Hacker News Reader

gwcon Everything Breaks, All the Time.

His point makes a lot more sense in the context it was originally intended. He's not making a point about programming or debugging in general; he's specifically discussing tech support as a one-man indie game shop. In particular, it's all about the cost-benefit tradeoff. In his words (taken from the first post in the series - http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/06/seven-tips-for-giving...):

But at the same time, as a small developer, you have very little time to spare for support. Time spent getting the game working for one person is time not spent making a new game for everyone. You will need to develop a sense of when the time lost helping a person is not worth it, either because you won't be able to solve their problem or because they will not able to implement the fix you provide.

...

Remember: It's only worth the time to do tech support if you have the chance to, in a reasonable amount of time, fix a problem and make a loyal customer. If you realize that, at the end of the road, you aren't going to end with a happy person and a working product, end the conversation as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

In that context, I think his approach is very rational. If you pushed him, he'd probably agree that more often than not the issue is in his code (even if it's just a question of inadequate error handling). However, if the problem is only seen by a single user and will be a significant investment to try and fix, then it's simply not worth the time when he could be working on a new game, a port, or even a different problem that has been seen by multiple users.

gwcon My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup

A programmer working defense state-side does not make nearly those figures.

80 to 100 is much closer to what a software engineer with several years of experience makes working for a defense contractor than 250, though of course actual years of experience and how well one has played the corporate ladder game can make a big impact.

Past a certain point it is relatively difficult to advance salary-wise without taking on management roles and giving up the hands-dirty side of programming / engineering. Once you're there it's an apples-to-oranges comparison for the kind of startups that are typical for HN-types ~ certainly no early stage startup is going to hire a 10-year manager to be employee #1 when what they really need is a hotshot programmer.

gwcon Disabling Google Buzz: How to purge your profile

I should not need to understand the subtle privacy interplay of several different and seemingly unrelated Google products just because I use one of them (Gmail).

I entirely agree with this, although I'll point out that IIRC Google Chat did the same thing in terms of modifying gmail but no-one seemed to really object to that. Buzz seems to be different because of the privacy issues, i.e. Google didn't communicate well what would happen (specifically a public profile that included your follower/followee lists) if you clicked "yes". That there's a new link on the left-hand menu can't really be the main issue, is it?

As far as FUD, I'm specifically referring to comments like this:

There is absolutely no way to opt out of Buzz.

http://twitter.com/etherial/status/9023625277

It IS possible to opt out of Buzz, ~ its just that its counter-intuitive and once you've hit the "Yes" button, somewhat difficult to undo.

gwcon Disabling Google Buzz: How to purge your profile

Don't let the FUD fool you. It's "active" in that you can see other people's buzz posts and you get a buzz item on the left menu, but until you create a public profile none of your information (such as follower/followee lists) has been made public.

For you (and others like you and I who picked 'no'), clicking 'turn off buzz' does seem to actually turn off the service for all intents and purposes. No info is made public. Sure, some people 'auto-follow' me, but only those who already had your email address. No real harm done.

gwcon Are Silicon Valley Startups More Likely To Be Acquired?

That's just silly. A confidence interval by definition is a range; the commenter is arbitrarily choosing to post only the low end of that range. If the high end were posted instead, Washington's lead would look that much more impressive.

That's not to say the math is useless; a better statement (which could have been supported by the data) would have been "The difference between CA and WA is less than the measurement margin of error given WA's small sample size".

gwcon The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.

I don't mind smart people with limited relevant experience having opinions or even defending them vigorously. However three passages in particular struck me:

Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate.

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues.

How is he drawing his conclusions? Does he really have a deep enough understanding of the underlying model when he 'runs the numbers'?

From there, he can make it quickly to the press office to help devise explanations for why taxpayers are spending more than $50 billion on what polls show is a very unpopular bailout of the auto industry.

I'm sure the NYT is not giving us the whole story, but there's a piece of me that worries that what makes this guy successful is not intelligence (though he certainly may be smart) but charisma. Just because you can sling a good presentation / memorandum and speak eloquently about it does not mean you should be setting critical government policy about tremendously complex problems.

gwcon Balsamiq hires 2nd empoyee

That may be true for 'most' founders (although I suspect it is far from universal), but I think it is fairly evident that Peldi has chosen the latter path. See: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=587

Peldi doesn't seem to be viewing Balsamiq as a stepping stone to getting rich and working on his next project in pursuit of some unknown end state; for him, Balsamiq IS the end state (or he hopes it will be).

If you really truly enjoy what you're doing - and it is clear he is - is there really any point to suffering some optional pain in exchange for a greater payout at the end?

(Standard caveat - Peldi, if you're reading this and I am way off base, please feel free to correct!)

gwcon Poll: What kind of cell phone do you have?

Toyota uses Prius as the plural of Prius, though apparently whatever you want to use is fine with them:

http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_...

gwcon "I never said she stole my money" has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word

I had an English teacher in high school who was highly attentive to this sort of construct. He would return many a paper with "VPR" marks sprinkled throughout for 'vague pronoun reference' and points deducted accordingly. Certainly a common error.

gwcon Google Chrome harder to hack than other browsers

Yes, that is the jist of the last sentence. However that was clearly not the message the bulk of the post was intending to express:

He [Charlie Miller] did mention, in his interview with Ryan Naraine, that Chrome was pretty much in another league. Their 'sandbox' makes it extremely difficult to exploit

gwcon Starting this summer, YC will be in California year-round

i.e. the difference between becoming Ramen profitable and needing to push for funding?

gwcon Advice to Incoming Freshmen in Computer Science

Especially when advocating the importance of non-technical courses.

gwcon Legal Suicide for Web start-ups: A beginner's guide

Isn't limiting this liability this one of the primary reasons for incorporating?

gwcon Tipjoy (YC W08) now allows payments via Twitter

Seems a little involved just to get in on a poker game. :)

gwcon Tipjoy (YC W08) now allows payments via Twitter

What if you're not, but would like to be?

gwcon Google Was Three Hours Away From Being Charged As A Monopolist

IANAL, but it is my understanding that at issue here is the deal would (could) have created / extended a monopoly. Antitrust in the US does not disallow monopolies, per se, as you note; however, it does disallow creation or furthering of a monopoly via contracts, M&A, conspiracies, collusion, etc.

