skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One problem with discussions like this is that "programming" has an absurdly narrow definition. If you aren't actually spending the majority of your day typing code into emacs and fixing Javascript bugs, you are not a "programmer": you have "migrated into management".

A senior law partner who never personally argues a case or drafts a contract, but does nothing but attend meetings all day and supervise younger partners and paralegals, is still "practicing law". The chiefs of large hospital departments are still "doctors" even when they don't pick up a stethoscope for days at a time. Late in Beethoven's career, when he was almost completely deaf, no longer able to perform or even to critique other performers, he was still a "musician".

Whereas (e.g.) Joel Spolsky is now a "manager". Except when he's working on Arc, PG is more likely to be called a "manager" or an "angel investor" or a "venture capitalist" or a "technology pundit" or a "marketer" or a "writer" or a "teacher" or a "designer" or a "strategic consultant" or an "executive chef" (I think he does all of these things!) than a mere programmer. But just because these guys somehow don't fit our hyper-narrow definition of "programmer" doesn't necessarily mean that they had a problem with their software careers. It might just mean that there are many opportunities in software -- some quite rewarding or lucrative; many of which are best performed by someone who also knows how to program -- that aren't captured in the scope of the term programmer.

Part of the reason why there seem to be so few "programmers" in their forties and fifties is that by that time many of them have dreamed up a better job title for themselves, like "senior member of the technical staff" or "chief of QA" or "Java architecture consultant" or even "co-founder" or "CEO". Spolsky loves to tell the story about his Bill Gates review:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

At the time of that review, Bill Gates had not been called a programmer for years and years. He was a CEO and a co-founder, and was paid accordingly (and then some). But what was he doing when he reviewed a spec in gory, technical detail? He was programming. At a higher level than the average college intern, yes, but just because you're not touching a keyboard or dealing with individual calls to malloc doesn't mean you're not programming.

Unless we decide that it does. But then we shouldn't be surprised to find that programming as a career is something that many people eventually grow out of. We've defined it that way -- as a term to describe an activity that doesn't scale well and that usually represents only a portion of a well-balanced intellectual or economic diet.
Can you please clarify what you mean by assertive approach? You continually use Microsoft as an example, but I don't really think spending half a decade in courts is assertive.

Or maybe you could use some mid sized companies as examples as Google and Microsoft are both anomalies.
How "assertive" was Microsoft at first? It seems like they spent their first decade toiling along at standardizing programming across the many different OEMs and computer types of the day. It was probably another decade until they did anything that anyone would consider "ruthless".

They started off trying to build something people want (Basic for the Altair) just like any YC company. I wouldn't say that most YC startups display any less ambition than building a Basic interpreter.
You're right. Github is certainly the favorite (and deserves to be).
I think the amount of oversight, controversy, and political grandstanding over giving $14 billion to companies that actually make things is just insane giving the $700+ billion given, without any strings attached, to companies that move numbers around on spreadsheets.
I printed this article out a couple of years ago when I started consulting and it has been an inspiration to me. It's always worthy of a re-read!
My guess would be that he means, for instance, shipping IE for free and essentially destroying Netscape was ruthless and/or assertive. He's probably forgetting that that occurred in 1995, one decade after Windows first appeared, and two decades after Microsoft was founded.
Writes/plays poker/cofounded a startup.
Seems like 1/3 of them are stuff that you never even heard of, 1/3 are big name companies that have no reason to be in this thing at all, and 1/3 are actual startups that deserve to be nominated.

So basically a typical techcrunch "startup" event
Huh? Here's the relevant section from the page you link to, in full:

David Heinemeier Hansson: [in response to a question]

I try not to predict the future. I’m not a big believer in fortune telling. The best way to predict the future is to implement it.

Since when was quoting a classic aphorism a source of "guilt"? Am I supposed to include a footnote every time I use phrases like premature optimization, or considered harmful, or half-implemented buggy version of half of Common Lisp in casual conversation? Or does the do-not-quote-others rule only apply to DHH, who seems to attract character assassins as honey draws flies?
Just to be devil's advocate, any credit card is going to do the same thing if your card is stolen; they're legally required to, but they also do a good job on this just as a customer retention measure.

My Amex story is about getting fucked over in a legitimate transaction, and Amex making it right even though the problem had nothing to do with my credit card. I was told to expect this of Amex customer service, and they were right.
I have a thing for second-hand 2001-era HP Omnibook 6100's, which fail after about 2 years (screen hinge, etc), but are QUIET. A recent favourite is Thinkpad T23's, which are titanium cased.
They’re losing because every car costs $2,000 more to build due to higher wages and health care. That’s it. End of story.

