yellow_and_gray

> he being the one with the idea and money

Ideas are worth $0. Nevermind you'll switch the idea to something else.

And the type of person who wants to a get patent first instead of getting users is precisely the kind of person you shouldn't be starting a company with. A patent won't get you customers. How many companies can you friend name that lost to another company because of a patent rather than a thousand other reasons?

Both your fears are valid. Trust your gut. My suggestion: don't start a company with this friend.

Is there a way to contact you? If you are willing to be a guinea pig I have something for you to try.

From the three main things people need (competence, relatedness, autonomy) you seem to be missing autonomy.

It's not only about knowing how to build (the lots of tiny specific skills this article mentions). It's also about choosing what to build.

If you study what novelists say, they are extremely uncomfortable when they start new work. It's the same for 10x programmers. There is an initial torment and courage involved in that choice that deters the average programmer. That there will be skills one doesn't have for the new creation is a given.

I'm disappointed in Stripe on this one. There should be better rates for micropayments.

Establishing a monopoly is more valuable than monetizing, which is what Snapchat has. You can monetize later, but you can't snatch all the users later.

That link is full of wisdom, thank you for posting it! I never met anyone who wrote their own wiki and used it for so long.

I was surprised the biggest thing for you was speed and full-text search, and also by this comment: "I think people forgot how to make a simple web app with a form and plain buttons."

The biggest thing for me is learning. Not so much categorizing everything correctly.

What would you do to improve how your subconscious works?

I'm trying to understand what you are saying. I also see holes in some arguments.

1) I agree there's gigantic risk.

If I understood you correctly, you are saying great programmers should have less of the downside of risk with more of its upside.

2) Are you saying great programmers apply to this hot startup in pg's example, pass the interviews, and then refuse the job offer because the compensation offered is too low? If that's what going on, then pg provided something worse than a sketchy anecdote: he lied. He omitted the startup is low-balling candidates it wants to hire. Is this what you are saying?

Or are you saying there are people with the potential of being great programmers who went into other fields because the average compensation of competent (but not great) programmers is low (which may very well be true), and this is the main reason we don't find them?

Also a small correction in "There are any number of people who are capable." It's great programmers we are looking for, not merely capable.

Another in "highly intelligent, incredibly driven people". It's not enough to be highly intelligent and incredibly driven to become a great programmer. You may have aptitude for, but not interest in programming.

3) Is it possible for a great programmer to go into another field? Because if it isn't, maybe the opposite is also true. That you can't take someone from another field and turn them into a great programmer. It's probably as hard for a great programmer to become a great sales person as it is for a great sales person to become a great programmer for example.

4) On the effectiveness of extrinsic motivation of great programmers, we already know extrinsic motivation doesn't work in general. It shouldn't be hard to find research on this. A quick search points to the following. Please correct me if this impression of mine isn't true. I want to find the truth:

http://www.fatih.edu.tr/~hugur/study_hard/Intrinsic%20and%20...

You are suggesting extrinsic motivation of great programmers specifically is an exception.

The rewards for being a great programmer already exceed the rewards for other options. Great programmers can clump together and start companies, and be rewarded more than they are offered by existing companies. This could destroy existing companies.

Are you trying to say great programmers don't do that because starting a company that succeeds is hard? And that existing companies try to take advantage of this (and possibly a first mover or other advantages) by not rewarding programmers?

It's not an unreasonable point to make, by the way, which is also an undervalued opportunity. Markets correct themselves. Maybe the only way to be rewarded for the value you generate as a great programmer in the future will require starting a company. I don't know enough to say.

- A related issue: you can't make someone be a great programmer just by rewarding them. Great programers tend to be intrinsically motivated. Which could be an additional opposing force that keeps them from starting companies.

- Another: pg claimed data that say there aren't enough great programmers; you claim there are: can you talk more about your data?

I'm trying to understand the problem better.

Once all great programmers get a job they like they don't switch, even if you have the money to pay them more. They like what they are working on.

