guybrushT

I waited for this thread for 10 years (check my username) and then didn't log into hacker news on the day it was posted :)

I wouldn't shower more praise on this game than folks have already done. Great article. Great HN thread. A happy day.

"I would lose the verbs. I love the verbs, I really do, and they would be hard to lose, but they are cruft. It's not as scary as it sounds. I haven't fully worked it out (not that I am working it out, but if I was working it out, which I'm not, I wouldn't have it fully worked out). I might change my mind, but probably not. Mmmmm... verbs."

Signature Monkey Island writing style . Ron Gilbert wrote one of the greatest all time scripts - one can read the entire game here: https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/562681-the-secret-of-monkey-isla...

"Dubliners there was the unlovable A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which starts well, charting bold, clear routes, like “Araby,” through the trackless waters of childhood, then fouls its rotors in a dense kelpy snarl of cathected horniness, late-Victorian aesthetics, and the Jesuitical cleverness that, even in Ulysses, wearies the most true-hearted lover of Joyce."

Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)

Quit a highly paid job with a big company (my decision). Joined a smaller company (my decision). Found great people to work with (luck) who are humble, smart and willing to teach - these days I tap dance to work.

The article doesn't dig into some important possible reasons why the growth may be slowing down. When a company is shipping at a large scale (~80 million devices a year), macro factors must be playing a role -- may be the # of phones shipped in the Chinese market is lower this year than expected?, or slowdown in consumer spending? or some other macro factor. The reason I say this is because the thesis presented in the article ("No Loyalty") isn't well substantiated. There are way too many counter anecdotes available where super loyal 'mi-fans' (thats what the loyal fans of this company are called) have stood in line for hours to purchase the latest phones (a la Apple).

Their growth has been quite phenomenal -- infact, they are probably the fastest company to reach $1B in revenue ever -- which isn't a small feat. But as size grows, doesn't growth inevitably slow down (for almost every company)?

Also, as another commenter has pointed out, they really are a internet of things company, more than a smartphone company. Seeing them just as a smartphone is missing the big picture.

I fully agree. Does anyone have an insight into: Why doesn't he make the source the code he uses in his presentations (e.g. the demo in 'Inventing on Principle') available? It would be hugely instructive and joyful to play with that code :)

Edit: typo

One of the best (and incidentally, very recent) illustration of your point was seen an AMA by Bill Murray [1]. The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them. Soon after, /u/BillMurrayTranslator (some random guy) rewrote the exact same content in a more coherent, punctuated and editorialized manner. The difference in readability is stark! Bill's answers were quite hard to understand because of their stream of consciousness nature.

Reading these two types of writing side by side (as in this ama), convinced me that 'write as you talk' can seem quite odd.

The advice does work fantastically well with people who feel compelled to use very formal language to make their point. In those instances, Write like you talk could mean: write in a simple way.

[1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...

I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry.

Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

I had the good fortune of reading his autobiography. I highly recommend it. It explains the events described in this article (eg the ostracization; allegations of being a communist; attacks on his character; the affairs; seizure of his wealth by the government and the fact that he had to stay away from the country that he loved and called his home for majority of his life). I truly walked away feeling deeply pained and felt sorry for him -- here was a man born into extreme poverty (the scene in one of his movies where the tramp eats a shoe due to extreme hunger, was a part of Chaplin's childhood). His mother went insane (became catatonic) due to hunger. As a small boy he saw his mother being taken away by the police and put into an asylum. And this person, spent his entire life making people laugh.

He was born to make us laugh. I think instead of focussing on his shortcomings and marriages, it is far more important to focus and discuss his craft.

The lookup Hanna speech [1] at the end of the great dictator is must read / listen. One of the best monologues in movie history. Tell me if this speech doesn't move you!

[1] http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechthe... (added link)

There is no immediate need of a hierarchy.

Depending on the size of the team, this is a good thing. As long as you have one "alpha", a designated or undesignated person who makes a call when contentious views are blocking progress.

I believe that a flat structure would be best You'd want to be careful of premature optimization here. I know what you are trying to get at (i.e. ensuring that you are setting up titles and roles that people can grow into), but this may not be the right time to do it.

