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What separates the best PMs from the rest, in your experience?

I'd love to receive some advice on this topic, Qasar, any chance you could forward me your pointers, too? Plenty of specifics I'd like to know, if there's potential for follow-up.

amirhhzon Cult Creation: How to hire your startup team [pdf]

Here's a more readable HTML version from back when I first came across this: http://web.archive.org/web/20111008014250/http://blognewcomb...

amirhhzon Things that suck in AngularJS

It was a while ago when I last did it, but the team are perfectly happy to merge-in docs corrections and improvements. IIRC, the CLA is not necessary for docs either, only for actual code.

At the last London AngularJS meetup it was mentioned that the team have 'pull request parties' where they try to merge or close as many contributions as they can, but more of them just keep coming ... good problem to have I guess, but they are aware of it and trying to address it.

amirhhzon Poll: Full-time software engineers over 200k, how'd you get there?

Thanks for this. I'm never sure whether my instinct of just treating people/clients well and keeping their interests at the forefront of my mind is yound/naive thinking or whether it pays off. Comments like this re-assure the latter is the case, and that indeed learning how to work with people and learning how to solve their problems is probably more important than most other things I can get good at as a technologist/developer.

amirhhzon Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#1 resonates strongly with me, too, as I've also been thinking about the best way to put MOOCs into tracks/streams that lead to an end goal (e.g. become a data scientist) and engage learners that way.

I'd love to talk to someone who's on the same page, do you think I could pick your brains on this? If so, a contact email is on my profile page :)

amirhhzon Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

Took the words right out of my mouth. Have you had any experience with getting companies/employers involved in something like this? I've been thinking about how MOOCs would fit into streams (or tracks as someone else here said) that lead a learner to an end goal e.g. data scientist, and companies are the most qualified to come up with the criteria for meeting such goals.

amirhhzon The Summly deal makes no sense

> Still seems to me like Yahoo! is a place where engineers are handed the purse strings

Exactly! :) Assuming the above is meant in a positive way, you might not have said/thought that if it wasn't for this, and other, stories recently involving Yahoo and their acquisitions.

amirhhzon The Summly deal makes no sense

There's a possibility that this publicity changes younger people's perception of Yahoo's. They'll see the BBC headline and a) will now know what Yahoo! is and b) might get motivated to write/learn code and even want to go work for a tech company (even Yahoo itself). Combined with everything else Marissa Mayer is doing, (b) might actually happen, as altruistic-seeming as it might sound.

amirhhzon How to hire a product manager

I'd love to read such a follow-up post. I'm doing exactly what you describe, and for the right reason, with this essay as something of a guide, so thanks for the help and validation!

amirhhzon HipChat releases native app for Mac

I posted a feature request here, if you also care about this, please vote it up: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/sugges...

amirhhzon HipChat releases native app for Mac

Immediately noticed one short coming: I can't resize the font any more. In the AIR version Cmd/Ctrl+Plus/Minus just worked (perhaps as a result of the AIR implementation, not a product decision), but in this native version it doesn't and there are no preferences for it, either.

If the HipChat guys see this, please consider it as feature for an update soon?

amirhhzon Things I Despised About My Education

"My education taught me to value getting the right answer. (It also taught me to value prestige, prizes, etc.) So I worked hard at memorizing things, and anytime I wasn’t sure I’d get the right answer the first time, I’d be scared to try, in case I failed or made myself look stupid."

Here's where the above really starts to hurt: during high school, I got away with avoiding failure because everything is set up for you to 'succeed'. As soon as I went to University the opportunities for failure increased by an order of magnitude and at the same time there was nothing and no-one there to assure you that this is OK and part of the process of learning. The spiral of self-doubt, depression and fear that this created almost completely ruined my academic career.

I got lucky and it all worked out such that I am now a software developer who knows failure and experimentation (on almost any scale) are part and parcel of getting better at what you do, and the impact of this knowledge on one's emotional well-being is immense. It's what I would tell my 18-year-old self if I had the chance.

amirhhzon So I Made A Mashup, And Then…

It was indeed 'In Da Pub' by 50 Pence aka ladon86. Here's a video with lyrics in the desc to help with the British-isms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pioFIcQw2zM

amirhhzon Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework

That puzzled me, too, I started browsing the code and noticed there's not a lot of testing of the project code itself: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/tests

So I agree, it would be good to hear from the devs about their opinions and thoughts on testing. (Is there a chance that they think the "realtime-by-default" approach lessens the need for testing?)