If a great programmer is working on the next Google, and you pay them more to work on something boring, they won't switch.

The limit is the total number of great programmers.

A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors.

Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?

Michelle, you are in inspiration!

Have you found yourself having different design ideas after this change? Or having developed a new style in your creations because of "mistakes" you make when you can't control your nose very well?!

Can you mention examples where you ended up designing differently?

It's not more wealth that would generate more projects. It's finishing a previous project that would generate more projects. You don't even get to finish the project without a great programmer so you don't get to start new projects. New projects can depend on older projects.

Generating that wealth serves as proof the project completed, which justifies moving on. It's not merely being handed that wealth by a VC that completes the project because then you didn't generate anything. All you did was transfer wealth between two parties. Having wealth isn't enough to generate new wealth in tech. You also need skill.

What having more wealth would do is help pay for more great programmers but it's neither the driving nor the limiting force. The limiting force is having great programmers. They are the ones who generate new wealth.

So what you said possibly supports the argument that it's not about wages. If there were unlimited great programmers, we might indeed hit a limit on VC wealth. We could be nowhere that limit because there aren't enough great programmers.

My comment above was confusing in that it makes someone think a limit in VC wealth is what makes it prohibitive to hire great programmers. That's not what I meant to say. I meant to say that if you are limited in having great programmers, then the total amount of wealth you can generate is also limited. The US, and any country, would be better off having more great programmers.

The limit you hit is in having great programmers. Lack of great programmers limits growth. Lack of growth limits wealth.

I wish PG revised his essay to make this point.

It's not a zero-sum game, and it's not about supply and demand. It's about growth, and hitting a limit on the total wealth generated.

I just explained this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805475

It's not only about wages. It's also about total wealth generated, which is driven by growth. The issue is you hit a limit.

Any startup eventually hits the limits of the market it operates in. But the point is startups don't get the chance to hit those market limits. The limit they hit first is they can't get great programmers. Their growth is stiffled early on.

Here's an example. Assume a startup is working on only one project and doesn't have a great programmer. Result: they don't get to make some breakthrough that would have increased the wealth of the startup by 100x-1000x. Without generating that wealth, demand decreases. You are still looking for just one great programmer to work on the project and can't start other new projects before you finish the existing one.

But if you didn't limit that growth (if you had a great programmer) there would be increased demand, because then you'd have 100x-1000x more wealth and could start new projects hiring more great programmers. It comes down to growth.

So having great programmers increases demand, not decrease it. The more you have, the more you end up needing.

Until you hit a limit. Once all great programmers who are in the US are snatched up, at any price, then you reached a limit to the amount of wealth that can be generated in the US by great programmers.

Because it's incorrect.

Maybe it is about wages for companies that don't understand there's huge variance in productivity of programmers. But it is about talent and not wages for companies that do.

You do have a valid argument that when you increase supply prices drop. But they drop in proportion to the supply. It would be nice if one could estimate the total number of those great programmers, and then calculate what % of the total programmers they are. If they are 50% that would be a problem. But if they are 0.5% (1/100th that), is it still a problem?

> If Paul can figure out a way to filter in the great developers while filtering out those that are only coming to make money

Maybe he did. They become founders. They start companies worth 100x - 1000x their annual salary. As you go up the continuum of exceptional performance a great programmer becomes a startup founder.

Considering how Apple and Google tried to fix the salaries of software engineers to stay low, maybe even that isn't an option in big companies.

What are you really against?

What do you want to see happen?

> What is wrong with immigrating to Europe / Asia?

You may be right here. I used to think it's better to immigrate to the US, because that's where everyone was immigrating to. I thought I wouldn't find good people elsewhere. But your comment just made me realize I'm not so sure.

> and all the potential startups and growth elsewhere wither and die

All of them, really? Every single one? There's no middle-ground?

> It is not like you are going to be founding the next big thing while bound to employment at one of the big three to stay in the country.

Why did you exclude that as a possibility?

