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1. Empathy 2. Humility 3. Sales 4. Accounting 5. Spanish 6. Chinese

I believe it's against Amazon's Terms of Service. They're bigger than you are and they will sue you if you violate their TOS. So check it out!

I liked Marty Cagan's definition: "once you have achieved a threshold number (I advocate at least 6) of live, referenceable customers for a given vertical market"

I'd say you don't have product-market fit until you have closed, signed win-win sales and a working process to acquire more at a profit. But I'm not a huge fan of 'minimal viable products' and rapid iterations. You really ought to at least have a strong competence at actually delivering something that solves the problem for skeptical buyers before you go out "testing".

Never give anything away for free! If people aren't willing to pay for it, your product has no value!

No! If my team can't write readable code, I'll get a better team!

No, because you'll be five years older and young people will cost less than you do. Might as well go eat worms.

Anything totally unrelated to computers, math and hacking! Food, clothing, printed books, sporting goods ... Really, seriously, us hard-core geeks have all the geeky stuff we need and want!

OMG LOL WTF

Yes, unless there's a paid development position at the end of the course. ;-) But seriously, your first programming language should be one where there are numerous entry-level programming jobs in companies where you live. Network, network, network!

Elves?

Yes, and because of the rampant age and sex and racial discrimination in technology, they're history by the time they're 35 just like an athlete.

There's only one reason for Netflix to buy AMC - if they can reduce content cost by firing a bunch of dead wood in AMC management.

I keep seeing this article or variations on it over and over. The question I have is, "Why did they ever have a free version?" Why does DropBox have a free tier? GMail? Why do Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE give away thousands of QA person-hours and more thousands of server hours on community Linux distros? Why are the complicated pieces of software that are browsers mostly free?

While clever and inexpensive, the low speed and low accuracy of this device made it unusable. It was billed as "3-figure accuracy", but in fact it only got that on some cases. A bright undergrad or grad student could quickly uncover useful problems that it flat out couldn't solve.

In short, it was a toy. Anyone basing one's academic grade on this thing was a fool. You really did have to spend the money for an HP-35, or the later Texas Instruments SR-5x calculators that were less expensive.

This is junk - not even junk science, just pure bullshit.

This is a celebration of programmers' ability to generate unmaintainable code by exploiting implementation dependencies. People get fired for pulling this horseshit every day!

"too many startups building great products that people never find out about."

I'm going to call bullshit on that. If your product stinks, all the marketing in the world won't save it. I challenge you to name one great product out of Silicon Valley that languishes in obscurity.

If a startup has a great product, they need a sales force actively prospecting, qualifying, and closing win-win sales. "Inbound marketing won't do it, social media won't do it, search won't do it, advertising won't do it. Revenue is for closers.

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,” Edward Snowden told the Guardian.

Well, he's certainly entitled to believe that, but I seriously doubt he could have actually done so. He's either deluded, lying, or both.

What a whiner! Maybe it's different for laptops, but for desktops, you can still go almost anywhere and have a custom-built system made without any Windows install at all! Huge hard drive, flaming fast GPU, RAM up tha wazoo, studio-grade sound card and as many cores as Intel or AMD can cram onto a chip these days. Hell, if you want a Linux laptop, buy a Sputnik from Dell!

This article is total horseshit!

This reads like an ad form ChromeBooks. ;-) Seriously, though, was that (or an iPad) an option?

I guess I don't see the point of a Redis clone in Erlang when it would be easier to tack use cases onto something that already exists, namely Riak. It's a key-value store, it's in Erlang, it's distributed, it's getting a full-text search and it has adjustable parameters so you can pick how you want to deal with the tyranny of the CAP theorem.

The only think Riak doesn't have is a high-speed RAM-based data structure capability. But hey, Redis does that. ;-)

I'm in the same boat - building something I really want to build and use myself, not really caring much about product-market fit or any of that other stuff.

Yes. So are front-end developers, devops folks and every other 'specialist'.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

-Robert A. Heinlein

I think the technical term for what Rob Rhinehart has is "eating disorder". He will get sick eventually, as all people who do stuff like this do, and if he's lucky, the damage he is doing to his health will be reversible because he's young.

Zack, just off the top of my head, I'd say you're feeding a troll. Don't.

Yes, I read Lancaster's book back when it was published. It's crushingly out of date in today's world, however. No sane person in 2013 will subject him/herself and family to the risks of operating any business as a sole proprietorship or even a partnership. Get a freaking lawyer and accountant and buy business insurance. Do it right or don't do it!

No, actually, it's almost always insurance sales or multi-level marketing.

This guy will change his tune when he gets fired for being an asshole.

You want to charge $700 / hour for programming? You want to be a professional in the same sense as a doctor or a lawyer? Fine!

1. Get a PhD in computer science or software engineering. 2. Submit to state licensing, certifications, fees, examinations and codes of conduct. 3. Buy liabilty insurance in case your screw-ups hurt someone and they sue your incompetent ass.

Look, doctors and lawyers have been around at least since civilization arose, say six to ten thousand years. Programming as a profession independent of, say, doing math or building weapons systems or accounting has been around only since the 1950s, and it wasn't till the 1960s that large numbers of people got paid to do nothing but programming.