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This is a timely comparison to how we could imagine Alphabet/Google in the future. Provide a shield from the market to allow long term thinking.

I feel like a better title for this article on HN would be "General Assembly partners with Google to create bootcamp for Android Developers"

The current title implies two things: 1) That Google is creating this bootcamp on it's own 2) Google is hiring the developers

As written it's pretty linkbaity.

I am not even sure if they are promising jobs in any literal sense "General Assembly has said in a statement that it will connect developers who finish the course with jobs in its hiring network".

To be clear I am a big fan of GA and bootcamps in general, I just feel that the title of this article is misleading.

It could be fun, plus a recruiting technique, since it creates awareness around Netflix's culture, and I am sure they hire a lot of engineers.

We've recently experimented with making it easy for Olarkers to bring their families to the retreat, so it becomes like one big Olark Family Reunion. On the other hand it adds quite a bit to the logistical overhead, what are your thoughts HN? Bring the family?

The author of this book wants readers to pay what they feel the book was worth to them. http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-right...

So you if you end up downloading and reading the direct PDF link (the security through obscurity method is clearly failing here) I recommend paying what feels right to the author:

You can watch a pretty good summary of the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk

This is a provocative title from VOX. Original data is from: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/05/mapping-the-hourly-wa...

EDIT: A lot of the commenters point out it's based on AVERAGE apartment rent. (As opposed to median), which makes it a lot less interesting.

Why so much focus on wage, when we could instead focus on building more housing? It seems like on some level if you increase wages, landlords will just increase rent. If you increase supply, landlords will reduce rents so their buildings don't remain empty.

Doing some quick math, if someone works 40 hours a day for 52 weeks a year at a minimum wage job, they will make: 7.25 * 40 * 52 = $15080 a year.

The VOX article says you should spend at most 30% of income on rent. Which works out to: 4524 a year or $377 a month.

At current mortgage rates (assuming 0 down), someone could break even in 30 years spending ~$77K to build a 1 bedroom apartment using $377 a month to make the loan payments.

It follows that if you could construct 1 bedroom apartments for less than $77K per unit in today's market you could solve the housing problem, and make money simply by providing 1 bedroom apartments to low income minimum wage workers.

An anecdote. When Facebook was based in the Palo Alto area it offered stipends to employees who lives near the office. Landlords learned about this and increased rents accordingly.

I'd expect landlords to do the same if wages go up and supply remains constant.

This article is "OK", but their example is a 4 person co-op, which makes you think that all co-ops like the food co-ops you see in college towns.

There are actually multiple forms of co-ops. Typically capital does come from the members (whether they be companies or individuals), but it could also come in as debt i.e. from a bank.

For example:

Sunkist is producer co-op owned by citrus growers to vertically integrate. http://www.sunkist.com/about/cooperative.aspx

REI is consumer co-op owned by the shoppers of the store (though arguably managed much like a normal corporation): (And did over $2.2 billion in sales for 2014) http://www.triplepundit.com/2015/04/reis-co-op-business-mode... http://www.seattleweekly.com/2003-06-18/news/who-owns-rei/ http://www.rei.com/about-rei/financial-information.html

Ace Hardware is a retailer-owned cooperative. Where the franchise board is owned by the member franchises. https://www.myace.com/invest/about-ace

There is an interesting metaphor here of how B2B integrations are similar to a farmer's dilemma. Two B2B companies talk about doing an integration. Both will benefit if it is done, but one generally does more of the work.

Olark is Hiring Remote Backend Python Engineers, and part-time customer service in US timezones

Our collective mission is to:

- To help people make Happy Customers through personality, authenticity, and mutual understanding.

- To exemplify a positive organization by creating a safe space to speak, listen, empathize, and build each other up.

- To be active in the communities around us by learning from and sharing lessons with everyone we meet.

Learn more about our values here: http://www.olark.com/values and positions here: http://www.olark.com/jobs

Olark | http:/www.olark.com Customer Support Champions | Part-time | Remote | Anywhere, USA

== About Us ==

Olark was founded with the goal of helping small businesses create deeper (and more human!) connections with their customers. Since our initial funding from Y Combinator in 2009, we have bootstrapped a profitable company centered around a simple, powerful, and beautiful chat product that 9000+ businesses use every day to talk to customers. With two major offices and remote teammates across the world, our small 30-person organization is tight-knit and collaborative despite the distance between us. We believe our positive, participatory, and peer-driven team culture plays a big part in driving our growing success. Come chat with us about it!

https://www.olark.com/about

== Positions ==

Are you fanatical about providing great customer support and have meticulous attention to detail?

