acid_bath

I agree that hanging out with the Wall Street types, going to Wall Street bars, and living in Wall Street apartments probably skewed his perception of NYC's tech scene greatly.

But, hackers like myself who hang out with hacker types, go to hacker bars, and live in hacker nabes probably are probably equally skewed, albeit in the opposite direction. It's people like me who are shouting from the hilltops that NYC is the new SF, when in reality it's probably somewhere in between these two extremes.

Brooklyn reminds me a lot of Boston, tech-scene wise. There's a plenty of computer programmers around and a fair number of of young entrepreneurs, not to mention a startups located there. I know a few bars frequented by coders and there are coffeeshops galore. Not having spent time in SF I'd still say it's probably a more arts/entertainment oriented than tech oriented crowd, but the recently gentrified areas of Brooklyn are lightyears away from old-money Manhattan.

Rock on man :) If that makes you happy, rock on.

My motivation for posting my wall of text is that I just don't think his problem is external. Maybe external changes will prompt some introspective changes, maybe it won't, I just genuinely don't believe that latching on to meaning given to you by others (job, house, debt reduction) has inherent value when it comes to getting over an existentialist funk.

:)

NYC rates, yep. I'd make significantly less elsewhere.

Three things:

NYC is expensive. A 6 pack of crummy beer is $14 across the street from my office, and a studio in Harlem is still $2,000/mo. Realistically, $100k/year in NYC is like $60k/year elsewhere. I know quite a few people making six figures that live 2 hours outside of the city because they can't afford it and I've read that you shouldn't even consider having kids in Manhattan until your household income is over $200k/yr.

Second, IME a lot of startups in NYC have deep pockets. I believe this is because most of the startups in NYC are funded by big companies with NYC HQs. Otherwise, they'd start up elsewhere because everything about running a biz is expensive in NYC (employee wages, taxes, rent, etc).

Third, there's a talent drought in NYC. If a tech savvy type of guy wants to be on the east coast, they usually end up Boston/Cambridge.

High cost of living + startups w/ lots of coin + talent shortage = $$$$ for devs.

Also, I made some broad generalizations. There are plenty of self-funded startups in NYC too.

> It's not the environment that matters, it's the change of environment.

That's a good point. I think as long as a person doesn't put too much hope into the idea that the environment itself is going to force changes upon oneself, it's a good idea.

I'm going to offer a counter-point to your suggestion:

I don't believe changing the external environment, or income, or people who you are near, is going to do jack shit.

Here's why: I feel exactly like the OP. Failed weight loss. Failed relationships (in my case it's making good friends / co-worker relationships). A giant list of failed or incomplete side projects. Still can't pay off my loans.

The difference: I make 3 times as much as the OP. I work for (and have always worked for) exciting startups. I live in a trendy area of NYC (not SF, but the same health-minded social stuff).

The money, the atmosphere, the location: false hopes. They don't change you you are. You're not your salary. You're not your neighborhood. You're not your job.

YMMV, but as someone who's been-there-done-that and hoped that a better job, more money, and better location would somehow fundamentally change who I was, I think that line of hope is no different than someone who thinks a bigger TV, fancier car, or hotter wife is going to make them happy. It won't.

EDIT: Let me be a bit more specific. I don't like it when people do some hand-waving and claim that it's just The Way It Is.

The main issue is that your environment does effect you, it just doesn't change you.

Money: I've lived on ramen & water. I had friends who understood that drinking cheap beer at home was the best I could do. Once I started making more money, I certainly thought I could avoid spending more. And for a while, I did. But things start to add up. First, you network with people who make the same Good Money that you make. So you pretty much have to up your entertainment budget or else be a recluse. Like it or not, your old peers will envy your money. You'll stop getting invited to basement parties (age is certainly a factor too). You decide one day you deserve better than living in a slum with bars on your windows and doors and rats in your walls and upgrade to an OK apartment. You decide it's time to "grow up" and stop buying used clothes. You decide Natty Light isn't the best beer in the world. Your old $25k/year lifestyle is now a $75k/year lifestyle with only incremental changes. This leads me into...

Location: If you move to a yuppie place, you'll spend yuppie money. Coffeeshops cost more. Old dirty grocery stores give way to Whole Foods. There will be subtle, almost subconcious pressure to spend more and be even more critical on yourself than you already are. The "keeping up with the Jones'" cranks into high gear. If you feel like a fat loser in the midwest (or wherever), it's 10x worse when you're surrounded by wealthy in-shape people. Trust me. My smug sense of being better than most people when I lived in poor suburban/rural areas has given way to feeling like a worthless fat piece of crap every time I walk outside (this is a bit of an exaggeration, but with a BMI around 30 I'm easily the fattest guy I can see 95% of the time).

And finally, job: A job is a job. Some are better, some let you work in your boxers, but from 10,000 feet they're all just ways to give you more money to spend on shit that you hope makes you feel better but doesn't. You can try to derive happiness from a job and for some people it works, but it never worked for me because I don't really have much control over my job. At 25 years old I'm not yet in the position of actually making big changes. Sure I can decide on a framework or the language to use, but do I choose which direction the company goes? Do I make hiring decisions? Not yet. Certainly in 5 years this will change but at 3 years out of college, even in startups, you're not given the sort of responsibility, IMO, that gives significant job satisfaction.

