balloot

I read this and still have no clue what this business is. You may want to consider the possibility that Silicon Valley isn't massively broken and you simply don't have a good elevator pitch.

I've programmed large projects in 6 or 7 different languages now and I simply don't believe your statement "I'm dozens of times faster working in Scala than I ever would be in php." That's like saying "I would write that essay dozens of times faster in Spanish than I would in English."

The tough problems that take most of the time are the design and theoretical understanding of the problem. The actual tools used to implement the solution, while not trivial in their differences, are never as important as fully understanding the problem and having a good architectural design.

Or put differently, if you found me the fastest, most knowledgable person in the world with PHP web development, and then found the same guy for Scala, my assumption is they would both build a particular project in the same amount of time, all other things equal. And I could guarantee that one of the two wouldn't be "dozens of times faster" than the other.

The memory profile says otherwise, doesn't it? If you create a named function and call it like "setInterval(draw, 50)", the memory use stays constant.

This is silly. You're creating a new anonymous function on every interval, so it will increasingly take up memory to hold these anon functions until the GC kicks in. It's doing exactly what it should do, because you don't want it doing GC every 50 ms.

Please. The internet and cell phones have changed the world as much as any technology since the light bulb.

uh....You do realize that almost every photo on FB is user-generated, right?

It is? What interesting thing has come out of Austin anytime recently?

Red state. 'Nuff said.

You clearly don't hate to be a "genre pedant" :)

You can scale development teams and put re-usable patterns in place without pushing all your templates and view logic to the client. That's what libraries like Backbone are made to do, and I would agree it is generally overkill to implement a site that way.

You're missing the point. There likely isn't a problem at all. His perception that drivers all of a sudden are greater in number and more aggressive since he moved in is probably completely inaccurate.

It's definitely the case that most drivers gain a bit of speed going down a hill, but it's been that way forever and it's not something you're going to change. So if one of your main concerns is the speed of traffic outside, don't buy a house at the bottom of a freaking hill.

Perfect example of NIMBY-ism. You bought a house at the bottom of a hill. You got a price that likely had this negative quality priced in, because cars drive fast downhill. Now, you act like people just started driving fast downhill in the last few years, and that this problem needs to be resolved immediately to suit you.

I actually just accepted an offer at a startup, and like the idea of a tool like this because I had to approximate it. However, it's simply incorrect to compare your startup job with an VC investment, and the numbers given by your tool would create a situation where you would turn down almost any realistic startup opportunity.

For example - let's play with the offer given in the article: 1.25% + $85k salary (I'm including all extras in both salaries). Given that the author made ~$142k before, the tool says that if she expects a valuation of $100M on cash out with a 1% stake (after dilution), she should have been offered $117k. That's simply not money you'll get at a 5 person startup under any circumstance, even given the very generous valuation estimate for a startup with $800k funding.

Alternately, if you join as employee #15 or so, you're probably getting closer to .1% of the company, and the calculator says that you should take a $3k deduction off market rates on a $100MM expected valuation. That's also not even close to what really happens.

The problem lies in the comparison to a VC investment. Because for a job seeker, the real comparison is "take a job with standard salary". Your calculator claims that if you could make $600k over four years at a "normal" job and $400k over four years at a startup, you would be upset at a $1MM stock payout because it wasn't 10x the $200k "investment". That is just totally asinine.

In reality, a rational decision would take any salary/equity combo that has an expected value (in the statistical sense) of $1 more than the market rate. There is no multiplier.

That's about right. One of the biggest surprises to me as I learned more about how startup equity works was the HUGE dropoff between cofounders and employee #1 in terms of equity.

How exactly does screwing the employees out of stock options help the company not shut down? Outstanding stock options have zero effect on a company's profitability/burn rate.

In any event, OnLive might as well just shut down anyway. It has completely poisoned its name and nobody worth a damn would go work there after this stunt. And it's far too ambitious a project to have any chance to thrive with B-level engineering talent working on it.

I still don't see how people can equate Zynga with the game market as a whole.

The "Ville" products are not games. They don't reward skill, you can't win them, and they don't offer any fulfilling multiplayer experience. Most real games fit one or more of these attributes.

Zynga products have more in common with cigarettes than something like Starcraft. Both of the former offer a not-terribly-fun experience that has been thoroughly optimized to provide maximum compulsion and habit. The other is made for entertainment and draws its value from people enjoying this entertainment.

