PaulJoslin

I think the real reason people say 'ideas are cheap' - is because in the grand scheme of things - an idea is not worth much.

An idea on it's own, is just an idea - without a really good execution / team behind it - it has little to no value.

Only once a good idea has been executed really well, by a good team - does that idea suddenly have value. Generally the 'proportional' effort of actually executing the idea (in time / money / resources) - compared to the effort in generating the 'idea' - makes just having the 'idea' cheap.

This is not to say all ideas should be valued equally - there are both good ideas and bad ideas, but no idea will provide value (or have much worth) without it being executed really well.

(Hence someone can think of something like 'uber' or 'facebook' - relatively simple concepts to conceive as an idea - but without huge efforts in execution - they would not have become as valuable as they are).

What I mostly notice is that people who have never tried to execute an idea (or don't even know where to start) - are the ones who generally value ideas the highest. e.g. someone may say 'I have an amazing idea, but I won't tell anyone in case they steal it'... or someone else may say something like 'I had the idea for facebook before facebook existed'.

In both of these examples - the person has valued their 'idea' as much as the end execution.

Just looking at his two blog posts, I think that the company's hiring practice worked perfectly and weeded out someone who may be technically competent, but is toxic to the work environment.

His tone is aggressive and completely self centred - imagine trying to have a meeting with him where he sticks stubbornly to his opinion, refusing to listen to other opinions and potentially throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get his own way.

Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I'm not saying anyone should work for free, but sometimes you have to help out, whether it's working a bit later or helping during a crunch time. He comes across like he only would want to work on things that interest him, during the hours he's paid and then be out the door.

I think the company that was hiring did a good job of filtering him out.

I think this is an important lesson in marketing and getting press attention that other start ups or entrepreneurs should take note of.

The key to getting press / marketing attention / viral affect is to do something different that gets people talking.

On black Friday everyone is cutting their prices. If you put out a press release saying you were cutting your prices too it is unlikely to even register on the press' radar. However, do something so different and disruptive that it becomes a unique and funny story and it warrants press attention and share-ability.

Quite often I notice people on HN reading every post about 'Simple guide to marketing your app' or other people's success stories, thinking 'If I follow these steps they used to promote their app, I'll have the same success' - however the opposite is true, if you do what they did you're less likely to have the same impact they originally had.

This applies to anything from the original idea of sending personalised emails to the blogosphere regarding your new app, to the original milliondollarhomepage.com.

TL;DR; - Be different, disrupt the expected and gain press by not following the crowd.

It's coming from China[1]. A LOT OF MONEY from China. Like $millions. That's how all these early adopters in the USA are being able to cash out millions and the price is not crashing.

They seem to like the fact it separates them from the US dollar, as well as allowing Chinese residents more control over their money and a potential store of wealth comparable to gold (although far more volatile).

Of course I still believe this is unsustainable, but in a strange form this is a wealth rebalancing act on a global scale... the rich Chinese giving money to the US citizens.

As long as the rest of the world doesn't go bitcoin mad and let the Chinese cash out again, then if it ever pops there will be a lot of wealth lost in China.

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/bitcoin-surges-to-1...

This is why I was unable to buy bitcoins when I first read about them on HN in 2010 and similar in 2011 when the price had gone over $1 and actually showed promise. (I have some emails to colleagues / friends showing my frustration at the time of wanting to get some)

I always wanted just 1 (still do), but back in 2010 I was just going to spend £100 and see what happens. It seems in the US the people who did similar to what I wanted to do in varying forms made good profits (and had an interesting ride).

This is different from 'speculating' (e.g. 'oh I wish I had actually bought some') - I had full intent and wanted to buy them, but just the barrier to entry due to UK regulations were very high. I even tried to arrange peer to peer transactions through reddit or in person but they also seemed difficult. Most people I ever met in person who had any didn't want to sell due to the belief of the ever increasing price.

