davidhansen

it's nice to be reminded that there's a world outside SV/London where people can actually get started (and funded).

It's also nice to bear in mind that there's a world outside SV/NYC/London where people can get started and succeed without playing the "getting funded" game at all.

Shocking, I know.

We developers are getting evermore control and power on the internet

No, we're getting far less control and power, compared to the free-for-all of the Internet's early days. SOPA is just one example of longstanding power structures extending their control over engineering domains.

In the real world, the people with the guns win. Sometimes it takes time for them to realize the importance of new technologies, but eventually they win. Always.

she said yes. We’re announcing to our family on Christmas, as per our family tradition.

Congratulations, Patrick.

Well, you'd be wrong. Speaking from personal experience, nobody cares about bootstrapped businesses. There is no glory, admiration, or external social validation of any kind to be had by bootstrapping a business. The money, the challenge, and the freedom of control makes the obscurity worthwhile, though.

Minor nitpick.

A spouse, a mortgage, children, student loans -- life quickly throws you all kinds of things that you don't have the option of escaping.

Once you've made the choice to get married and have children, yes, you cannot escape your choice. But life does not "throw" these things at you; you choose them. Some people do not make these choices, and therefore remain free of these constraints forever, regardless of age.

but a lot of people similar to Candidate A who can actually code are being presented with questions about linked lists and similar structures no-one who has written code for years would remember, let alone use in their daily work lives.

Your reference to "remembering" is entirely irrelevant. What is relevant here is whether the candidate can reason through the problem - and more power to the candidate if s/he's been out of school for N years. What I strive for with technical questions is not to find out how well the candidate remembers their Knuth( although finding someone who actually read Knuth is nice ) - it is to determine how well they think through problems. And with no offense intended, if you can't at the very least come up with some ~3N complexity stupid-but-it-works stack-based solution to the problem of reversing a linked list, you probably shouldn't be a professional developer.

Yes, and here's to hoping he doesn't do any business with Citibank, directly or indirectly.

And don't put off marriage.

Why not? Elucidation on this point would be appreciated.

I'm not sure why the author of this article somehow thinks that geeks deny the existence of sexism in geek culture. The reality is that it's widely known and accepted. If the author wants to find something to rail against, he should have chosen the fact that everybody knows, but nobody cares.

I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people bring up one of the most important factors in its existence, one which has nothing at all to do with objectification. It has more to do with envy, anger, and an amazing ability to hold a grudge.

Many HN readers are from a younger generation than myself. Many of you grew up always equating geek with "cool", and have no conception of what it would be like to be treated as nearly subhuman for liking computers. Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely rejected, but openly mocked by girls during the most critical time in a young man's life when he is supposed to develop his sense of social status and sexuality. Frustration and humiliation is quick to turn to anger, and from anger, a deep rooted misogyny.

The result of this kind of upbringing is often a socially stunted man who, despite all his powers of logic and reason, finds it difficult to reason away the anger that he knows shouldn't be there, but is. He witnesses sexism and mistreatment of women around him, but he lacks the empathy required to say or do anything about it.

This concludes my armchair psychologist's analysis of one possible dimension of a hypothesis of why many of my generation permits geek culture to allow rampant sexism.

Caveats: I have no data or training in psychology to suggest this is at all a significant factor. But I am quite familiar with the phenomenon, and I know several other nerds who experience the same thing. I mention it only because it seems the zeitgeist is that men don't even see the sexism. I posit that many do see it, but it doesn't matter to (a good portion of) them. And that a possible cause of this in geek culture specifically is latent adolescent anger at women.

I've worked in software for roughly 14 years, and I've worked almost exclusively for startups during this time. I understand the concept of nepotism, so I get your point - I guess my question is not really "how do these people keep their jobs" so much as it is "how do these people even exist?" The notion that a conscious human being could behave in the manner described is unfathomable.

I can't speak to social networks or social media tools, but I can assure you that ecommerce has a lot of difficult problems to solve. To a first approximation, it's easy to throw up a LAMP site and sell random crap. Once you get beyond this and start trying to squeeze out profits by building and executing on various optimization problems, things get significantly more complex. Companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart have invested huge amounts of money into esoteric research to optimize supply chains, fulfillment processes, inventory control, promotional returns, energy usage, expected customer value, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

The product is probably about 90 % done already, the last 10 % should take no more than two weeks

Spoken like a true non-technical cofounder :)

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the the pareto principle applies heavily to software development projects. It's quite likely that the "last 10%" will take much longer than you think.

That said, I've seen this happen quite often from inexperienced developers, and it sounds like you have one on your hands. It's easy for passion and ego to carry a project from a blank slate to a state of mostly-functioning. Hackers usually get a great rush from this stage of the project. It's their code, their architecture, their baby. Sure it's got some rough edges, but the important stuff is done. Their genius has been imbued into it, now comes the drudgery of polishing the edges - oh wait, this sucks. The process of turning something that works into something that's usable or salable is boring. What a letdown. They just solved this intractable problem in O(log n) time, and now you want them to make the interface's corners rounded or add some copy? Bah. They'd rather stare at the wall.

This is a total shot in the dark here, but I've seen it often enough that I'm fairly sure it's the mentality you're dealing with. And I can't say there's an easy solution. It's nearly impossible to motivate hackers who think creating software is all fun, all the time. You either chose a bad cofounder, or just a young one who needs some exposure to real software development projects. either way, I'd recommend a confrontation, followed up by hiring out if things don't change.

The completely honest answer to your question is that I'm not willing to start killing people. Seriously, no troll.

