skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't see the point you're trying to make."

Might want to work on your reading comprehension then.

"We're talking about freedom in hacking abilities here."

We're talking about jobs, quite obviously, as a given from the PG quote that started off this thread.

Not ability -- of course if you have an ability for something you can work on that something on your own time, that's not remotely close to being under contention.

As for money, if you have money, you don't have to work anywhere you don't want to. Also not disputed.

PG's claim is the best hackers can work wherever they want. This claim is a fallacy. No amount of technical skill guarantees that you can get hired exactly where you want.

Instead, empirical evidence shows that knowing someone in the company is the most effective way to get a job.
I agree with you in principle. However, it seems that rape has declined with increasing exposure to pornography: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/06/rape-porn-and-crim...
I disagree. "Web" part is usually just the UI, exactly how the author views it himself. 10 years ago people did that in Visual Basic (yes, it existed for those who don't know and was even more popular), but "heavy lifting in the back end" has always been there, just as it is today, along with every imaginable data structure from CS available in some library or another.

This is why I don't see what's different. I had a boring VB-Forms job in 97 immediately upon graduation, just like I can have a boring Rails job today.

Speaking of optimization: We have plenty of hardware startups here in Austin, where cool guys code in C running under real-time OS and have 4-32MB of total RAM (without paging) with very limited libraries, I bet there are more jobs like this today that there were total programming jobs "back in the day", since number of devices you can code for is growing exponentially. And oh yes, they do have to optimize.
I really don't want to make any more comments, because I'm sure they are equally irrelevant. However, since I grew up in the town where Digi-Key is located and once dated the daughter of a bodega owner, I must proceed.

First, bodega and convenience store owners don't order smokes from Philip Morris, they get all their stuff from various distributors. The stores themselves are usually locked into one distributor for junk food/smokes and another for liquor. Depending on how low you go on the convenience store food chain, often times the "distributor" is just a guy with a truck. Thus I'm not sure a good online business could be made aggregating the various prices of cigarette distributors. A useful startup idea would be a location-based mobile app that would tell you which bodega nearest you carries the cheapest cigarettes. You could make it non-evil by selling ads for nicotine replacement therapy that you would have to click through before getting the price for a hardpack.

As far as Digi-Key goes, they aren't the biggest distributor of electronic components... maybe in the top 20, or maybe top 10. However,they probably ARE the biggest distributor that will sell small lots to hobbyists. They are also one of the major employers in a small town in a rural area that has had a flat economy for decades. The only other employer of note is the snowmobile factory. Most of the money in the area is made by landowners who are paid your tax dollars to not farm their land, or else grow sugarbeets, one of the least efficient ways of obtaining sugar. Since they would have had to pay the most, those same farmers voted against school improvement bonds every year I lived there...so I'm going to have to go with "evil" on stupid farm subsidies but now I'm really digressing...

I'm going to have to vote "not evil" for Digi-Key. They know they are competing on price and are doing what they can to avoid losing business. If sales go south, they have to lay people off. Most of the employees don't have anywhere else to go find work. From my limited personal experience, there isn't a CEO caste at Digi-Key with golden parachutes who all stay rich whether or not the company does well. If they lose business, everyone gets fucked. I'm guessing they are cockblocking Octopart out of fear. This sucks for Octopart and is inconvenient for people prototyping electronics, but is it evil?

EDIT: what's really evil is that unknown or expired link error!
"Cheers, we'll just agree to disagree!"

Sorry, you don't get to pre-empt all further discussion after saying what you want to say. :)

"Programming has a lot to do with people"

Everything people do has a lot to do with people.

"and convince others of your message is crucial to being an effective programmer and is very much what leadership is."

Once again, you are conflating leadership with programming. Two separate things. You can be good at either without being good at the other.

If you are working with other good programmers then they should be able to tell whether your design has the most technical merit, or whether some other design does. If you're politicking then the code is going to suffer.

"It used to be that a programmer could be an asshole of a person and have no communication skills"

I think that's a majorly incorrect stereotype. People with no communication skills tend to have social phobia. They are shy, not assholes. The assholes are the "Rockstar" types and the people who think they are amazing leaders. They like to communicate their perceived superiority to other people.

"Good people move on from jobs because they out-grow them"

Good point.
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Plus one for the comments about Omnisio. Justin.tv just wasn't cutting it. Especially during the talk with the Sequoia guy who did the whole "I don't even have to read this slide" thing.
It's too Clockwork Orange-y.

