indie01

Maybe it's more like companies should compete for people, and people should compete for whatever jobs or job titles there are to be had within a company.

begin /mini-rant here from personal experience:

But with the advent of bloodsucking agencies and such, this ideal tends to not work. This I've learned the hard way. People can't compete for jobs within a company they're hired to go actually work at b/c they're stuck under contract (or would be) if the "trial period" goes well; finders fees and various other things added onto the cost of hiring said employee.

On one interview I went w/a place in San Jose I was basically told (because I specifically asked) that if this place found me a full-time employment gig, they'd take THIRTY percent of a full year salary. So, if my going rate is, for simplicity purposes 100K, this agency makes 30K. $30,000 for what? The week's worth of work it took to "discover" my resume on the internet, call me in for an interview, and interview me and make me sign a contract? I don't think so.

It makes such little logical sense to me why companies even feel the need to outsource their search for talent. Why do they? HR is one of those things that's benefiting from the efficiencies of the web and better search methods.

/end mini-rant :)

Hmm. My understanding is that it strips out a bunch of unnecessary (correction: able to be simplified, not necessarily "unnecessary") elements and makes it easier to write leaner JavaScript. Also easier to have a browser render JavaScript.

Wittens' talk at http://acko.net/blog/jquery-oscms-presentation-slides at the OSCMS was pretty good; basically, JavaScript is not bad, but too much can be overwhelming to people.

P.S. Not always the slowest set of elements to load on a page. A fun little hack: http://www.spaceminnow.com/school - standard disclaimer -

Remember that shifts are cyclical, temporary, and not the end of the world. Be happy for other countries which are finally getting a break.

Interesting how so many of them in this list share the characteristic of being fired from one job or another. Most innovative types don't seem to work so well in stringent environments, or what I like to think of as the SJ mentality of "management by suffocation."

I like pcnames:

http://www.pcnames.com/

because it utilizes some nifty JavaScript, a kind of "search as you type" method regarding inquiries of domain names. It also (claims that it) doesn't log or record those queries.

That Network Solutions leeches queries and then charges $34.99 per year for registration is also insane. (Testing:) It really is quite unfortunate that they're @ number one of the list for a google search RE "domain name registration". . .

I guess there's always the BBB.

Indeed.

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2005/211008.h...

From the first page of the DOJ complaint:

"The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division today filed a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR), challenging a policy that obstructs real estate brokers who use innovative Internet-based tools to offer better services and lower costs to consumers. The Department said that NAR's policy prevents consumers from receiving the full benefits of competition and threatens to lock in outmoded business models and discourage discounting."

Isn't it interesting to note that in this instance, it does not specify whether the 'consumers' of the broker are considered agents or the actual homebuyers themselves? Most brokers don't deal with the little people (the little people being the homebuyers themselves) . . . they run shops which employ agents who compete with each other (e.g. artificially inflating property valuations).

In this wikipedia article on the MLS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Listing_Service):

''A person selling his/her own property - acting as a For Sale By Owner (or FSBO) - cannot put a listing for the home directly into the MLS. ''

So. . . a decent housing search tool aimed at people who want to sell FSBO to people who are not agents themselves and who don't have buyers' agents would probably go over quite well.

The main challenge here would still be that evil Realtor stranglehold . . . keeping the agents away from the FSBOs.

Quote from the article: "The business proved extremely profitable for the banks, which earned a fee for each mortgage they sold on. They urged mortgage brokers to sell more and more of these mortgages."

This is a very interesting topic, one I've thought about a lot. In attempting to understand the cause, I've forumulated some hypotheses about how and why the sub-prime 'crisis' came to be.

But first some background. After earning my Master's ('04), I was having a very difficult time finding employment. I thought what any lifetime academic tends to think -- maybe more education will help?

So I enrolled in and aced just over 3/4 of this "ProSchool" course for Real Estate Brokerage. In it, I learned all about how Realtors and their mortgage broker cronies operate. Suffice it to say that I also came to discover that my personal ethics possess integrity > the ethics of most people in the real estate industry, which is why I decided to not pursue that path.

Sub-prime mortgages are to the real estate industry what lemons are to the auto industry. And while there are laws protecting people from rapacious salespersons in the automobile industry, there aren't really any such protections for homebuyers. It's probably important to note that I don't really consider "mounds of paperwork" a means of protection, especially when buyers don't understand what they're getting into for the long-term; it doesn't matter how many pieces of paper they're told to sign -- those pieces of paper are usually protecting the interests of real estate and broker-finance persons.

