skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many large companies don't have 15 million customers, especially in a single year. In fact, most public software companies don't.

The difference between, say, Salesforce.com and 37signals is that nothing at Salesforce gets done without:

* a 10 person dev team

* a 5 person QA team

* a development manager

* a QA manager

* a director of engineering

* a VP/engineering

* a technical product manager

* a product manager

* a VP/product management

* 3 dedicated sales engineers

* an account manager

* a regional district manager

* a VP/sales

* an SVP/sales

* a marketing/communications person

* a marketing manager

* a PR person

* a VP/marketing

* an accounts receivable person

* a CFO

* and I could keep going...
Okay, fine. I'm more concerned about people who have 3-4 years of runway and still aren't confident enough to jump into a startup without first consulting a website full of strangers. To each their own.
So, even though I think Spolsky's posts have gone further and further off the rails, this is one that resonated with me:

* first, management jobs in startups do go to the founders and "key hires" (definition: if you have to ask if you are one, you aren't) --- and

* the key predictor for whether someone does well in a startup has, in my experience, been how willing they are to write lots of code, as opposed to just talking about code.

Every bad hiring decision I have ever contributed to has involved allowing myself to be impressed with someone's design/architecture/methodology/"engineering". Conversely, everyone I've ever neg'd because they didn't seem grounded or professional enough has gone on to depants me in the commit logs.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418098
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How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight
Even though I recognize you meant this, I'd edit your key predictor to read,
'the key predictor for whether someone does well in a startup has, in my experience, been how willing they are to write lots of _good_ code"

I've been at several startups where the developers who made the most difference where those who wrote concise, correct, and elegant code that did the job, and nothing more. They didn't get distracted into writing "architectures" when all that was needed was a "tool." Their code was a pleasure to build upon, and people instantly respected their ability to bang it out.

Sometimes less is more.
Just what can be accomplished in life by getting into one of these ridiculously competitive high schools that could not be accomplished without getting into one?

Would the kids who get into ivy league from this high school not have gotten into ivy league from a more reasonable high school?
It didn't really hurt my feelings. We're all (well, mostly) adults here; we can disagree without taking it personally.

I just thought it was kind of odd that you'd suggest someone might not have enough risk appetite for a startup, and then when someone else replies that most entrepreneurs take calculated risks, point out that they failed. Failure is a part of risk. All those folks who did take the risk of starting a startup...well, most of them failed. Does that make them unqualified to give startup advice? Kinda contradictory, given your original point.
Right now a call to Facebook’s Users.getInfo API call will return the user’s [...]profile...if Facebook added status to this method, Twitter would be destroyed.

No it wouldn't.

I'll say this as simply as I can for anyone who ever plans on saying how Facebook will kill/destroy/et al Twitter: Don't. Facebook and Twitter cater to complete different tastes of two almost entirely different audiences.
I was at a conference with a Sun evangelist banging on about this stuff. I was pretty skeptical. One of our Hadoop grid sysadmins used to work at Sun. He was raving about things like D-Trace and a bunch of features of Solaris that other *nix don't have.

I guess I'm not 100% sold on Open Solaris but they do have some pretty badass stuff in there.
I actually didn't mean that. I meant: write lots of code.

The bad decisions I made?

(a) thinking that people who could talk and talk and talk about code (shut up I'm not interviewing with you) would write good code

(b) thinking that people who couldn't explain why they'd ever use a red-black tree instead of a hash table would write bad code.

I'm making a case for more-is-more. People who write code (really write, sure, not cut-paste) have work ethics, are really into actually writing code, can easily be trained to bring them up to a median "engineery" standard of code, and get stuff done.
Yes, I do believe he was making a pun.
There's a fine line between good writing and verbose writing.

I'm taking a writing class right now, and they really stress that real-world examples explain your argument better and make the writing more interesting, and I think that's actually true.

That said, giving too many examples makes it too long to be worth people's time and/or bores them with too many examples that are too similar.
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I have to disagree with you completely (then again I wrote the article :) ) ... Twitter is just a feature for the most part ... you could instantly port Twitter to Facebook in a day or two with a little bit of programming
i think they're referred to as "girls" or "women" not "females" ;)
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My Twitter network is completely different from my Facebook network.

That is why Facebook can't easily kill Twitter.
Simply showing up and saying you can migrate data from one into the foundations of another doesn't at all sustain any sort of argument that a distributed Facebook Status model will "kill" Twitter. The modus operandi is drastically different between the two sites. Twitter isn't a "feature", it's a "service", a highly extensible and mobile service. The fact that it is focused on such a simple protocol as telling people what you are doing, imo will ensure its longevity.