Capitalism is powered by money and greed. At it's heart, the point is to maximise profit and efficiency. This drives innovation and growth across the world... this is no bad thing.

However, as a side of effect of this, it also means businesses want to become more efficient, reduce costs and maximise profitability - your share holders are expecting good returns and that's just the way the world works!

However, according to this http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-ratio-average-worker/ The CEO is currently getting around 241 times the average salary!

Let's say the CEO takes $9.6 million and the average worker gets $40,000...

This income divide is causing the problem, as the prices will move up in line with the wealth the CEO has just got (along with the workers obviously), but to the average worker, they're not really being paid much more (or any more at all) to counter act the inflation.

If you go back to that graph in 1980 where the CEO only made 35 times the amount of the average worker and redistributed more of the profit to the employees, let's say average employee now gets $55,000 and the CEO gets $2,000,000 then the prices remain more affordable relative to the money in the market and the wealth has been distributed more evenly.

Note this is with the assumption the corporation still made the same profit whichever way it was divided.

The top 1% of wealth is greater than the other 80% of wealth combined in the USA and it's this greed that is causing the divide, rise in prices and rise in poverty line compared to the 'average salary'.

That is incorrect, London is not like that today. London is an extremely multi cultural city, with both rich and poor living side by side in the same boroughs. A lot of people argue that most of London's unique culture in places like Brixton came from the poor and that's what made London in a lot of ways great.

If you say, everyone in London will need a job, then you are then moving the poor / unemployed on mass out of the city. On paper this may look great, but for social-economic reasons this is a disaster.

You would end up with a 'walled garden' of elite living in London and the poor / unemployed living outside. The city would lose it's unique cultures, become even more gentrified / elite than it currently is and social unrest could start to occur.

1. I address this somewhere else. I agree this is broken, but this is not a problem with the benefit system - it's something to do with wages not rising accordingly with everything else.

2. Perhaps, although if they do something stupid with that money, they still need supporting - so you either let people go homeless / starve or help them (which creates a new layer of welfare)

3. I'm not saying twice the food would be consumed, I'm saying prices would rise accordingly which would mean consuming the same amount of food costs more than it does now. The goal posts will just be moved and the poverty line will be above the basic minimum everyone gets paid.

The idea is nice, but if it causes widespread increases in costs / consumer goods / rent due to the reasons I mentioned, then the only places you may be able to just stay at home and work may not be the place you want to be.

For example, I live in London and enjoy this city. I would love to be able to stay at home and work on my side projects in hope of making extra money, but given the outcome I believe from this, everyone who was to only accept the basic income amount would no longer be able to afford to live in London and would have to relocate to less desirable places in the country.

Yes, you would now be free to work on your projects from your own home, but you would now not live where you want, with the people you are friends with, in an area which would be full of people who also are only taking the basic wage and probably a pretty horrible place.

The on paper calculations of the affect of this is like a snapshot of some code, before you press run. In the first state it is in, it would be fine, but the economic effects from this over the long term both in social and financial terms would be profound.

That's correct Mike, it's not always the case (benefits being cut and working a job can provide you with a worse quality of life) - but I think that is more of a problem regarding the wages people are being paid in jobs, rather than the benefits system.

For a long time inflation, house prices and general costs have beat basic wage increases - leaving many working for less money relatively than they would've got years ago. Meanwhile, the big corporations report yet ever greater profits and the CEO's take ever higher multiples of basic salary in bonuses each year.

The system is broken, but the equality of pay and living standards is not to blame with the government, it's to blame with greedy corporations, share holders insisting they need to do anything for profit and wages being pinned down to the minimum they can be that the work force will stand for (to maximise profits).

If corporation pay was fairer (like it used to be) where perhaps a CEO only makes 10 times the basic workers salary, rather than 100 or 1000 times the basic workers salary, then the wealth from the corporation output would be shared more evenly and the problem would be solved (for people in work).

