skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the frameworks are great for automating a lot of the junk we used to have to do manually. The "problem" is that people are cutting their teeth on things that don't require much knowledge, so they may miss out on a lot of fundamentals.

After the low-hanging fruit, there are some real problems that require some serious knowledge to solve.

> No longer can you just be a very good hacker to succeed, you also need to be able to raise money, market your product

Some people are just coding, not doing startups :)
Let me preface this by saying I really have no idea what I'm talking about. But...

Equity is not considered "income". The only time you get taxed is when that equity is sold, in which case it's taxed as capital gains (if you've held the equity for longer than one year). Capital gains tax in the US is 15%, so it's a pretty good deal.

The bigger problem I see here is the angel taking 60-freakin-percent of the company! That's a huuuge chunk of the company for an angel investment. At the end of the day, you're not going to be left with much.
> Never pay to pitch, basically.

That's just good advice generally!
Those don't "solve" the problem. Those don't even give you a wage as good as many of your peers.
Nintendo had a great comeback with the Wii after the GameCube (and even the N64). Microsoft could do something similar, but I haven't seen any indication they will.
Pretty neat! Actually image processing was just an example. I just don't want to be caught inside a system were I'll have to spend a lot of time implementing stuff already granted for free in other frameworks (I'm short in time :D ).
HUGE if's.
> I also a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?

Try to keep up here, Freddo. Try following the context :) Smart is orthogonal to skilled at a particular endeavor.

> Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.

Funny how you twisted "lacking in the taste department" into "dumb". It's a computer industry truism that MS lacks taste, whereas Apple has good taste.

This is also amusing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/05.html
There's been an open source "copy" of Basecamp for quite a while now, but I don't see 37signals going out of business. Turns out companies are quite happy to pay a real company real money for a real service, rather than mess around playing with free alternatives that may or may not deliver.
Adam Smith said something about trusting the selfish motives of the businesses he bought stuff from.

Many bad deeds are done with good intentions (by charities and NGOs), and many profit-seeking deeds are done competently (by corporations), bringing wider benefits

But start-ups can fall into the rare category of performing good deeds with good intentions. The founders genuinely want to make the world a better place, and they're prepared to take risks in order to bring it about.
These are also going up, with slides, at http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08
First - founders should always be on a vesting schedule, just like everyone else. This schedule should be laid out in the founder's agreement. This isn't for tax reasons but in the case you have multiple founders and one of them leaves.

Second: giving 60% to an Angel investor is way too much, but I presume you picked a random number as an example. If you plan to raise a larger round later (from a VC etc), you should get a convertible note, where the Angel doesn't get a set amount of shares but rather the right to convert the note into $(amt invested) * (discount rate) at the time of the next round.

Third: Yes, you need to pay taxes on your stock as it vests. You should talk to your attorney about what's called the 83(b) option to mitigate this tax liability. Given that your stock is worth very little you should have minimal liability.

Fourth: I presume you just stated this scenario as a hypothetical and you haven't actually started a company and done this, much for the above reasons and what other comments have said. Do your advisors have experience launching/guiding a successful startup company before?
Here's the link: http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos/27:35

poor guy
looks to be a dns issue. it works fine at home but not at work. fwiw, whois on the domain shows it expired yesterday and is now owned by a domain squatter.
"i think microsoft beat apple because apple was busy beating itself. apple had about a ten-year lead in gui operating systems, but couldn't keep up"

Microsoft gave people a clear transition to a windowing environment -- back when people weren't even sure they wanted one -- that allowed them to run hardware from any vendor they wanted, with software from the vendors they were used to using, and allowed them to load a windowing environment only when they wanted to. It was a nice, safe, incremental step. Going to Mac meant throwing everything away and starting over.

"it's very painful to switch operating systems, due to network effects."

Agreed. And don't forget: when you get there, you have a limited selection of hardware (and none at the entry level), you can't play most computer games even if you were willing to buy them all over again, and if your company has custom apps, they probably only run if you load up Parallels, which is a daunting prospect for most people.

There's no question that network effects drive Microsoft adoption. But Apple also isn't behaving like a company that wants to attract all of Microsoft's customers. It's behaving like a company that's perfectly happy skimming off the most profitable customers and collecting a premium for it.

