81–90 of 114 posts
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I never expected it to get this high. The post was a rant and, as most rants do, turned out to be a bad idea. I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.
The current link asks me to download a binary file when I click it in FF 2.0. Whats up with that?
This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be. Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
I never expected it to get this high. The post was a rant and, as most rants do, turned out to be a bad idea. I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.
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luck in combination with the Max Strategy (continually trying different things all the time): a lot of products did not identify their use before hand, or their real use was discovered accidentally after they were made. post it notes - started as a failed adhesive. a coworker found that it worked well using it with paper and a gospel hymn book snood - (a very popular puzzle bobble variant) the programmer made it beca…
Perhaps better stated that a lot of products did not identify their eventual use beforehand. For your list the seed product had some utility: * adhesive gives rise to postit * rubber alternative gives rise to silly putty * pedagogic device gives rise to game, kernel
for some of the seed products their makers intended for them to have utility, but they didn't - that's why they were initial failures...
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traditionally the hackers have been the most undervalued in the whole equation.
Philip Greenspun wrote convincingly about how programmers are under valued because they fail to treat programming as a proper profession. They don't dress and otherwise present themselves professionally. They fail to interface professionally with customers and analysts as a doctor or lawyer would. Programmers themselves tend to demand a management style that treats them as a cog in the machine, where they are fed det…
Unfortunately I think this also has to do with the way Western culture views the foundation of programming (math, science, ...). Unlike in say Asia, math and science are looked down upon by main stream culture; since they are considered "nerdy". Maybe that's why we are on our way to producing a lot more lawyers than programmers and engineers (at least for our part of the world)...
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I know of businesses who look like they were started by businesspeople who hired hackers because the hackers were later ousted (like digg). The businessperson displaced the hacker after the fact. Can you think of any businesses were there where this clearly didn't happen? Can you think you any successful software company started by a businessperson who paid consulting fees to thoughtworks or IBM, set up a booth at a…
Amazon.
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Send them to an outsourcing site. Tell them you'll offer a competitive rate. Most of these guys won't think of spending a dollar.
I wouldn't work for rates "competitive" with those at eLance or Rent-A-Coder. I've done projects through those sites, and despite explicitly stating, "Don't bother with lowball offers--we're looking for good work, not low prices. We are developers, and we will be judging your experience and code harshly." I still got bids of 150 bucks for a project that I would have billed a weeks worth of hours for. They, of course,…
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Also, Intuit.
And, Wikipedia. And YouTube. Can Dick Costello code? I can't remember (he's a really nice guy, though). No? Feedburner.
Intuit was cofounded by Tom Proulx, who wrote the first version of Quicken himself. Scott Cook gets most of the credit because of his determination, but without either of them, the company wouldn't exist. It certainly was not an outsourced startup.
Wikipedia I'll grant you. Though the concept of wikis was invented by Ward Cunningham, who certainly was a hacker.
YouTube was started by 3 ex-PayPal employees. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were certainly hackers, Chad Hurley was more design. They built the initial version themselves.
This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be. Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
Are the recently arrived users simply voting up articles yet not adding any comments of their own to explain why they've voted up?
How about this?
If a person votes up an article (which costs a point), a contributing comment by the same person can start out at 2 points instead of 1. You're basically paying back the point taken to vote up an article. This would give more incentive for users to voice their opinion instead of simply voting up (without commenting) as well as now giving others a chance to agree/disagree. If their comments don't really add any value, they'll receive bad karma as normal.
You can also show a flag next to the user id to show whether they voted for this article or not.
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And, Wikipedia. And YouTube. Can Dick Costello code? I can't remember (he's a really nice guy, though). No? Feedburner.
Jeff Bezos was a hacker. He didn't call himself one because he also had significant business & financial skills, but he worked as a quant for D.E. Shaw. D.E. Shaw is the Google of hedge funds; anyone there is more than a match for the Ph.Ds at Google. Bezos's degree was in EECS, and his childhood projects would easily have gotten him into YCombinator. Intuit was cofounded by Tom Proulx, who wrote the first version of…
We can argue about the other two; I feel like I'll lose Intuit but win Amazon, but who knows. Not worth it. I think my point stands.