Not to mention corporations which don't pay tax causing governments to lose out on a lot of tax revenue which would in turn pay to support the poor!

The thing I genuinely don't understand regarding the basic income for all argument is that surely it just moves the goal posts rather than solves the problem at hand?

In the current system, you can go stay at home and get income support, which should provide you with the basics i.e. a home, food, electricity etc. If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working.

[Note the 'should' and 'hopefully' - This system may not always work, but when it doesn't it's generally a fault with wages paid not being sufficient rather than the benefits system being broken]

This therefore means there is an incentive to go work. There is also control, to make sure the money the unemployed person is getting is mostly spent on the basics (such as housing, rather than say drugs).

The problem with suddenly giving everyone a minimum amount of money, is that due to everyone now 'at least' having that amount of money at hand, this becomes the new 'bottom' of the market. If I get a job, I earn money on top of this basic amount, which means I can afford nice things and the person unemployed still can't afford anything.

To clarify, this works similar to pricing of items in different markets. A beer in the UK is ~£3.50 (£5 in London), a beer in Vietnam is about 14 pence. Both costs are fairly relative to what they would have to pay their work force to produce the item (plus cover costs and make a profit) and what the local market can afford to pay.

If let's hypothetically say, you gave everyone in Vietnam this basic wage, the cost of beer would not remain at 14 pence. The first reason is because the work force would find their existing pay negligible compared to the basic pay (so wages would have to rise to be incentive to work on top of basic pay) which would in turn cause cost of manufacturing to rise, but also the market would realise with this extra money available - the price could be set higher and would rise accordingly.

Now back in the UK if this was to occur, you would have slight price rises due to these factors which would in affect move the poverty line up higher, which would mean the people at the bottom are still poor relatively.

What's worse is that assuming the people who are unemployed are given the choice on how that money is spent, they may in fact not spend the money sensibly (i.e. on their housing) and end up homeless instead.

The final problem with this model is that the cost of living and economic output is not evenly distributed throughout a country. £1750 a month in northern England may give you a fantastic lifestyle, where as in London you'd barely cover your rent. (What happens to the unemployed in London in a fixed give everyone a basic income situation? They have to leave London and move where they can afford, which then makes it potentially harder to find a job and splits the country into two halves, the elite / the poor).

Fantastic work. I really hope pg has accepted your application to ycombinator. You clearly have a talent for hard work, perseverance and knowing how to market your product well. Even if pg doesn't like the idea, he should realise the team is very capable.

I have a question though Karen, did you know you were going to do this project before you created this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w ? (I originally saw it on r/GetMotivated when it went viral originally) or did you decide to build it due to the popularity that the video got and the requests from people wanting to achieve similar?

(Just curious from a marketing point of view whether you planned for the dance video to go viral to boost your idea or whether you saw an untapped market due to the popularity of the video and decided to fill it)

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[EDIT] - Just got my question answered by watching this : http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s - I'm glad that it was an idea that came out of the viral consequence of the original video, rather than the original plan all along.

Also just realised that the woman learning to walk video I saw today on r/GetMotivated was submitted by you / part of the same project.

I can see pg's mind turning over in the office hours video, trying to understand the concept and how big it can grow - I think he's right in the fact that you should see how people use it and allow yourselves to pivot if another idea emerges out of where you're at so far.

I guess the issue is that one of the reasons for the successful popularity of your original dancing video was that it had a nice balance of unique story, being told in a short enough manner that the viewer keeps watching, combined with the final scene coming together perfectly with the music / train / nailing the dance which in my opinion was the 're share' moment - where the user thinks 'I must re share this!'.

The problem is in the 10 second videos it's unlikely I'll want to 're share a single video' - so it's the compiled story at the end which becomes the thing I want to share as a user - but that's not automated / easy to produce. That said, I did enjoy watching the journey of you guys producing the product in 100 days (10 second clip at a time) so, in a world of transparency and people wanting free publicity it does seem to work. (infact I would happily continue watching the journey for 10 seconds a day, to continue the journey past launch out of interest to see what happens next).

