skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not on the heavy consumer apps, eh?

No, the Microsoft people I've met tend to be from the language teams, mostly because I'm working a lot with IronPython and F# in my codebase, so that's the kind of thing I go to conferences about.

And, to be honest, working on language implementations in small teams for Microsoft sounds a lot more appealing than working on Windows or Office in ginormous bureaucratic teams. Then again, being a tiny cog in the AdSense machine doesn't sound appealing to me either.

> What's the process now?

Doesn't sound all that different from a Google interview.

"I've told folks that my MS interview was on par in difficulty as my Ph.D. candidacy oral examination, partly due to the fact that it was much, much longer. (A Ph.D. oral exam is done by 3-5 professors vs. you in a room and they decide whether you continue in your studies or whether they kick you out). Mine started at 10am and ended at 6:30pm or so when I sat down with Scott Guthrie at the end of my loop."

http://www.iunknown.com/2008/03/steve-yegge-on.html
If by "marketing" you mean throwing a Starbucks at every possible location possible than I'll agree, but I can't recall the last time I saw an advertisement (billboard, TV, magazine)... Though, maybe that's the point.
You said: "Up-and-coming" != "the very best".

I'm not talking about up-and-coming skill-wise, I'm referring to level of fame or notoriety. What it really boils down to is whether you have enough money to just work on what interests you vs. what pays the bills.

"they can absolutely get a job (almost) anywhere."

Not really. There are far more jobs that require skills you don't have than skills you do.
maybe he's subtly alleging that they didn't do much in the way of solving it.
Yeah we are still uploading the videos. Should be finished later tonight though!
He did not argue that self-interest is always good; he merely argued against the view that self-interest is necessarily bad

I think the essay covers different ground than Mr. Smith by explicity stating it is in your self-interest to be good.
"How many of you use Google as your default?" Ballmer asked...
Google is large enough it can take on people with almost any expertise.

But what if DHH wanted to get a job hacking the Linux kernel? Or Frankel wanted to get re-hired to AOL to work on the stuff they didn't like? And RMS doesn't even program anymore from what I understand.

What you're looking at is freedom due to financial independence. If you're financially independent, you don't have to work someplace you don't want to. It does not, however, mean you get to work wherever you DO want to.
Recently, App!e. Earlier, Micro$oft.
Why do you even look at ads?

http://adblockplus.org/
Yes, that speech is an all-time favorite I suppose amongst many dropouts. That is a quite a story you have there, lux; I suppose burning bridges can make one act, but indeed it takes a little bit prudence to guess when to burn the bridge. What I am trying to say is keep up the good work :) Please do drop me a line (click on profile name), I'd like to talk further about this, for I am having a hard time calling shots on value.

MBA - yes, it seems to be a tough call; so far,the most interesting thing a hacker MBA told me was that a lot of MBAs either do it because a) they don't know what they want to do next b) their current job sucks and want to get out of it.
i sent a message to a friend about moving to boston, and got a boston real estate ad a couple pageviews later. I also get programming job ads (i'm graduating this year). But yeah, there's usually a girl with a come-hither gaze.
Apparently my Flash 9 is not 9 enough. Flash sucks.
Nice advice about the notes. Best way to find problems is pains - find a big pain (if you have pain, that's all you can think about - think tooth aches, punctured tires - "burning" problems) for your customers and deliver a tylenol, not a vitamin (let's face it, we all know we need vitamins, but the effects are hard to see immediately anyways, so make a tylenol!)
Maybe, but I think his main point was that the environment
has changed, and now that the gritty fundamentals of just making a web app are polished, there's nothing left to do.

Except there probably is. In previous years, you'd have to do all sorts of backbending to get your software in a cardboard box and on someone's shelf. Or schlepping to the Fortune 500. Now, people can access underlying magic, if there is any, much more directly. I can't think of a better example than Google.

There's a certain magic to reddit, too. In it's heyday, the frontpage was really, genuinely good. An algorithm doesn't have to be complex to work well.

And consider eBay. Let's just let people post stuff, right? But it would be a mess without a search system, without a way to detect fraud, and without a way to award users. None of these things are solved problems, really, and the existing solutions took enough thought that many would be online auctioneers said they thought it would never work.
That stuff is really easy.

And you may convince them to join you after all, like YouTube and the media companies they parasite off of.
Here's the deep-link to the part of Paul's speech where he discussed Octopart's battle of good vs evil:

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-sc...
Here's the deep-link to the part of Paul's speech where he discussed Octopart's battle of good vs evil:

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-sc...

(apologies for link dup)
Facebook doesn't target most of their ads the people creating them do. Go log onto facebook, scroll to the bottom click advertise then create an ad.

