles, then you are Agile even if you are not doing TDD, peer-programming, daily stand ups etc. No matter what the zealots are telling you to the contrary.
Agreed. Another way of putting this: Agile is best practices for iterative, incremental development. Applied agile means borrowing/stealing practices from others, and more importantly creating and adapting your own processes to your particular team.
While I think you're trying to be critical, you've actually hit on a key point in agile.
Agile is about principles, not procedures.(I speak of litte-a agile, not big-A agile). It also emphasizes people, not artifacts. Because of this, two things naturally occur: 1) Whether or not you are "doing" agile is a judgement call, not discoverable by a formal prof or checklist, and 2) agile is more like playing the piano than learning calculus. You don't learn it by watching a film about it or reading a book: you learn by doing it and getting better over time.
You can look at this as "moving the goalposts" if you like, or you can look at it as optimizing for each circumstance. I think realizing that there are no goalposts is one of the stages of actually getting it. (and there are many folks in the agile camp who have not gotten it yet)
I know HN is targeted towards the startup crowd, but do we constantly have to vote up these self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating posts about how it takes some kind of special breed of human to work hard for a year or two?
Hey aminuit
The post isn't especially self-congratulating. Actually it's almost the contrary... Hard work is hard, whether you're a pin pusher, an agile railer or biz guy trying to make it.
The idea behind the post is especially this: we are ordinary man facing ordinary (hard) challenges, and it's meant as a reminder for aspiring entrepreneurs who only see the bright techcrunch-like side of the coin.
Thoughts?
> This is where you hire a copywriter for your website and he or she fills the pages with cleverly crafted, delightfully delectable prose that oh-so-playfully sing and dance.
Prose is singular. The plural of prose is proses, though it's not frequently used. If you're going to chide authors on style, make sure you've got the grammar correct first. Also as a counterexample, I'd like to point out that woot.com typically exhibits playful prose to great effect. Honestly, I probably visit more for the excellent ad copy than any other reason.
Based on the grammar, "that playfully sing and dance" refers to pages. The grammar works fine.
But it's clumsy, and should be This is where you hire a copywriter for your website who can fill cleverly-crafted prose into pages that sing and dance.
Initially (or at least a couple of years ago) if you submitted a PDF, the link would only be available through Scribd. It was a topic of much discussion. See here for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195431
Google is going to have to build (or outsource) a lot of what Verizon already has. He may be considering those costs when he does the per household numbers. Consider that Verizon has an army of trained field technicians, fiber trucks, call centers, easement rights, and so forth.
FYI the term 'corporate welfare' typically refers to governments giving special treatment to corporations, not corporations tolerating unproductive hangers-on.
There is lots of real computer science going on in the world, and there's a bunch of money being thrown at it. It's just that you won't hear about any of it by reading TechCrunch all day.