Actually, if you want to take a look at someone that fits Paul's criteria for a company that tries to grow by acting like a nonprofit and going out of it's way to look for ways to benefit its customers, you could do worse than to look at Ubuntu. Ubuntu looks like a company that could start eating Microsoft's lunch at some point.
Videos are going up now at http://omnisio.com/startupschool08
Equity can be considered income in some instances, depending on how exactly the transfer took place. For instance, stock grants such as Restricted Stock Units (RSU's) that you might get from working at a large company are certainly taxable income.
The Windows 7 team seems to recognize that they have to recover from a colossal screwup. Whether they understand what they need to do to make that happen -- and whether they can execute on those ideas -- I have no idea.
"[..] still algorithms, data structures, and low level programming are marginal and it's hard to become a good developer without being exposed to this concepts."

The people who would have become good developers in the "old days" will find their way to this information and become good developers anyway.
Absolutely. I think the meaning of "hacker" is being diluted, I'm seeing people use it interchangeably with "programmer" on this site.

When I think of great hackers, guys like Richard Stallman, Justin Frankel, or DHH come to mind. They're most certainly idealistic and only a couple of emails away from getting hired at Google.
Heh, awesome. Speaking of which, did anyone else decide to go to grad school this year?
Don't forget gambling, copyright infringement, harming for entertainment, tricking for gain.
By using the (according to Larry Wall) First Chief Virtue of a Great Programmer: Laziness.

I'm pretty lazy and my mind has the tendency to space out into thought, so no matter what I'm doing (programming, yard work etc) I always look for ways to make it easier on me. A lot of times there isn't much to improve and you just have to keep plodding along, but sometimes you get really neat insights and ideas.

For example, some time back I was working as a web developer doing applications for program managers at a large company. After a few months of doing that, it turned out a LOT of the applications they needed were very similar, so after I finished my intern work term and went back to school, I made an application that writes other applications for my 4th year design project.

The idea behind it is that non-programmers can use a GUI to generate a certain class of applications automatically. Turns out that was a very good idea, since while I was writing the prototype Coghead (www.coghead.com) came out with their public beta and their software aimed to do the same thing I was doing (albeit in a different way).

I could give more examples, but being lazy is generally a good source of problems. :)
hahahahahahah Paulslist. I like the sound of that. :)

Yeah, living with other startup founders would be awesome. Email me too. zkinion@outrunpoker.com
Congrats guys! Hell of a job
I have no idea how you could reach that conclusion from the article. The data in question is not "two random numbers":

EF reported a 19.2% increase in paid clicks and 11.2%
increase in CPCs at Google Y-O-Y. Do the math (1.192*1.112
= 1.325), that's a 32.5% Y-O-Y revenue increase. That's
the closest anyone got to the real numbers!
> I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.

Like I said, they may not be typical, but most of the Microsoft people I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that. If where you come from that's considered trivial stuff, feel free to make your own judgements accordingly.

> If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department.

Really? Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team. Would it really be that horrible to get big-company pay and benefits to have the opportunity to hack on compilers for functional languages?

> And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?

Done away with, last I heard.
One thing I've found helpful is to keep a notebook (either online or physical) with every interesting idea, unsolved problem, or irritating deficiency that I notice. Once you get into the habit of thinking "how could I improve this?" or "why does this suck so much?", I've found that I've begun to notice an abundance of potential problems to tackle. There's a big difference between just thinking idly about something, and taking the steps to write it down.
Doesn't work? This feels like revealing Santa Claus to a kid... Sex still sells. Really, really sells. Just how are you measuring advertising effectiveness from which you can say that these ads aren't working?

I guess you do have an interesting point about giving the users more control over the ads they see. This seems to be a semi-hot startup area right now, in case you haven't seen this.
Awesome. Thanks for providing this to everyone.
A great service, for sure. Thank you for your work on this.
>>If we're talking about advertising then I think Apple will always be up near the top of the list - especially on sites like Hacker News.

Apple was mentioned ;)
Taste is also orthogonal to skill at programming. Apple had better taste then Microsoft even when their code was absolute crap under the hood.
My other favorites were Paul Buchheit and Peter Norvig, but it depends what you like. Here are my summaries:

David Lawee: Launch quickly! Google buys technology and people.

Sam Altman: How and when to get funding for your startup. Easy and detailed explanations.

Jack Sheridan: There are four important legal areas to consider for your startup: Who owns the company? Who owns the tech? Who controls the company? Who gets what in case of liquidity? Analysis of each of these.

Paul Graham: like the "Be Good" essay, but much more fun in-person

Greg McAdoo: What Sequoia looks for: big total market, company that defines a new category, rapid iteration, accumulated advantage.

DHH: "Step 2: Price!" In the context of the prior two talks, this one was explosive. Aggressively stated position that differs from the implicit philosophy of the rest of startup school, and a certain Web 2.0 scene in general.