Either way, both you and Finbarr have produced, marketed and launched a cool product in 100 days which is a pretty amazing feat in itself.

I understand what the blog post is trying to convey and I agree that programming is a wonderful craft, allowing anyone who knows how to code an amazing world of possibilities.

However, the way the blog post tried to convey this, it falls down for two reasons:

1 ) If you were someone who had studied media rather than programming you could film your own 'news' channel and upload it to youtube if you thought you could disrupt the news industry. This being the equivalent of sitting in your bedroom at home making a site or an app the way you want to. Thus this freedom to express your ideas does not just apply to programmers.

2 ) Just assuming that the news industry team don't know what they're doing and as a new hire media intern you would know how to fix it for them if only they let you, is almost like being a new intern at a software house and expecting to go in and tell everyone they need to change their methods or practices because you know best.

I expect you'd get similar resistance to making them change, as in both examples you as an intern have little experience compared to the people in either industry. What from an outside observer (or new hire) may seem dumb, perhaps is the most effective methods after years of A / B testing by the people within that organisation.

Am I right in thinking with this design you can only have one app as a point of focus at a time? So assuming I'm doing development, I can't be in my IDE, with a browser open on a particular stack overflow question, while having the app I'm debugging open in front of it all and some other app also in view showing diagnostics?

Instead, I'd have to flick back and forth between the apps like a headless chicken?

[Edit] Actually, take his example apps as a suggestion. He's running VLC to watch star trek, but can't watch it at the same time as say using the browser. In a traditional window set-up, you can just set VLC to stay on top and overlay a portion of the screen while you can continue doing something else (like using the browser).

Although the concept looks pretty, it almost seems to be a step backwards in available functionality.

The idea of it was a smart idea, but the real reason for the success was the marketability of the story behind it.

In a world of internet before everything went viral, this story was just 'crazy enough' to essentially go viral. The concept of a page being worth a million dollars both in a literal and theoretical sense made this quite a popular link to share in the initial phase (when the site was empty apart from a couple of adverts).

This then drove a viral / media engine (including television / radio and word of mouth) which suddenly actually made the pixels on the page worth something!

Companies now flocked to get adverts on the site which was getting a large number of genuine traffic / media attention and thus the media cycle continued (as it was now a profitable, extremely successful site) - this in turn finished when the page was full and months later everyone lost interest.

Unfortunately, I think many of the copy cat sites didn't understand why this was successful in the first place. It was a clever new idea, which was likely to get press attention for being so 'unique' / 'clever' - the copy cats were unlikely to ever get the same 'viral' effect, so were never going to become successful like the original site.

If I remember correctly, even the founder himself tried to spin off a second site based on the same concept with limited success - mainly because people had seen it before.

I really like this idea.

It removes the risk for the developer to just 'build' (which is ultimately what they enjoy doing) and also shifts the key responsibility for the initial marketing / customer acquisition away from the developer (which is often what they either don't enjoy doing or suck at).

After this phase, either the idea is a success, the developer gets paid and a mvp is now a business hopefully with profit (for both parties involved) or the idea was not a success and the developer still gets paid some money.

If you have a world changing idea and you've quit your job with a plan to start a start up - that's fine. This probably isn't the right opportunity for you - try Y Combinator or go in search of real funding once you've built a self financed MVP.

However, if you're a developer with a niggling idea that you keep meaning to work on because you know it could turn into something bigger or you just don't feel confident in your own marketing / customer (or user) acquisition skills then this is a really great opportunity!

I've literally missed so many opportunities before, where I've had an idea - not executed it due to no short term monetary reward or no confidence that I could market it correctly and then watched as a start up is formed a year or two later by someone else which was essentially that idea!

I disagree. I thought it was a clever idea to ask people what they would pay for the service. It's a simple service, pricing it would be hard unless people tell them how much it's worth to them.

