ryanlchan

>I'm never starting another business where everything isn't self serve, automated and done at the beginning.

Isn't this the exact point which the article argues against? Perhaps the problem was really that you couldn't work out a good methodology to automate these tasks with your partner, a problem that would've occurred even if you'd tried to automate it at the beginning.

I think the real takeaway here is just the same "fail fast, fail early" we see everywhere, but taken to the next level. Get Real urges you to ship your product as early as possible, but this is saying that you don't even need the product to get started.

I believe that Google uses a similar development methodology with Chrome to separate the channels out. Everyone works on the Chromium trunk, and features are enabled/disabled depending on which channel they are appropriate for. Single trunk development makes a lot of sense when you make a product which doesn't rely on distinct version releases.

This, combined with a polite [EOM] tag, makes subject-messages much more rapid than writing a full email. I have much more rage at people who type e-mails with nonsensical subject lines that are just as long than their body content.

Would you rather have someone email you with:

1) Subj: Can you print an extra copy of the Excel for 10AM? Thanks! [EOM]

2) Subj: Quick request for you before our meeting today Body: Can you print an extra copy of the Excel for 10AM?

Personally, I much prefer the first.

Is this the beginning of companies using web 2.0 tech to solve 'big problems'? Watson might be the first step towards using the social graph and big data for things other than selling more widgets.

I'm keen to see how medical professionals start using this tool though. Professional pride and the immense amount of inertia present in medicine could hamper adoption. Worse yet, I can only imagine the level of legal liabilities using a system like this could incur. I'd love to see this adopted and think it could radically reduce costs and increase productivity in the medical field, but I'm going to resign to simple cautious optimism.

Buy a stiff spring mattress then put a thick memory foam topper on it. You won't notice the difference between it and the $3k+ Tempurpedic mattresses and you'll spend a lot less.

Interviewing works. But not for every situation.

Do we really believe that the big consulting companies or banks don't know how to filter for the better candidates given how much their business depends purely on having the smartest people?

Consultancies like interviewing because they are looking for clay candidates. Workloads are inconsistent and variable; the skills required are generally learned on the job in real-time, so optimum candidates are those who are adaptable and can be molded into many shapes. Optimum employees can look smart while work long hours in small teams, so the hiring criteria are simple: 1) a good GPA 2) whether your interviewer likes you or not. These are factors you can get from an interview (or five).

However a lot of companies are looking for diamond candidates. Diamond candidates are functional hires; those who are very good at what they do, Erlang Ninjas or Ruby Rockstars. These companies are trying to find a specific skill set or a 'brilliant mind' which will complete/compliment their current working profile. Interviewing diamond candidates is useless.

I'd guess that the vast majority of firings are not due to incompetence. They are due to disconnects; cultural, vision, personality, whatever. A diamond candidate is tough to interview for these disconnects. By virtue of their technical ability, their fit is usually downplayed or compromised in an attempt to nab 'the best programming team' or the 'most visionary CEO'. This is why so many companies think that interviewing sucks. They're just looking for the wrong things.

tl;dr Interviews work for hiring people, not functions.

I think Microsoft has a master plan.

Skype and VoIP in general have all kinds of potential synergies with current MSFT products, difficult to materialize as they may be. Remember that they just put out an incredibly powerful 3D camera called the Kinect. With Skype on Xbox, we could see the beginnings of accessible 3D teleconferencing. Even if it's just Skype, its inclusion further cements Xbox's place in a living room by replacing another utility.

Some analysts are forecasting for the telepresence market to grow at ~30% annually through to 2015, with a strong driver being enterprise clients. Why not bundle Skype into Office? Microsoft Communicator already does video chat, but only with other Exchange users. Expanding the install base by 124M users might be the kick in the pants teleconference needs.

Whether or not these scenarios are achievable by MSFT is up for debate.

I honestly expected to pay for this until I hit 'Get the code' and saw a github page. Simply making the website aesthetically pleasing increased my willingness to download and pay by an order of magnitude.

Even now I'm looking for a donate button.

NASA's budget was cut by $241M in 2011.

Makes you wonder sometimes.

tl;dr: It lists conference speakers and their decks, organized around Twitter handles.

Imposing timing on meetings is irrelevant at best and destructive at worst.

The real reason these Agile, Googlesque meeting techniques dictate a time is to force attendees to prioritize. You can't dick around in a 15 minute meeting. However, by artificially imposing a time limit you also curb productive discussion. Fact of the matter is, some decisions take longer than 15 minutes to come to.