I'd never buy an American car, and it has nothing to do with the price. They're ugly, and crap. End of story.
Exactly. I'm filing this one under 'general networking advice'.
That has everything to do with the price. They're ugly and crap because of the extra cost.
"Do you know how many people in America go to jobs where you need permission to go to the bathroom?"

I am actually quite interested in that statistic.
http://buffalobeast.com/133/bigthree.jpg
I don't think that's logical. I mean, I agree that there should maybe have been far more strings attached to the $700 billion, but that doesn't mean there should have been less oversight of this one. (There's actually pitifully little.)
"These very first applications were basically simple implementations of some of the existing behavior/features that existed in facebook. A few that come to my mind are SuperPoke, SuperWall, FunWall, Send Hotness etc"

Actually those top apps then (many of which still are) just replicated functionality MySpace already had. The various FunWalls, TopFriends, some of the music apps, etc.

It's not a bad strategy really. Look at one, more popular social network, assume that heavily used features there would be in demand on another social network, and build it. If there's ever another platform from a second place competitor that lacks a lot of the functionality of its first place rival, it would be wise to do the same thing.
Anticresis
It's rather unlikely you're doing anything wrong. IIRC, BeautifulSoup docs acknowledge that it is rather slow.

Also, if you don't make use of the methods that extract/unravel object trees, they may not be properly GC'd, leading to further slowdowns. I can't remember the method names exactly (might be destroy() and extract()), but they're in the docs.
Every Mac I've owned has failed also. But every laptop I've ever owned has also, similarly, failed. Maybe it's me.

My point is though: Apple treated me right when my machine fails, the other laptop manufacturers (Dell, Acer) do not, not by a long shot, and for that reason alone I'll keep buying Macs.
Every pet I've owned has died (except the current dog)

One of our dogs only lasted 17 years, the other failed after just 15. The chooks weren't much good; we only seemed to get about 4 or 5 years from them. The finches are all dead, and so are the budgies. The rabbit died too.

My wife had a dog they gave away, but they kept in contact with the new owner, and after 6 years with the new owner, that dog was dead too.
They are actually - days like these the delivery guys don't get paid enough :)

It's not as if the roads are sealed or anything, but there's enough snow out there that most people are ill-equipped and ill-trained to deal with it. Cars are sliding off the roads because of lack of snow tires, and people are getting beached up all over the place. Not a pretty sight. But a good driver with snow tires/chains is not altogether too handicapped.
AttorneysDelivered
Lawyer Directory, Attorney Directory -- Attorneys Delivered is a directory for attorneys designed to perform well on the major search engines.
I don't necessarily disagree with him about this, but I do take issue with his disdain of academic or hobbyist projects.

The internet is increasingly providing free access to very large and very interesting data sets, and so of course we're seeing more and more people take advantage of this to do interesting things with this data. And as working with these sorts of datasets becomes more and more common, it is silly to think that we should have to reinvent the wheel every time instead of having tools evolve around their uses.

Moreover, we're in an age where a couple people can successfully take an idea from a hobby project and turn it into a working business with little more than time, effort, and knowledge. Given this, I would ask where the line is drawn between "I need to work with this data" and "what sorts of cool things can I do with this data". My personal belief is that the line is very fine and blurry, and that the work of "jerkoff hobbyists" today is likely to lead to the serious uses of the future.
In a previous life as a math nerd, I used to do memory and mental arithmetic tricks, so this post rings true -- i.e, these calculations are all in fact easy to do with practice, even if they might not appear to be so at first.

It appears that the only way to make math cool is by focusing on the least useful part of it, and further, by giving it an aura of mystery by making exaggerated or false claims, when in fact the purpose of math is to clarify. Sad.

In this vein, see also my deconstruction of Arthur Benjamin's "mathemagics" performance: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/82413.html
Ring-a-ding-ding. Totally agree.

For those of us that would hack paid or not, I'm thrilled to see someone like this considering getting out of the industry.

It opens up a seat for someone that loves programming to take their job.
I like pirates of silicon valley better,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflXMZL2stU
again, I wasn't trying to bash DHH. Just adding some humor to my search for the very hard to find quote I'm still looking for.

But if you wonder why DHH seems to attract character assassins, look no further than how he signed off from his Christmas Eve post http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-an...

"So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!"

That's a great way to tick off a billion or so people.
But who oversees the overseers? The American people have proven they can't pick a smart loan, much less manage $700B.