From US Code Title 15, Chapter 1, § 1: Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_0...

The other sections of that chapter discuss some specifics (such as §18, which specifically covers M&A) and there is a wealth of case law backing it up and clarifying, as well.

gwcon How Hard Could it Be? (Joel on Leadership)

I'm not sure Joel wrote about this to brag; at the very least, he wrote about this because it made for an interesting / relevant entry for his monthly Inc.com article.

I agree that it might come off a bit as preening, but to be fair Joel's column hasn't stayed away from mistakes and bad decisions he's made as well. As such I take the tone as being closer to "this is what I've done and why I've done it" than "look at this awesome thing I did".

gwcon Tending Your Software Garden

I find that the the weeding your garden example has a more general analogue outside of content: managing code debt. The more mature a code base and the more hands that touch it, the more often little shortcuts, design decisions that lead to later refactoring, incomplete or incorrect documentation, etc. will show up; these are like "weeds" in your "software garden".

As with letting weeds in the content choke out the actual signal, not taking the time to do code weeding will ultimately lead to buggy, unmaintainable code. Of course another approach is to try and avoid code weeds in the first place (e.g. TDD), but at some level code weeds / debt is inevitable over time for any sufficiently mature code base.

gwcon Dumb people don't know they are dumb. Is there a simple explanation for this?

"above average" in this context usually means median, not mean - i.e. "in the top 50%"

gwcon Web 2.0 Startups Beating The Odds in Down Economy

7 of the 9 are YC companies - pretty impressive.

Does YC have some particular connection to the Web 2.0 Summit or is this simply a reflection of YC's leadership in the "companies that have developed nifty Web 2.0 sites (with only a little cash up front)"-funding business?

gwcon The diversity trumps ability theorem

There are other types of relevant diversity, however. The authors speak directly to "functional" diversity, which they describe as "differences in how people represent problems and how they go about solving them".

In the context of wanting to write the next Digg, I would propose that a better application of their conclusions would be, e.g., to favor hiring programmers from different schools over hiring programmers who went to the same school and studied under the same professors. In this way you might get some diversity in terms of how your programmers approach solving problems versus having a group of programmers who each approach a given problem in the same way and presumably reach the same conclusions / solutions.

gwcon The diversity trumps ability theorem

If you actually read the paper, I think you will find that the authors do not, in fact, make the proposal that you are assuming.

"Should the organization hire (i) the person with the highest score, (ii) 20 people with the next 20 highest scores, or (iii) 20 people randomly selected from the applicant pool? ... In this paper, we provide conditions under which iii is better than ii."

Further, the paper is not purely theoretical, as you suppose: they then go on to provide such conditions and describe the 'computational experiment' using AI agents that they used to explore and verify their hypothesis - keeping in mind that fundamentally, their hypothesis is simply that there exists conditions under which functional diversity trumps maximized individual ability.

It's worth noting that they make a key distinction between functional diversity and identity diversity. While they do correlate the two in their abstract - with sources - their conclusion does not speak to the latter at all, instead focusing on the former and "diversity in perspective and heuristic space".

You may certainly disagree with their conclusions, but it is unfair to construct their argument as a straw man consisting solely of theoretical ideas and stupid assumptions.

gwcon Pitching VCs? Better know about IBM's latest OS/2

This phenomenon is by no means unique to entrepreneurial pitches. I see this all the time in big business: managers BSing customers about stuff they don't know, managers BSing higher managers about stuff they don't know, engineers BSing managers ... you get the idea.

Is it just fear of seeming weak or ignorant? What is it about our culture that makes us so resistant to admitting that we don't know something?

I'm reminded of the "Have you tried Javascript?" story: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Straight_Shooter_for_Upper_M...

gwcon Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead.

I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions.

If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself.

As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.

gwcon Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?

HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.

gwcon Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem.

I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?

gwcon How Many Silicon Valley Startup Executives Are Hopped Up On Provigil?

At the risk of misinterpreting edw myself, I think what he is getting at is not at all that he finds people who use (or as the case may be) Provigil or caffeine or what have you offensive.

Rather, it is that he finds it offensive that posts that seem to glorify or encourage such behavior (the OP certainly hints at that with the closing bit) end up so high on the main page and, in his mind, take away from more valuable discourse.

Personally I agree that this particular post is more news than not, though the recent post about the Liberal Arts PhD who was advocating marijuana use was borderline at best.

gwcon Pothead Ph.D. - This is most definitely not a cautionary tale

LPTS, do you have any sources that provide actual data to back up your claim?

I'm not trying to be snarky ~ I am legitimately interested in seeing data; too much of this debate is founded in anecdote, editorial, and propaganda on both sides.

gwcon The Great IPv6 Experiment: Free Adult Content

From the article: "One of our clients runs a network of very large adult oriented sites, who has agreed to "donate" several of their most popular videos from one of their sites for this experiment."

Assuming you believe that statement it seems they're on the up-and-up as far as copyright goes.