The question isn't. 'What do you think this service is worth?' - the question is 'How much would you be willing to pay for this?'.

The key difference being, I may like to use the service if it was $5 a month, but not if it was $50 a month - on the other hand someone else may do thousands of invoices and be happy to pay $100 a month.

The feedback he'll get will let him guage the size of the market, the prices people will be prepared to pay and allow him to offer a reasonable plan. Without this prior research he could over price or under price the product substantially.

If on the other hand, no one gives him any feed back on how much they'd pay - I'd take that as clear sign that either the market isn't there for people willing to pay for this or he's targeting the wrong market with his marketing.

Perhaps half the reason they kept asking about the business model / trying to compare it to Dropbox was that they were trying to evaluate whether they had a potentially billion dollar + company on their hands, or a niche nice little side business.

It has been discussed in detail in one of PG's essays [1] about how it's only the big wins that matter to them these days and trying to determine whether the company has the chance to become that big is all part of the problem.

The fact that you didn't get into Y Combinator shouldn't have stopped you continuing with your idea. It is a problem that needs a solution and your solution may have ended up being a multi million dollar idea which would have given you both great success. The problem is, the start up space these days and incubators in particular are on the hunt for the billion dollar ideas - thus they can gamble on many, for the few successes to help break even.

At the end of the day, you guys seem really switched on and the effort / level of detail you went through suggests you are capable of success - just potentially you need to re apply with a bigger idea next time, after reading PG's 'Black Swan' essay to understand what they're wanting to hear you pitch.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

I don't want to be negative, but $34 for a 124 page book seems a bit steep. What's more, the fact it's 37 interviews over 124 pages means that on average it's only 3.3 pages (including pictures) per 'interview' / example.

If we expect a standard introduction / conclusion to the book, then I expect the average number of pages per example would be even less.

Looking at the sample on his site, it doesn't exactly go that in depth with the questioning.

I think the key attraction to this book and many other 'self help / get rich / be successful' style books, is that people get drawn in by the 'examples' and hope that somewhere in the pages there is the answer that they've been looking for, the golden piece of information that's going to guarantee them success. However, their time may have been better used trying to execute their idea, rather than just trying to read things which reiterate the success of others.

- If this was $12 I would have not been so negative, but for $34 it just seems steep considering the potential lack of real value it will give.

One of the trends I've noticed more and more over the last few years, is that Design is now a USP in itself.

Take anything that already exists and execute it with better design / user experience and watch it become popular / successful.

That said, it once again highlights that as developers, we shouldn't ignore design or think that just getting the basic functionality working is all that matters. Design in a consumer market is a major influencer, often more so than the functionality itself.

Well, think about it this way. How many people as a result of his great advice and transparency have mentioned / linked to his site?

- That alone ensures he will rank top of Google for any Bingo Card Creation based key words.

- Then there's word of mouth from anyone who has ever read one of his articles to anyone who may benefit from using his software.

To be honest, some of the recent success stories like this, have often become a success partially due to the publicity gained through sharing how they got it and being transparent.

If they had stayed quiet, most of these success stories may not have happened at all.

Examples: - BingoCardCreator - Buffer - The guy who sells the ebook on making money through android - Etc.

Often, these scenarios have marginal success, which the owners then blog about, which gains a lot more attention, which drives the business forward and makes their success larger. This then becomes even more news worthy and the process repeats.

Refined carbs / refined sugar seem to be the problem with most foods these days. With the fear of 'fats' many food producers replaced the 'fat' with refined sugars to add the flavour with less fat (on paper).

- http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/sugar-problem/refined-sug...

- http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/nutrition/a/fructosedangers...

I think what I enjoyed the most watching this was the fact that he clearly has a lot of artistic talent, as well as the ability to code.

Many programmers have been unable to produce masterpieces, due to the lack of ability to produce any of the required graphics / sprites.

