rgovind

The post on why medium.com could have been profitable as a lifestyle business but since it took VC money, it should resort to spamming users with recommendations etc

If it is ok for managers to ask "Describe a time when you failed", it is fair game for interviewee to ask tough questions.

And you can never be sure what questions will be asked from you during an interview, especially, since the only thing job description says is "Rockstar frontend Engineer"

Since Greg was CXO at blekko, I would say for whoever is making search engine, its important!

Yes. In today's search engines, I cannot give you a blacklist and say filter out these results. If I am looking for tutorials, I cannot say no video results. If I am looking for market research, I cannot filter out news websites from the links. For personalization, I cannot give google any suggestions on what I absolutely do not want to be included etc.

can you please add an email at which we can contact you? I don't see one in the profile.

i.e. you can be both investor and employee in the company. But you have to run payroll which means company must be generating money or be VC funded

Government runs hospitals in every town but only poor people use them(though they put up with bribes here). Rich and middle class typically use private health care as its generally better. Private health care in cities is excellent even by western standards. In towns, its decent. Poor also turn to private hospitals when time is important or when government doctors fail. One thing government does well is giving vaccines to new born and infants.

Also, many times, you just walk up to a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for a medicine instead of talking to the doctor. Saves money and time

If you go cheaper than that and wait, somebody else might snag them up!

For some of us in Bay area, we pay $5000 in rent, utilities, day care etc. I, by and large can't optimize on these things. I can only optimize on groceries, restaurant eating, vacation/weekend outings and few things like that. So, I hope these personal finance apps remove rent, utilities, day care etc from their analysis.

Also, one feature I would pay for is this. When I am entering a Walmart or Target or Whole Foods, it should warn me that I spent 'x' amount on groceries last week and that I should keep my spending below $y to stay within budget. Somehow, I see this feature missing in all apps I see so far.

W.r.t askwhale.com, seems like it is a mashup of Quora/Reddit and video based Q&A. Given that there is greater friction in video compared to text based Q&A sites, who would be interested in contributing this?

I find it quiet surprising that none of these startup classes teach how to do market research and market sizing. Yet when a new batch of startups demo every six weeks, the first thing they talk of is, size of opportunity. Market opportunity is one of the things to consider before deciding on a problem to work on. Please consider adding this info to your classes.

Also, None of them teach how Sam or any YC partner or any VC would approach or start thinking whether a startup is worth investing in or not. That would be hugely beneficial to some of us as it will help us in channeling our thoughts.

Lets say you have an ecommerce firm. When a user is browsing an item(diapers?), at a mimimum he/she expects to see images, description, reviews, cost, tax, delivery dates, promotions, related items. In addition to what you see on frontend, in the backend, there may be jobs run for analytics, revenue reconciliation, warehouse management optimization, carrier management, fraud checks, item data setup and a host of other activities. Each of these tasks has its own complex business logic and typically has its own team. Each team runs a service, possibly in the form of a REST API call. You can call them microservices.

I believe Quora and Facebook tried it in various forms though there you could reach out just about anybody. I assume 21.co will do same thing going forward.

or a way for you to get into feedback from management. If you directly apply, you will never know why management did not pick up your resume.

Principal engineer in Linkedin, Google, FB etc?

An easy way is to walk up to a QA or engineer, tell him "We are reviewing some sessions by customer and we keep getting this error". can you please help me replay customer sessions? This is an executive escalation?

Can I use it for audio streaming as well?

Is real shortage possible? If what I am willing to pay is limitless, won't people catch up, learn the skills and shortage willl be gone?

There is bigger question here. How many people are still make money from selling compiler/language tools? Like, write a static analyzer, or php optimizer or sell a Swift library for linux application or a language-X to language-Y transpiler. So, far, I have found this industry to be opaque, unlike web industry! And if they make money, how much?

Btw, there was YC company which sold PHP server optimizations. Anyone knows the name? (I think they are closed now but I am not sure)

Its at least a structured analysis. Thanks for teaching something today.

I would hire a career coach. One idea I have been kicking around is bi-weekly scrums for those who want to go up the ladder. You will go to the scrum, explain what you have done in last two weeks and explain what you will do in next two weeks. The scrum master/coach plus others will give you suggestions based on what your career goals are.

Text hands down. We can easily scan and skip parts that we do not need. Videos are such a drain on time and are boring. Its hard to go back and forth.

Per month? Per year?

Interviews with VCs and Entrepreneurs are dime a dozen nowadays. What I see missing is resources which help technical people think about business aspects. How does one understand/analyze competition, market size, customers etc.

I really liked AMA from YC partners here on hacker news. They answered a few questions about how one should things about early stage starting up. I would like to see more of such things.

I have a feeling Mentor had a finger in my pies. EDA, Embedded, automotive, compilers, PCB and what not. I feel Synopsys and Cadence are more focused.

Why would this happen given that semiconductor industry itself is shrinking? I used to work in EDA until recently, but since money in semiconductor is dwindling, people like me have no interest in pursuing ideas in EDA