Paul Buchheit: Inspirational. Leave your job if you feel drained. Left Intel for Google. Then left Google. What if Woz had stayed at HP?

Jeff Bezos: AWS is great! It's scales up and down elastically!

Arrington: "I genuinely look up to entrepeneurs." Roosevelt "man in the arena" quote. Engage in dialog with people who criticize you.

Marc Andreessen: Read "The Black Swan". High-level philosophy. Experiences in the first bubble. How to avoid mediocrity in growing your company.

Peter Norvig: Nerdy math/algorithms fun. "It's more agile to work with data than code."
When I solve my own problems, I end up creating the next "emacs" for the problem area. It is awesome. But people on the web don't want emacs' they want notepads.

So don't do that I guess.
Following your reasoning

You're not; you're supplying new reasoning for me. My point was that big companies can screw up even apparently straightforward projects, so screwing up novel ones would be even more likely.
The videos don't seem to work when I click play on several browsers/boxes. Are they still being uploaded or something?
thanks justintv guys
When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad. The way adults used the word good, it seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I grew up very suspicious of it. You know how there are some people whose names come up in conversation and everyone says "He's such a great guy?" People never say that about me. The best I get is "he means well." I am not claiming to be good. At best I speak good as a second language.

There are a lot of people out there who spend an enormous amount of time coming up with rationalizations to justify doing bad things. What I realized after spending a lot of time around Paul Graham is that he's actually the opposite: He spends an enormous amount of time coming up with rationalizations to justify doing good things. However bad he may want to be, his fundamental good nature always seems to win out in the end.
JRuby - Or how I manage to write Ruby in a strict corporate environment
I am surprised that Google has not been mentioned.

Marketing is more than advertising. And Google has marketed itself brilliantly since it's conception.
It's a mindset. Start thinking of everything as "something you can fix". Every time something annoys you or you think of something you wish existed but doesn't, or you think of a novel way of doing something, write it down. After a couple weeks you'll realize that you have a lot more ideas than you thought you did, but you were just (falsely) assuming that you couldn't do anything about it.
There are many caching proxies "faster and more efficient than Squid". But, none do all that Squid can do. Much like there are many web servers that are faster and more efficient than Apache...and yet Apache remains the worlds most popular web server. (Yes, there is room for others, and performance is a niche that needs to be served, but the dominant player also has to have a very large feature set in order to answer the needs of a very large range of users.)

Also, there is an industry standard tool for testing performance of web caching servers called polygraph (written by two of the founding Squid developers), and ncache seems to have not been tested with that tool. Micro-benchmarks are almost always misleading.

Disclaimer: I was a core Squid developer for several years, and consider many current Squid developers good friends. But, I don't think that invalidates my assertions.
It doesn't work you like that: you can't just think of a problem out of nowhere (nor a research project, nor an idea for a poem). It's a lot easier to pay attention for a while and notice when you have a problem.
Using the Wiimote with PyGame
This bears repeating. People think increased difficulty identifying the good developers (lower signal:noise ratio) means there are fewer good developers. It's a heuristic bias, as far as I can tell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
It seems to me there is more to being good than having good customer service, which is the only evidence you mention here.
This post shows that social network advertising doesn't work (for the author), but doesn't say anything about why except to guess that Facebook's sales team sucks.
You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.

The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.
nope.. not a free ebay either... I like to think of Flugpo.com as a middle ground between ebay and craigslist. There is a large spectrum of security between ebay and craigslist and we are trying to fill that middle gap.
This isn't a new idea at all

Which idea?
This suggests that if you listened to enough advice then you'd be able to form one big unified theory of everything startups. Not so, too much advice directly conflicts. Too much is based on improbable anecdotes.

Where is this level beyond which more advice is no longer worth it? I think this line exists. Hmm
I've always wondered that. Facebook not to talk about Yahoo know a lot about their users and yet their ads are really lagging behind. Maybe they are being held back by privacy concerns.
It's probably family, not a formal investor.
it's a hard problem in general because craigslist has such market share... when myspace was that dominant back in the day every one knew they would fall eventually because myspace was such a pain to use.

craigslist's problems are not so glaringly functional. They have safety problems with anonymous posters and scamers. They have issues with locking out people in the development community. I've heard a lot of complains about their forums.

It's hard to figure out the best way to attack though problems in a way that draws people from craigslist to a new service.
> I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that

Not on the heavy consumer apps, eh?

> Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team.

So you're saying they have positions open that need people with taste to work on them. In other words, they have a shortage of people with taste ;)

> Done away with, last I heard.

