gwc

But at the same time, as a small developer, you have very little time to spare for support. Time spent getting the game working for one person is time not spent making a new game for everyone. You will need to develop a sense of when the time lost helping a person is not worth it, either because you won't be able to solve their problem or because they will not able to implement the fix you provide.

...

Remember: It's only worth the time to do tech support if you have the chance to, in a reasonable amount of time, fix a problem and make a loyal customer. If you realize that, at the end of the road, you aren't going to end with a happy person and a working product, end the conversation as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

In that context, I think his approach is very rational. If you pushed him, he'd probably agree that more often than not the issue is in his code (even if it's just a question of inadequate error handling). However, if the problem is only seen by a single user and will be a significant investment to try and fix, then it's simply not worth the time when he could be working on a new game, a port, or even a different problem that has been seen by multiple users.

80 to 100 is much closer to what a software engineer with several years of experience makes working for a defense contractor than 250, though of course actual years of experience and how well one has played the corporate ladder game can make a big impact.

Past a certain point it is relatively difficult to advance salary-wise without taking on management roles and giving up the hands-dirty side of programming / engineering. Once you're there it's an apples-to-oranges comparison for the kind of startups that are typical for HN-types ~ certainly no early stage startup is going to hire a 10-year manager to be employee #1 when what they really need is a hotshot programmer.

I entirely agree with this, although I'll point out that IIRC Google Chat did the same thing in terms of modifying gmail but no-one seemed to really object to that. Buzz seems to be different because of the privacy issues, i.e. Google didn't communicate well what would happen (specifically a public profile that included your follower/followee lists) if you clicked "yes". That there's a new link on the left-hand menu can't really be the main issue, is it?

As far as FUD, I'm specifically referring to comments like this:

There is absolutely no way to opt out of Buzz.

http://twitter.com/etherial/status/9023625277

It IS possible to opt out of Buzz, ~ its just that its counter-intuitive and once you've hit the "Yes" button, somewhat difficult to undo.

For you (and others like you and I who picked 'no'), clicking 'turn off buzz' does seem to actually turn off the service for all intents and purposes. No info is made public. Sure, some people 'auto-follow' me, but only those who already had your email address. No real harm done.

That's not to say the math is useless; a better statement (which could have been supported by the data) would have been "The difference between CA and WA is less than the measurement margin of error given WA's small sample size".

Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate.

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues.

How is he drawing his conclusions? Does he really have a deep enough understanding of the underlying model when he 'runs the numbers'?

From there, he can make it quickly to the press office to help devise explanations for why taxpayers are spending more than $50 billion on what polls show is a very unpopular bailout of the auto industry.

I'm sure the NYT is not giving us the whole story, but there's a piece of me that worries that what makes this guy successful is not intelligence (though he certainly may be smart) but charisma. Just because you can sling a good presentation / memorandum and speak eloquently about it does not mean you should be setting critical government policy about tremendously complex problems.

Peldi doesn't seem to be viewing Balsamiq as a stepping stone to getting rich and working on his next project in pursuit of some unknown end state; for him, Balsamiq IS the end state (or he hopes it will be).

If you really truly enjoy what you're doing - and it is clear he is - is there really any point to suffering some optional pain in exchange for a greater payout at the end?

(Standard caveat - Peldi, if you're reading this and I am way off base, please feel free to correct!)

http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_...

He [Charlie Miller] did mention, in his interview with Ryan Naraine, that Chrome was pretty much in another league. Their 'sandbox' makes it extremely difficult to exploit

From US Code Title 15, Chapter 1, § 1: Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_0...

The other sections of that chapter discuss some specifics (such as §18, which specifically covers M&A) and there is a wealth of case law backing it up and clarifying, as well.

I agree that it might come off a bit as preening, but to be fair Joel's column hasn't stayed away from mistakes and bad decisions he's made as well. As such I take the tone as being closer to "this is what I've done and why I've done it" than "look at this awesome thing I did".

As with letting weeds in the content choke out the actual signal, not taking the time to do code weeding will ultimately lead to buggy, unmaintainable code. Of course another approach is to try and avoid code weeds in the first place (e.g. TDD), but at some level code weeds / debt is inevitable over time for any sufficiently mature code base.

Does YC have some particular connection to the Web 2.0 Summit or is this simply a reflection of YC's leadership in the "companies that have developed nifty Web 2.0 sites (with only a little cash up front)"-funding business?

In the context of wanting to write the next Digg, I would propose that a better application of their conclusions would be, e.g., to favor hiring programmers from different schools over hiring programmers who went to the same school and studied under the same professors. In this way you might get some diversity in terms of how your programmers approach solving problems versus having a group of programmers who each approach a given problem in the same way and presumably reach the same conclusions / solutions.

"Should the organization hire (i) the person with the highest score, (ii) 20 people with the next 20 highest scores, or (iii) 20 people randomly selected from the applicant pool? ... In this paper, we provide conditions under which iii is better than ii."

Further, the paper is not purely theoretical, as you suppose: they then go on to provide such conditions and describe the 'computational experiment' using AI agents that they used to explore and verify their hypothesis - keeping in mind that fundamentally, their hypothesis is simply that there exists conditions under which functional diversity trumps maximized individual ability.

It's worth noting that they make a key distinction between functional diversity and identity diversity. While they do correlate the two in their abstract - with sources - their conclusion does not speak to the latter at all, instead focusing on the former and "diversity in perspective and heuristic space".

You may certainly disagree with their conclusions, but it is unfair to construct their argument as a straw man consisting solely of theoretical ideas and stupid assumptions.

Is it just fear of seeming weak or ignorant? What is it about our culture that makes us so resistant to admitting that we don't know something?

I'm reminded of the "Have you tried Javascript?" story: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Straight_Shooter_for_Upper_M...

I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions.

If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself.

As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.

HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.

I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?