The fundamental problem with Zynga products is that they're not games. The fact that they famously concentrate on "compulsion loops" and forming habits in their users tells you all you need to know. No real game has to focus on the compulsion to play - they just make the core game experience great so you come back. Not to mention that compulsion loops require user gratification, and there's only so much gratification you can squeeze out of harvesting digital goods.

The one notable exception is Poker. Poker is an actual game, and not shockingly it's the Zynga product with the most profitability and longevity.

Would totally make sense given it works best in the two browsers most closely tied to the underlying OS.

The reason I know about this case and its updates is precisely because of HN. You make it sound like this is a mainstream news story. It's not. It belongs here.

What Louis CK is essentially saying is that given a large amount of money already in the bank, it is more valuable for him to have affordable tickets than it is for him to maximize revenue. That is a decision that is perfectly rational. Not everyone gets their full utility from making the absolute maximum amount of money possible.

Also, a side effect of this is that below-market value tickets create a shortage, which in turn makes it valuable to be the first to learn about new tickets. This has to be driving signups to his mailing list and twitter feed.

But the motivation given is to beat the people around you. Which in many cases does not help the company as a whole. It also puts a damper on team coordination.

Nobody here is suggesting a total lack of merit pay. We're just saying that it is awful to assume that in any small group in an organization there is always someone who deserves to be fired, and someone who deserves a big bump, etc.

The problem I have with stack ranking, and one that I would think engineering companies like MSFT and AMZN would share, is that it is just bad science.

I can get on board with the idea that it is good to drop the bottom 10% of the company on a regular basis. But they're essentially taking very small sample sizes (individual teams), and assuming their distribution matches that of the entire company.

Or to put it another way, let's say you ranked every employee in the company 1-40,000 or whatever. You are trying to drop employees 36,001-40,000. An absolutely awful way to make that happen would be to create 4000 small groups of 10 people and then drop the bottom person from each group. Anybody who's even somewhat proficient in stats can tell you that this setup will yield results WAY off the mark. You could even quantify it with some simple analysis, and though I don't have time to do so, I'm sure the results would be horrifying.

And that's assuming a totally random distribution of people, which isn't true, and totally ignoring psychological effects of such a system. But at the very least, stack ranking is just bad science, and that should matter to these companies.

Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones?

Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?

Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?

You're complicating something that isn't that complicated. LinkedIn's TOS very clearly states in the terms that it is illegal to "Use the APIs in an Application that competes with products or services offered by us"

So when you see:

http://talent.linkedin.com/Recruiter

And your site is using the API to create a service for recruiters, it seems crystal clear to me that you are violating the LinkedIn TOS. This is not some grey area or some arbitrary changing of the rules - it is a very clear violation of LinkedIn API guidelines. I just don't see how this proves even a little bit that LinkedIn doesn't "care about their developers".

And for the bigger picture, it is amazing to me that a significant number of people expect LinkedIn to sit around while some other company attempts to undercut LinkedIn's own premium product using LinkedIn's API.

It's not that complicated. If you build your company on the back of another company you must abide by their TOS. If your business plan is to build the best porn app on the App Store, you would be similarly disappointed.

In general, if your business plan relies on the goodwill of another company and you provide little value to that company in return, you don't have a very good business plan.

I have an issue with your wording.

"Getting free data via LinkedIn's API" != "Working with LinkedIn"

I just don't get all the hand wringing. You are not entitled to unlimited use of another company's data. They can shut you off at any time for any reason. And if you build your company around someone else's API, an essential part of the business plan is preparing for the day when the API-providing company takes notice of what you're doing and evaluates your use of their service, with the expectation that they may shut you down if you threaten them.

If your only response to this is "go cry to various small tech publications", then you're doing it wrong.

So your client gave its its sales reps iPads when they needed laptops? :)

If it bothers you so much, you are free to not use Amazon. It's not like they have a monopoly in the eReader market. What exactly am I missing here?

It's not $3 to transmit a file. It's $3 to:

Design a great UX

Handle Credit Cards safely

Give you access to a robust infrastructure that won't crash

Market the site

Build and research a top quality e-Reader

Build data centers all around the world

etc etc etc

Bottom line is the guy made WAY more selling with Kindle/Amazon than with any other format, even given their large cut. That didn't just happen by magic. He is free to sell only with other vendors and make less money if Amazon's fees upset him so much.