I'm opposed to both of the bailouts, with or without oversight.
The closest thing I found (via quick search) was a quote (apparently) by Paul Krugman:

"Meanwhile, how much has our nation's future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?"
I've had a powermac g5 tower dual 1.6 for over two years now and it still works fine (though flash seems to be a lot slower now)

My other old mac a G3 (i forget how old it is) is still working well with Tiger (albeit a bit slower compared to everything else)
Mircosoft was VERY assertive at first. Without laying out a detailed history, very early on gates had a keen business sense and was quite ruthless. They may have been 'building something people want', but the seeds of what microsoft would later become were without a doubt being planted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
What I don't get is how Rolando, which came out TWO DAYS before nominations closed, landed on there (not to say I don't love it) - http://vote.crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/#category_16
I have one very related quote, though by Greenspun, not Kay:

"We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn't work."

from http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
I would say that Chrome (and Google starting to favor it over firefox) will slow down Mozilla's growth more than the downturn
QDOS produced by Seattle Computer and purchased by Microsoft after Digital Research dragged their heels on their promises to deliever CP/M to IBM, was a rip-off of CP/M. We can argue about this point but it's documented by Gates' biographers.

Gates was hungry for that deal and beat Kildall to the punch, doing what he needed to, bending the rules/law to get his foot in the door at IBM.

The essay by pg about "doing good" mentioned by someone in this thread might ring true when the valves are open and VC funding is flowing freely but in the new financial reality that we are in, I am arguing that it is the companies that have this kind of ruthlessness that will be the ones who make it, not the ones who want to "do good". Microsoft is not an outlier in this practice. It is self-evident that this is the American way of business.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iPWjNoSS9vUC&pg=PA120&#...
There are really a billion people who (a) read DHH's blog and (b) have the maturity of a middle school student? How sad they must be when their peers turn on "The Wire".
Why is this fugly "award" so over-hyped?
If you're two guys, two laptops and a server in an apartment, there aren't many costs to cut. That's the typical YC company. Marketing doesn't seem to do as much for a new company as PR, and simply being YC-funded is a big boost in that area.
whatever the auto makers do it's nothing compared to the f-ups of the bankers. even their loan is miniscule compared to the 2 trillion dollar loan we've already given the banking industry; not to mention the 5 trillion in free money and the complete lack of oversight and transparency for the bankers.

More attention should be re-diverted back to the banks...
I don't think asking people to pay for your product is ruthless.
Now you're being less "gossipy" and more "insulting to everyone's intelligence", since your original post questions whether DHH is "delusional", and asks if it's "really come to this". You could have just asked the question you claim to have been asking. But that wouldn't have attracted all this attention, now, would it have?
I have nothing to be defensive about -- it's your article.
Evil is only useful once you step outside of a competitive market. EX: Cable company's seem to be Evil because they make more money that way, but trying to be more evil than the next pizza delivery company is useless.
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And so you think YC startups are failing to negotiate well with IBM? I'm curious beyond some vague idea of ruthlessness, that really just seems like a fairly typical licensing deal magnified in importance by history, if there are any specific examples of a YC company not being ruthless.

I still go back to my original comment, which is that when you boil this whole question down, it makes no sense at all.
When I vote, the site says:

"Element.update("cat_1", "Thanks for voting!");
Element.hide("noms_1");"

Weird. BTW, I am using Chrome. Is the error specific to it?
These "speech macros" are an interesting phenomenon.

How many people who have no problem with homosexuality still use "gay" as a derogatory term: "Oh man, that's so gay."

If they were raised in the US or Canada in the last 30 years, it's just probably something they heard in the school-yard and now don't examine at all.

I've said such things, and the subsequent introspection has given me a new insight into those old fogies who say things like "Nigger brown", without meaning to be racist.

They were socialized in a racist culture, and although their individual views may be different, they can't fully shake the legacy.
It's funny that you two have taken up the question. When I first read that comment about lack of killer instinct, there were certain YC founders who immediately popped into my head as people whose faces I'd have liked to hear him say that to...
The Fed should oversee the loans, and Congress them, just as with anything else. I don't consider myself informed enough to have a strong opinion about the $700 billion one. I don't have any moral objections.
Can it be an alligator wrestling startup at least?
The argument "X is better than being unemployed" can be made for many values of X. It isn't spitting on fortune to suggest that some values of X are more desirable than others, and should be pursued strategically over the course of a career.
Where's the sexism? Sexism would be assuming that the whiners were all boys, or using exclusively masculine gender instead of mixing it up a bit.
you'd be incorrect. (You'd also be kind of rude.)

Sounds like someone needs a spine ;)

On that note, though, I apologize for accusing you of something you did not do.
I think you understand the point. Saying things like that on Christmas Eve is a clear attempt to be a lightning rod for criticism.