Just develop some freaking self-control.
Ask YC: Should there be an option to hide Karma?
There are many valid arguments to always show karma, but I would suggest that having the choice of customizing your karma display has a net affect of adding value to the site.

The obvious advantage of showing Karma is the feedback it creates to help users learn what is accepted commentary.

On the other hand showing Karma fosters a type of pro Karma group-think, which takes value away from the site.

Anyone have similar thoughts?
There is a subtle but important difference between understanding how business function and going to business school, the former is more important when starting a startup.

If you want to learn more about the business aspects, move to a different role in your current company in the business side, like Sales, Sales engineering, etc.

The opportunity cost in time and money is another concern. You can take the 2 years of time, and probably less than 1/2 the amount you would spend on B school to startup your startup, which, would be a better learning opportunity.
Disable UAC.
Just a few comments about bioinformatics:

- most of the work to be done is the same boring stuff you do at a startup: maintain the server farm, deal with flaky libraries, tune the database. The interesting algorithm work is done by PhDs... at universities.

- the bullshit factor at bioinformatics companies is as high or higher than the trivial startups you mention. You are ultimately working on tools that people don't really know how to use and trying to sell them to people that probably don't need them. The only "real" customers are pharma companies or larger biotech firms. This makes the environment much like working for an enterprise software vendor which everyone knows isn't very fun.

- the bioinformatics companies are either in glamorous places like New Jersey, Boston suburbs or... Silicon Valley. So, you're unlikely to be able to escape from the SV scene anyway.

- at a startup these days, you at least can use slightly less painful tools like ruby and python. In bioinformatics, you are stuck with ancient Perl/CGI scripts or some VB/Java time bomb.

I spent 2 years in bioinformatics and will be forever grateful that I was given the opportunity to escape and work on silly, pointless consumer entertainment software instead.
Amazon must have a few power generators at its data center, making Bezos's analogy at least redundantly ironic.
For Xobni, Why It Is Good Time To Sell
"PG's claim is the best hackers can work wherever they want. This claim is a fallacy. No amount of technical skill guarantees that you can get hired exactly where you want."

Again, you're taking the "wherever they want" thing much too literally. I don't know if you're actually trying to make a point or just trying get the last word in, but judging from your other posts, you're just being pedantic.

PG is not saying that a guy like Peter Norvig is going to land a job as a neurosurgeon. But if there's an opening anywhere for anything that's even remotely technical, the probability that they would hire Norvig must be near 100%.
A New Way To Advertise/Monetize
browntech means technology that can extract more value from oil. such as better logistics for more efficient international delivery to figuring out how to get oil out of sands and shale.

saying that it means tech in India is quite a stupid joke.
No it doesn't meet the criteria, but I think it's a good example nevertheless. That is obviously an example of someone getting an idea, and making money off the idea and not the implementation.
YC Analysis: "37signals/DHH style" companies?
Everyone has probably read about or seen DHH's talk by now, where he advocates attempting to create small/medium sized, sustainable companies with a simple, direct business model (sell something directly to your customers).

A lot of his examples are from 'real world' products (Italian restaurants, say), that clearly have very different economics from on line businesses. The marginal cost of another bottle of Bardolino is not indifferent, even though the markup is also going to be good. The marginal cost of another basecamp customer is very small. Also, his Craigslist example was not particularly compelling for me. Those guys dominated their market, but more because people flock to the site because everyone else does (network effects). Their choice to keep things small/real seems like a very conscious one, but not necessarily something they could get away with if, say, they were kijiji and eBay were the owner of Craigslist.

So, my question: what other web or software companies make a living the 37signals way? What are they key characteristics of their markets? Obviously they can't be in a winner take all market dominated by network effects.
Thanks for an awesome day. I would never had imagined that it would be possible to listen to so many great speakers and thinkers together. It was very inspiring and was one of those days that changed the way I look at my life and career.
And maybe it was just Matt's hangover, but DHH never said "500 x $40 = $125,000." The slide actually says 400 customers @ $40/mo = $200,000/year, as you can see in the video (http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-... @ 11:50)
Google REST Search API
Interesting overview. I upvoted/saved this because I expect it'll generate the most discussion:)
smugmug.com
One example, I used to want to search for craigslist items regardless of location. I found some sites that briefly offered this service, but they were requested to stop by CL.
yes, i don't recall the math mistake either
Digi-Key is the largest small-volume distributor of electronic parts in the US. They do $1.2Bn per year in revenue of which $700M is done online. Their gross margins are about 50% and their business is growing at 20% per year.