You can to target region, gender, age, and a few other things(keywords, status, etc).
Social|median: Personalized News Filter
The sales team probably sell very few of the ads on their outside of the huge corporate branding ones. The ones you see on the side of your profile are mostly paid for and targeted by individuals.
What YC is doing now seems to be working and highly differentiated in the market. Doesn't seem like there's much reason to change it.
The talk on which the essay is based:
http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-sc...
I just want to point out that TurnTide was a Philly area company. Now that I live here, I have to plug it!
Hey, that's how I knew about it. I'm a PA area guy too.
Hmm, so there is something more advanced that my dormant self isn't getting - definitely interesting!

Unfortunately, there is no way to write a facebook app to capture the displayed ads - but I think it would be possible with a firefox plug in...
Sorry we had to bump up the number of php-fastcgi processes to handle the large number of simultaneous users that suddenly hit the site :)
Well, then join our hackathon group (if you haven't already): http://startups.philadelphia.groupomatic.com/
not exactly related, but i always thought legos were really expensive
Mount Flickr as a Drive with Flickrfs
No, I don't think that was you :) That guy simply kept moving his finger on the touchpad and jerk that for around throughout the entire talk, I tried not to look at it but it was right in front of my nose :)))
I don't think there's a "message me" option in the profile pages. I just posted my email to mine though, so feel free to email me :)
Why To Not Not Not Start a Startup: The Hedge Approach
He wasn't out of a job. He was working at Microsoft and was shopping around. I suppose there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise. All I can say is speak to really good programmers, and by that I mean people that can 1) code 2) not only communicate with people but communicate effectively and lead groups, and 3) understand the bigger picture and how their work fits into it. They can move from attractive job to attractive job the way a hot Hollywood celebrity can move from attractive partner to attractive partner. Personally, I'm jealous :)
Thanks, just applied.
I can't wait for the Gene Rank Optimization cottage industry to take off.
The Google Tech Talk given by the author is, if you're interested, a good watch:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567
"Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)"

Does this not worry anyone? It's basically a statement justifying investment based on confidence, not that an investor is able to reliably guess whether a company will be able to generate PROFIT or not, but that it will be able to generate EARNINGS at all!

this is not investing in two birds in a bush (likely to be profitable). It's investing on the basis of four in the nest (potentially earning money at all!).

that's astoundingly risky. Now, either you believe investors are stupid and risk-insensitive (or risk-blind! not uncommon in a bubble) and will keep investing the same sums of money as they ever have, or you believe they are clever, credit strapped and most certainly not risk insensitive. Option A means a world of pain up ahead for investors and their backers, because we're in a mighty bubble. Option B means PG is wrong (though doubtless he'd like to be right, because it makes flipping seedstage companies from the YC stable a hell of a lot easier)

Based on the total inability of even the biggest players on the scene - e.g.YouTube, Facebook and Bebo - to monetise, I really don't see how the confidence to move to an earning-optimistic (from profit-optimistic) investing mode is at all justified. If anything, earnings are less certain than they ever have been, the slide should be the other way.
I would totally be interested, but I'm already way over my project limit right now ;) I'm running one company by day and I'm launching another in about a month that we've been working on since last September.

I'd love to see a beta though when you guys get something online! My email is in my profile too now. I'll keep an eye out either way :)
Approved! The next hackathon is Thursday at the Bear Rock Cafe in KOP from 10am to about 3pm.
I'd imagine that if DHH really, truly wanted to work on the Linux kernel, he'd have no trouble getting hired to do so. Or if Frankel really wanted to work at AOL. The objection to hiring them is that given their past programming projects, it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that. Nobody wants to hire someone who doesn't want to do the job that has to be done.
Omnisio is a damn good product.
[EDIT: How long did it take to develop, if anyone knows?]
By default, I block ads. If I find the site to be useful (the litmus test is "will I return?") then I unblock the ads. Why do I do this? There are far too many digg/reddit link whores that for all intents and purposes add no value to the Internet, but have tricked me into clicking on their links. The sites that are linked usually repackage somebody else's work into their template, and have manipulated the system into getting people to click on their links. In some cases, it is flat out copyright infringement. And if you load the ads on their page, they have won. In fact, they'd probably use the ad revenue to help legally defend themselves if the original authors of the content they copied were to sue them. It's quite despicable and that's why I can reconcile blocking ads. Like I said, I unblock ads on websites that I find useful.

