HN user
I also didn't mean fancy design.
But in your 'startup ideas', in the idea #16, you said Google has no sense of design, so I suppose that the people responsible for it (Google founders originally. Marissa Meyer with a team of designer now days, I believe) wouldn't be accepted in YC.
And that is more of a rhetoric observation. I know they would.
But then isn't the 'sense of design' requirement unnecessary?
Thanks. Maybe it was lost in translation, but by Design do you mean appearance (like in graphical, interface, industrial design) or architecture (like operating system design)?
If it's the former, I hope you don't get offended by it, but I think, looking at HN and your website, that you wouldn't be accepted. :) Nor would Sergey and Page.
> They require either A. OS X to be hacked to run on the machines (aka: your pirated copy)
Hacked != Pirated.
I am planning to use a hacked MacOS X for IPhone development and I will buy the OS. That's fine, I can pay for the software.
I simply can't afford their overpriced desktop hardware. (The iPhone is reasonably cheap compared to their desktops).
Edit: I don't know why this has been down voted. Maybe I should say that what adds to Apple's desktops cost, besides their premium for the brand, is the importation tax for items over $500 here. As high as 60%. With this tax, I can simply buy the software and assembly the hardware from commodity parts myself.
Amazon could provide both a wifi and an EVDO connection. Wifi chips probably are very cheap on scale these days.
If the EVDO connection is available in their area, great. Use that. But if it is not, users can figure out how to set up the wifi connection. They have to figure out how to set up the wifi connection in their notebooks anyway.
I don't know if this already has been answered before, but how do you evaluate if a candidate has a sense of design?
Is there something like a census with the percentage of workers in each profession for those times?
I think a netbooks's screen is too small to use it as a convential desktop.
This just got me thinking. If Apple is rumored to launch a Netbook and a Ipod Touch with a bigger screen, maybe they are going to launch both in the same device. That is, Apple's netbook and the new bigger Ipod touch will be one.
Something like the new OLPC prototype, with a virtual keyboard on the other screen. It would be the Nintendo DS killer.
In the case you didn't get it, it is a java applet game (using Processing). Here is a description:
"Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.
The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays."
I think he is a spam bot that uses Markov chains.
Jeez, this sounds good, but if people here are like me then they already have about 5 books on their list that they want to read. I don't know how many would commit
Read? Who spoke about reading? I thought we would discuss the books without actually read it. Isn't that what everybody does?
I wonder how much time it will take until human brains can be inspected like that.
It would be an interesting tool in job interviews.
Removing the last 8 bits or, by the way, the whole IP address from the user log data DOESN'T make it anonymous.
"Yahoo will also hide cookie data related to each search log and strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number, from the query itself."
There's much more personal information in a few month of search logs than that.
You used the word indie at the first comment, but I interpreted it as startup, because this discussion is about startups.
Most startups aren't indies.
For instance, Plentyoffish.com was a ONE person startup not so long ago with revenues of 1MM and 1B pageviews. Just imagine what a news recomendation site with TWO persons would be able to do. :)
You don't need to hire consultants to have a process. You just need to buy a book or read it for free in the internet.
You just need to think about the security implications of what you are going to to, do it keeping in mind all that could go wrong, check again what you have done, and keep a spreadsheet registering how well you are doing. And do it systematically.
>>And yet most of them are not hacked in that manner
The guys at Wordpress and Jommla beg to disagree.
It depends on how popular it is. If the open source version of Reddit becames as popular as Wordpress, then it certainly would get hacked in that manner.
Feel free to post your own Poll.
If you do, I can ask the moderator to delete this one.
That is because english is not my native language and I didn't know how to explain it better.
Why do you think it is badly constructed?
That is why I have placed that introduction.
If this news recommendation site is being constantly hacked to the point in which it has more malware than a porn site, then the developer should consider making it more secure. Otherwise users would not visit it anymore, unless the owner starts to place some hot picures to serve together with the exploits.
You can interpret formal process as systematic process.
The logic for each answer is this:
Answer 2. If you claim to care about security, you should understand the security implications of what you are doing and you are an expert. You can take care of it on your own.
A 1. If you care about security and you aren't an expert, then you don't really understand all security implications of what you are doing and should be basing your judgment on the recommendations of those that do using a systematic process created by experts. You don't need to hire a consultant to do it. You can just buy a few books or read it for free in the Internet.
A 3. If you care about secure software but aren't an expert nor use a systematic process created by experts, then you aren't checking all security implications of what you are doing, but instead checking only for a few generally know flaws.
A 4, 5, 6. You don't understand the security implications of what you are doing and refuses to take the recommendations of those that do.
As multitouch screens becomes more common, users will want an experience more familiar with the real world because the interface becomes more concrete.
And 3D interfaces, even inside a 2D screen, could improve the illusion of that concreteness.
Ops... substitute 9.64% by 9.56% in that comment. :)
You are playing with words.
The point is that there's really not much difference between 10% and 9.56%.
Netflix's Grand Prize could very well had been 9.64% and it would already had been won, despite everybody saying one year ago that 9.64% might be impossible given the dataset.
We will talk again in one year to see if 10% may be impossible.
And why do you think 10% is impossible but 9.5% is not?
If the goal had been 5%, you would say: - It may be simply mathematically impossible to get to 5 percent...
And they are already at 9.56%.
Therefore, he is putting himself in a state where he is not a real man.
This is his logic, not mine.
Linus once said that debuggers are for sissies. I knew he would regret saying that sometime.
Here is another of his rants against debuggers. Just substitute 'kernel debugger' by 'simple chipset debugging facilities' (whatever that means) in that email and basically he has his response for why Intel isn't adding it. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.h...
Intel engineers are saying, 'simple chipset debugging facilities' are for sissies!
Looking at the comments, I have only one thought: Pownce was thrown to the sharks!
My point still is valid.
Even these particular guys certainly would have written buggy code. A QA process could correct it.
"...not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done."
I don't think the claim that they would not have broken anything can be backed by facts.
If you look at Microsoft, for instance, their programmers used to write very buggy code, but with the introduction of better processes, like their Secure Development Lifecycle, they saw a substantial improvement in code quality (as measured through security and reliability metrics).
The damage done by not following a quality assurance process and writing buggy code was so big that Microsoft's image will be affected for a long time, even though they have now improved the code quality.