Anyway this is all just IMO. There's certain to be folks with the exact opposite feeling on this, so I'm not claiming I'm right, just that this is my experience.

> we prompt them to share their new page with friends immediately after signup

Does this actually work? I've seen a few places that do this but I've always assumed it's probably a poor performer (and makes your site looks spammy) because people haven't had a chance to evaluate if they want to tell their friends about your site.

> Second, and this is the most important point, because it's come up again and again in the comments, he is consistently missing deadlines and has failed to be very productive.

So I wrote a pretty harsh post previously before this little bit of -very important- info was added. Not getting things done while not working full hours is WAY different than getting things done on an unusual schedule.

Odd hours + Productive = OK / expected

Odd hours + Not productive = Dead weight

Good luck.

EDIT: followup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469271

Old post:

I think the OP should be thankful his dev doesn't walk. If I partnered up with some biz guy who demanded I show up early for no other reason than appearance I'd assume he's an empty suit and leave. (9am is early in this industry, I've never had a job that demanded I show up before 10:00).

OP: You're a 2.5 man closet startup and you're asking your other half to be less productive for the sake of appearance. Are you sure he's the one with the problem?

All this talk of being "unprofessional" is a joke when it's two guys who just scrounged up enough capital to rent a cheap office trying to impress a fucking intern. Jesus Christ.

On second thought, I'm certain I'd bail if the OP was my "partner." The lack of thought put into this, the fact that you've considered trying to oust him instead of confronting him, the fact that you seem to lack the ability to look at your company critically (again: 2 dudes and some interns == 9-5 IS NOT A BIG DEAL) all shows a severe lack of biz sense or even common sense. You're obviously insecure (cares too much about appearance to some teenagers), ill-informed (does not understand developers or managing developers) and not equipped for a leadership position (talking to HN instead of the one person in the company who he should be talking to).

I hope the "partner" you're treating like an employee reads this thread and bails. You reached out to a forum instead of talking to someone who's your other half. I can't imagine how you'd run an actual company.

It sounds harsh but it's a harsh industry.

I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the returned image was.

My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer though.

> I have no hard data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that your average woman in her 20s is FAR more likely to be at least partially dependent on a husband or parents than a man of the same age.

Careful with your selection bias, though.

My experience mirrors yours (all my male friends are completely independent, many female friends are dependent on boyfriend or parents), but almost all my male peers are software developers, engineers, some PhDs, etc. My female peers, on the other hand, are from a more diverse pool of people.

Depends a lot on cost of living. For example, I'd never work for as low as $50/hr unless I was very desperate, but I also live in NYC. Typical contractor wages seem to be about $100/hr depending on YOE and type of work.

CS isn't a degree that teaches you how to program. For me it was much more like a discrete mathematics degree. I learned probably hundreds of algorithms (compression, cryptography, 3D rendering, AI), how to analyze and create new algorithms, but not how to program (except in the typical CS101 courses).

It was always assumed that any student could learn the language of their choice from an off-the-shelf book. I myself knew about half a dozen languages and mastered a couple before I graduated, but that was all extra-curricular work. In many ways I'd probably be a better developer if I obtained a Software Engineering degree instead, but CS gave me the foundation to tackle the interesting computational problems.

The professors knew they would be much more valuable explaining how RSA worked than how to debug a syntax error or learn the language of the month.

I will definitely use this. Going to install it when I get home [no Mac at work :( ].

You sound like me. By changing jobs about ~6 times, I've gone from $16k/yr "assistant to the intern DB administrator" to well over six figures. Every job change was either because the job was gone (startup going under) or a very substantial (50%-ish) increase in pay.

The author of the article acts as though anyone who doesn't stick it out for 5 years is actively trying to screw over the company. That's just plain BS.

"You’re in it more for yourself than your company."

What a delusional asshole. If anyone says they care more about a company (and in turn the success of the shareholders) over their own success, they're lying. Anyone who expects this is insane.

Really? _Really?_

You really think that there exist enough "incredibly intelligent" people to fill every tech role in existence?

Sure, every company can _ask_ for the top 1%, but unless they're delusional they're going to have to deal with the fact that some of the people they hire are just going to have to be average. Doubly so for a company offering no job security and long/chaotic hours for a very low chance of payoff in a few years.

Trust me, I know the risks because I've worked almost exclusively with and for start-ups. To me it's completely self evident why startup culture attracts the crazies or "rockstar" programmers. Who else is going to gamble so much time and effort on a what's almost certainly a failed venture? Usually not the industry's top talent, unless they're one of the founders.

Of course, I'm speaking very generally and making sweeping, stereotypes based on my own experience, which may not accurately reflect reality.

--edit--

My post above sounds a bit more aggressive than I intended, sorry. All I'm saying is that "incredibly intelligent" programmers with good communication skills are rare and it's pretty unreasonable (IMO) for a startup founder to just expect them to show up just because he has an idea and a little bit of money.