Any structure is good, bad, best depending on the situation you are in, the size of the group, the problem you are trying to solve etc. The point is not to see hierarchy & structure as inhenrently good or bad -- but to work back from what you are trying to accomplish to the structure you need. Lets say you were trying to organize a 6 month expedition to a remote area with a group of people that you just met. How would you or this group go about it? I don't think you'd setup titles or hierarchy -- you'd probably go with "role clarity", and doing things that engender "excellence" in their respective tasks.

In a startup, one expects an organization to be driven by passion, creativity and very little structure. This is an important part of why people are there. Traditional forms of motivation or organization often don't work very well (e.g. hierarchy money, title or fear). Once the group is large, then there are companies that go for military style "command & control" structures. Even military is organized differently during war time and peace time. This comes back to the context of your particular situation & what you are trying to do. Are you in war time or peace time? :)

The most important thing is that you have a process that everybody understands -- you may never codify that process, but everyone on the team should know that it is there. And the process is: "To get things done & make a difference". What is the best way to do this?

You want to give a sense of progression, via money & title etc. These are good things, but there are more levers you can pull. In a small group, it is obvious who is kicking-ass and who isn't. You should let them, create an atmosphere first where they can do this -- and then, when they are. Talk to them about what they want. Do they want to run a team? Do they want more money? Do they want a more senior title? Do they want more free time? Do they want more flexibility? Do they want more responsibility (e.g. looking at 3 workstreams, instead of one)? Your answers will evolve. But don't take your eye off the prize -- and the prize is to create an atmosphere where people can excel.

Judging merit You make this sound hard, but is it? In a small group, isn't it obvious when someone is kicking ass? The problem you are worrying about is that when somoene is kicking-ass, how do I make sure they are rewarded, so that they continue kicking ass. I would say, let people kick-ass first, and understand why they are -- lets say they inherently love 'solving problems', then give them problems to solve that honors & respects their talents.

Post ends with:

"This project was fun. It was very exciting to bring it to life step by step, and such a pleasure to see it working after we put so much effort in it. But this is nothing compared to how much we learned thanks to it. What seemed to be pretty easy from the beginning, turned out to be very tricky in details. I could not imagine I would have to learn statistical methods and clustering algorithms, dust off my school notes on electronics (though we only need the basics here), and discover a number of useful tools and services on the way."

These are exactly my feelings after reading through this marvelous blog post.

I didn't know about Julian Schwinger's life before this. Two of the many awe-inspiring paragraphs from the text:

Bethe describes his meeting with Schwinger: "I entirely forgot that he [Schwinger] was a sophomore 17 years of age. . . His knowledge of quantum electrodynamics is certainly equal to my own, and I can hardly understand how he could acquire that knowledge in less than two years and almost all by himself.” Bethe concludes that “Schwinger will develop into one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists if properly guided, i.e., if his curriculum is largely left to his own free choice."

"he published his reformulation of quantum electrodynamics in three long papers in Physical Review, Quantum Electrodynamics I (1948), II (1949), and III (1949). They include several of the results for which he, Richard Feynman, and Sin-Itiro Tomanaga were eventually awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics."

A life well led.

I do. And you are right. I think we will get to a place where one company does it right, before we agree on an interoperable standard.

One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar / familiar OS called MIUI.

They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices it makes.

Xiaomi is the largest and fastest growing IoT company on the planet, and worth keeping an eye out for.

Couldn't agree more.

As my username probably reveals, this is my favorite game, and one of the most enjoyable / funny gaming experiences that I have had. The part that I still remember, after all these years is sword fighting insults. Till today, my friends and I sign off our emails with some of these dialogue writing gems [1]

"Nobody's ever drawn blood from me and nobody ever will." "You run THAT fast?"

"People fall at my feet when they see me coming!" Even BEFORE they smell your breath?

"I'm not going to take your insolence sitting down!" "Your hemorrhoids are flaring up again eh?"

What a great game, and what a great era for gaming.

