steiza

I meant does it still count as bootstrapping if you raise after hitting $1m / year in revenue.

Without VC there would be no Google, no Microsoft, no Amazon, ... I don't think many people seriously advocate for a world with no VCs.

We (at Olark) are wondering the same thing. We just recently talked to Poll Everywhere (S'08) - they are also bootstrapped and well over $1m / year in revenue. Wufoo was as well (they were acquired in 2011).

If you're a bootstrapped company (let's say < $100k in outside funding) and you have revenues >> $1m / year, we'd love to hear from you!

Does it count if you raise after you hit $1m / year in revenue? I'll let you decide.

If you're feeling adventurous, carry a tape measure and check out the size and shape of furniture around you.

If you really start getting in to designing furniture "The Measure of Man and Woman" (http://www.amazon.com/Measure-Man-Woman-Factors-Design/dp/04...) is full of useful measurements and ranges that tables and chairs should satisfy for average, 1 percentile, and 99 percentile humans.

Wood is actually pretty forgiving. You can prototype the size of something in cheap pine, and remember, it's always easier to cut off another inch from those table legs then it is to add one!

I only recently realized how easy it was to run your own PyPI - it just has to handle a few HTTP GET / POSTs.

If you want to run your own PyPI internally, here's a very simple PyPI server (~150 lines of Python) that I wrote: https://github.com/steiza/simplepypi

Olark - Palo Alto, CA; Ann Arbor, MI; remote ok - Full Time

### Who is Olark?

Simply, we're the people that put live chat on thousands of websites across the Internet.

More than that, we're helping businesses scale their personal touch to the Internet, as the lines between customer discovery, sales, and support blur.

### Who are we looking for? (details on http://www.olark.com/jobs)

- Ruby on Rails Engineer / Architect: you've worked before on an at-scale Rails app and love making it easier for our customers to use our app and make it easier for your fellow developers to contribute improvements.

- Graphic Designer: you'd like to apply your understanding of both functionality and aesthetic to improve our website and chat window.

- Marketing Communications: you'll help us educate the world about how the meaning of customer service is changing

### What's our culture like?

- Our all-hands retreat in August combined team outings (winery tours / biking / canoeing) with talking about the future of interacting with customers and how we were going to change it.

- Engaging with our customers! At conferences, answering e-mailed questions, and (of course) chatting with them on Olark. Interacting with our customers has repeatedly gave us insights that couldn't have come from simply writing code.

- We have project-based teams that shift (roughly) quarterly. We want to give our teams enough time to make sizable changes, but experience has taught us that iterations need an end date so we can collect feedback from real-world usage.

### How to apply

For more details and to contact us, check out http://www.olark.com/jobs

I can assure you Detroit has "normal" services like city water, garbage collection, electricity, and the majority of roads are maintained (even if 100% of them don't get plowed during the winter). I still don't see how anyone can say that is "reminiscent of anarchy". Is there an anarchy you lived in that it is reminiscent of?

Downtown Detroit has two major sports teams (the Tigers and the Red Wings), renown cultural attractions like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the world headquarters of a few companies like Quicken Loans and General Motors... the characterization of downtown in this thread is really bordering on the absurd...

Detroit is not, as some comments are suggesting, in a state of anarchy.

Yes, there is crime, similar to other major American cities with crime problems (like St. Louis or Atlanta). Yes, because of depopulation it is hard to get groceries, do your banking, or catch public transportation. But this does not mean the 700,000ish Americans who live in the city proper live in "anarchy".

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula there are also many roads that don't get salted and plowed, and long waits for ambulances - do those people also live in anarchy?

Only now as an adult, having grown up in southwest Michigan, do I appreciate how unusual the region is.

The amount of culture and philanthropy in area is very high considering the population. In Kalamazoo there's the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center (thank you Upjohn family), the Gilmore Keyboard Festival (thank you Gilmore family), the philanthropic work of the Stryker family, ... the list goes on and on.

About an hour north of Kalamazoo is Grand Rapids, another major Michigan metro area, which is also defined by philanthropy: Art Prize (thank you DeVos family) and the Fredrick Meijer sculpture park (thank you Meijer family), just to name a few.

Are all towns in the United States like this?

Zach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look!

Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )

For the hackers on this thread in South East Michigan, there's a Ann Arbor CoffeeHouseCoders meetup tomorrow: http://www.meetup.com/coffeehousecoders/

It's a great way to meet the other area hackers and hear what other people are working on.

This was a lunch keynote at codemash.org on January 14th, 2011, although it may not have been the first time it was given.

For any HN'ers in the midwest, CodeMash is an awesome polygot conference that takes place January every year in Sandusky, Ohio. I've never been at any other conference where you meet experts in Python, Ruby, Haskel, and other languages in the same session.

Not only that, but the selection committee asked for clarification and gave extremely detailed feedback on the talk proposals; I think my proposal went through two major edits/reworks. Hopefully this will mean better talks all around.

Other conference planners take note!

I think most people agree that universities should try to teach people how to learn, and not just the latest technologies and good engineering practices. But I've sat through too many university lectures on programming language syntax or introducing threads to believe the university is teaching me "how to learn".

Why not tell students, "here's an introduction to C++, read it before next week's lecture" or "for this project you must use a VCS, pick one and learn it" instead of making me sit through lectures where the professor reads documentation to me? Have other people had the same experience?