Instead of focusing on the time a meeting takes, focus on what needs to get done and who needs to do it. Create concrete objectives, then give one person that responsibility: "John will assign work streams to all team members" vs "Do work planning". No ambiguity - success on an objective is binary.

I'd take that even a step further: Google's been trying to unify Android across its mobile platforms, but why stop there? Why not bring this to desktop? And what better way to unite the desktop and mobile than through the browser and the cloud?

The latest versions of Chrome Canary have been increasingly focused on bringing the app experience to desktop computing. It already has dedicated applications for Google maps, Wikipedia, etc.

I'd credit a lot of Apple's mobile success to their ability to create a consistent experience across the product line. If Google can unite Chrome and Android together into a coherent experience across all product lines, they're going to have something very special on their hands.

I'm going to echo the 'real lawyer' advice. It's really not that expensive - your first consultation is likely free, giving you the ability to shop around to find a firm that you trust. With the right lawyer and a boilerplace incorporation, you should be able to get incorporated with only $2-3K.

Though there's nothing terribly complicated about forming an S-Corp or a LLC (the two entities you'd be likely to form), there are a lot of little niggles that, should you get wrong, can go very wrong. Allow me to remind you of this disaster that happened on HN just a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399139

tl;dr Don't hack your legal stuff. Get a real lawyer.

Absolutely yes. Much like doing a startup in the valley brings a hoard of intangible benefits, so does attending a great university. Being surrounded by peers who are dedicated to learning and having a supportive environment which encourages you to explore create an experience unlike any other. It may not be as financially rewarding as it once was, but a university degree is indubitably still 'worth the cost'.

On that note, I'm tired of having links that only look at schooling from an economic viewpoint. It's the tea party of educational criticism: an empty, intentionally deceptive stance that somehow manages to be controversial enough to come up regularly. You'd think that the startup community would know and accept that the best ideas don't come from hard financial reasoning (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc). If you can believe it for a company, why not for an education?

This is incorrect. The 5% fee is actually charged in addition to Amazon's fees. (see https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq#WhatFeesDoesKickChar). This doesn't make much of a difference in profitability (20k vs 50k still isn't a whole lot), but it's something. Enough, at least, to keep bootstrapping.

And that's the main point of it - not to make a whole bunch of money, but to offer a really great service. As evidence, the Kickstarter guys have been going for a few years now, and it wasn't until very recently that they started taking any money out. They're really passionate about helping artists, filmmakers, and creatives find the funding that they need.

Paywall bypass: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/0...

I've always wondered why gamification wasn't integrated into things beyond web apps. Gamification is a concept, a lens through which we can enact persuasive design - there's nothing in there that says its web specific. Lots of Web 2.0 concepts came from 'real world' product design; I don't see why the relationship can't go both ways.

Simple, cleanly designed, and cuts through all kinds of annoying paywalls. And it works from anything with a browser; not just iDevices. Couldn't get any better.

This is a great strategy, well argued, well reasoned, but it's, to quote the article, 'so 2007'. Single function is great if you're trying to appeal to business people who have no other need than email, but that's becoming increasingly rare.

I would happily trade all the crappy extra features on my Bold 9700 for bulletproof durability, push email faster than outlook, and a glitch-free interface (all of which it fails on at the moment). But the minute our IT department starts supporting iPhone I'll be dropping my Bold.

Consumer smartphones (iPhone/Android) have become a 'good enough' enterprise phones. No they don't email as quickly and don't sync quite perfectly, but neither does RIM. And even if RIM does get that extra 10% of convenience from email, it still won't be worth losing every other app I use. In addition to email I want maps, calendar, dictionary, news, books, music, and games. What do you think is more likely: will iPhone get better at email, or will RIM get better at... everything else?

Our new class of analysts are all dual-wielding iPhones and BB's, and everyone is waiting for IT to start supporting iPhone so we can finally drop RIM. Will email be as fluid, easy, or quick? Probably not. But it'll be good enough, and I can stop carrying this single-function brick around.

I agree, but for entirely different reasons. Android will win for one reason alone: China.

There are 900 million people with cell phones in China. It is currently and will continue to be the biggest cell phone market on the planet. However, the market's fragmented to little bits; shanzai phone here, nokia there, motorola sprinkled in between. But there are two driving forces common to all of the successful phones in China.