I understand that the popularity contest driven plutocracy we currently operate under will never create a sane government. This is not because voting doesn't "work" - I am not suggesting conspiracy here. But affluent societies don't give a shit. On the whole, so long as you feed, clothe, house, protect, and entertain your electorate, you can do whatever you please, and your power will likely not be challenged. My vote does not, and never will, count, when I am vastly outnumbered by the votes of people so comfortable in their lives that they don't bother with silly things like political introspection.

So, my only alternative is to participate in the only historically viable means of effecting meaningful change: a violent overthrow of the system. I am not willing to do this. That is why I don't "do something".

I'm not calling you a liar, but I'm skeptical about stories like this. I can't even fathom any scenario in which someone more intelligent than a cucumber could behave in this manner. How does this PM manage to get and maintain any job at all, let alone one that requires the ability to understand software development process and constraints?

You've also probably seen thousands of variants on "what ever happened to do no evil?" posted to myriad Google articles over the years, as well. Such is the nature of discussion. Sometimes the same idea in a slightly different context is unique enough to qualify for positive value. Does my comment qualify? I don't know.

I will just note that some of us lived through the dot com bust, and we remember quite clearly what the mentality was like, especially for insiders. For us, the environment today is damn near identical to what it was like then; we just had slower connections and hardware. When we post semi-snarky comments like this, we do it partly as a warning. Profits do matter. At some point, the kids will realize it.

How are you defining value creation? Why are investment sizes listed, but not earnings, or even revenue?

Oh, that's right. It's 1999 all over again.

What about product and administrative ? Both are usually large enough to be their own categories, especially compared with something like PR.

I operate a number of ecommerce sites, so I'll give my perspective. I will preface this by saying I like the concept, and the implementation is clean. Congratulations on your launch - it's nice to see new ideas entering the industry.

First, you should be aware that launch traffic is demographically nothing like customer traffic. If your site has been posted to tech blogs, startup blogs, tweeted amongst your tech friends, etc, then most of that launch traffic is of the "I'm just checking out this cool new site" variety. This does not convert nearly as well as the "I really need to schedule a gift for my wife" variety. Expect your blog links to pay off over time in SEO linkjuice value, not in the one-week short run.

Second, you picked a bad time to launch a gift scheduling service. Well over half of your potential customers have already purchased the items in their gift list. And for those that haven't, they will most assuredly be going to companies with longer-running reputations that they can trust to fulfill delivery timeframes. Expect October of next year to be significantly better.

Third, the UI is probably not intuitive to people accustomed to traditional ecommerce sites. Aunt Millie is probably not going to realize that clicking on the barely-visible arrow icon on the left/right margins will display another product. One unfortunate fact about ecommerce, and one that is likely the driving force behind stagnation in design evolution, is that catering to expectations is usually more valuable to conversions than catering to coolness. I say usually because there are a few exceptions to this rule( think Apple ), with heavy emphasis on a few.

Fourth, impatience. Seriously, it's been a week. It takes time to get to know your customers. As you learn more about them, you'll be able to craft an experience more conducive to giving them what they want, and as a by-product, increase the conversion rate.

Orange County, CA

That may be about to change, however. Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with a mass about three times that of Earth that's on a trajectory that will have it pass close to Sgr A in 2013*

If this is for real, I am ridiculously humbled by the power of modern astronomy. It's pretty damned amazing to me that we have the ability to detect the location, dimension, and trajectory of a mere 3 earth-masses of thin, amorphous gas 27k light years away, in the noisiest and densest part of the galaxy.

Related anecdote:

When we first started, the niche for our first retail site was already dominated by several existing companies. Like idiots who didn't know any better, we went ahead anyway.

Fast forward a few years: We now own several of the aforementioned companies.

Interesting, are you in NYC or the Bay Area? In our local market, a 7 year ruby developer would command on the order of $75k.

Just as a warning, angel.co is completely useless if you don't already have a number of preexisting connections to the angel investing community. If you start with 0 followers, you will have 0 followers forever, and nobody will ever see your profile.

Could someone help me understand the space thing? Specifically the phenomenon of rich engineers and businessmen like Allen, Carmack, Branson, Bezos, Shuttleworth, etc spending huge amounts of money on space-travel-related projects.

I, like many nerds, grew up with a powerful fascination with space, cosmology, and the myriad science fiction novels based around the various problems and possibilities of space travel. I understand the allure. I am also a capitalist, and therefore don't begrudge these guys the opportunity to do with their money as they see fit.

What I don't get is why we never hear of wealthy engineers spending their money on technology projects that would have a much much larger benefit to humanity, and arguably cooler than spaceflight. Things like nanotech, robotics, and hell, even cold fusion come to mind.

Why space?

From launch? Roughly an hour.

More drum-beating about this illusory talent shortage, eh? I'm still waiting to see any signs at all that this shortage actually exists, aside from random "I can't find a rockstar!" anecdotes.

In some ways we think the 1% are a bunch of undeserving assholes who are screwing things up for the rest of us. We see Valleywood as a huge bubble and, just like Hollywood, it often looks shallow, vain, and like nothing more than novelty from the outside.

They are, and it is. The bubble will pop, and those of us who managed to build sustainable businesses without the benefit of setting huge piles of other people's money on fire will be very well positioned to take advantage of the carnage.

Patience is rarely a virtue in the startup world. But in this case, it is. Keep building.

Meanwhile, those of us continuing to succeed in the "tech backwaters" of the US will be forever amused by the smug self-satisfaction coming out of the "cool" cities. This little spat being just one example.

People need contact with people.

Usually, but not always. Hermits really do exist.

My understanding is that he works 13-14 hours per day, 6 days per week, and he takes Sundays off entirely for family time:

"I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son.

ref. http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.htm...