[1] http://monkeyisland.wikia.com/wiki/Insult_Sword_Fighting

There are 2 amazing things about this article: 1. It was written a while ago, and the general description of the country and its problems are just as true. 2. This quote: "In the eastern section of India, there is a company called Bengal Fertilizer, which was built in the early nineties. The government spent $1.2 billion on it and it took seven years to complete. It now employs 1550 people with complete work schedules, vacations, canteens, unions, etc. And yet they have never produced an ounce of fertilizer."

A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.

As a father, and as someone interested in this discussion (about "child learning to talk"), I think you will love Prof Deb Roy's insights into how his infant son learned language.

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word?languag...

As one of the other commenters pointed out - it is like a tree (words/concepts) branching out from one another. I would be fascinated by seeing if this research can be continued into adulthood, where the individual "concepts" aren't as important as the interplay between them.

this is very well made. i was hoping to make something like it - but way (way!) more minimal. here is the first draft - http://adombic.appspot.com

I love this part: "It would have taken an entire lifetime for any engineer with a soldering iron to try all those variations. So I said to him, Now that games are software, it's going to be a different world for games."

This is software eating the world in 1977 and it hasn't stopped till date :)

I am super keen to make a hardware product (I know only software), and started watching this with great anticipation. It would have been great to hear the story about their journey from 1995-2001. Thats would have been hugely valuable in itself. I am stuck at : How do I take my hardware idea, and make it real? How do I make a prototype (it requires an e-ink display) to know if someone will actually like it/use it? Since there are a number of HW startups on this page, thought I will ask my question. Specifically, I want to make a photo frame with an color e-ink display.

Edit: in a sense the journey from 1995-2001 was covered in the startup school video (linked in another comment), but that was mostly about the "company". He didn't cover the "How-to" of specifically how they did prototyping, manufacturing and development in the early days. 'how to start' this stuff is what I am interesting in.

I recently read [1] that one of the fastest company/startup to reach $1B in revenue is the Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi. This brand is #3 in global smartphone market [2]. All of this accomplished without having any big customer base in the US, Europe or Japan (traditionally large markets for tech). Personally, I find this amazing at so many levels. So yeah, I agree with you, China: "the largest everything".

[1] http://www.ogilvydo.com/topics/mobile/the-secrets-of-the-fas...

[2] http://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/1628622/...

What I learned from this is a great way to prototype/demo and share an idea before building the whole app. The three improvements you suggest - 1) re-sharing in groups 2) read confirmation in groups and 3) saving - aren't the pain points that I have.

Personally, my pain is just p2p sharing with a person sitting in front (or next to me) - I want the app to understand (say, when both users press a button - its like scanning for a nearby bluetooth connection) to add a person on my whatsapp, allow me send stuff (pics), share a contact, or share a meeting invite - stuff like that. WhatsApp would be great to do this. Proximity-based p2p connections should be quite easy, and apps could make it "feel" more automatic/magical.

I saw a study from Google in 2012 about the influence of internet on technology product purchases. It had many insightful nuggets about internet in India (my area of interest) - such as explaining the degree to which internet had spread in smaller cities in India, how people in those smaller cities use the internet in their purchase decisions, the fact that query volumes from mobiles phones in India for the same category were growing 3 times faster than desktop..and other such insights.

It felt that the insights were coming from Google's unique vantage point - i.e. their domination over search. I believe that there are many areas in which a company like Google can add great insights to the world (e.g. how to build a great company from scratch) and that when they share them, it ought to feel like "only Google could have come up with this".

If I read a book from someone senior at say Apple about best practices for managing a global supply-chain - then I'd be very curious to understand their unique point of view.

So my first comment about this being "disappointing" is coming more from that angle - Are these insights only Google can give? I am not sure (although it doesn't invalidate the insights themselves). Now, my second comment that I found them shallow, could be because like you say "I already get it" (although frankly, I don't think so - I feel that I don't get this stuff :) I am just always super curious to learn stuff from Google et al).

I found these slides rather shallow

I couldn't agree more with you. I was expecting some fact-based, data-driven insights/perspectives from Google - so, for me I'd say the "insights" seem disappointingly shallow because they are just "opinions".