The root cause, the motivations of realtors, brokers and car salespersons are the same: commissions and fees earned, amounts directly proportional to amount exploited from customer. Think about it like. . . commissions and fees are beneficial to people 'from the top down' in a type of order-of-operations' that's similar to the mathematical order-of-operations. Who gets paid and when, according to this model:

1. Financial Institutions (banks control real estate brokers; as the article states, banks pay themselves first); 2. Brokers (brokers control agents; brokers pay themselves first and then pay agents); 3. Agents (agents or specifically real-estate agents conspire among themselves to artificially inflate housing and property values. There's no such thing as a real estate agent who rents!) [P.S. I think they are evil root cause of insane rents as well]; 4. Property Managers or Landlords (both can be controlled by agents, managers pay themselves first, by rules have no qualms about repossession or eviction).

Obviously, the entities in the list all get paid their fees or commissions immediately, or at least within a couple of months of the occurance of a sale or the sub-prime mortgage. Or even a regular mortgage.

Fast-forward to the time of the ARM-adjustment, and the mortgagee can't pay the significant increase. Poor dumb customers? Not always. . . isn't it job of the fee/commission earning realtor or broker or finance person to explain exactly to the customer what he or she is potentially getting into? Yes, but often these people gloss over the details. This is why I think the lemon analogy makes a lot of sense. Who in their right mind would pay full-price for a vehicle they know is going to be inoperable within a year or two?

I think what this essentially boils down to is people in the banking and real estate industries transferring their risk to the people least able to handle it and then not being legally accountable for their ethics.

Skimping on sleep in undergrad and not regretting it, chalking it up as "practice" for life sleeping in a cube? That doesn't sound very fun. I think there's a saying. . . something like "A students end up working for C students."

I've always wondered where that leaves B students. I have no ideas how many A's I earned, exactly, but I do recall my GPA to a vague notion of a range between 3 decimal places.

>>5. Starve existing (and possible) social networks of users through network effects and platform lock-in (done)

This is what Microsoft did. Maybe not necessarily with "social networks," but in principle. The fact that this little iteration of 'lock-in' is both preceded and followed by a "getting investment money" cycle would be a cause of alarm to me if I were a potential facebook investor or employee. Scratch the "investment" word and you're left with just "getting money." Welcome to the real world.

Lock-in is not a sustainable means of long-term growth, revenue, or profit. Obfuscating code behind a bunch of platform-specific run-around gibberish and license lawsuit nonsense doesn't benefit users and gives developers major headaches. Lawyers do seem to like it, though, since they always are "getting money".

As history has shown, superior, non-obfuscated, legal, free! open-source code will inevitably appear on the outside of any lock-in. Lock-in creates something known in management as "groupthink" and it's almost never (ouch, sorry for the pun) "group_wise_". Groupthink causes those on the inside to value that which is on the inside > the market is able to value it. There's a reason disclosure is required in the world of securities: it's called "insider trading."

So for long-term strategy, I'd say facebook flubbed bigtime by being greedy. Being greedy ala-Microsoft and "not accepting anything less than a billion" or . . . whatever the tipping point was that caused them to jump in the stew with Microsoft specifically . . . that was really just not smart. Trying to be too many things to too many people?

The Internet was built for niche markets. I'm hopeful on the open source niche. :)

It's indeed an industry loaded with pretentiousness.

Here's a clip from a related and interesting article about the wine industry:

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/05/news/companies/Two_Buck_Chuc...

>>>In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe's to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range - and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July's California State Fair over far pricier competition. The label is one of America's fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores.

One of the more interesting things about web media vs print media is that web media's impressons are actually more documentable than print media's.

Hand a person a newspaper, and it's really quite iffy whether or not they caught or noticed a 1/8 page advertisement on page 23 in section C; give them a link to a readable source, however, and (as long as the text isn't too small) it's more or less guaranteed that they've received an actual impression from the advertiser. A documented and documentable impression, even. This becomes especially important as it takes place without the use or waste of paper.

I guess one of the major stumbling blocks is actual expense as it relates to documentation. I remember thinking about how Gmail works. For example, which would be more valuable: content itself or documentation about who has viewed a particular block of code with some content? The NY Times would say that the content/articles are more valuable, thus allowing its advertisers to gain exposure being in close proximity to them. But without the ability to be funded or paid by advertisers, their content becomes less "valuable" by definition.

And this is why I think open source will be the future. . . scaled efficiencies, not necessarily producer/consumer dynamics, create value.

