161–170 of 213 posts
I like Google... And Dropbox is also good. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel! HN always tells me who the villain in a story is. Someone please help!
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PG's well-known definition is "a company designed for growth". http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Meaning Apple is a startup?
Startups are rarely profitable since a company designed for growth reinvests its revenue back into the company to create future growth (think a "ramen profitable" startup vs a "lifestyle business").
Large profits mean the company has run out of investment opportunities.
" the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting " What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?
I suspect a "startup" is any company that is serving a market that has yet to prove it is viable. Many folks use that term to describe any privately held company that is growing into something much larger.
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Not if we're talking about the real world (implementation), rather than the theoretical capability of a language in itself. Perl and Ruby don't see much love on Windows, particularly with GUI toolkits and the like. Python is the only one of the three that feels comfortable using on Windows, from the skeleton of the app down to actually distributing it. Java is really good at cross platform apps though. This is one of…
I use Ruby for light scripting on a Windows machine. RubyInstaller worked just fine and so do the irb shell and my scripts. Dropbox is a web app, so who cares about GUI toolkits? Perhaps you're right that the Python community tried harder, earlier, to support Windows and other non-UNIX platforms. But it's hard to imagine Dropbox actually selecting Python to build their web app for that reason. Maybe in their earlier…
Then comparing apples to oranges "I use Ruby for light scripting" vs "widely deployed desktop app with users from the three major desktop systems (Windows, OS X, Linux)."
This kind of behavior is a serious annoyance in online discussions.
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Dunbar's number makes little sense for directly determining/classifying organizational sizes. Most of peoples' relationships lie outside of the organization they work for. You'd probably have little to no relationship with people in your organization way before you reach Dunbar's number.
Well, it may be 50, it may be 150, but the point is, it's probably fine to call a company of 10 a startup, and it's absurd to call a Google or Facebook a startup. Which leaves open the question of what to call Dropbox. Well funded, profitable, late-stage startup? Sounds like too much of a mouthful.
Which leaves open the question of what to call
Dropbox. Well funded, profitable, late-stage
startup?
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because he didnt found or was an early employee of a highly successful startup, yet. Same is true for Linus and many other hacker heros, but its not a bad thing imo.
Linus Torvalds is at least a multi-millionaire; when RedHat and VA Linux went public, they each gifted him with shares in gratitude for inventing Linux, reportedly worth around $20M [1]. Some sources put his wealth at anywhere from $150M [2] to $1B [3]; his actual wealth would vary significantly based on when he sold and what he's invested in since, since those shares shot up 10x on IPO day. [1] http://en.wikipedia.o…
I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?
If Guido van Rossum wanted to work on python full time, I am sure that there would be companies like Red Hat that would be very happy to pay him to do exactly that.
I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?
my thoughts exactly. I feel like it's a status symbol for a comapany. They are most likely busy giving talks and lectures to do any actual work. Maybe their value is in the odd meeting where they can voice some input. I've never had the pleasure of being in the room with giants such as these so I wouldn't know sadly.
Python has been a backbone of Dropbox since its early days as it allowed the startup to write code once but deploy it across platforms. Can anybody elaborate on this? Is the argument that Python is cross-platform because everybody uses GNU tools on every platform, or are there other reasons why Python is more cross-platform than other languages?
I started using Python on Windows machines, and I was able to develop programs that run without any problem or adaptation on Linux servers. That include thing like GTK, making a GUI and working on Windows and Linux.
It is possible that I could achieve that in other languages, I guess. But it had that capability, for sure... And for Dropbox that's a very interesting feature, as they have a client that needs to run on Windows, Linux and OS X...
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What do you think Google could have done?
Figure out why he wanted to leave, and see if they could remedy it (e.g. more money; different challenges; etc).
There are also things related to company size. I am more confortable working for small companies than big ones, there are other people that is the other way around...
It's not as simple as saying: "please stay, whatever you want"