skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See also: Why Video Game Company Employees Quit

A lot of the reasons here are similar: disenfranchisement, low pay, long hours, crappy benefits (though this is not true at all for some companies). Also, unlike Google, there is usually very low job security and you sometimes have to accept a semi-nomadic lifestyle.
He wasn't asking us to tell him how much he would make in advertising on his site. He was asking us for resources online that he could read/research/utilize so that he could make the estimate himself.
Another Java-style construct: Clojure has a do form, which enables you to consecutively execute the following expressions in the list.

It seems to me a way to sneak statements into the language. Or does lisp have something like that as well?
Yeah, I saw that, but the key point for me is that making the changes to meet the deadline rather than giving up is a form of practicing persistence that ought to prove useful in the long run.
Didn't the original idea post mention that they will make the tablet open-source?
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This attitude ("It's good enough for me, I don't care anymore about the learning curve's steepness, and I'm indifferent/enthused that my language is only accessible to a tiny minority") captures the CL spirit quite well. It also explains why you have to do so much wheel reinvention when you code in CL: those lower lifeform coders, who you openly despise, produce working, ready-to-use libs for most common tasks on JVM, not for CL dialects. Up to you to reimplement your superior libs in your superior language for your superior self.

CL is the perfect language for those who consider that development is not a social activity, and luckily for you, there are a couple of niches where this remains a sustainable delusion. For now. Meanwhile, Clojure carries on the Lisp heritage in the branch of software development that's not going to get extinct soon.
Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests.

wow, couldn't agree with this more. this is exactly why I've been on the fence about going after Android till it matures a little more.

Apple is closed-platform, and I understand that its often an issue in the hacker community but I honestly see it as an enabler... particularly for indies and small shops. Until the iPhone and OSX, gone were the days of the small teams. To build for Windows configurations, you often had huge cost sinks like support and QA... likewise for the gaming industry.

Now hackers have things Microsoft's XNA and the iPhone that are giving small, visionary teams the ability to create AND MORE IMPORTANTLY produce to the WORLD out of their garage (oh, and reap direct fiscal rewards).
aside from that, it would be also nice to put some real content behind the fold (EG: a preview for the next page or something).
I guess I'm not understanding why google took the app down. It just sounds pathetic.

They made a sample application to show off their new product. Is the problem that it's too 'similar'?

I'm guessing the exposure would have been far less if 37signals just kept quiet and ignored the google app. I sure would have not known about the google sample app, and if I had I would have assumed that it was just a barebones concept, not something I could depend on or get support from if it didn't work.

My general rule of thumb is to always act as though any competition does not exist, because otherwise your simply advertising them. This means having features that 'no one else has' so you don't even have to name the competition.
I was really hoping to hear some insight from these ex-employees about the google culture to see how it compares to my disillusionment with a "cool" big company.

Instead, most of the comments (I couldn't get through all of them) were whining about benefits, pay, and snack stations. Seriously? As a friend of mine tweeted the other day about my old company - "people are getting laid off. stop complaining about the lack of free beer this friday".
Japanese apple farmer grows apples with Apple, iPod logos
Another possibility: The humanities and other non-practical research aren't declining, but rather failing to expand along with the rest of college education. I would think that most University of Phoenix students wouldn't have gone to college a generation ago. Is the number of traditional humanities professors per-capita really smaller, per capita? I doubt it.
Thanks Prakash there's some useful links here, but this thread refers to somebody needing realtime data for private use. I'm after pointers to a supplier offering historical data that can be used within a public webapp.
good read.
As far as "Getting Real" goes, uh ;) that's yet another thing that's been done in Smalltalk years before.

Here's the archives for the magazine "The Smalltalk Report" which featured an article series "Getting Real"
http://www.macqueen.us/stIndex.html

Here's a great article to get you started: http://www.macqueen.us/smalltalkReport/ST/ST01/15al.pdf

[EDIT] this is not bashing _anyone_. Just recalled the article series while reading this blog post and thought there may be some people here that have never read The Smalltalk Report. Good stuff!!!
I will share my unpopular opinion. The concept of equality has destroyed the university. Not everyone is capable of digesting a humanist education; however, in the attempt to make sure "no child is left behind," the university has thrown its doors wide open. The result is that those who would best profit from a university, the capable minds, are left behind. Thus, I propose a new battle cry for the day, one meant to capture the true essence of the modern movement: "only capable minds left behind."
Alas, no German spellcheck on my firefox! :)
From the article:

"If you don’t make the full effort to understand what is going on, and you just believe imitating some subset is going to reproduce the results, you’ve entered cargo cult territory."