There's really nothing like a stereotypical "the burbs" on the peninsula -- or anywhere in the Bay area for that matter. Concepts like "the burbs" are perpetuated by the perception of a need to commute via personally-owned vehicle or transport, as there are no other options -- and that just doesn't happen here. It's perfectly reasonable and viable to live without a vehicle in this place. Besides, Caltrain is fun.

If you think about it, the only people that benefit from people en masse becoming infatuated with a certain neighborhood (or likewise shunning certain neighborhoods) are Realtors, who make $ based on turnover of property in certain areas, and Realtors are all pure Evil. I actually gave up driving my car after I moved down here; only 5 months thus far, and I estimate I've saved a lot -- far more than I would have spent otherwise -- in transportation costs, time, and even energy.

I guess I just don't understand your point. I've never met a genuinely creative person who ever gets bored. I guess I don't really think of "getting bored" being resultant from a function of place.

The peninsula is much nicer than the city, I think. I lived in the city for a little while after moving here, but after my car got broken into TWICE in one month, (even my sunglasses were stolen), and a couple of way too expensive parking tickets and even getting towed on one occassion, I decided to go migrate south. Very glad I did; it's much cleaner, there are more trees, less crime, and notably fewer crazies. It's easier to hear yourself think, too. Rent is not really any less than you pay in the city, but you seem to get more -- as in square feet -- breathing room, etc.

>>>> ""I'm calling it," Roy sighs, "that's it." And so, at 4:20 in the morning, some 70 miles shy of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Roy puts his turn signal on like some average commuter and once again stops, 2,160 miles short of his dream."<<<<

I found it interesting that they decided to call it quits so soon; in Indiana, of all places, for rationalizing the lack of ability to catch up on average speed. (On this particular attempt) Indiana isn't very far at all from the border of NY state.

The Northeast has extreme population density, slower posted speed limits, etc. It seems to me that after completing that initial leg of the journey, they could easily catch up for lost time going across the more-or-less desolate midwest, even given their slower than desired avg MPH start.

So they technically completed only 635 miles of the trip (2795-2160). . . a mere 22.7 percent of the total miles to be traveled. I think if it were me, I'd wait until at least the halfway point before calculating averages and deciding whether or not to throw in the towel of defeat.

I definitely think that if there were anywhere to make up for lost time, it would definitely be across parts of the midwest.

There was an article in Business 2.0 Magazine awhile ago titled: "Escape from Silicon Valley". OK, I just found it for you:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

Although it discusses the pros and cons of big city vs. little towns for start-ups, it also touches upon a variety of factors which seem to be relevant to your question.

I started my startup in a tiny place (Flagstaff, AZ) thinking I could make it work there. It almost did, but the reality is that there are numerous benefits to be had not necessarily from living here (SF), but from having the contacts and network of people in this area; living here just happens to be one of the best ways to get it.

I lived in Portland, OR for awhile, and visited Seattle a few times. I seem to remember something about abnormally high depression and suicide rates being cited for residents of Seattle . . . also, isn't Seattle one of the few places that has had cost of living increasing significantly / deviating from the norm? Not to knock Seattle (hey, hey -- no income tax in WA state), but the success of a startup I imagine would be correlated to happiness of its founders/employees.

Anyway. One of the things that I think makes this area such a hub of successful startups is that people here truly believe they're going to change the world. And, a lot of them end up doing just that. :)

>> One of the most important things we've been working on standardizing are investment terms. <<

I can see this being very beneficial, both for the VCs and the startups. The standardization of terminology in any discipline or field allows the people in it to have their lingo easily referenced and indexed, increasing efficiencies. Who wants to wade through a bunch of superfluous gibberish to get to the point?

In grad school, I remember having the realization that every discipline has it's own little shorthand lingo. I remember thinking about how confusion can result when there are clashes/overlaps in, for example, acronyms.

>>An angel who wants to insert a bunch of complicated terms into the agreement is probably not one you want anyway.<<

Exactly: reducing complexity, not increasing it, seems a better objective.

"Our developer workstations boast 386 Mhz . . . and industry-leading green text graphics. .." This is classic! You people are hilarious. I'm still trying to figure out what that was . . . did one of the dudes have a bottle of maple syrup hung around his neck (?) and another one fuzzy dice . . . walking down the sidewalk during the rap music scene? Awesome.

Wow, even my apology is getting modded down! I must have hit a nerve or something. :) To all who modded me down: way to jump on the bandwagon.

Why is everybody so anti-HTML?

>>'If I have to open a browser to read your "plain text"....'

If you are able to open a browser to read both plain text (source code) and a rendered page with some text, you can be pretty sure that the person who wrote the code knows what he or she is doing with both.