1) Price 2) Adaptation to local needs

Shanzai (unbranded local phones) came out and took massive market share by having an almost immediate feedback loop with which to respond to customer demand. Want two sim chips? You got it. Want a phone so loud it turns into a boom box? We can do that. Can you imagine Steve Jobs making these concessions?

MediaTek is cranking out Android capable SoC that bring the price of a smartphone down to $150 - unsubsidized. This is a price level that allows Android to go Shanzai - a very scary proposition for any large handset player. What now separates these 'low end' phones from the high end? They're not perfectly designed by Jonathan Ive, they're not super intuitive, they're not 4g, but they're good enough for China. Remember how Flip came out and just decimated traditional video recorders? It was good enough. MediaTek's $150 android phones are good enough.

If you really want to put the nail in the coffin, realize that if they're good enough for China, they're probably good enough for Africa, for South America, and beyond. The iPhone might retain the high end crown, but Android will undoubtedly become the dominant global smartphone platform.

Don't forget about your future customers (You do plan on having customers, right?). They are often the people who want you to succeed most while demanding nothing but product in return.

Wow, go to bed for a bit and suddenly HN has a riot.

I wrote this post. It is, hopefully, clearly satire. Furthermore ironic due to the fact that I have been, in fact, a technical cofounder. I'm just tired of the overwhelming sentiment on HN that programmers are a business' gift from god, and that all you need to do as a nontechnical cofounder is go read a book. If it was that easy we'd have facebook for cats six times over.

Look, there are plenty of good business people out there who don't have the time to create a 14,000 follower blog before they have a product, much like most hackers don't have the time to create full, working products before they have any customers. It's absurd to hold one half of the company to such stringent standards while allowing the other, as a comment so clearly put, to 'code it out of thin air'.

I'm tired of the 'Business people should learn how to code' mentality. It's not about technical vs nontechnical. It's about learning to have, and use, both.

I'm sick and tired of people putting arbitrary dollar valuations on abstract things. College is not a financial investment. You can not only look at your debt and your income to make this decision. It might make for a good, sensational news article, but it's almost immoral how backwards this viewpoint is.

The real value in college, like just about any other pursuit, is network building. Like several commenters have said, if all you wanted out of school was to learn something, you could go to the library. The fees for college are for the intangible aspects, and are worth far more than a direct dollars-to-dollars comparison will show.

Think of college as an IDE for personal development. It sets up a ready-made environment for you to explore new relationships, indulge in a variety of pursuits, and learn about the world. There are thousands of other people using the same IDE, creating a lively place for discussion of issues you'd never otherwise think of. People introduce you to new features or mechanics which you never considered before; you naturally begin to collaborate and contribute to large scale projects. You might even lead a few. Could you get all of these experience by piecing different activities together? Of course. Would it be nearly as productive, successful, and transformational? Of course not.

Like an IDE though, sometimes college can get a little bulky; you're naturally going to be paying for some features you don't want or use. But most of us keep paying anyway, because there's a few killer features which make it all worthwhile, ones that you wouldn't dare put a pricetag on. Attending university altered the entire trajectory of my life, starting from how I saw myself to what I want to accomplish. It redefined what I thought was possible for human endurance and achievement. It restored my faith in the ability of small groups to enact large positive change. It cost a pretty penny, but it has provided an unquantifiably large return on investment.

This, but in a more subtle way. People seem obsessed with the economics of having a university degree: how much money you make, the cost of it all. But we're putting an economic microscope on something which is inherently hard to value in dollars.

How much are your friendships worth? Your outlook on life? Your confidence and optimism in human nature? Your expectations of what is achievable?

These are all things that college will mold and shape, yet are impossible to value from raw dollars. Yeah, so maybe if you were just looking at pay, getting a Harvard degree isn't the best investment. But having a few years to indulge in the best faculty, stunning facilities, and intimidatingly intelligent peers changes things for a person at a very core level. Maybe it's worth the debt.

Degrees are not commodities, even in some instances they are treated as such. Your education is not a financial investment, even if some people people will treat it as such. If you're worried about the payback on schooling, you're doing it wrong. And that comes from a guy with a significant amount of it.

Is there a problem here in listening to the wrong people? That author admits that this demographic is quite different from what might emerge organically; might their answers be equally as different? I'm not downplaying the inventiveness of this method for getting feedback, but I'm worried that it's a little misguided to use this for development purposes.

I think we're all interpreting 'just start' differently. Cal might not have done this intentionally, but it's not really fair to compare 'just start' for skills vs. for start-ups.