Given that people look at Facebook statuses as a mere extension of a user's profile, versus a Twitter timeline actually serving as your profile, simply distributing your Facebook status on a web page isn't going to phase Twitter one bit.

And I still stand by what I said earier: Facebook and Twitter users aren't the same. Mark might update his status on Facebook "Mark is at the ball game" but on Twitter, he'll probably say "Local sports team is up by 4! Go team!". The inherent purpose and utilitarian value of the two sites are completely different for one to arbitrarily overthrow the other, just because the one (Facebook) mimics the distribution of the other (Twitter)
I never said you were unqualified to give advice, and I wasn't trying to insult you for your startup's failure (of course failure is a part of risk). My original point was that risk-averse people probably won't have successful startups, and I didn't understand why you would hold up your failed startup up as evidence to the contrary.

Here's another bold opinion: if some jackass like me can persuade him not to do a startup by pointing out that startups aren't for the risk-averse, then he probably shouldn't be doing a startup.
Ah thank you for the correction.
I dunno, dude. This doesn't seem like a high that requires extremely high availability.

And anyway, if they can deal with rebuilding a RAID after a failed drive then (by definition) the site can deal with copying all the data off the drive. Heck, you could periodically yank a drive our of the RAID and replace it with a fresh one, and you'd have a backup.
Add Facebook Connect and a way for people to import all their twitter updates in 1 minute and you've come up with an easy way to kill Twitter
This shows a complete lack of understanding of Twitter.

Twitter does status updates and does them amazingly well.

You (more-or-less) know that all of your followers read all of your statuses.

You can get Tweets from any device remotely connected to anything. SMS, Firefox, desktop, iGoogle, web, etc. This would take a lot of time for Facebook to catch up on.

And with Twitter there is no other noise. Statuses are the entire thing. That focuses you on that. You don't get distracted by pictures, videos, relationship status changes, etc. That focuses it, which is very appealing to users.

No one would make Twitter-like apps centered around statuses because people don't care that much about statuses on Facebook, and people wouldn't start caring about statuses because there would be no Twitter-like apps to make getting statuses easy and versatile.

It takes a lot to totally transform how people use a service like making Facebook Twitter-centric would.
I just find it amazing that there was never a situation where someone said "I'd like to test this change on some live data before rolling it out" or "I'm about to make a change/upgrade, I better run a backup first"
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"Exactly how much is that?" Good question, no answer. I recommend you get some sort of a network byte counter, then go to a few sites that feel similar in size/scope to what you plan. Use their "bytes per visit" as a ballpark figure.

For instance, I'm using Safari and turned on the "Show Network Timeline" then reloaded hacker news. 34kB. Then I went to slashdot.org: 643KB for a first visit, probably more like 74KB for subsequent front-page load (scripts are the bulk but they cache).

If you use a VPS solution, you will be managing your machine which is nice, but if you aren't already skilled at that it will be a distraction from your webapplication that you might be better without.

The big question with VPS solutions is "how fast is my machine today?" I have a tiny slice at VPSlink that used to be nicely snappy, but now is painfully slow. Something outside my visibility has changed on my server and there is nothing I can do. My slightly cheaper server at RapidXen is much faster.

Slicehost guarantees CPU share based on your slice size, but I don't see the denominator, I assume since a nearly 16GB slice is available that is the denominator which would give you 1/64th of the machine, worst case. Disk IO is another thing entirely, 1/16th of a modern CPU is ok, 1/64th of a disk drive spindle is painful. I suspect that is why my VPSlink machine has become slow.

Money can mitigate some of this, just buy a bigger slice. Mine are tiny because I am interested in how much I can do in a ~$7/mo server.
They are learning vocabulary and cramming other extremely "useful" stuff. In the process, they are wasting the best years of their youth, getting addicted to caffeine, and losing any creativity they might still have left.

Their parents should be sent to jail. This is no education, this is child abuse. They could try to adopt the fine things of other countries' educational systems, not the worst. Cram schools are intellectual concentration camps, nothing else. Poor kids.
This is total piffle.

The important difference between Facebook and Twitter is one is open and the other isn't.

People already in Facebook's ecosystem use status like Twitter, and people inside and out use Twitter to update their status.
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Yeah well, like I said in the blog comments:

Facebook: full-fledged social network. Twitter: simple, quick-posting environment.