When I tried to run Plan 9 in a VM I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to open a shell in the window manager and type ls. I also couldn't figure out how to use the text editor (why can't editors be simple enough so you can just type?) If Plan 9 booted in text/terminal mode I'd use it.

Does anyone know if you can boot Plan 9 in text mode?

However well-designed the OS is internally, it also needs to be approachable externally.

> Community is the single most important factor in whether or not a technology will succeed in the longer term or not.

I'm not so sure. I wouldn't make that statement about Java for example. Technologies that succeed in the longer term have some merit to them. If it was just about community, Lisp would have ceased to exist, and yet you typed your comment in a web app written in a Lisp.

Plan 9 is the Lisp of operating systems. Why does my gut say Plan9-as-a-service is an undervalued startup idea?

What I haven't understood about Plan 9 is if it does process migration. If you run a multi-threaded, computation-intensive process will Plan 9 automatically distribute the computation to all CPU servers and gather up the results?

EDIT: It turns out the article does talk about process migration, but still doesn't answer the distributed computation question.

"Process migration is also deliberately absent from Plan 9. Although Plan 9 makes it easy to instantiate processes where they can most effectively run, it does nothing explicit to make this happen. The compiler, for instance, does not arrange that it run on the CPU server. We prefer to do coarse-grained allocation of computing resources simply by running each new command interpreter on a lightly-loaded CPU server. Reasonable management of computing resources renders process migration unnecessary."

EDIT2: Ah, there's no automatic thread distribution. But you can fake it but forking multiple processes on multiple CPU servers and sharing their address spaces. Does this mean you have to write your own CPU server allocator?

"Plan 9 does not implement lightweight processes explicitly. We are uneasy about deciding where on the continuum from fine-grained hardware-supported parallelism to the usual timesharing notion of a process we should provide support for user multiprocessing. Existing definitions of threads and lightweight processes seem arbitrary and raise more questions than they resolve. We prefer to have a single kind of process and to permit multiple processes to share their address space. With the ability to share local memory and with efficient process creation and switching, both of which are in Plan 9, we can match the functionality of threads without taking a stand on how users should multiprocess."

Thanks. This helps.

I didn't see tab completion when I was running the installer and I gave up.

Thank you for answering my question.

What stopped me from using FreeBSD a year ago was lack of automatic tab completion on the shell.

I would like to try FreeBSD again. Does anyone know if this works now?

edit: clarified the reason I ask is because I want to know.

The biggest thing I learned from this downvoting is that sometimes it's better to only quote new knowledge and let others pick up the conversation from there.

Am I the only one who suspects a high number of commits is a sign of good programming, and by induction good programmers?

Paul Graham: "A startup is a company designed to grow"

No wonder that's not what the word means in common usage considering startups themselves haven't been common enough to make it into hundred-year old dictionaries.

> prefer young people because bullshit is harder to swallow the older you get

You know, it's frightening this sentence is still true if you replace "bullshit" with "dreams" and "swallow" with "believe." It's frightening because ignoring your dreams is the most common regret of the dying.

So age might only on the surface be a filter. The true filter might be optimism.

I sincerely hope you don't ignore your dreams.

I didn't say it's bad to have a smaller business. I said it's bad to have a smaller startup. Because by definition a startup is a company designed to grow. If a business isn't growing then it's not a startup. Between the two extremes of being a Google or a barbershop, it's closer to a barbershop.

It also isn't as weird that I wrote that comment considering I alarmingly find myself falling into Colin's shoes as a single founder. If there's a trap laying ahead that I could avoid, I'd rather know about it sooner than later. It's not to disparage Colin that I wrote the comment. It's to learn from him. I like Tarsnap and I'm a Tarsnap customer.

If there's a way forward that is unexplored terrain, I at least would like to learn more about it.

I wonder how far YC pondered over this question actually. What do you do with the cpercivas?

This gutsy, uncompromising quality is a trait of successful founders. I'm curious to see what will happen.