I keep hearing that one of the big way in which "how google works" is different is that their "people operations" (HR) runs very differently from other companies. I would have loved to understand - how?

"What's different now?" is such a, I am sorry to say, stupid question. Depending on anyone's opinion, their world view, whether they think macro or micro - the answer can range from "nothing at all" to "everything is different". Lets take communication as an example - "what's different now?" - depending on who you talk to, they can argue that the fundamental needs are just the same (just forms have evolved) or someone can argue that things are radically different now because of X (where X could be snapchat or any new-age medium etc.). The same is true for entertainment - I have had discussions where I was convinced that the "fundamental need to be entertained" is just the same, but I also see so many new media around (so of course, its different now).

It would have been great if they had given more insights on how a successful internet age company truly works from the inside - a bit more than "its best to work in small teams, keep them crowded, and foster serendipitous connections". I thought Eric/Google could contribute a new perspective to this discussion, given their vantage point. Otherwise its just another tautological business/self-help book.

I am a bit disappointed because Google's vantage point in this world is so unique (they see so many things in the world, that others don't - given their reach & size) - that they could have really added something very positive and new to "What's different now".

The whole point about "Smart Creatives" also seems so shallow - for hundreds of years and maybe before, "Smart Creatives" as they have defined it, are having tremendous impact! Where is the "So what?" I understand that this is just a teaser to encourage people to read the book. If so, its just bereft of any fact-based, data-driven, truly unique perspectives or insights that I, personally just won't bother.

Is there an ELI5 explanation of what are Deep links? And in the context of an app, what does a "link" to a place in an app means?

"We’re indexing the top apps with deep link tags and building a knowledge graph that organizes apps by their content and by the actions they allow users to take." - whats the advantage for a developer to allow their app to be indexed?

I am super intrigued by the tech. But just want to understand by what it can do for an app.

Tried that. No response.

Looks like there are others who want domains from this company as well - https://www.google.com/?q=JNOM+Online+Marketing+LLC.#q=JNOM+... :)

The post reads like PR. But what I found interesting is just how deeply synchronous and asynchronous communication are intertwined. This may be obvious to many of you, but for me I have always wondered why so many communication channels coexist (without any friction whatsoever) and what specific human purpose they all serve - e.g. when/why I send email, voice call & SMS? (not including the many proprietary ones).

Why a pure messaging app (like Whatsapp) wants to do voice, and why a pure voice app (like Viber) started doing messaging. Perhaps, both are needed within the same app to make it all work - but then why don't they do email? Why not have an app that calls, messages and mails? :)

Well smartphones are probably that app - they are a great communication tool just because they enable SMS, email and voice call together (all in the same seamless package).

Would love to get some thoughts about where you think this app sits in the communication app spectrum - what need it fulfills (I can't see using it, because it does nothing for me). But generally speaking, I'd love to discuss communication apps! :)

There is a recurring theme in this post about "putting candidates to the test" - sometimes simple testing in the hiring form (to select the ones with the highest intent) and them to "test with a project" to find out the best ones. I wonder if this is very practical for a company that isn't a popular/based-in-vally startup. I have a two part question: (a) How successful have you been in getting this level of engagement with candidates before you hired them? I would love to learn more about this. And (b) How well does this work for "non-programming" roles - that is, can you really devise practical projects/problems for people to solve. I know the business development example mentioned in the OP, but that is a small test in the form of a question - but I can't imagine what a real "project" for this type of role would be? -- sorry, thats 3 questions :) .. but I am curious to dive deeper into this aspect of the post.

And just because of that (i.e. making it available online) I cannot even begin to describe just how much good this might do in the world.

I could expand this sentiment to every teacher or lecturer who has chosen to put their video online, especially the great ones. They have done a great service to the world (probably beyond what they may themselves realize).

I recently met an undergrad student in India who considered Steve Huffman to be his guru (he was a fan of his Udacity course, and so am I, btw) and swears by everything Steve taught him. And, Steve probably does not even know that he has a fan following in a small town in India :)