Notch was just adhoc drawing animated sprites and they looked great.

You have to realise that quite a lot of the ground work he is doing at this point is probably very familiar code. The fundamental code which scrolls the screen about, renders the sprites and moves the objects around the screen will be something he's written so many times it's instinctive.

Cool concept, fairly good execution.

I think I would advise not to just focus on concerts, but potentially other mass events, e.g. sporting events.

I guess you're using the audio stream to do some form of sync / time stamp though, so that may limit potential uses.

I agree, this functionality is not required to make the product succeed. The product is already useful in itself.

I was merely referring to a use case of someone learning to program / think like a programmer by watching replays of real programmers doing their job. e.g. similar to pair programming / training with a mentor, but be distributional across the internet.

As far as 'training' / 'learning':

- If the student looks at some finished code, they can understand how to do something for a specific use case once, but maybe not know how the original programmer got to that solution.

- If the student watches someone write that code, they can understand how to write something similar again themselves and know roughly the process of thought that was used.

- If however, the student can not only watch someone write that code, but also 'understand' why they wrote certain code in places or why they changed the code throughout the process, then they will not only learn how to write for this particular use case, but become a more competent programmer and be able to apply what they learnt to many situations, in context of what is required.

At first, I enjoyed watching this, it allowed me to see a glimpse of pg writing one of these famous essays.

However, after the initial 'wow' factor, I realized a slight flaw in this idea of learning by solely watching others (in replay). You see, without any context of changes or explanations for the mistakes that have been made and corrected, I as a viewer may as well just wait for the final product - as the learning is limited.

If this was with programming (a potential target use) for example, I may be none the wiser why the person writing the code suddenly deleted a chunk of code and replaced it with something else, unless of course some annotation / narration was provided to accompany the replay.

Don't take this as a negative point, the idea is great, but I think it could be far more useful with this added feature.

A feature suggestion from me: - Allow the recruiter to decide what he's looking for in the code. e.g. Complexity / Efficiency / Clean maintainable code / OO Principles, etc.

The biggest problem I have with job interview style 'coding puzzles' - is that the code that is optimum to solving the solution is actually not code I would want to write day to day and wouldn't be code I would want to work with day to day.

The reason is because in my line of work, we are working with good clean, maintainable code, using good OO principles. This includes naming of variables, naming of functions and accounting for extendibility and maintainability from the ground up.

However, most of these coding puzzles, will be looking for people to write the 'simplest' / 'most elegant' solution to the problem, often leaning towards efficiency or using the least number of lines / characters.

For example, the variables will be 'x', 'y', 'a', 'b', everything will be manipulated through integer 'index' and complex reg exp's may often feature as short cuts to longer code.

- Now there's nothing wrong with the solution this produces. However, overall coding style I prefer is maintainable and easily readable. Variable names have meaning, we work with concrete objects and each piece of complexity is broken into separate functions / classes.

Neither solution is wrong, but the approach to either is completely different and for a interviewee it's often hard to know which path I should be treading when writing the sample code.

On the one hand, the interviewer may think I lack any forethought of maintainability / readability, if I just hack together something quickly using single character variables.

On the other hand, the interviewer may think I'm adding too much bloat / taking too long by using full naming and creating my objects to handle what I want to achieve.

Was this an attempt at a Rushmore parody? As that's what it felt like.

On a serious note, it concerns me slightly that over the entire website the moustache is mentioned more than any credible reason why Google would actually want to hire him.

Equally, on his resume - his top ranking skill is 'Using Microsoft Office' - when compared to his other attributes ranking, I would say that's slightly worrying. i.e. You rate yourself more of a master of Microsoft Office, than you are of digital marketing skills.

Finally, this seemed to be released on the 29th of July, and only has 506 views - currently, it seems to be failing slightly on a digital marketing front. (Although this may change now with a top of hacker news / inevitable post on Techcrunch, effect)