There IS a big difference between these two sites, Facebook won't kill twitter, we can go to sleep calmly now :)
Okay, I will prove my point using what you've just said: if people are importing their Twitter feeds into Facebook, instead of letting Facebook status serve as their alert beacon for friends, what do you think that says about the user value of Facebook status updates?
Human Beautification Algorithm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328377
Are people really still buying into SEO services?
Anyone keeping a through index of these fail blogs? Could make for a fun anti-pattern.
that article is just motivation for me to prove him wrong. like the time Michael Arrington said "What is it? I really have no idea." about my startup.
I would just add all of my friends to see who picked me.
Of course if you can't trust the (creator/maintainer of the) code on a machine there's nothing you can in code on the machine to make it secure.

That said, if this kind of problem is a valid concern for an installation, the simplest solution is external validation of backups. For example, one might hire someone not in control of the original system (and not in contact with them) to do restorations and provide certification that they worked according to a test plan. This is the foundation for a lot of Sarbanes-Oxley technical audit consulting.

Audited backups would, of course, require a fairly elaborate disaster recovery plan, which sounds out of scope for this company.

I don't want to pass judgement, but if a pivotal IT person was let go and sabotage was discovered, at least a basic pass through the systems taking backups doesn't seem out of line.
Twitter is a really easy service to underestimate. If Facebook could wipe out a competitor that easily don't you think they would have done this already?
It's "just a feature" (I don't agree with this, btw - it's a service) with about a billion separate implementations (brightkite, facebook status, jaiku, friendfeed, tumblr, etc, etc), and yet it still exists as the market leader in the space even though pretty much all of these sites do it "better" in some way.

Did you write this article simply as linkbait, or do you really believe it?
"Their parents should be sent to jail. This is no education, this is child abuse."

Is that a troll or a seriously expressed opinion?
"Just what can be accomplished in life by getting into one of these ridiculously competitive high schools that could not be accomplished without getting into one?"

I suppose that depends on what the default high school is in the community where that child lives. I attended two high schools (because my dad moved from one state to another while I was in high school) and I do think that what high school you attend can make a big difference in your life. How much of a difference that makes depends on issues other than simply the characteristics of each high school.
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There is currently no "A-grade" way of providing audio using only JavaScript. The best fallback is flash, unfortunately.

And probably the best flash->JS library: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
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Browsers are nowadays pretty much regarded more as application platforms than as web page viewers (see any social networking site and its "apps" section). Still, those are mostly server-side applications; cross-browser compatibility alone makes game programming in JavaScript nightmarish.

I have to agree, though it hurts me to say that because I make JavaScript games (http://scriptnode.com/lab/spacius/).
That's an interesting and intuitive-after-the-fact observation. Thanks.
The emperor is the brains behind the machine

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-emperors-phone-call/10...
>Snap achieves its wicked mischief through loading JavaScript from its site; if the HTTP request fails, then it can't fuck up your browser.

Alternatively, just use Firefox with No-script. Then when they read this blog post and change stuff coming from spa.span.com to spa2.span.com, or to somerandomstringthatssolongyouwontpredicit.span.com, the Javascript trying to make the request still won't work.

Or if a whole new site comes along that does basically the same thing, you'll block that.

Also, most blogs have RSS/Atom feeds which area a
here's another with dynamic room names http://yamr.net/hacker_news
The various online newspapers and magazines need to get together in a cartel-style fashion and just force a micropayment system. Just charge one miserable penny to a view an article. Once it gets going, it would work.
I would also say this shows a lack of understanding on the Facebook API. Even if status updates were accessible by the User.getInfo, facebook applications would still only be able to access the status updates for the user running the application and that users friends. No massive scraping/broadcasting like in twitter.
Upvote the thread, then click here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mad44
Why would it want to? Facebook and Twitter have completely different goals
I'd bite if they give me a free toyota/honda when I make a purchase of an American car. That way, I'd at least get one crappy car + one good car instead of 2 crappy cars.
These kids and their parents need a healthy dose of existentialism.
An interesting question to ask:

If facebook provides a blogging feature, would it kill wordpress.com or blogger.com?
This article bugs me. First, the author's distinction between real and momentum vc is very retrospective. Especially with early stage investment, it's just not always clear who will be a 'real' investment vs. a 'momentum' vc. All early stage vc's are trend spotters who are trying to time their investments in companies to the market.

