You posted the Tarsnap redesign 111 days ago, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820705

As far as I can tell you didn't incorporate a single piece of advice you received in that thread. I'd print out patio11's comment and staple it above my desk.

The homepage still looks like the website for any random, academic OSS project. It doesn't say "hardcore," it says amateur, and there's no way I'm trusting you with my money, let alone my sensitive data.

I just don't understand what that homepage is designed to sell, and why you're so insistent on keeping the "minimalist aesthetic," the crazy pricing, and the walls of text. Is it for your sake, or for your customers?

If the former, I think I know why Balsamiq has higher sales.

For example, imagine I'm a potential enterprise client who, for compliance reasons, needs exactly what you're offering. How much do you think I'd be willing to spend? Does your site even let me spend that much?

You have a beautiful piece of technology. My background is in mathematics so I really appreciate the brilliance that went into building something as comprehensive and innovative as tarsnap.

But that is the first step of 10. The other 9 steps are about marketing and sales, and Balsamiq is better at that than you are.

EDIT: An illustration of your distribution strategy vs. Balsamiq's.

http://www.google.com/search?q=secure+online+backups http://www.google.com/search?q=mockups

I was an intern for AMD a few years ago (these are my views and not AMD's). I was pretty skeptical about AMD's antitrust claims against Intel until I went to work there. I'm as free market as they day is long, but there's a whole untold story of the evil things that go on in the back meeting rooms, even outside of sales, where most of the public lawsuit claims are/were.

The thing to remember is that AMD is a small fraction of the size of Intel, and they have to cover the same market segments. If they try to specialize (say, servers, or notebooks), Intel will just sell that segment at a loss. AMD has to cover everything with only a fraction of the people to stay competitive, and it's really hard.

Even while I was there, we had what I suspect (but have no proof) were incidents of people leaking product plans, roadmaps, etc. (but no IP) to Intel. It's sad, really.

If this is the craziest bug you've ever seen, my guess is that you've spent your whole career programming in languages that lack raw pointers.

I guess any bug that occurs below your accustomed abstraction level is "crazy". If most of your work happens in an interpreted high-level language, a quite mundane bug in the runtime (like this) is "crazy". Hardware bugs are "crazy" to most software people at any level, but to hardware folks they're just bugs.

Nope. Checking the vendor string to determine capabilities when the CPUID instruction already has flags for different capabilities is unjustifiable. When a CPU claims SSE2 support, the compiler should enable SSE2, regardless of the vendor string. If AMD's implementation of SSE2 is buggy, that's their problem, and Intel should have no trouble making it into a PR win.

This is really no better than printer manufacturers putting chips into their cartridges so that they can use the DMCA to prevent third parties from refilling or making compatible cartridges.

That's like someone linking a 37signals blog post and complaining that they don't tell you what 37signals does in every blog post. It's called going to the homepage. And I'd be surprised if the majority of Hacker News didn't know what 37signals is, and likewise with Balsamiq. Peldi's like one of the most active and well-known entrepreneurs here.

That is not the only reason she is hated, but yes, some of these things are on the list. In her typical fashion, they are stated in a positive manner when really some of them have extremely negative consequences. But I guess these are the perks of being in the first fifty and having the king's ear.

1. Set a firm agenda.

It also helps to have and frequently exercise unilateral veto or green light power. It's a lot easier to hold meetings in which you don't have to build consensus or even explain your decisions to the people whose year's work you are killing after just having heard of it half an hour before.

2. Assign a note taker.

Sucks to be the engineer who gets this task. Maybe my brain needs a second channel where I can actually think about what's happening and one to take the notes with. As it is, when I get to be the note taker I'm reduced to a speech-to-text machine with no agency in the room.

3. Carve out micro-meetings.

Once again, absolute power of the pen makes this a bit easier.

4. Hold office hours.

Nothing to complain about this one. Damn good idea. Wish I had the political capital to pull it off myself but it's hard to get people to buy into that when you are an IC. My workaround is to disappear from my desk a couple hours of each week to put my head down. Not as effective as "You can only talk to me between three and five on Wednesday, and by the way sign up two weeks in advance before all the slots are booked out," but we work with what we've got.

5. Discourage politics, use data.

That is, when it's beneficial to the point of view you already hold or when you don't care and just want to make a safe decision.

6. Stick to the clock.

Whatever. OK, I guess.

I'd also like to point out that none of these things happen in the vast majority of the meetings I attend. Normally it's agenda-free and the most senior person in charge wastes everyone's time by interrogating the tech lead about things that senior person should have read in the design document that was sent out the day before, and that besides that are higher resolution than the senior person rightly needs to know about, while everyone else sits around and checks email. Like meetings at any company.