rick888

"It always disappoints me when I hear that point number two is such a successful tactic. I have read quite a few books from people in influential positions, and even today it's mostly not "what you know" but "who you know"

Networking has been fundamental to jobs because humans are mostly social animals. People always complain about this, but with the Internet, you can network with more people than you ever could in the past, making it easier to get your foot in the door.

I didn't have a network when I got out of college, so I made one. I now have friends and acquaintances that I can call if I'm ever out of a job. I won't get the job immediately, but it will at least help me an interview.

It's not difficult to do this, you just need to be friendly and social with people in your industry.

Being employee #1 is the worst of both worlds. You get the risk of a startup and you most likely will get very little payout if the startup is successful.

Most of the people I know that were employee #1 got nothing.

It's not about the profits. It's about property ownership, which is important in any free country.

If I bought torrentfreak.info, copied everything from the site, and slapped some ads on it, would the owners of torrentfreak.com come after me? If they believe all of the garbage being posted on their site, they won't, but in reality, the users would probably try to DoS my site and give excuse after excuse as to why this is SO much different than piracy.

This also reminds me of the GNU license. When someone takes GNU software and violates the license, it's "stealing". Violating the copyright is "freedom". I've even seen it here in HN (the Thesis theme is a good example of this).

I'm saving my money for the day when copyrights and patents are abolished. I will sit there and wait for a small company to release something good and then destroy them because I have more resources, capital, and connections in the industry to get it to market (the exact same product/idea) before they do.

I see a parallel between this and Bitcoin. Everyone thought it would be a great idea to have a decentralized monetary system without banks. We are repeating history and seeing the many reasons banks are important after all.

I predict that if we ever do attempt to abolish copyrights or patents that we will slowly learn the painful lesson as to why they are important.

"If somebody had written a dystopic novel in the 1980s illustrating how some subjects had been forbidden, and if you would speak about them on the phone, a voice would pop in and say, “You have mentioned a forbidden subject. This has been noted. Please refrain from discussing forbidden subjects"

Does this mean we should also get rid of labor unions? They prevent many companies from automating many positions for the sole purpose of inflating/guaranteeing someone a wage.

It's okay. I'm a developer and I don't care about piracy. Sites/people like are going to slowly push most software businesses to some sort of service. Internet connections and computers are getting faster every day. The end result? You will now be paying a monthly fee forever as opposed to a flat-fee..and there's no way to pirate it.

Some might say the tea party falls into the exact same category.

"They're just saying it in a way that few people approve of, but if that's the only way they can be heard, then that's what they'll do."

..and I don't agree with it. Eventually it will lead to senseless violence in addition to the senseless destruction. They are on the same level as any low-level terrorist group.

I've been logging in and out for the past 3 days and I don't see any new design change.

Update: I can only see the new changes from Firefox.

"who were fed up with things like taxation without representation tarred and feathered people, destroyed large amounts of cargo, and violently overthrew their government."

I make a pretty good living and I don't like the new jobs program and taxes that Obama is proposing. If I acted like Anonymous in response to this, would you think it was okay too?

"Actually try to understand and address the grievances?"

When the people of Anonymous decide to act like civilized adults rather than teen-angst laden teenagers, I might start to agree with you.

The group reminds me of many people I see on Reddit that can't get their way and their only response to this is anti-social and childish behavior.

I believe that Groupon gives refunds, but it still might work with other sites.

It will probably have negative effects on my sales. The new changes will showcase digital purchases/downloads and I'm selling physical goods.

I will be glad when this finally rolls out. I am a marketplace seller and whenever amazon makes any changes, there are tons of other bugs that come along with it and my sales drop dramatically until they are fixed.

The last major set of changes happened in July.

But, I would rather have it now then mid-December,.

I had to rewrite lots of my code because it became fractured when I was working. It was mostly because some parts required me to sit down for many hours to write it out and test it and I had to try to squeeze this into 2-3 hour blocks after work.

In addition to this, a full work day sucks most of the creative energy out of me. At the point when I would just be getting to my side project, all I wanted to do was take a break, which I pushed through, but my projects suffered.

"Only point I wanted to make was that quitting job is not a pre-requisite to having a successful startup, which you were implying. I used to hear that often and naively believed that to my own peril. I discourage others to do the same however amount of saving you may have unless you are at a stage where you never need to work for money."

If you don't have any money in the bank, then you shouldn't quit your job. However, I feel that it's better to quit your job after saving money than toil away for a much longer period of time trying to do both.

I suppose it also depends on your startup. If you are trying to start the next zany Twitter or Facebook app or your goal is to just get funding, then yeah, maybe a year of savings won't work...

Either the startup is generating cash or you have enough money in the bank to last you at least a year. A year and a half ago, the company I was working for went out of business and I was let go. I had 3 years of savings and I decided to go full-time with my side projects.