If you find a website useful, I think it is much better to act in good faith and put up with the ads. If the ads bother you, then try to find an alternative website for that purpose, or contact the authors and present your dilemma. Perhaps they will offer a subscription service sans advertisements, or tone the existing ads down a notch.
It really depends on your situation and what you want to do. That being said, I can't see any MBA program being worthy of a hacker's time.

MIT's program is recognized as one of the most quantitative programs, but from experience, it is really not all that quantitative or analytical. My graduate program at MIT (TPP) was in the third floor of E40, right next to the Sloan School (across a walk bridge). I took some classes there (various econ courses). I helped TA one MBA class entitled Digital Business. My wife was a statistics TA there (PhD in OR dept., also in E40). And my one of my thesis advisors was a Sloan professor.

When I took classes there the actual MBA students (as opposed to other MIT grads and undergrads) were easily overwhelmed with the math and frankly not interested in it. Many would start and drop my wife's courses (through no fault of her own!). As a result, the actual MBA courses ended up being dumbed down, even though I wouldn't be surprised if the MIT program is more quantitative than others.

The MIT MBA program is also known as a more geek friendly place. There is an IT track you can select. But, similarly, the classes aren't for hackers at all. My wife took one of the core computer classes, and it was so ridiculously not hackeresque it wasn't even funny.

Anyway, you can easily learn everything on your own. Is there value in networking? Sure. But you can get that without spending $120K+. You can either enroll in a program like the one I did where you actually get paid to go to it (imagine that?). Or you can just start participating in the community (business plan competitions, talks, social events, etc.).

Are there other reasons to go? Sure. In many jobs on Wall St. you still need an MBA to cross a threshold in the company. My sister-in-law is in one of those jobs and they eventually paid for her to go to an executive MBA program on the weekends. She didn't learn anything there she didn't already know.
Chipotle. Their market cap has increased 3x in the past 2 years, and it's largely through word of mouth.

But as an industry, the best marketing/branding job in history has got to be the diamond industry. There was a time when diamonds had nothing to do with marriage. They created a new market, consisting of almost every Western male.
Fast Teams: A Checklist for Agile Teams
Geico
I'm working on a new kind of chatterbot employing crowdsourcing in the form of a game.
You can follow my progress using Twitter:

http://twitter.com/amichail

Also let me know if you would like to participate in a private beta in a few weeks.
"I'd imagine that if DHH really, truly wanted to work on the Linux kernel, he'd have no trouble getting hired to do so."

That's pretty silly. Just because someone is famous for a Ruby project doesn't mean they'd know they first thing about low-level kernel code.

"it's pretty obvious they wouldn't want to work on that"

I'm not talking about working on something they DON'T want to work on. Obviously! I'm talking about working on something that is outside what they are known for, but which is an interest of theirs (hypothetical in this case).
Recommendations for good Drucker books, particularly those with appeal for the Startup and/or Hacker mentality?
Wow, I guess I'm really boring them. Coz all I get are those lusty dating site ads.
I am not a lawyer, so don't listen solely to me.

No.

1) You shouldn't be giving up 60% in an angel round.

2) If the company is brand new, the shares should be worth essentially 0, which means you should be paying like $1 for them.

3) Your situation isn't entirely clear, but it seems that there is no taxable income here. You will have to pay capital gains taxes when you sell your shares, however.

4) If it is restricted stock (e.g. vesting), there is a tax issue. It is simple to deal with, however. Like others' have pointed out, you need to do a an 83(b) election. It is a simple one page thing, but you have to do it in a timely fashion. So look into it now. If you don't, you will get taxable income as your stock vests, which in most cases, is not what you want. The reason you don't want this is you will have to pay taxes on "phantom income," i.e. on taxable income that isn't associated with associated cash flow.
Sorry, can't; jwecker beat me to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741
Moleskine FTW!
Great! I plan on attending.
This could be great, but the video and sound quality is not very satisfying so far (video is jerky, sound distorted).
"and lead groups"

What does that have to do with programming? A lot of programmers find the notion of management extremely distasteful. ;)

"They can move from attractive job to attractive job"

Then I guess they keep ending up in jobs that weren't what they really wanted to do after all!
I've been using this for a few days, and the news it recommends are exactly what I see in my RSS reader from here and the blogs I subscribe to. Maybe it will improve as more people use it, but I personally don't see the benefit.
I don't see the point you're trying to make.

We're talking about freedom in hacking abilities here. If you're severely financially strapped then, yes, you're restricted. No one is saying otherwise.
The Google China building
Yes I digg it, yet I am very tempted to add off color comments and act juvenile. I bring this up because I wonder if you guys are working on a system to scrape these types of comments?
I love that movie, and the soundtrack too!
Pretty much everything is suboptimal. Consequently, if you dig into anything deep enough, you will begin to notice many of its problems. And depending on how you "dig," people usually will just tell you the problems.
"Flipper ethics"? Yikes. There is a special flavor of bile that comes from bootstrapping types. I wonder if it's caused by dread of their own lack of connections to investors, or of their lack of expertise in this area, or what.

