Bamafan

Did you simply release that app and customers come after? Or did you have to pay a certain amount to acquire customers (i.e. paid advertising)? Or did you acquire customers some other way?

It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.

My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.

Point blank - without Romero, there is iD Software (it was his idea to form a new company). There is no Doom. There is no Quake. Romero was one of the primary creative forces behind iD.

Carmack was the tech genius who made their ideas come to life.

(Was not obvious back when it happened though, at least not to me.)

But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.

Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.

I was referring to medical school accreditation itself.

Another reason is the supply of doctors is artificially restricted by the AMA.

Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.

Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.

I might be going way out on a limb here, but I think this kind of thing is a subtle driver of age/family discrimination.

What kind of workers are more likely to live by the office, and thus able to drop in on a moment's notice? Young, single workers.

What type of workers are less likely to do this? Older workers or workers with families who have to deal with commute/spouses/children/etc.

[a] Others (non devs) can be entrusted to make decisions without developer input. Rare, in my experience.I've been in several hour-long meetings where I've only had 5 minutes of input, but that 5 minutes of input saved weeks/months of frustration/headaches.

[b] Offices are setup in such a way that devs get their own quiet space without surrounding distractions.

Most money available in the industry exist at places where 'a' and 'b' don't exist.

Sadly, this can be a very important component to your success as a developer (or anything else) in corporate America.

I've said it before, I'll say it again -- the creators of StackOverflow don't know what made the site successful in the first place.

SO is successful because it's an experts-exchange.com clone without the pushy subscription model plus a few social voting features added in.

THAT'S IT.

The problem also is that the site was essentially complete within the first year. But there are still people on staff and they took a bunch of VC money. The people on staff need to do something and the VC money needs to be spent.

So of course they start meddling with their already completed product. Editing is now seen as an Important Thing and many red herrings like "keeping the site from becoming Reddit" are trumpeted in order to justify this meddling.

Nonsense like "Gorilla's vs Sharks"[1] are trumpeted in order to justify this meddling.

And even worse than the meddling on the new stuff, they go back and close old questions, even ones that have been quantifiably validated by the votes of hundreds of people. I'd actually bookmarked many of them, only to find them mysteriously closed months later.

Holy shit, are you fucking kidding me, guys?

[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/

Please don't let your personal relationships spoil an informative (if sometimes heated) discussion. That kind of kills the "hacker" spirit.

You and Jeff are confused about what makes stackoverflow.com successful.

The reason stackoverflow is successful is because it's a clone of another successful tech Q&A site (experts-exchange.com) minus the scummy answer cloaking plus some social voting.

That's it.

All this stuff about the "right kinds" of questions being "key to its success" is based on absolutely nothing. There is nothing to support that. The one thing we do know is that deleting high quality user-generated content pisses people off.

This is a rant that's needed and one that SO needs to open themselves to receiving. Their stance on this is just wrong.

I'd actually bookmarked several of your posts (among others) because they were so valuable. So it enrages me to no end to click those bookmarks and find that the entire discussion is simply gone.

To recap - a high quality contribution whose value was validated by dozens of individuals (or perhaps even more) was simply deleted.

The problem starts at the top. As you can see from Jeff Atwood's post below (codinghorror) , even the founders of Stack Overflow don't understand the value of their own platform to their customers. They had a preconceived notion of what StackOverflow Is and they are going to stick to it, users be damned.

I don't mean the bash them, but if nerds want to see a prime example of why they take orders from non-nerds (whom we like to think of as "less intelligent" than us), this is exhibit "A". And if you want to know why StackExchange will fail everywhere else, this is exhibit "A". No other group of users will put up with that crap.

I think it's more of a cash flow thing than anything else. People buy the best thing they can afford based on the cash they have available at that very moment.

Thank god you got there in time! NYC TTYL is down to 5 years. Probably won't be there in 2020.

"But now the government seems to consist of self-interested parties who are happy to persecute citizens of every country including its own."

When has this not been the case in US history?

Sounds like you buy into the same "in the old days, things were better" pollyanna version of US history many of its own citizens do.

I'm not sure an annual charge would necessarily fix the situation for heavy users. It's very similar to the situation of cable and phone companies losing money on heavy users of their service.

Spring is OK in the service and DAO layers. I prefer Stripes on the web layer. Stripes IMO has a far more sensible approach to laying out the web layer (e.g. combining controller and backing object, fewer configurations, more sensible tag system, etc.).

http://stripesframework.org/display/stripes/Home

#1 How are you able to connect to 4,000+ paying customers so quickly?

Actually, that's it. I'm guessing any number of HN guys could create this product. But we don't know how to get people to buy it.

Maybe it's just me, but I've "worked for" several English majors. OK, perhaps they weren't my direct boss, but I've been on many projects managed by Project Managers with degrees in areas like English and History. (IMO, whoever is managing your project is the person you're "working for").

And I didn't "choose" to work for these guys. Usually I go through a technical interview, then get assigned to a project whose PM is a non-technical person.

Perhaps this is unusual at places like Google, MS, etc. But outside of those types of companies, it's not unusual at all in my experience.

Also, how did you get so far in your career as an MS developer with such limited access to source code?

"Similarly, if you’re a programmer, you’re probably perfectly capable of writing Facebook or the Google search engine or Twitter or a browser, and you certainly could churn out Tetris or Angry Birds or Words with Friends or Farmville or any of hundreds of enormously successful programs. There’s little value in doing so, though, and that’s the point – in the Internet age, software has close to zero cost of replication and massive network effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates."

The problem with this: there are TONS of examples in the software world where the first mover DOESN'T dominate.

That said, I enjoyed reading this job post. It might be the best job post I've ever read.

EDIT: user "roc" below says this same thing, but much better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3839190

I'd kill for some Phase IV PMs. :)

(Actually, it's rare that I meet Phase I PMs. Very few PMs think in terms of developing software across those 5 stages. To them it's Photoshop -> Make Photoshop Mockup Do stuff -> Fin)