galistoca

It's a very good question. You have asked a genuine question but I think it can be a great rhetorical question. I feel like developers nowadays blindly learn these "new technologies" just for the sake of learning new technologies, even though they will probably never build anything that really need these technologies. Maybe you get some street cred for knowing more but if I were you I would rather spend my time and energy actually "building" and experimenting things than just learning some esoteric technology that you probably don't even need.

Probably not the answer you were looking for, but I can't help but think it's pathetic how developers tend to think they're competent at what they do just because they know how to use the latest popular build tool, deploy tool, and some new framework that you probably will go out of fashion in a few years. (I'm not even exaggerating. Coffeescript used to be the "it" language but not anymore, people used to rave about grunt, then moved on to gulp, then webpack. Probably next year it will be something else. Same goes for Backbone => Angular => React hype cycle, you get the point.)

Just to share my two cents, you mentioned knowing these "React", "Kafka", and "Heron" will get you a better job, but that is far from truth. Let's say a company is hiring a frontend developer. Chances are they won't hire just because you know React. It is assumed that good developers can just pick up any new technology and learn quickly so just knowing some trendy technology won't make or break anything. They will probably test you to see if you have fundamental "vanilla javascript" capability.

You seem to think being disruptive means it has to be always super successful and always ethical. Being disruptive has nothing to do with how successful they are. There are tons of disruptive approaches that failed. Also being disruptive has nothing to do with whether they're ethical or not. Maybe you have your own little definition, but that's not the definition the rest of the world uses.

Ok smart guy, then tell me how so.

Exactly, that's why the incumbents couldn't replicate them, because they had to stay legal. Let's not go into whether this is ethical or not. I'm simply pointing out what disruptive means.

There's a huge difference between "tackling the problem differently than their competitors" and "tackling the problem differently in a way that their competitors can't imitate easily without sacrificing their assets". The latter is disruptive, the former is just what doing business means. I think Uber does fit into the latter.

Just to be clear, I do agree with your general tone of the article, it's just that your Uber part made me cringe.

There should be a blocker for sites with anti-adblock system.

I think you're underestimating most people. Everyone knows they have one life. If they were given a chance to really do whatever they want to do and were asked to think about it, they will always decide to go with the decision that fulfills the top level of maslow's hierarchy which is self actualization. The problem is most people live lives without being aware of this, so I think "Do what you want" is a good advice because it at least attempts to make people stop and think about it.

I normally do when I comment on HN. But honestly there's nothing to "counter" because like I said there's no substance to the article. I could criticize all the little details but that also doesn't feel right. It would be like a professor trying to grade a student's report and having no idea where to start because it's just a long rambling about nothing and has nothing to do with the suggested topic. In these cases they will just say "Rewrite".

This article is made up of 95% fluff and 4% content, and 1% the word "Keynesian".

And even that 4% content has no logic, just trying to deceive readers using lots of confusing/dubious expressions.

"Since then I’ve gotten a college degree, come within striking distance of finishing grad school, and acquired a number of practical and social skills I simply didn’t have as a teenager."

> So basically if you trim it down it means "I became and adult and went to college". (I had to re-read to realize "come within striking distance of finishing grad school" means nothing. "Acquired a number of ..." also means nothing because that's the definition of growing up. I acquired number of practical and social skills too. And so did everyone else.)

As for the content itself, this person needs to learn a lot more than some esoteric economics theory books and some blog posts about startups, before criticizing how startups work. It's all based on shallow understanding of how things work.

In my experience this is the most useless question ever for a consumer social app. I can easily say "Yeah of course I would, it sounds awesome!" and genuinely mean it when I say it, and then you'll get all excited and build it and release, just to find out I don't use it.

If you want to find out, like a wise man said, just do it.

The reason VocalIQ's success rate was "over 90%" is probably because they were constrained to a specific domain (car control). This is very common approach among NLP community. Of course you will perform better when your algorithm is constrained to a specific domain.

All the previous speech recognition platforms like Siri, Cortana, etc. perform worse since they are for general purposes. On the other hand, the reason Amazon Echo works so well is because it has very limited purpose.

We all know just because AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol doesn't mean AlphaGo is smart enough to take over the world.

Spinning this "90%" vs. "20%" just sounds like a bullshit marketing.

A service that tells you something that doesn't exist that people will pay for.