Uh, that is exactly what he's saying, no?
I believe 'do' is found in the majority of Lisp dialects.
"There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon -- in five, 10 or 30 years -- the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist."

It seems like the author never heard of (natural) selection leading to resistances against diseases. Or it just would not fit his story.
Isn't techstars in boulder?
> I hope they ... release an SDK that would help develop for OpenMoko without the actual hardware.

You don't need an SDK; any Linux machine with GTK+, Qt4, or ETK/EFL toolkits can be your SDK. There ace already Openmoko "emulators" available using qemu to simulate the hardware, although you don't really need that since you just need to develop the app on your Linux box for a 640x480 tall-or-wide screen, and then either set up an ARMv4 cross-compile toolchain using GCC, or get someone with a Neo to compile the app on the Neo itself. "Easy as pie."
Terrible companies can make terrible products irrespective of whether they're running Android or not. The only difference being is that if it is running Android, articles like this are written.

Edit:

the iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S.

I'm not sure why people keep repeating this dubious fact. Blackberry is the most popular in the US, Nokia are worldwide.
Someone please compare Clojure to PLT Scheme.
So I don't repeat myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424891
I'm the only one in my immediate circle that reads xkcd. Can you point me towards a reference?
Noone's. The point is it's not a valid argument. The sameway the author had problems deploying SBCL on his machine, I could have problems deploying JVM on mine.
They got $1 million: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/an-online-farmers-m... . Always nice to see another vertically-focused online marketplace get funded.

(Interesting note: we started getting a lot more interest once we stopped talking about ourselves as a platform technology that just happened to start off in video games and gear and just kept it simple in calling ourselves a marketplace for video games, systems, and accessories with no upfront mention of the platform. Lesson: tell potential investors the same thing you tell your customers; you can answer follow up questions however you want.)
If you want to take the path of 37signals / FogCreek you need to strike the right balance between building your product and growing a community around your business.

It might therefore be a good start to read Seth Godin's Tribes as well as Getting Real rather than just Getting Real on it's own.
I meant reading your blog and such :)
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I don't have that attitude and I'm sorry if you encountered it (it's true the Lisp community could be friendlier, warmer to newcomers). However, what can a I (or any other Lisp programmer for that matter) do about the steep learning cure you mention? You have to try for yourself to learn the language, noone's going to do it for you.
I believe people miss the point about 37 signals do less.
It's not that you shouldn't make any effort to make your product stand out, it's that you should work harder to optimize your base features than just add new features.
Programmers often think to simplistically about functionality.
the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract
commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven.

What about the web?
Are all the Ruby Fringe videos available someplace for downloading (such as happens with the assorted RubyConf vids)?
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There's more to it. You're right that this is a part of the problem.

The collapse of academia, of which professors have been by and large victims, is a rather revolting phenomenon, but professors share some segment of the blame. At some point, many professors developed the attitude that research is their real work, and that teaching is commodity labor that can be passed off to semiskilled TAs, never mind that there's a vast discrepancy between the effectiveness of a good teacher vs. that of a mediocre one.

Physics professors can get away with this attitude, since physics research is extremely important; without it, there would be nothing to teach. And there are some brilliant researchers who are terrible teachers, and they're valued contributors to the academic mission. Literature professors can't get away with this. First of all, literature would still exist if there were no "researchers". Second, the entire purpose of their existence is the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, e.g. teaching.

The bureaucrats in charge of the universities have come to agree with (some) leading research professors that research is the real work of an academic, and the work by which one professor can be distinguished from another, and that teaching is secondary, replaceable grunt work. The humanities academics have been royally screwed by this attitude.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429126
multinational + >25000 employees = lotsa fun...
Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.
Zero errors is also OK. As is a proof of correctness.
Other game-making compos:

Pyweek (make a game in Python in a week) : http://www.pyweek.org

TIGSource compos (make a game in about a month, game-makers are allowed so you might think this is lame): http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=9.0

GameDev.net contests: http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/

Retro remakes (currently recovering from a cracking attack): http://www.remakes.org/

"Gamma" series of compos : http://www.kokoromi.org/gamma/

Unfortunately they are all inactive at the moment.

