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I think they should let him back in. He was an entertaining read.
This was actually news to me that he got banned. Can't imagine what he did to deserve that.
> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?
personally I like mercurial better than git, and also using on my desktop to clone github repos with hggit extension Facebook picked mercurial over git because it's easier to customize.
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Complicated question. It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now. Besides, I think it's fairly likely that even if I were set for life, I'd be doing something fairly similar to what I'm doing now. I think that in terms of lifestyle & personal goals during the 4-5 years…
Hey Nostrademons, I appreciate your thoughtful responses so I was wondering what your thoughts are on importance and corresponding compensation of the 1st employee at a company. If the first employee is important enough that in your mind, it's possible that with depending on the first employee they may or may not be a billion dollar company, do you think the first employee compensation is commensurate with that? Asto…
Aston (presumably) made out with a lot more than the $300/400K a year that a Google/Facebook engineer tops out at. He also took on more risk, but the risk was largely technical risk: the possibility that him and his teammates couldn't deliver what 65,000 people said they wanted. That risk is largely under their control, while as a founder, the primary risk is that nobody wants your product or it can't be built economically.
I do think that the large amount of money in the funding ecosystem lately has distorted this bargain somewhat. In boom times, you get cases where the founders get funded on hope & pedigree and draw a salary immediately (meaning that their financial risk is more akin to an early employee's), and then they go and hire a bunch of naive employees at below-market rates before getting any validation that people want their product (meaning that the employee now takes on market risk that was previously reserved for the founder). This doesn't do either the company or the employee any good; these companies are significantly more likely to fail than ones who stay founder-only while they prove out the market, and they ruin more peoples' lives when they do. If you look at employee #1's who have actually made out well - eg. those at Google, DropBox, Thumbtack, AirBnB, SnapChat, etc. - all of those companies had validated demand, had raised funding, and in many cases were already in use by thousands of people when they hired their first employee.
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Michael O. Church a troll? Please. The guy had an odd view of himself but I always found he provided excellent well thought out analysis and arguments. I'm not saying he is always right, but he wasn't a troll.
Are we sure "pensive_returns" isn't Michael O. Church? Serious question: commenters on HN that write in an idiosyncratic fashion about Church have turned out to be him before. Every time I read a comment about Church, I find myself asking, "is this how a normal person would write about someone best known for commenting on message boards?"
An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…
What is the connection between AutoAdmit and Church? I don't understand how he's relevant here.
Draw your own conclusions.
That's a level of understanding I have trouble getting from very experienced developers and system admins, let alone a fresh college grad. I wish more people would realize that.