wright

What about for people without Flash, where's the download link?

PG, I would have downmodded him for you but some mean people took all my points :(

> I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that

Not on the heavy consumer apps, eh?

> Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team.

So you're saying they have positions open that need people with taste to work on them. In other words, they have a shortage of people with taste ;)

> Done away with, last I heard.

What's the process now?

It's probably family, not a formal investor.

You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.

The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.

> I also a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?

Try to keep up here, Freddo. Try following the context :) Smart is orthogonal to skilled at a particular endeavor.

> Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.

Funny how you twisted "lacking in the taste department" into "dumb". It's a computer industry truism that MS lacks taste, whereas Apple has good taste.

This is also amusing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/05.html

> Never pay to pitch, basically.

That's just good advice generally!

I agree that the frameworks are great for automating a lot of the junk we used to have to do manually. The "problem" is that people are cutting their teeth on things that don't require much knowledge, so they may miss out on a lot of fundamentals.

After the low-hanging fruit, there are some real problems that require some serious knowledge to solve.

> No longer can you just be a very good hacker to succeed, you also need to be able to raise money, market your product

Some people are just coding, not doing startups :)

My next YC idea: A plugin for Vista that makes it work.

> who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year,

That's what 4-year vesting is for. Besides, part-time work from an expert is better than full-time work from the hoi polloi.

I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.

If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department. And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?

Being good at bluster can make someone seem pretty smart. But the computer doesn't care about that. It filters out what you can really do from what you can fool people into thinking you can do.

> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.

Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.

Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.

Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.

You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.

In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!

More like how your car can't require its own brand of oil, gas, air filters, light bulbs, etc. If Cisco starts selling its operating system on a CD and you make a clone that can run it, it's fair game. Or another company that makes specialized firmware can sell it so you can install it on your car, assuming it passes regulatory requirements for safety (I'd assume).

http://www.google.com/search?q=illegal+tying

From what I hear they are going to be the most successful YC-funded company.

> I don't mean plagiarize them, but emulate what they're doing and figure out the parts that you're good at.

They DID plagiarize. Nobody's objecting to other seed investors, just the plagiarizing.

What they SHOULD have done is asked YC for permission to use their application, then said "we are using YC's application with their agreement in order to make things easier for applicants".

It was Picasso and artists.

> who fail to understand the humor in the above para may not kindly apply.

I don't know why writing about establishing some kind of sweatshop in a poverty-stricken country would be seen as funny. There are a lot of places that have conditions like that, no joke.

In light of the Lexmark decision Apple can't stop others from being interoperable legally. Their choices are to bludgeon clonemakers with frivolous lawsuits and try to bankrupt them for pursuing their rights, or to keep trying to make OS X paranoid about what it's running on while clonemakers keep patching the code that does hardware checks. And clonemakers might even be able to sue to stop Apple from doing that.

See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/07/1416228

Nah, the DMCA bites the bucket in cases like that. It was already overturned for a garage door opener and a printer manufacturer.

You can't claim DMCA protection in cases where you are simply trying to shut out competition. Others are allowed to be interoperable.

Requiring usage only on Apple hardware would be illegal tying.

Trying to do it technically would amount to the same thing.

> I was a diligent Oriental in high school and college.

Orientals are objects. Asians are people.

> Frankly, smoking, drugs, alcohol--and using an IBM PC--are signs of stupidity. End of discussion.

Probably the majority of creative people in the history of the world have used drugs of some type. In fact, that's how we got some of our finest literature and works of art.

IBM PC? Is he still stuck in the 80s?

> There absolutely are absolute rights and wrongs.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -- Anatole France

Guy was just a PR flack for Apple which happened to net him a lot of face time and even magazine covers. He doesn't "Think Different", he just got a marketing job and talked up his employer. Fini.

Anagrams for founders coop:

------------------------------------------

Unforced Oops

Dunces Of Poor

Poser Fund C.O.O.

It's not about copying the idea.

It's about making yourself look like a total asshat by copying someone else's writing verbatim and passing it off as your own.

> which I'm sure they'd rectify if asked,

"If you have to ask..."

> then they'll, like most ventures, find ways to differentiate themselves and do their thing or die.

There's a YC copycat in India that differentiates itself by posting armed guards to keep you in your office until midnight. And not let you sleep. Seriously.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158049

Calm down. This is precisely how industries standardize. No one thought it was "sickening" when search engines pages started to imitate each other's blue title + grey descr + green url design. It was just an obviously good idea.

How does that feel, bitch?

> It is a bit disturbing that he took everything exactly...

Still think they sound legit?

I find it dubious not only for the massive plagiarism (even the word limit!) but in that they seem to lack the l33t skills needed to make an HTML form submission page.

I think having YC in your corner is a boost; these guys look like they'd HURT your chances. Why would you want people who are unoriginal and unscrupulous dragging you down?

> Suppose instead you split that investment between 10 companies at a tenth the valuation. How confident do you have to be that any given one will become a billion dollar company?

You'd have to be more confident in aggregate.

Let's say in the former case you have a 50% certainty with one company; and in the latter case you have 5% confidence with each of 10 companies.

The chance that NONE of them succeed to that degree is 0.95^10, or about 60%. So only a 40% chance someone will make it, vs. 50% for the former.

With smaller probabilities the difference is less, but guesstimating at billions is such a crapshoot. How about something more realistic?

How about doubling your money: Let's say you put $1 mil into the former company. If it doubles its worth, you've doubled your money. But in the $100k for each of 10 companies case, they all have to double their worth, or one has to grow 20x.

Let's say you think it's a 50% safe bet in the former case, but a whopping 90% chance in the smaller cases. The chance they ALL double up is 0.90^10, or about 35%. So you're probably losing money.

Sure, some might do 3x or 4x to make up for a couple of the flops, but you probably aren't going to let a 100k investment just die; you'll be sinking more into the money losers, so the successes have to do even better to make up for the bailouts.

It kind of depends on what your strategy is. Netscape had to staff up quick so they raised as much as they could. In their case, they needed as much as they could get, I suppose.

He's a computer freedom activist. Worked for the EFF, anti-DRM campaigner, etc. Not that anyone should need special qualifications before they stand up for their rights.

That's true, plus you have to be pretty smart to graduate medical school.