There are actually very good reasons for why "flipping" is good for everyone. It's obviously good for the founders (notwithstanding DHH's puzzling story of a guy who was forced to switch from a mac to a PC after his startup was acquired). And the acquirers take a rational risk by purchasing a startup. At the point of acquisition, a startup may only have a 1/100 chance of being the next Facebook, but it will be acquired for 1/1000th the price of Facebook. 100 of those acquisitions, if you're Google, and what you have is a Facebook for tenth of the price (and a whole pile of other good stuff).

In fact, if you don't want to take too much risk, going for acquisition is better than going for revenue on the scale of 37signals. It even seems dishonest that he compares the 37signals way and the IPO way in terms of risk, completely ignoring the acquisition way.

Also, I don't think the average hacker wants to be a "tycoon". He probably just wants to solve the money problem once and for all.
the hat dude had some serious ego problems...
You know, that might be just on the right side of crazy. Could one build some kind of layer on top of Vista that would make it tolerable to users?
I'm a little uncomfortable with it, because it's the same reasoning that led to the subprime-related derivatives debacle. People felt that securities should be worth something, even though nobody was actually paying for them, and so they marked to model instead of marking to market. The result's been a disaster so far.

But remember - there's more than just blind hope at work here. These companies are delivering real value to customers, they just don't know how to capture that value. The whole field of finance is based on providing capital to people who deliver real value but do not yet have the means to capture that value. If that weren't a necessary function, we'd have no need for loans - every business would be able to finance itself from retained earnings. People pay back loans all the time, even though they don't have the money on hand at the time the loan is written.

They just have to watch out for what happened with the subprime market. Statistically, this was a really solid bet: a certain proportion of mortgages default in any given year, that proportion is relatively constant, and so by dividing these mortgage pools into tranches, you could get predictable risk & reward streams. The problem was that by securitizing the mortgages, they changed the market. Since banks no longer had to live with the consequences of bad loans, they started writing loans to riskier borrowers, which threw all the statistical models out the window. Graham risks a similar problem if, by letting more marginal startups get funded, he changes the assumptions that let him be reasonably confident that any startup that builds things people want will be able to make money off it.

BTW, this doesn't always end badly. Fractional reserve banking is based on a similar principle - it's statistically very improbable that all of a bank's customers will want their money back at once, and so it's fine to loan out 90% of the money. Or the logic behind retained earnings vs. dividends: if a firm is reinvesting its capital wisely into the business, then it should create just as much shareholder value as if it's been paid out in dividends.
While watching videos on Omnisio, I found the pop-up comments to be annoying. Maybe the comments should be off by default or let people vote up/down the comments so that you can remove the negative comments
Its going to cost you about $130,000 to get an MBA. (2$50,000 tuition + 215,000 living expenses) Think of all the bad-ass shit you can do with $130,000. You could buy all the sweetest electronics and hire an cheap electrical engineer fulltime for like two years and build something sick. You could invest that in your savings and be 5-10 years closer to retirement and then do fun things and not have to work for the man.
Scalability is not a problem to be waved off. I think there are bigger chunks of problem space to be fixed in scaling applications than there are remaining in systems programming.

We're going to have a new generation of engineers that understands how shitty the scalability situation is today, and has experience with its pain points, and figures out exciting new solutions to those pain points.

(which is not to say that there aren't big problems remaining in systems programming! Just that I think there's more to the scaling thing than this guy does.)
People (usually) don't hire based on specific skillsets. They hire for talent and passion, and figure that if someone really wants to be working on that problem, they'll find a way to teach themselves what the need to know.

My last job had two main projects - a Netbeans plugin and a JSF webapp. I had no JSF and no Netbeans experience, though I'd done Java Swing development before and written several PHP or Perl webapps. My coworker on the JSF project was a former COM and .NET developer who didn't know Java.
VCs pull back from funding start-ups ... is the Web 2.0 bubble bursting?
Interesting, I guess, but not really surprising or useful
Start with "The Essential Drucker" - it's a collection of chapters from all his books, and then you can pick out what seems most interesting from that. I'm currently reading "The Post-capitalistic society", which is fascinating, and I recall really enjoying "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" as well. I don't remember where the bit about profits came from - I think it was in The Essential Drucker.

(To be honest, all the business books I read kinda run together in my head, and I'm lucky if I can even remember who said what, let alone where they said it.)