Also there are "Game Jams" which occur in-person and usually aren't a proper competition, just an attempt at getting together and making cool games.

Examples: TIGJam, Indie Game Jam (deceased), OLPC Game Jam
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German IT news site heise has some interesting information regarding this: http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agor...

Allegedly an unknown HTC executive told an Australian magazine that Kogan actually never had the money to build a smartphone. The compatibility problems were only used as an excuse.
This is the sort of stuff I would be excepeting out of YCombinator startups. Instead we got mostly lame web 2.0 websites with no clear business model. Okay, that was a bit harsh, but still - I think most of the YCombinator applicants don't have enough ambition and the ideas are too focused on the web 2.0 world.
I remember reading an article by Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone covering Jenna Jamison, the notorious adult film star and the adult industry in general.

Since Neil was sent "on set" while Jenna was filming, a lot of the article details him talking to people that work in the industry (journeyman/freelance make up artists, camera men, sound guys, Male "Actors").

One thing that stuck out to Neil that he drew attention to is what these guys bullshitted about at work: Sports. Kids. Health Care. Wages. Tax tips (since they're all contractors).

The reason I bring this up is to make this point: No matter how mundane or bizarre your industry, people still have the same genuine needs. A company that addresses those needs in a superb factor will have loyal employees. If Google is subpar in salary and puts people in jobs that're menial and they're overqualified for them, they will get bored and they will leave. I can't simplify it any more than that. Any company with 18,000 employees can't rely on "cool" to motivate. For an easy 17,000 of those workers, money (or stock options) is the biggest motivator.

A lot can be said about this, but I'll go out on this note: Not all of the world's greatest problem solvers are in their mid-20s and are motivated by the "cool" factor of a web app and think in Python.

The majority of people, in any field, are motivated by money. Microsoft pays in the 68th percentile for a reason. You'll never be rich, but you'll always be comfortable. And yes, intelligent 24 year old Standford CS grad should feel like there's something more to life than supporting Google AdWords code, which, according to other internet rants, is simply a frustrating experience.
Research can be incorporated into learning, but not in the current university. If the modern-day university was smaller, then research and learning could be conducted side-by-side. The problem plaguing the system today is that there are too many students, mostly of incapable mind; there is only so much room in a research lab. I know this because I worked in one at the University of Florida. It could easily fit five to seven students in addition to the chief researcher. If we cast out those incapable of receiving a true education, we could fit the rest into a lab; research and teaching could coexist. It is an elitist viewpoint, but a valid viewpoint.
Reddit was initially built on CMUCL on FreeBSD. Here is what Steve Huffman said on why they switched to python one weekend.

"The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and required constant monitoring."

You can read more of it in this blog entry.

http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/12/reddit-and-lisp-psyc...

Edit: Corrected :-)
I think the layout similarity was an issue; but it seems to me that they just have demonstrated a barrier to entry (a non-product one).

For a product company, 37Signals does a lot of blogging, conferences, a book and so on. I think the guys are good at this, and they really enjoy it. It makes me think that, in a way, 37SIgnals is really an educational/PR company, that happens to make money from their software. If you want something like what they make, you'll need to pay someone to host it - why not them, since they are nice guys?
The nice thing is that each community (or at least core dev-teams) is super happy with its place. Django has always been positioned as having very clear boundaries: DVCS, webdesign and javascript toolkits are explicitly outside of their scope. Rails embraces the whole ecosystem.

What would be interesting would be a framework on top of Django that pulls in these external dependencies and creates something new.
Wall Street Voodoo
Microsoft has gone from the company that promised you the ability to never work again in 7 years to a place that's your usual 5pm parking lot traffic jam. Compared to those days, compensation has fallen off a cliff.

However, with respect to slinging code at any non-equity day gig, Microsoft's rates are great. Microsoft has a lot of Partnerships with other large companies that stretch their benefit package.

Put it another way, when I interviewed there and asked about compensation, the recruiter simply said, "You can still go to any dealership in the area and say, "I just got hired at Microsoft" and expect to be approved on the spot, regardless of past credit history."
People run browsers in different resolutions, and developers learned to deal with that...

