arithmetic

Agree. "Just be happy that you're getting paid" is not an acceptable culture - petty things like snacks and freebies count.

That's one hell of a supportive "friends and family"!

I'm surprised people thought the perks would last. Every company goes through that phase, where employees are showered with perks (of bizarre variety - everything from free laundry to day care for kids to free pop soda). The company either grows to the point where many of the perks are no longer sustainable (employees grow older, have kids -> company spends a LOT more on day care etc.), and/or hits an economic recession where belts need to be tightened. These things don't last. The stuff that lasts are the quality of the people, the culture of the employees (and hence the company) and the products that they ship.

I wonder if they use mint.com to track their startup expenses :o

Is it just me or does the entire interview seem very strained and uncomfortable? Schmidt seems to violently differ from Sergey and they both go compeltely mum when asked about their competitors.

You'd think they'd act like grown-ups before the press, given media's tendency to blow things out of proportion. But nope, not Schmidt.

The way the article is titled (emphasizing that it was Brad Pitt's foundation) almost makes me think that they expected the foundation to fail. "Oh, an actor's foundation. What good could they do?". Or they were being sensationalist (anything with 'Brad Pitt' is highly clickable surely).

FCC would have ruled AT&T to do this anyway.

Holy crap! That is extortion!

I wonder if they're watching this HN post and going "Darn it! He's in Cambridge!" :)

The Big Brother is watching. Who'd have thought?

Someone should tell Jon Skeet that he's really not missing out on much.

Give this guy a break. Atleast he's trying to be productive. And we can all check back on him during Thanksgiving if the Einstein theory really worked.

Or you can get the video leactures from here http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

Considering tools like MoMA are exclusive to Mono and don't have an equivalent in the .Net world (http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA), I'd state that in some cases Mono is a little ahead of its Windows counterpart.

Orthogonally, if he really wanted people to buy the CD, why place an ad in some magazine and expect people to place orders? Aren't there other ways to advertise?

(yes, I get that the point of this post is about success, and how the 1% argument is flawed, but still..)

The Kindle as it exists today, is going to be a pretty sad design for mostly anything other than reading. Definitely not intended for playing shoot-'em-ups - playing chess or educational games might work, but then again, Kindle's form factor puts it right in the middle - it's too big to fit into a pocket like an iPhone and too small to be used as a full-fledged laptop.

I'm a little suprised by your reply - I haven't seen an entrepreneur say "We don't really want a founders visa" either.

We've seen several threads on news.ycombinator on the need for a "founder's visa" and immigration reform. The current H1 visa system is cearly busted. If there is going to be a new office set up for early-stage entrepreneurs, this is certainly one of the important tasks at hand for the federal office.

It'll be very interesting to see the kidn of start-ups that come out of this venture, even if its not useful to compare it against what Y Combinator has produced.

Let this new office get serious about founder's visa and immigration issues, and then we'll see if there's any truth to all the startup love.

What is the pre-requisite for reading this book? I'm mainly curious to see if this will be a useful way for beginners (such as kids) to start learning computer science. Given that many of us learnt computer science by writing games and other fun utilities, I'm hoping this will be a good CS beginner's book (and a fun one at that).

I love the title of the story - very intriguing and fitting.

For the longest time, I couldn't run more than a couple of miles a day. I was always told that I had poor stamina. I trained for a year, and recently ran my first marathon and I'm now addicted. I can completely relate to what you say above - its so easy to just go on and on (because you seem to be able to) completely ignoring your body. I've had 14 hour days at work at the end of which I'm very tired, and yet would easily run 8 to 10 miles and feel extremely refreshed at the end of it, that I would go back to work.

Adrenaline kicks in as a result of high-intensity workouts, and it then becomes hard to tell your body to slow down and rest. The key is to know your body's limits and feed and rest it regularly.

+1 makes me hang my head in shame.

I would highly recommend "How to design programs" by the same authors. Such a good read, and also teaches Scheme (as a side-effect).

Does anyone even care? Even if there was Google Voice on the iPhone, would you use it?

Having said that, the TC headline may as well be right. This is one nuke that Apple is going to find hard to swallow.

That's what happens when you stop innovating (and looking around at competition) and start competing on price. When all you have to offer is lower price, you're already halfway downhill.

Yes, confirmation bias at play. But I'm still not sure if that makes it OK to title the article "Why CEOs are so stupid" - that's a gross generalization even for this particular CEO, given that there was this one interview where he messed up.

These are useful! It always helps to take the monotony out of writing code (especially with methods that check boundary conditions and overflows) and spend more time on the actual design.

It is really sad to see Skype, which is incredibly popular, still doesn't know how to leverage its platform. I hope they learn that to build and leverage a product successfully, you absolutely need to help developers make money off your product. If developers don't feel invited, neither will end users in the long run (well, they will have the user base until the next Skype killer comes along).