What is the definition of "best" anyway? If you really just think about pure performance nothing can beat a binary code probably. When you say "best" it probably means most productive in the short/long term. In that case it's not about what the language is good at. After all it's humans who use the language. Just like how esperanto is such an awesome concept but nobody uses it and that makes it a useless language, the more people use a language the more valuable it becomes. And yeah Haskell is esoteric. I am confident that I know way many more programming languages than an average programmer but I don't program in Haskell. Try picking 10 random programmers and ask them if they can program in Haskell, at best you'll find 1 (actually that's even being too optimistic)

Maybe i'm missing something but isn't this just like Urban Airship? Basically you need to have an app already in production, and you push through Twilio instead of directly hitting APNS. I do understand the benefits of having a 3rd party manage expired device tokens and sending broadcast push, etc. but having a hard time understanding what's novel about this.

I wonder how this works. Currently there's only a landing page that asks you to request access so I have no idea.

Do developers integrate Twilio SDK into their apps (similar to Fabric, etc.)? If so, sounds like a way different model than what they used to do (Basically you could integrate just by calling their REST endpoint since it was SMS based and required no installation of any app, but with APNS the only way I can see this work is if you tightly integrate with Twilio API by using their SDK)

How do they figure out a number is associated with an account? Does this assume that users will enter their phone numbers when signing up to a service?

The code is there for you to see, what harm can it possibly do? If you're cautious of this, you should be cautious about entering your username/password into web browsers to sign into websites I think...

Well you would be running it on your machine anyway so guess it doesn't really matter.

I knew someone would call me sexist. I know where you're coming from but I think people whenever they come across something that makes them uncomfortable just call it "sexist", "racist", etc. and call it a day. All I did was state the fact. You explain how it is sexist and if it's logical I will shut up.

Lastly, he switched because no one was getting rich off anyone's work. We were going through difficult times. But that was not the point of my comment. You blame me of being sexist but maybe you should also be less biased when reading someone else's words.

I see a lot of people on this thread who just say it's bullshit without understanding what's going on. You can live your life that way, or you can enlighten yourself on what really is going on and make the right decision.

This "salary cut" works only in this case: The employee is not just looking for money but something intangible from the job (Experience/network/etc.) This doesn't apply to most of you guys who have no intention to start a company or make a huge leap in life. That's why you think it's bullshit. But there are also a small number of people who are really not driven by just money but puts a lot of value on the intangibles I mentioned above.

Many startups look for these types of people, so to those of you who are hating on this idea: there's nothing wrong with you hating on them. It's by design, these companies don't want you either. I know from experience because I've hired people who just got in without any specific reason. These people tend to give up very soon because they simply don't care about what they're building. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that these startups can't afford to hire you.

Here's my horror story: I was working on a startup. We were fortunate to have a guy who's extremely talented and wrote the core part of our product. However he switched ship immediately when he realized it was a business that will take time to mature. I really hated that guy for a while because we had to basically abandon our core product the day he just left. Now I understand and also know that part of it was my fault too, but it was a very difficult experience for me. If you look at the world with this lens you'll notice so many "rockstar developers" jumping ship after another when things don't go well for the company (which is totally fine for them but bad for the company). That's why startup companies should care more about the "right match" than "rockstar developers". And hiring a rockstar developer by paying him tons of money when he's not so passionate about the company's vision is the worst thing you can do.

An analogy is most girls who don't want guys who are just in it for her looks. When you try to seduce a girl, complementing her looks rarely works unless your social status is extremely obviously high or if your looks are extremely great. In most cases you have to demonstrate that you like her not just for her looks but because of her personality. Most girls don't want a guy to just have fun for one night, never to see again, especially if they like them. I know many girls who gave up on a guy she really liked because she didn't want to be hurt. Startups are like that.

I think this whole "you need a work life balance" propaganda can be as misleading as "eat, sleep, code, repeat", especially for younger programmers who have no idea and rely on more experienced idols (such as the guys at Basecamp).

It really depends on what kind of life you want to have. If your priority is more towards making a huge dent in the world, I think trying to have a "work life balance" is a terrible idea. Here I'm speaking statistically because there are rare cases where people stumbled upon success even without putting all their life into it, but I would say these are exceptions, not the rule.

Most extremely successful people have had very abnormal life--far from a balanced life--(Maybe you hear about them talking about having a balanced life here and there but that's them speaking after they have achieved success. Of course if you spent all your youth on working on something you would want that time back. But I doubt they would be where they are if they actually did what they say).

Take a look at Basecamp for example. I don't want to pick on them but there's no better way to argue with their philosophy than what's going on with them. Sure they were one of the pioneers in their space, sure their co-founder created Ruby on Rails, and I totally admire what they have achieved, but what have they achieved in the last several years otherwise in terms of their own product innovation? They have killed most of its other products, and their main product--Basecamp--is not exactly the mainstream product that everyone uses. If anything it's Slack that will become what Basecamp could have been. I watched one of their interview videos where they were talking about how they thought about building an awesome new product but decided not to because they didn't want to waste time maintaining a new product. Personally I cannot sympathize with that at all.