I guess I'm going to have to email Mr. Kay myself if I want to find this so hard to find quote. Noone on HN seems to know it. I do recall that when I read it at least 10 years ago, I read it "offline". Maybe the goog doesn't know this one? ;)
Firstly, I think they are getting a lot more than 150k visitors a month. The Alexa numbers suggest more like 10x that.

That is not a lot of visitors. My one man static content site is getting about 200k (high value niche) visitors a month.

A search engine is likely to depend on ad revenues. It might be able to target its ads better and to get high click through rates, but also needs to serve a lot of low value searches so I cannot see how it can make enough to justify a valuation that is anywhere close to a positive return.
Internet Access Turns School Buses Into Rolling Classrooms
he smoked 40 cigarettes a day? How can people abuse themselves that much? He is lucky he only had a heart attack, unlike cancer, at least it's not permanent(as long as you don't die)
The quote is actually by Lincoln. I'm sure a lot more people cringe when it's attributed to Kay than when it's attributed to DHH.

In neither case it has anything to do with the persons it's attributed to. The whole point behind attribution is that it's done by third parties.

What a useless mud slinging invitation.
Not ruthless but certainly assertive.
Yeah, I'm just not getting the ticked off part. Could there really be a "billion" blog readers who have never seen Bruce Willis in Die Hard and therefore can't spot the pop-culture reference in DHH's closing quote?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/quotes

I thought that even one-celled animals had seen Die Hard by now. But perhaps it's more of a generational thing than I had realized.
Yeah, you could easily see people call PHP a toy language because of its problems in the past (and some present), however, its one of the most widely used languages ever.

Like noodle was saying, I saw a bunch of toy languages in college that a professor would write solely for the purpose of teaching something; a language that would never be used in industry.
I mentioned QDOS and the IBM negotiations only because I was disputing your statement about Microsoft not being assertive early on. I think this is clearly not the case. The aggressiveness of their negotiating tactics and their willingness to potentially get sued for copyright infringement relate to the context of my question about whether YC startups lack grit.

You are asking me for "specific examples of a YC startup not being ruthless". But I am asking for the inverse - examples of aggressiveness. I haven't seen any at YC. Have you? Perhaps you don't believe it's necessary or important but that was the premise of my original question. I insist that this is not a troll but a sincere question and an important one in the current economic environment, even more especially for companies not privileged by YC funding.
thanks. that's a nice one. The Kay quote is along those lines. I'll know it when I see it. It will be odd if it turns up and its not Kay ;)...I think so though.
It's a DAILY question on the Joel on Software discussion forum; there's a group of people there that have turned it into a mutual self-confirmation club where they all try to make each other depressed about how bad their jobs are.
Admittedly my opinion, but I think that the predicament of the auto companies is mostly due to poor decisions that made the difference between small profits and massive losses. The losses at the I-banks are just pure unadulterated greed.

Additionally there are costs to compliance, and those are probably going to be greater at car companies (that have factories, dealers, financing divisions, etc, etc). The car companies have tighter margins and more costs to meet compliance. Banks move numbers around, not physical objects - their compliance could, and should, cost less.
Go speak to professors directly, or find out if local colleges have an IPP (my college, for example http://ecs.utdallas.edu/ipp/) program where you can register your company so they can help you out.

Each professor (especially ones who teach juniors and seniors) know the talented kids in their classes and they can help you out.

If the intern position doesn't require college experience, try high school computer science teachers. They usually know their star students better and the kids would much rather work doing some programming than working at Subway.
Great logo!

Personally, my first impression is that it looks like a subway system's logo: you have arrows on the left to designate travelling, rails on the right, and the various strokes remind me of the complexity of the interconnected lines of a subway system.

Just a thought.
Google to Employees: No Christmas Bonus, Here's a G1 Instead
Right now, we've seen pretty constant pricing from "cloud" providers like Amazon and Slicehost. While they probably had razor thin margins a few years ago, they're probably decent now. As technology improves, they'll probably have to reduce pricing to remain competitive. In fact, Linode (who has been around for 5 years, considerably longer than Slicehost) has seen constant upgrades.

Linode has gone from, on their base plan:
64MB 2003
80MB 2005
100MB 2006
128MB Jan 2007
256MB Mar 2007
300MB Sep 2007
360MB Dec 2007

Similar increases in transfer and disk space have been seen over this time period (http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/).

I expect that Amazon and Slicehost will start offering more as pricing comes down. With virtualization being offered by more and more firms, they'll have to follow market pricing and as disks and RAM get cheaper and cheaper, what is offered will go up. Margins are probably decent now as he notes in his posts. As such, anytime storage or RAM falls by half, we should see a discount in the cost to us.