> I think that a startup is not the place for that kind of person. I just want incredibly intelligent, competent people who are opinionated but value each other as well.

Well good luck then to you, sir. If you find that Perfect Employee who's willing to start a job that might not exist in 6 months with below average pay and benefits (the standard startup MO), hire him or her immediately.

It's not a conspiracy if they're right in the open about it. They're praising a platform that does not exist yet, and what do you know, they have an app that will be available (for $$$) at launch.

I don't mean to imply it some Big Evil Conspiracy. NYTimes is a business like any other and they need to make money. NYT has a vested interest in the iPad's success.

What a surprise: A media outlet looking to stay afloat lauds the unreleased platform they hope to monetize.

Maybe I overreacted, but the article does make some pretty big claims: needing an entirely new version of a site just for non-mouseover browsers? C'mon...

Re-tooling your site so that it's not dependent on mouse-overs, fine. Making a "third" version? Time to re-think your existing site.

> in the short term it's going to require building versions of sites specifically for them.

Or re-think their design choices in the first place (which is of course building a new version, but perhaps not specifically for touchscreens).

1 - Links should look like links. If I have to move my mouse around to figure out which part I click or if it's clickable at all, it's a failure. I shouldn't monitor my status bar or watch my mouse curser for a change. I'm not saying everything should be underlined or something, but make clickable things look like clickable things in whatever way is intuitive for the given site.

2 - Hover to navigate. Get rid of it. Find a way to make the click action do the same thing. I abhor menu systems that require a series of mouseovers to get to the clickable element. If I move my mouse a bit too far it disappears, or FSM-forbid if I don't even know that I'm supposed to be able to just hold my mouse over it to do an action. Also: Javascript required.

The above may not apply to flash widgets, so that's understandable. But even some of the complaints in the linked article could be fixed with a better UI:

"Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise." - OH NO! Maybe do what every app does already: tap once to show controls, fade away after no clicks within a window. Is that hard?

"Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click." See #2.

"Buttons that have important explanations/summaries on mouseover, which you need to understand before deciding what to click." This is relatively valid, but again, make your UI cleaner or more intuitive and this problem solves itself. Look at game controllers for consoles: do they have tooltips?

"Functions that use mouseover to preview and click to commit; such as choosing hair colors for an avatar: you mouse over the colors until your character looks the way you like, and then you click to commit."

Hover becomes a click. Make a separate submit button. Done. Please hire me, I'm apparently an exceptional UI engineer.

... Anyway, I'm not saying there wouldn't be issues of someone took an existing for-desktop flash app and tried to run it on a touchscreen. Most wouldn't work. That being said, is it really so hard to come up with a UI that doesn't require mouse-hovers?

Is it impossible for Adobe to conceive of their product ever working on something without a mouse? That when the mouse-n-curser paradigm is phased out (and eventually it will be) that Adobe is going to close shop because there's just no way to do Flash w/ touchscreens?

I doubt it.

For the older crowd on HN: How much of ageism is real, and how much is in your head?

I only ask because all the places I've worked at have had a lot of older programmers, at least in their mid 30s up to mid 50s being the typical range. Then of course there's the slew of non-quite-programmers-anymore but who still make tech decisions (managers).

Then there's the very frequently uttered "Well he doesn't really have enough experience but we need to fill this position ASAP" and "He worked for Corp XYZ for 5 years?! Get him now!"

I'm not saying it's tough to be a younger programmer because it's not, but strictly IME (internet companies) older devs are a rare and valued commodity.

Now that I think about it, could it be because most of the senior devs don't have much web-related experience, due to it being relatively new?

> I wish more people would do that. There aren't enough of us.

Ehh... I'm pretty glad we're in short supply. Makes it very easy to just walk into (or out of) a job even in a poor economy and raises my wages to levels I feel guilty for charging :-|

Not that I'd do this, but I can at least see the appeal. Just about everyone who wasn't a "big name" that I've contracted for has dicked me in some way. Demanding more work before payment, or dropping off the face of the earth, or "suddenly realized" that 100 hours of work at $100/hr is going to be $10,000, etc.

I realize both parties are taking a risk that the other won't deliver, but once a project is done the situation is heavily in the favor of the person who hires the contractor. At that point the employer has everything they want and the contractor has nothing (or maybe some up-front cost). A method for being able to "un-deliver" or "repo" an un-paid-for product would have been useful to me many times. But un-like a car or house, I can't just take it back.

That being said I'd be paranoid that something would accidentally trigger the validation mechanism. Any time it validates over HTTP there's a chance the server won't make a connection for various reasons, and then you look like an ass.

Eh, I think it's a solution in search of a problem.

Other than looking cool, if you timed yourself, I bet it's much faster to just type it.

(on my mac):

Cmd + L

type "gm" (gmail.com is now highlighted in the dropdown because it's one of the 4 most frequent websites I visit and FF is smart enough to know I probably want it)

Enter

Total time: Less than it takes for fav4.org to load.