I'm no testing zealot, but I've found writing tests useful and it would be a shame to be frustrated by that missing piece in an otherwise great project.

amirhhzon Facebook acquires Instagram

When I read the headline I thought two things: a) Wow, the Instagram guys deserve it, congrats to them. b) I need to delete my account.

The second point is because I have been actively trying to avoid giving fb more data than absolutely necessary. No ill will towards Instagram.

amirhhzon How to thrive as a solo non-technical founder

What would you say about trying to identify a potential co-founder's underlying motivation (money, experience, small team/flexibility, fame, actually caring about the market, etc.) for joining a start-up?

I'm actually asking from the perspective of a technical person who finds it hard to trust/gel with potential non-tech founders, but I thought perhaps you had some thoughts :)

amirhhzon Red flags in emails to angel investors

Perhaps that the real business of WakeMate is the software they build, not the wristband.

amirhhzon The WHY of WAT - understanding why 'JavaScript is Crazy'

Yes, sorry, Caplin server's didn't expect the load! It's being worked on.

amirhhzon Search: .lenght - Github

In JavaScript, if you check for a non-existent property on a variable (e.g. aVar.lenght vs aVar.length) it will return "undefined". So people often rely on this behaviour to check if something is an array or not (no comment on whether this is good or bad), with:

    if(somethingThatMightBeAnArray.length){
        // do things with array
    }

So misspelling of length can be making a lot of code out there behave in an unexpected way.

amirhhzon UK Schools ICT to be replaced by computer science programme

This might interest you (if you haven't seen it already): http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/10/computer-sci... :)

amirhhzon UK Schools ICT to be replaced by computer science programme

That's a remarkably smart thing for a politician to say about computing education.

I had to check, but that quote was actually from Ian Livingstone.

I'm very pleased he is so heavily involved. In fact, I don't think any of this would be happening without the backing of industry leaders and their complaints. Kids and teachers themselves have been complaining at least since 2005 when I was exposed to "IT education" in school but that obviously wasn't sufficient reason to take action.

amirhhzon Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

I just tried to follow this link on my phone and it redirects to godaddymobile.com to show me some spam and no article. And they're in the Internet business...?

This company just reeks of clunkiness and tackiness. As keeps being mentioned, I can't believe tech-savvy, well-informed, well-educated people (e.g. YC founders) could go on godaddy.com, see their marketing material ("Go Daddy Girl (R)" ... what?!), their interface etc., and still go ahead and give them money.

amirhhzon Show HN: My new personal website

Nice work! I'd had this idea for my personal pages, too, specifically for my CV/Resume! Would love to see a blog post describing how you've done it (I know the code is there, but a discussion of it would be informative).

amirhhzon Princeton bans academics from handing copyright to journal publishers

From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”"

That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.

amirhhzon Modern Ruby Development

I don't use it for everything, hence my JetBrains recommendation. I use PyCharm a lot, too, for example, and Android dev is a hassle without Eclipse.

The portability of Vim-the-application and thus the portability of the skills to use it are a big reason why I put in the time to learn it (same applies for Emacs). I can just as comfortably program locally, on a remote server or on a friend's machine.

amirhhzon Modern Ruby Development

Try RubyMine from JetBrains, a very slick product, and worth paying for (I don't pay for much but JetBrains IDEs I make an exception for).

In true HN tradition, I must urge you to try Vim. I found this very helpful when I first start: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

amirhhzon Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?

A budding journalist friend of mine has been looking for a place to put her writing portfolio and she hasn't been happy with blogging/squarespace/etc.. I just sent her writerfolio.com, I hope she likes it and signs up :)

amirhhzon How not to recruit for a startup

What about the Atlassian approach [0]? They give the recruiters a chance to prove that they can deliver excellence and if not, both parties know it won't work out. I think it's a good model for the employer and the job-seeker.

p.s. I found out about this via this video: [1], scroll for transcript.

[0] http://www.atlassian.com/about/careers/recruiters.jsp

[1] http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million...

amirhhzon StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

As others said, it would be good if you indicated only OS X support. I just assumed from the screencast that at least any *nix system would work. Surely making a Linux client isn't far off, though, right?