It's tough to juggle both because you have to switch your mind from one thing to another. Not only this, but if you are working full-time and working on your company in your free time, you have little time left over to just relax. This caused me to burn out a couple of times a year.

Another concern of mine was that the company I was working for would try to claim ownership over my projects if they ever became successful. Even though the code bases were completely different (and so were the industries), I never wanted to take that chance.

I suppose I could have just put everything out there and told my former employer what I was working on, but this would have caused lots of problems for me.

I'm in a better place now and I've accomplished more in a week than in a month when I was trying to do both. I am also in a good position because I don't have a wife or kids. I realize that not everyone can do this.

Most of the time, if your startup is a side-project (IE: you have a full-time job), it won't be successful. Not to say that this is impossible.

I've found that when you are working full-time on something, your mind is in a different place. You can also move much faster.

Have you ever run any kind of business where you are giving away something for free? People will eventually take more and more until you go out of business.

"I don't think that leeching lies in human nature"

I think many thousands of years of human history proves this statement false. Leeching is one of the core components of human nature. Businesses (or governments) that take this into account will be successful. The ones that don't will fail miserably.

"I believe I was using the definition of value gleaned from the post above which pretty strongly linked value with getting paid for your work. Call it what you will, my point is that the economy is focused on producing something that people will pay money for. But current models are based on scarcity, which may be becoming obsolete."

Scarcity is still there. You can copy adobe photoshop, but you wouldn't be able to build it from scratch in your basement. This is the scarcity: the intelligence, creativity, and man-hours it takes to build it.

You can copy it easily for free now, but the industry will eventually change. Internet is getting faster and faster and eventually (because of the people that feel they deserve software for free), we will only have software services.

I am a developer and I don't create software applications anymore..only services. It's funny because if this wasn't the case, people could buy my apps for a flat-fee. Now they need to pay me money every month to use it.

It's also because most people just want the comfort and stability of a job.

Thanks a lot. Now it's blurred out..

Another tip for automated cronjobs is if a job is going to go over the time (IE: if you have it running every hour and it might run over an hour) use a file lock to make sure they won't run at the same time.

So, the founders aren't the ones that started the company then? When I say "founder" I mean the person that started the company from day 1: taking no salary in the beginning because the company wasn't making any money, taking a chance for months or even years that the company will go out of business or possibly succeed, or even working on the company during off-hours from a regular 9-5.

If a company has enough capital to pay employee #1, then yes, the founder is making a salary. But, at this point, the risk is considerably less and employee #1 shouldn't be getting anywhere near the same payout if the company gets bought out.

The founder also most likely has their own money tied up in the company.

Employee #1 can always get unemployment if the company goes bust. The founder will have their name and business credit history tied to the company if there are major problems. Employee #1 can just go find another job as if nothing ever happened.

"If the big-F Founder has a richer set of post-failure options than founding employees – and gets more beneficial notoriety even in failure"

More risk=more reward. If you are employee #1 and you aren't getting paid industry or above industry rates, then you shouldn't be working at that startup. If you want all of the glory when it succeeds, then you need to start your own company.

Have you ever actually started a company? It's not easy. Much more difficult (and risky) than being employee #1.

"but all the team are also 'founders' in a reasonable, non-hagiographic sense of the word."

I suppose, but who is taking all of the risk? A founder takes a loss if the company loses and wins when the company is profitable. An employee doesn't take a loss (in a sense that they are paid a regular salary no matter what).

1) Business owners will just take advantage of this (this thread is littered with comments that show exactly this). You will get less pay and make them rich.

I'm really sick of companies that think I will take a 30-50% pay cut for a foosball table and Nerf-gun fights on Fridays.

2) You can gain valuable experience by starting your own company. There are plenty of blogs, articles, and sites like HN that can help you along the way.

It's not surprising to me at all. People seem to expect a large stake in a company where they are just an employee..and then get frustrated and upset when the owners take a buyout and they get canned.

I wouldn't work for a startup, unless the pay was higher than than market (since there is more risk involved). I would also treat it as a job (IE: no insane hours).

All too often, people toil away their life for someone else's idea and then get kicked to the curb (it's happened to me a couple times too). If I'm going to be wasting my free time working, it's going to be for the possibility of a big payout..which will only happen if I own the company.

I think it also keeps you focused and on track. A single founder can easily just keep changing directions (which I've done myself) when they should be focusing on one idea.

Since Facebook is already mainstream, this isn't a surprise.

Before I read what you posted, I immediately thought: "This will help my productivity during the day".

yes. Hurricanes are bad.

You are much better off starting your own company if you want to get to those levels.

This happens with every community that becomes popular. As it becomes more mainstreamed.

I suppose Reddit has fixed this issue by creating subreddits, but if you look at the main page, it's turned into cat pictures, memes, and stupid jokes. I don't think this was the case when the site started.