saturdayplace

I thought Adrian Holovaty's take on Chicago's tech scene was really interesting: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago-bootstrapping/

As far as I can tell, this tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555803747792609280 is the only thing he's said about it at the moment.

Looks like he's also planning on having an annual pod-racing competition: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555804403504918528

That's addressed in the essay:

> It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently likely to get an offer at an acceptable price. In practice that means startups should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well or really badly

If you're sure you want to sell, and are convinced you'll get the price you want, talk to them. Actually, that second qualifier seems REALLY useful here. I imagine that its easy for founders to get stars in their eyes about a potential acquisition. Forcing yourself to think rationally about what price you might realistically be offered might help you evaluate wether a meeting would be worth the time or just a distraction you can't afford.

Must be something in the water. I'm working on something similar I hope to release early this year that should work cross platform. My plan was to build it as a self-hosted web app, so all the editing happens in the browser, but trigger commands that eventually generate the static site, and help with deploying. See you in show HN in a few...

Hollywood has already validated its product, and found product-market fit. It's now just stamping out products it's pretty sure people will buy. Anyone claiming Hollywood doesn't make things people want to buy would, given the choice, swap bank accounts with any of a very large number of Hollywood executives. The coffers of which are by definition filled with customers' dollars. You may not like most of what's on offer, but then, like is so often mentioned around here, you are not the target customer.

The last offer I successfully negotiated went like this:

Recruiter: What kind of number are you looking for?

Me: I'm looking for a minumum of $num. (A 25% raise from current gig)

Recruiter: We can totally do $num.

<a week or so passes while they put the offer together>

Recruiter: We're offering you $num.

Me: Could you do $num + ($num * 7%)?

Recruiter: I'll see what I can do.

<a week or so passes while he gets approval>

Recruiter: We're offering you $num + ($num * 7%).

Me: Sounds good.

Now, a professional negotiator probably wouldn't have coughed up a number first, but my gig at the time was paid fairly and I really liked the company. So I tossed out a number that was big enough to actually get me to jump ship. Was no skin off my back if they couldn't reach it. But they could. And I had a pretty good feeling from the hiring manager that they wanted me there, and that they'd advocate for me with HR, which I'm pretty sure is what happened.

While I'm not certain, I think most people go with option 3, and I'd put money down that's what Patrick's planning on.

> The only time in recent memory I used it myself was when a Redditor asked for anti-Bitcoin bingo cards, a request which I am unquestionably the best qualified person in the world to answer.)

Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you're interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they're one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.

SEO. It's a an exact match for the search term he was gunning for, and the .com wasn't available but the .org was. Exact-match domains get hit with the +15 wand of visibility in search results, and the whole .com vs .org distinction isn't as black/white as it used to be.

I have anecdotal experience that might confirm the economic plausibility of a LA-LV line. Driving south on I-15 from LV on a Sunday will likely drive you absolutely up. the. wall.

Patrick, if you haven't yet gotten any emails about this, the Amazon link to "Predictable Revenue" is to the .co.jp domain.

Two things:

1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?

2) I believe that Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.

Before I was a working programmer, I worked in graphic designer and 3D modeler and sometime animator. In 2008 I was working for an architecture firm building pre-visualizations for the projects they were either currently building or ones they were bidding on. I'd dabbled as a web developer as a hobby for a couple years.

Then the bottom dropped out of the economy and I was laid off. I took it as a chance to turn this whole web hobby thing into a full-time gig. After two months I landed a job as a web developer at a very small printing company. They needed someone who could blend design and web dev into one role, and it seemed I fit the bill. They had another dev and apart from that had no idea how to build a website. I was grateful I wasn't going to have to dig into my savings any more. Three days in I already started dreading going to work in the morning. I didn't gel with my manager, we constantly misunderstood each other. I never understood what he was looking for design-wise, so I kept bugging him for clarifications. I got the impression he thought I was a diva. And the dude was a printing industry vet, who just didn't understand the web at all. It wasn't a good fit.

I was rescued that Friday by an offer from a different company I'd interviewed with. So after a week, I walked into the owner's office, told him I had a better offer[0], and that I was leaving now. I walked right out the door. No two-weeks notice.

That job is notably absent from my resume. Why would I put it there? The whole point of a resume is to sell yourself to potential employers. If you don't want it to come up in future job interviews, don't put it on there, and it won't.

No one else is going to look out for your career[1]. I almost look at my personal career development as my actual "job" and positions at companies as steps along the way. Take charge of it. You get to be responsible for your own path.