Cal's advice, as he says in the article, is for a very specific audience. His whole spiel is to get so fanatically good at one specific, tightly niched skill or knowledge set that it starts returning exponential returns relative to how much time you put in.

This is pretty antithetical to the 'just start -> fail early, fail fast' mindset of startups. And that makes sense: If you're trying to develop a skill (say, being an awesome ruby programmer), then you're better off clearing a week and deepdiving into ruby; the criteria and the bounds on this process are clearly defined. However, if what you're trying to found a start-up from an idea, your scope is totally unknown; there's no way that you can clear off your week and decide to become really good at 'creating the next twitter', because no one knows what that skillset from the outset. The idea of 'just get started' in startups is to help you define that scope of what it is necessary, then give you a chance to see if it's reasonable to develop and execute on it (FEFF).

Well honestly it's about backing up the $300/hr rate. the job of the consultant is to come in and quickly convince the client that they not only know what they are talking about but are experts at what they are talking about. In reality you've only read the wikipedia article and a few trade publications for background, but somehow you have to convince the client that you do, in fact, know your shit.

The flash and pedigree refers to one of the ways you can convince people of your expert knowledge. People tend to put more faith into a recommendation that comes out of a Harvard grad than others, even if the Harvard grad talks completely out of their ass (pedigree). Furthermore, if the client sees that other people, just like themselves, have been paying this Harvard grad to talk out of his ass, they figure he must be a good person to have (prestige).

So in essence, the high rate of consulting comes down to the ability to say 'but we have lots of Harvard/Princeton/Yale minds working on this!' and 'No one ever got fired for using IBM'.

And that's just the way the firms like it.

tl;dr The best chauffeur doesn't have to be the best driver, and consulting firms are not raw meritocracies.

I work at a McBain Group level consulting firm as one of the analysis-slaves. My colleagues hail from many different universities, but only around half are Ivy League, though all are first tier. There are 15 of us, whittled down from a field of around 3,000. In other words, for each position, they considered about 200 applications.

We might not be the best analyst, the best client negotiator, or the best excel wrangler, but in this industry those aren't the only things that are valued - the firm's profits aren't singularly tied to the strength of their recommendations. There's a certain amount of flash and pedigree that they need to justify billing out a 24 year old at $300 an hour. This isn't unique to consulting, but seems to get paraded around due to the amounts of money the position commands and the apparent inequity of taking the 'rich' and making them richer.

Think of your girlfriend/wife's hairdresser. Are they worth the $50-150 she pays them to cut their hair? Is that haircut really worth the %300 premium over supercuts or the corner store?

Based on the raw haircut of course not. But this stylist does Michelle Obama's hair, he has great gossiping skills, and the salon looks great. So she does it anyway.

There are tons of industries just like this. Why are there no ugly people in Hollywood? Why do Apple products command a premium? It's very similar to any other luxury good; you pay a lot for each incremental improvement.

I don't disagree with you; in fact, it's the hiring manager's misunderstanding as much as the prospective student's.

The Bachelors is required simply because it's an easy screening mechanism; the colleges have already whittled the list down to a more manageable size for the manager to go through. It used to mean that a person had an interest in learning beyond what was required, which was nice for jobs. Now it's just that their parents/friends/teachers have told them to go.

Really I'm saying simply that people are expecting and demanding the wrong things out of a liberal arts (traditional definition) degree. Most of the time what they'd really want is a vocational degree, or at least something more similar to what the English do with law school, where you enter directly out of high school.

This attitude was precisely what turned me away from Google. I interviewed for what they call the Rotational Assistant Manager Program (RAMP), which in reality is rotational and management related only in that you go through several different marketing positions.

I'm reasonably well versed in technology; I know my way around a rails or python app, have a good understanding of massively parallel computing, and can explain how PageRank works. Yet as a nonengineer at Google, you get zero input on new products. Development is almost entirely handled by engineers, with very little input from the outside.

Coming from a highly integrated startup perspective, I thought it was crazy. After years of indoctrination in A/B testing and user feedback loops and agile development, a tight integration between development and marketing/customer facing teams is almost an expectation.

But when I raised the idea of bringing in marketing to the start of development, the Googlers gave me funny looks. Engineers run the show, then hand it off to the marketers to sell; there's no real mingling between the two. At the onsite weekend, where we interviewed side by side, the engineers and the marketers weren't even allowed to sit at the same table for meals. Clinging to its technical heritage is hamstringing Google today.