When Microsoft accused Linux of violating 50 software patents, most people thought they were pretty evil. The claims were frivolous and their aim was to preserve their market share at the expense of consumers. Likewise, Digi-Key makes the frivolous claim that by displaying their public information and linking to their webpage, Octopart is acting illegally.

This is not a debate about whether Digi-Key is good for the town of Thief River Falls or if Digi-Key should be making money. They have as much right to make money and keep their employees happy as Microsoft does, but when they use their muscle to wrongfully stifle innovation at the expense of consumers, it shouldn't be surprising that some people would call them 'evil'.
One way I've thought of to make people not care about my judgment is to be arrogant. Then I can both gratify my ego and keep people from regarding me as a genius at once:D

Plus, what I've said will stay in their mind since my arrogance will bug them, and if it's worth anything it'll resurface at a later point. If I'm lucky, they'll think it is their own idea, making it even more effective.

Wins all around. This is probably what smart arrogant people tend to think anyways, and they've stuck it in my mind through their arrogance:)
wow! Digi-Key FTW! They're doing about 1000 times better than they were when I was in town. I had no idea.
The reason Paul is calling Digi-Key evil is because they are actively trying to kill Octopart in order to preserve their monopoly pricing, not because they won't cooperate. Octopart needs as much cooperation from Digi-Key as Google needs from Wikipedia.
To point out one startup using cool math: Powerset.

Google may use cool math, but be careful calling it the "only" at anything. There are tons of companies you probably haven't heard of doing awesome things. Everyone knows about Google, though, so it's easy to point to it as an "only".

I hope that made sense.
Matt was referring to one of the slides toward the end (23:49).
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What is the perfect hedge fund resume for hedge fund jobs? There isn't one. While this is usually not the case, some hedge fund professionals never graduate from high school but make over $1m/year trading or selling for funds. That said some of the below factors are a few of what will usually help land you hedge fund jobs.
This Week in Ruby (April 21, 2008)
Marketing lessons from Google
Looks great!

However for me, the videos stuck at some point -- Mike Arrington's at arount -17 min, and PG's also after about 5 minutes.

Even if I try to skip over this point, it just goeas back to "..I got my dog a few years ago <stop>".

Screen shot:

http://screencast.com/t/lraJDenM

I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Vista, Flash WIN 9,0,115,0
Simple forum software for user feedback?
I want my users and causal surfers to be able to leave feedback, ask questions and chat with me or each other. I need simple forum software and/or hosting that would let people post without registration, see recent posts and search for older posts. I want to minimize management to a point where I simply review comments. I also want to be able to move the forum later on, so I need location transparency (dns cname's), data portability and user account portability.

Suggestions?

So far I looked at:

Google groups (registration required)
JS-Kit Comments(really nice and lightweight but has no search and no way to collapse threads)
PHPBB (rumors have it it's full of security bugs so I don't even want to start worrying about applying security patches on time)
vBullitien (seems very complex to setup/customize and also needs to be maintained)
getsatisfaction.com (registration required, very loud interface, little portability/transparency)
Asking a corporation to be "good" or moral is like asking a car to be good or moral.
I no longer have any sympathy for Digi-Key now that I know they are doing $1B+ a year in sales. However, your point was played out back when sites started aggregating prices from camera vendors. The cheapest vendors were the worst ones, with really shady practices, like taking apart kits, then trying to re-sell you the stuff like the wrist strap and battery that should have been in the kit in the first place. The camera shop aggregators now all have reputation rankings.
FogBugz...
Of the successful startups I can think of off the top of my head, few - if any - were first to market. Especially with new technologies being riskier and more expensive, it seems the wisest thing for a cash-strapped startup is to stick with whats popular. Though avoiding risk is probably not a common trait among tech entrepreneurs.
I think that's all true -- there are core algorithmic issues in both reddit and eBay that are interesting and for which there is a lot of room for improvement. But at least to me, the problem with most of the work being done on webapps is that very little of the time is spent on these kinds of problems -- the vast majority focuses on moving data back and forth from the database, adjusting the UI, working around browser bugs, and similar grunt work. IMHO, anyway.
I wanted to go work for them someday. :`(

But maybe it'll be like how the TellMe deal went. They're still more or less independent.
Scribd user tracking all MySQL UC presentations in his account
So where can I see this in action?
have i not fucked up that comment - mistaking earnings and profits as two separate things?
rememberthemilk.com kind of goes halfway, with a freemium model.

In some ways, that seems more sane to me than DHH's pay-only ideology.
To dovetail on the complaints about bioinformatics; most of the government grants are given to PIs, or Principal Investigators, who are a notoriously clannish bunch and each one has free license to operate as they want. IT can be lower on the priority list for them than say, the bio-stats geeks who work exclusively in Excel, SAS, SPSS, etc.