Although I can see how it can appear this way to customers, this isn't really Agora's problem, it's developers'.
I would say being from Boulder is one of the biggest strengths. Vibrant and helpful tech community out of the pressure bubble.
If you read about small-scale game development, this is a common practice. Danc (http://www.lostgarden.com/) talks a lot about rapid prototyping. Since games have a clear but poorly-defined goal (they have to be "fun"), it's easy to make a limited product around a proposed method of finding that fun, and then either going along with it or throwing it out if it doesn't seem promising. Thus, you can (and probably will) start over several times before making a complete, polished game.
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Haven't used their service, but this seems to be what you need: http://www.opentick.com/.
so are the ships crewed? they just sit at sea?
For most if not all ISPs, using a purchased email list is against the TOS. It doesn't matter how targeted it is. You have not stated that you have a purchased list, but I'm assuming it is from your wording.

You should contact your ISPs data security department(not tech support) and ask them to advise you on mail limits. Typically these are based on mails per hour. Im not suggesting you send the mails, because I think it's a bit tacky for a quality product, but they will best be able to answer your questions. Also be aware that the number of emails is not the only way you will be labeled a spammer by an ISP. The amount of email just triggers a port filter and equally or more important is the nature of your mail, the source of the addresses and the response of the people receiving it.

When I was doing data security and TOS work for an ISP, spam complaints meant us cutting your service off. People hate unsolicited email. Find another way.
I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR / Silverlight.

What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and iPhone.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. You rarely hear about people having issues getting the JVM set up on a random machine. On the other hand, deployment of SBCL is a complaint you hear somewhat regularly from people using shared hosting.

It's not necessarily a fault of SBCL, as much as it is a function of Java's popularity. But to say they equally share deployment problems seems a bit misguided to me.
I did something very similar to this:

http://danhulton.com/round2/

Penny Arcade has a subforum wherein from time to time, a battle of sorts takes place. Players are matched up one-on-one and given a week or so to produce SOMETHING that depicts them beating their opponent. Most folk draw something, some wrote and recorded songs, some wrote stories. I wrote a game.

For the first round, I was able to adapt a work in progress (a shooter where you control the location of the ship with WASD and the direction of your shots with your mouse). For the second round, I started from scratch and wrote the above beat 'em up.

(The graphics largely come from River City Ransom, as do all kinds of touches like the sounds people make as you beat 'em up. The characters are altered to represent various forumers avatars, and the heroes was mine - I use the rat-flail from VG Cats as my avatar.)

All in all, I was able to get it done in a single week after a regular 8-hour job coding. And I had a BLAST.
The bananas you buy at the supermarket are all genetically identical clones. This is why they are so vulnerable to the banana plague.
Exactly - I expected more of the frustration to be about the menial work and how people weren't feeling motivated, not how annoyed they were when google skimped on snacks.
Because there are lots of different kinds of Blackberries.
I have no idea whether my system will prove to be accurate, but it's a start:

Number of users * avg page views a day = total page views/1000 = inventory. Then do a % of your inventory of sold as CPM * a CPM rate. Next do a % of your inventory sold as CPC * a CPM rate. Then can ad affiliate marketing % and so on.

Build all that as a spreadsheet and you can play with all the numbers with all the numbers as you do research in your space as mentioned on previous comments.
Andrew from TechStars here, let me know if anyone has any questions.

I would question the 'rival' tag. I think their is no doubt that everyone here loves startups, and the whole community benefits when there is a vibrant scene.
Interesting, all edible bananas are sterile:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0726_wireban...
Yes, they are. Or their footer and about pages are eerily misleading.
Just for the record, since I think the feedback might be useful: I had the same read. The way you phrased things there did sound if not condescending, at least undeservedly elitist.

From what I've gathered from contacts of mine that have been through Google it is a good place to work, but it's good in that sense that big companies are good places to work, not because it's the computer science promised land.

When I hear ex-Googlers (or Mircosoft) talking about being in Google, it sounds a whole lot like what I felt in my 4 years at SAP, but that doesn't seem in tune with the recruiting rhetoric.
44 presidents (including a new one tomorrow), 44 presidential sites, all on one page
No one will do this. Twitter works because it is a low-impact way to communicate. If I have to think (Gee, this is about #rspec and #ruby and is kinda fun but not #fun...) then I'm no longer using Twitter I'm doing work.