Of course, it sounds like this is exactly the type of business these guys want, which would let them live the lifestyle they want, but if you ask me, I would choose a life where I create something that has extremely huge impact in the world--hopefully even after I die--even if it means sacrificing a lot of my "lifestyle". The Basecamp guys decided to live a life where they are mildly successful and enjoy their life, but they probably won't achieve anything world-changing if they keep doing what they do. That's fine and I'm sure they don't care, and I'm not saying everyone should live a crazy life, but I'm just saying it's as "such bullshit" to say everyone should live an unambitious life as saying everyone should give up their life to be successful.

What people are saying is nobody really cares about "leaving an odd impression on an outsider". You're acting too serious about something that's really not your business.

That totally unnecessary fade-in/fade-out effect for images is extremely annoying, especially on mobile devices. The entire website keeps flickering because of that.

Google Facebook

While I agree with some of the comments he makes, I think he's making some extreme assumptions.

I didn't get into CS because I am anti-social. I got in because it's the awesomest thing ever. Why? If I trace back, I remember thinking it's super cool to be a "hacker" (Not in the diluted sense people use the term nowadays but actually people who would pull off things most people thought were impossible). And having many friends actually helps in this case because the more friends think I'm cool the more I will put my effort into it.

If you think deeper about why this is the case, I think it was because most of my friends also thought it was the coolest thing ever. It is very cool to be able to do things that other people are unable to do. This is probably because guys tend to have more guy friends than girl friends. If I had more girl friends, I probably may have grew up valuing different things.

Which means, I think the core reason why there aren't enough girls in tech is NOT because the industry treats them badly (Not saying that's not true, but just saying that's not the most important reason), but because of the difference in social environment girls and boys grow up in.

Basically if you're a girl in elementary school who want to become a hacker, probably very few of your friends will think you're the coolest person ever. What happens then? Then you don't feel as motivated to learn to program as if you were a boy.

At this stage these girls and boys couldn't care less about if Tech companies will pay them more or not in a decade. They just want to do things that are considered cool by their peers. For boys hacking tends to be relatively higher up (probably lower than sports though), while for girls it's pretty much at the bottom.

That's why I think all this "gender equality in tech" issue is something that you can't solve by hiring more women and stuff. It won't work if it doesn't naturally happen since everything was determined during our youth.

Ctrl+P, NERDTree, ag.vim. Especially ag.vim. I don't know how I would have navigated around complex repositories without it.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah for the first couple of times I was heartbroken (It still happens), but now I've learned to embrace it. Nowadays when I have an idea, instead of asking the same dumb question to people "Would you use this?", I try to build an MVP as quickly as possible and let the product do the asking, and users answer with action instead of words.

Like Steve Jobs said, people don't know what they want. This is not a condescending comment, it's a great insight that comes from being able to understand how human mind works.

It is true that it's not easy. But one's job as a founder is to find a way to "make it functional in the first week". They even have a whole startup jargon for it--"Lean startup/MVP". You can sit and just complain how difficult it is and not do anything about it, or you can find a way to validate your hypothesis little by little. Again, I know this is not easy, but the OP should at least realize the reason he failed was not because the world fucked him up, it was because he couldn't come up with a clever way to validate his vision despite the difficulty. The better approach in this case would have been to figure out a way to release an MVP without trying to rely on an assumption that the bank deal will go through. There could have been many approaches like others pointed out in this thread.

You don't get to say what people like about something unless you let it out into the world. There are so many cases where people built and released something just to find out people love it for the reasons they never expected. This guy makes it sound like he knows why he failed but it's far from it. The biggest reason they failed was because they never released anything. The first thing you learn as soon as you release a product into real world is that people say one thing but do another--so many people say they love something but they never use it. Only way to get around is to release it in public and find the early adopters who WILL actually use it (instead of just saying they like it).

Any competent developer I would like to hire would be spending time building stuff with their skills instead of playing games with it. No disrespect to the players, but just saying if you're good at something you should use your gift to produce something useful instead of using it to consume what someone else built.

While I would say nothing is impossible, there are certain challenges that are very hard to overcome.

You probably need to look into history to learn what happens. You don't even need to look that far back. There was a company called Assembly http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/21/7258667/assembly-collabor... They shut down.

In my opinion creating these decentralized organizations is not that hard but they will never be able to win against centralized competitors who have clear incentive to win. Only time this approach can win is when there's no money involved since the re is no personal "incentive" to motivate the centralized organizations.