When did it become significantly more difficult to open a web browser vs a text editor? Command-line?

[indie@localhost~] $ firefox [indie@localhost~] $ gedit

I don't disagree with Mr. Yegge's assertion that plain text can be a decent way to present info on a resume if that is the only other option vs. discriminatory Microsoft .doc formatting, bullets, etc. . . . but his statement:

"HTML formatting usually makes it through safely because it's plain text. However, even if your tags are left alone by the automated mangler, there's no guarantee that your resume will be viewed from a browser, and nobody wants to read through a bunch of ugly markup while they're trying to assess your skills. So you shouldn't use HTML either."

Hello: programs (usually written by "programmers") are usually the entities doing this "automated mangling".

Anyway. I realize now that by putting "programming guru" in quotes, it seemed like I was attempting to insult the author's (SY's) skills, which I wasn't. . . apologies for that. I simply have an aversion to the word "programmer"; phrases like "programming language" seem really immature and pedantic to me. To me, code is the magic word.

A blogspot-templated blog; how cute. I always find it slightly humorous when people who profess to be "programming gurus" use something like a blogspot (or WordPress or MoveableType) template to dispense their expert programming guru knowledge. FTA:

"You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't you? Argh!"

IMHO, there's absolutely nothing wrong with listing HTML on one's resume, especially if one actually knows the context and how to use HTML to do something besides make text (for example, render) bold or italic.

Plain text resumes can indeed work to get information across, but if ever there were a way to demonstrate actual ability to code electronically, a resume coded in HTML would be that way. Resumes are about presentation. HTML, coupled with CSS, is a valuable way to demonstrate ability to present plain text.

Actually, thinking about it, most programming is essentially about presenting or rendering or parsing plain text, is it not? I would rather see somebody's hand-coded text/HTML resume than a plain-text text/text resume with (undemonstrative) HTML listed as a skill.

More on why job search is broken (and part of my startup philosophy):

There is a lot to be said for the meaning of irony when companies who claim to want creative and "out of the box" thinkers request that potential employees visit their website in order to submit the info on their resumes via little, pre-formatted text boxes.

On your feedback page is this sentence:

"Your opinion is very important for us since it help us to build a better preZentit for everyone. "

Proper grammar would be <i>since it helps us to. . .</i>

Just some feedback.

Hey, you just can't learn some of this stuff:

"Service is always included and tipping can be taken as an insult, as if the recipient helped with the expectation of payment." (notes from the article, on culture in Helsinki, Finland)

without knowing of someone with or having, on your own, some real-world "in the field" experience. Something tells me it wouldn't be the best idea to accidentally or otherwise insult Finnish people. :)

Actually, I doubt they'll be hiring any journalists any time soon. They're going under:

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/M/MAGAZINE_CLOSURE?SIT...

Too bad, since I think they're one of the best business-tech magazines on the market. I just barely renewed my subscription, too. Bummer.

I scored 26 as well. INTP: the cause of and solution to all of my problems.

I've been following this "net neutrality" debate for a long time, and both sides have made some decent points. I used to be a hardcore in the camp of pro net-neutrality, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that there are some things that regulation does not solve efficiently. I guess the most frustrating thing is that _lack_ of regulation is not going to solve anything either.

One thing that lack of regulation on this issue does is make it substantially more difficult for small innovators to reap the benefits of their efficiency. Those tiny, seemingly insignificant increases in efficiency go practically unnoticed by the large monolithic telecos, but the people who are in the position to innovate further upon those marginal efficiencies (increasing rate of return on efficiency, if that makes sense) cannot do so when the ISPs themselves are taking more than a reasonable share from the people who are doing the innovating (whether the innovators are customers or competitors is important to the ISPs in that I imagine most ISPs would rather have innovative customers than innovative competitors). And that is essentially why I think that a Laissez-faire approach cannot be good news for the tiny, tech-oriented startup whose lifeblood depends upon an Internet connection.

"Stupid" is such a subjective opinion. Individual brand-carving matters much more. . . immediate association is more relevant. These abstract names (wakoopa, frengo, squidoo) aren't really built upon any particular app of substance . . . it's a kind of reverse-branding that hurts in the long-run. Selling names works, but only a bit. Sooner or later, you have to sell substance.

Nice! The only thing it lacks is a groovy favicon. Favicons can be one of the most memorable features of a website . . . and keeping with your target audience, I would suggest something like a music note.

Otherwise, very nice site design, and a great idea. I so want to hide behind my code right now . . . way to make people like me feel all kinds of amateur. :)