Second, there is no real analysis to support the headline. Even in bad economic times, I bet historically, traditional asset classes like equities have done much better than vc investments as a whole.
Totally disagree, a blogging platform is not a feature ... status updates is
You are wrong ... you don't need session keys to access public data as I stated in the article ... read the developer wiki in regards to what can be displayed without a session key
Statuses on Twitter and Facebook are just text fields, although Facebook's starts with your name. The differences between how they are predominantly used are results of socialization, and many people use Facebook statuses like you've described Twitter's and vice versa.
The bailout already paid for the cars, now the manufacturer must make delivery.
Facebook users are used to basically only broadcasting updates to the people they know. I think would take a long time and energy for FB to get them to accept twitter-style openness and it would probably make a lot of FB users look for a new platform. Also FB makes you tie your real name to your profile whereas Twitter lets you use an assumed username which I think is necessary for twitter style microblogging.
Facebook has "notes". It hasn't killed those services because it's geared more towards private use than public, and Facebook's other features (photo and link sharing) have replaced most of what people used to use private blogs for.
The latter. And you're right, those == and === semantics are kind of crazy. But I think of that issue as more or less the same as the null-undefined-false-0 issue.

Also, to answer your question:

And if you know Javascript is different from Language X, and can debug the difference, why are you writing Language X and not Javascript?

... the answer, when X is Lisp, is that the benefit of the additional abstractive power is much greater than the cost of the impedance mismatch. Both sides of that equation would vary greatly depending on X, which is just a way of repeating what we've already discussed :)
Read the article again.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone. Instead, I'm sharing our personal experiences and discussing just how challenging these hurdles can be.

My business partner and I are struggling to make our idea work just like all of the others here. I'm not the person to try and prove wrong. I want your business to work out.

If anything, the post was intended to be a reminder of how we all just have to keep working and remain focused.
The word "debt" appears way too little. The word "credit" isn't even in the article. The whole mess we're in is because of borrowing from the future via a debt bubble to escape deflation after the dotcom/telecom bust of the early 2000's. I think Greenspun needs to read up a bit more on whats really happened.
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....bringing up a good point which is: why are people like Lawrence Summers, Paulson, Bernanke etc. expected to get us out of this mess when they CREATED it?

Things WILL get worse as our political system is unwilling to punish incompetence and the people who predicted this stuff would happen aren't being listened to now that its obvious they were right.
is there a difference between status updates and microblogging?
yeah, the bailout basically fights market forces. Car companies are struggling because no one has money to buy cars, but thanks to the bailout, they're still making cars. So now they even further saturated the market with cars that no one has money to buy.

And so we have buy 1, get 1 free cars.
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I've heard a lot of this stuff on similar articles. It's hard to tell.

Anyway, a lot of the people I know who went to Hunter seem fine, and I can't say the same about kids who went to more typical public schools, especially if they were nerdy, awkward, or queer.
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Wait their site says that "Powerband is a world-wide fiber optic network." and that it only costs $24.99/month (well it also says $35.99). Are these just lies at this point or has this kid somehow laid fiber optics over the globe since press time. I guess I was out when he laid the line to my house.
just read the post on your site...you're a real cunt to some of the commenters who are not in any way trolling you. maybe you should just turn comments off if you don't like dissent. any desire to try your site evaporated as i read your responses.
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For "Modern Nerd" he didn't mention that the N and the D are the same character, putting two words into one, which I think looks very cool.
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I'm sorry, but I just don't see many of those as weird. They're (mostly) well-designed and carry an obvious metaphor, as any good logo should.

Clever, maybe. Weird, no.
Look at it like this: status updates on facebook => telling someone sitting next to you you're getting married. microblogging => having a wedding shower. It's all about the broad spectrum of recipients and how the data is distributed, at least imo.
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This applies to small companies and even big companies (like Google). The skill set to be a good developer is consistent no matter what the size of your company.

I agree only partially. It definitely applies to all sizes of companies, but larger companies seem to care less about it during interviews. This is a large part of why startups work more efficiently on average.
doesn't the "automatically copied to both drives" mean they're running a Raid 1?

The problem seems obscure...what kind of software bug overwrites all data on disk?
> This is absurd

This is what I thought as soon as I read it.

Youtube does the samething too. They store the video on their servers and let us view the video. Their flash player acts like the "virtual desktop" that lets me view the video. Still I have to download something on my comp - the steaming video :)

I would actually believe and bet on some other guy who says he going to create a better media encoding format. That would be a better investment of time and money.