What's the process now?
Starbucks: A Fresh Roasted Comeback?
Is open source the answer to giving?
Inside the Eee PC 900
A new kind of Twitter outage
PG, I would have downmodded him for you but some mean people took all my points :(
As previously mentioned, the 83(b) election is the key thing. It just means you elect to get taxed on the stock when it is sold rather than when it's received.
I do the same thing. Make sure to ALWAYS write down anything you've thought of - you may think that you'll remember it but you may find yourself trying to think of that idea again.

Writing things down also causes some additional thinking to go on so that may give you even more ideas.
Google Wants to Index Your DNA (they have now invested in both 23andme and Navigenics)
Opportunity Outside the Bio-dome
I wish I could answer this because I know I've run across it many times. Unfortunately, it's all blended into a vague impression. The "power of thought" authors of whom Napoleon Hill is the most famous certainly wrote about this, but so did more conventional writers. Anyway, the only specific thing that comes to mind is this useless, but hilarious example of an old IBM company song:

OUR I. B. M. SALESMEN
Tune: "Jingle Bells"

I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
In his service to mankind-that’s why we are so gay.

It happened to be fresh in my memory because I submitted a link about it the other day. Lots of jaw-dropping stuff from a bygone era: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/songs/ibm-songs/index.ht...
"... Since day 1 with Facebook, I've been shocked at how poor the ad quality is. For a company that has a $15B valuation, their ad sales teams plain suck. ..."

How many good advertising/marketing team members are technical & can code? That is a big hiring hurdle that Fb puts in front of new hires.
The Social Map Is All About Me
What about for people without Flash, where's the download link?
Mixx.com - after $3.5 Mil in funding, an unfunded social media site is fast approaching your traffic
You guys are pimp. Love the video thumbnail for pg :)!
"Some people are just coding, not doing startups :)"

heresy.
A lot of people do startups to get rich, so that they can then use that money or free time to do good. I've wondered though, if doing the startup is actually the most benevolent thing they will ever do. In a startup your survival is dependent on helping other people. Without that focus, it's easy to do something that appears good, but isn't really helping that much.

The only difference between a non-profit and a company is that a non-profit cannot have equity investors. If a non-profit figures out a model to help people, there is no way to scale it. Thus, non-profits are the last entities that a country wants to subsidize through the tax code.
"take reddit or even a much more complex application like ebay, if you take away scalability I bet it is very hard to discover some very cool algorithm inside."

I didn't know that assessing what people would like enough to read or buy was a solved problem. ;-)
In tptacek's defense, he has a right to share a news yc submission with his coworkers without waiting for a justin.tv video (great guys) to come out first. Or he could share the notes and send the video link when it comes (did come) out later. My notes weren't a transcript but they didn't contradict what DHH said and the message is the same as it was during the presentation. :)
Smith is is saying that customers can depend on businesses providing value out of their own self interest (in order to make money.)

Graham is saying that as a business, you'll be most successful if you spend your energy trying to be good to your customers, rather than, say, trying to squeeze a little more money from them.

Smith: greed => good service => profit & happy customers

Graham: benevolence => wonderful service => happy customers & happy entrepreneurs & profit

Very different ideas.
> You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.

Fair enough. In that sense, then, I wouldn't say that programmers at Microsoft lack taste by definition.

There are things at Microsoft that have demonstrated solid taste: the original NT kernel comes to mind, as do early iterations of Word and Excel (starting back when they were primarily developed for Mac). LINQ. WCF. The DLR. There are also smaller pieces of tools that seem elegant, even when there are issues with the larger design. Active Patterns in F#. Attributes in C#. The ADO.Net CommandBuilder and DataAdapter.

I'm not convinced that it's that everyone at Microsoft is individually defective as much as that their methods of collaboration, like those of most large corporations, usually yield results less effective than good individuals or small teams could have produced with sufficient autonomy.
"If you have a decent reputation there will always be somebody practically begging for you to take their money to do some work for them."

That's not the same as being able to make money working on anything you want to work on. Of course you can make money working for someone else on their boring stuff, that's never been a question.

"I have interviewed about 20 programmers and only 1 blew me away. "

...so why was he out of a job? You see... even brilliant programmers don't always get to work for themselves or exactly where they want.

"This is applicable to the very best in any profession."

Not really. If you're the very best plumber you can fix Bill Gates's clogged toilet instead of the worst toilet in Scotland but you're still dealing with someone else's crap. =D
Freedom: a Mac app that gives you up to three hours of internetlessness
I agree entirely. First of, I am just seeing a very limited number of ads on the left hand side of the screen and they are all dating related - kind of disheartening - but this may come from being a young single guy.

Is anyone from different age groups seeing any different ads?