[0] It really was a better offer. Something like a 40% pay raise, WAY better benefits, a boss who understood what I did and could communicate what he wanted, and a very nurturing company culture.

[1] Well, someone else might. Some companies are better at this than others. But no one's going to advocate for you the way you would. So you might as well get used to doing that work for yourself.

I like vertical Mice. I've had two and prefer the Evoluent over the Anker. Seemed to help quite a bit when I started "noticing" my mousing wrist.

I was going to bookmark the linked comment, and found that I had in fact already done so. It is a very useful, actionable piece of advice. Thanks for writing it.

> While he paid me a premium, he received a much better prodcut

n.b. That's how good business owners will look at this transaction: in terms of ROI. Sure this client paid a lot of money, but it was an investment in his company. It paid off. When you start framing offers like this, you don't have to feel bad about the price you'd like to charge because both parties come out further ahead.

Edit: Of interest to HN, I had a conversation with a business-owner friend of mine earlier this week. In trying to come up with a business ideas, I'd asked her if there was any software she hated using. This sparked an interesting conversation. When we got to the discussion about pricing, I asked:

"How much would you pay for something like this? $500 a year?" Her response was, and I quote: "I would do it on a monthly basis. Anything between 20-49/month is easy to sell. People <I think she means business owners here> don't even notice it."

tl;dr When you save a company money or time, they will hand you money accordingly.

I don't think either of the posts you've replied to in this thread state that all employees at all companies require physical proximity to collaborate effectively. Just that Matasano (by virtue of its leadership) prefers proximity.

It's entirely reasonable that some people prefer proximity over remote arrangements. People who don't aren't likely to enjoy working at Matasano. That doesn't negate the existence of other perfectly good options for them, as tptacek pointed out.

This is the solution. Your manager understood his job, and its impact on yours. Everyone should be so lucky. So far, I have been! At my first job, my boss told me right off not to let everyone who comes by add work to my pile. It's hard to do at first. After all, your first reaction is to be helpful. But after a while you see the benefit of being able to to deflect things to your manager and have him prioritize the workload.

I'm not sure a name has that much of an impact on a business's success. I posted this comment in another thread recently: The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

In this thread: just talking or writing _about_ encryption can be difficult. To say nothing of correctly implementing it in a project.

Seconded. Please, Maciej!

An interesting thought I ran across once, is that there is no such thing as "no design":

> Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. -- Douglas Martin

Meh. The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

I think pg has written about this a couple times. Checking...

Yep. In order from oldest to most recent:

http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html

http://paulgraham.com/revolution.html

http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html

I just started a new job and have hopped into the first codebase I'll need to work with that I didn't write from scratch myself. I've just been pining for a way to browse through this code as easily as documents in a web browser. Maybe that's the wrong paradigm, but man, there's got to be a better way to read code that lends itself to understanding what's going on. Even though my IDE can "find usages" and I can set breakpoints and step through things, the breakpoints get hit so fast that it's hard to internalize things before hitting "play" again. But stopping for too long breaks the real-time nature of the system. Which I guess is too many words which essentially mean, "I've recently felt this pain, and I agree."

I just wanted to thank you for writing about the doldrums, and about continuing slowly through them anyway. THAT piece of advice seems so universally applicable, and I don't personally don't run across it so much in places like HN. I loved that you didn't just stop, just maybe slowed down, and that the little steps just kept adding up anyways.

p.s. I remember originally hearing about ChurnBuster on Our Own Little Accelerator. Why'd that show die?

Which is really just a more specific form of "Does my landing page actually tell newcomers what's actually going on here?"

The point of the article isn't where to lay blame for the security breach. It's to point out the hypocrisy of people who scream "Invasion of privacy" in every online conversation about the NSA, but somehow still feel justified in viewing or looking for these celebrity photos.

I'm not sure if it's a good Hungarian text, but the one I got the most out of was called "Learn Hungarian"[1]. It's out of print but you may be able to find a used copy on Amazon. To be fair, by the time I got my hands on a copy I already had a decent grasp on the grammar, an OK vocabular, and had been living in Budapest for a few months.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Hungarian-Zolt%C3%A1n-B%C3%A1nhi...

I learned Hungarian as a Mormon missionary, and by far this agglutination (I'd never seen that term before) is my favorite part of the language. It's like being given a set of word legos and told "go nuts!" And it always seemed really regular to me; I was never as frustrated learning Hungarian as I was with German in high school.

We taught English classes there, which helped me realize just how capricious the language can seem to an ESL student.