So, you're either working for the 'enterprise software vendor' (ie big pharma) or you obey the whim of the PI, which is like client work for people who, again, don't really want to listen to you anyway. 'Just get it to work' is the prevailing attitude.

The only notable exception would be if you were to get into bioinformatics outside of the USA. Try to find some work with either EU orgs (entirely govt sponsored research), such as the World Health Organization in Geneva, or take a look at what orgs are doing with public health research in developing countries. If you find a better ways to assist with AIDS research in Africa, you would be doing the world a bigger favor than currying favor to the pointy-headed in the US.

In short, look to the frontiers of modern society. They probably have needs that seem elementary to us, but are real and need solving, now.
Look at Beast, RoR-based.

http://beast.caboo.se/
uservoice.com (which was just techcrunched)
37signals' products are all freemium-based.
lessaccounting.com

Key characteristic: a real problem being solved and customers willing to pay for a solution. In the case of lessaccounting, mom-and-pop shops (online and off) that don't use quickbooks or find quickbooks too complicated.
I think another aspect of this to consider is this:

Eventually, most things will be commoditized, but this happens slower for some things, and faster for others. How does the 'dhh style company' keep that at bay - or do they? How sustainable is the business in the face of cheaper competition?
Ask HN: Legality of RSS Feed Usage in Web Apps?
I cannot seem to find a solid answer to this question, so where better to turn? I am in the middle of developing a web application that utilizes a number of RSS feeds from the leading sites in a given industry. Just to point out, these feeds are all partial feeds and usually nothing more than the title/link is displayed. About 90% of the websites providing the RSS feeds display some sort of disclaimer regarding the feeds: "for personal, non-commercial use by individuals only. The feeds are free of charge for use by individuals, as long as the feeds are used for such individual’s personal, non-commercial use."

Now I can't help but notice the endless amount of commercial (some form of advertising) websites that use RSS feeds from other sites, as well as web-based RSS readers which are basically profiting from the same thing.

So, what exactly is the legality here? Wouldn't these sites encourage commercial sites to utilize their feeds to direct traffic back to them?

Thanks..
This was submitted already without the www.
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Hi guys, my friends and I just started this service from our dorm rooms.
Actually we launched 2 months back but we're having trouble with users getting bored. Could you take a look at our service and recommend any fixes or something obviously wrong?

Thanks! We're very feedback based service.
Learning what makes Facebook tick
There are so many people telling you what to do and what not to do, how to do it, and how not to do it. I think you just have to jump off the cliff and flap as hard as you can.
After a quick first impression..the design was done very poorly. It's very confusing at first and unappealing. The site almost looks 'broken'. Haven't gotten around to the functionality yet..
>The trouble with lying is that you have to
>remember everything you've said in the
>past to make sure you don't contradict yourself.

Il faut bonne mémoire après qu'on a menti (A good memory is needed after one has lied).
[ Le Menteur, IV, 5, Cliton ]
Pierre Corneille
Seems pretty new. We have information about things like smugmug or 37signals being profitable for a number of years...
One characteristic is that they all provide enterprise software. The end-consumer market is very difficult since internet-users are used to get everything for free.
i use http://getsatisfaction.com
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The term "enterprise software" usually refers to software products sold to very large companies, or at least "small and medium businesses" which have 200-500 employees. David's examples were geared more toward the "Fortune 5,000,000" -- the much larger market of small businesses with a handful of employees.

The economics of the "Fortune 5,000,000" are very different than true enterprise software, as it avoids employing a direct sales force. Obviously 37signals wouldn't turn away a team from General Motors who wanted to use Basecamp, but they don't actively market their products to large companies.

You're right about the difficulty of charging for online products in the consumer market. DHH said that they were having trouble getting customers for their personal organization product, Backpack, even at $5 a month. After they repositioned Backpack to be used by small businesses, they were able to increase the price and sales still grew tremendously.
I'm a paid subscriber of Remember the Milk, but I don't think they do a good job differentiating their paid product from the free product. I subscribed because I felt that $24.95 was a fair price for a superior mobile interface, but there aren't many other benefits for paid customers.

37signals does this differently. Their free products are far more limited, and their paid products offer quite a few more features than their free products. This limits the value to the freeloading customer, but I think this makes for a more sustainable business in the long-run.
That's very intersting! Our last design had similar results. Do you have any suggestions on how to linearize a system of tools?