We are looking for a new member to join our crack support team, doing front line chat, email and occasional phone support!

Please apply online: https://www.olark.com/jobs

(NOTE: We'll have a bunch of additional positions opening soon)

Hats off to these guys, I personally felt this is one of the few interviews I've done where the resulting story captures a lot of the flavor of the early days of Olark.

When we started this Olark, we were big readers of TeamTreehouse (http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/working-in-a-flat-company), and Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...).

I can't help but think there are some elements their organizations that they leave out when projecting them outward.

This is pretty awesome, thanks dave!

Let's say we wanted to give power users a way to hide the chat window, and have it come back when they wanted?

How would you want it to work? (i.e. we could do like, if query string contains hide-olark-for-30-days, we could just hide it for you, and if you wanted it back, we could give you an API command you could type into dev tools?

Our biggest concern (and we do allow hide-able chat boxes, is that once it's gone, many visitors actually want it back in the future on unpredictable intervals. So you can't just simple say "hide for 30 days")

Site owners actually have the option to make it close able, and implement with just a simple "help" button.

I think what generally happens is that the team that handles customer communication does not have the dev resources to get someone to add UI elements to their page, so only bigger companies take advantage of "closeable olark" and click to open the chat window.

We also found that once people close the window, many get confused and have a hard time opening it again. (clearly not a problem for the "average HN reader", who might clear cookies and reload)

I think Tawk does a pretty good job of handling the basics. Most of our customers operating at any scale end up integrating Olark with a CRM such as Salesforce or a Helpdesk solution. We also have excellent cobrowsing, and a there's also a lot you can do with our api, http://www.olark.com/api.

It's also important to remember they will need to monetize eventually.

Assuming the tab is going to be there, what would make it be less distracting to you? When we first started all this we wanted to get rid of those incredibly annoying people wearing headsets bouncing around the screen. (I think we've made progress).

(Some themes are animated others aren't, perhaps if we had more people use non animated themes by default, it'd help)

It is interesting how much pricing can really help drive revenue :-). It's really hard to know what works without experiments.

At first I was a bit confused by this article, and it looked like there was likely a large correlation/causation bias in determining quality.

Especially since the two outcomes they were looking for were IPO and potential for acquisition.

But after thinking a bit more about the topic, I think they have basically determined how to detect tech companies as a proportion of new business registrants per county. (Especially tech companies have a higher potential for some form of exit, over the typical company given the pervasiveness of acqui-hires)

As they said law firms (i.e. firms with the name of the founders in the name) had less positive outcomes.

If you liked this article, you might like the movie Dreams of a City, which talks about the creation of East Palo Alto: http://vimeo.com/23458988

EPA's has a really interesting history, back in the 1920s an entrepreneur by the name of Charles Weeks started a Poultry Colony, preaching "one acre and independence". (http://www.paloaltoonline.com/print/story/2008/04/16/one-acr... , http://www.santaclararesearch.net/SCBIOS/cweeks.html) - you can still see the remnants of this in the structure of the lots along Runnymede street. http://epawiki.pbworks.com/f/Remnants+of+a+Failed+Utopia.pdf

Every desk in our SF office was handmade by Roland (Cofounder) at Olark. Kind of crazy, but kind of awesome, by the end we had a pretty efficient system. Of course our patio became completely coated in saw dust.

I think the key lesson here, is you need to be in a position where failing to raise more money does not kill your company.

So if you can convince your entire team to eat ramen for an indefinite period of time between your first raise, and your second raise, you would have "solved" this problem for some definition of solved.

Sam, out of curiosity, what is the average raise for a post-demo-day YC company now-a-days? (if it's public).

I wonder this 500K benchmark is still something useful to investors in the valley. My guess would be that there end up being only a few YC companies each batch raising <500K and I doubt the amount raised ends up being a good predictor of success.

I thought the article was interesting, especially the author's fear of nonexistence. I know I'd much rather think of more pleasant things.

I wonder if the dearth of comments here is due to a general uncomfortableness with nonexistence.

A nice reminder that we should all be doing what we love.

I guess I was thinking more broadly.

To most people everything feels like a walled garden, their phone, their computer, their TV. Sure you can install software on them, but very few people actually install new operating systems on anything at a low enough level that it would actually help their privacy.

As the technological elite, something like a TV that has so much embedded junk seems extra walled off. But I'd argue that most people have no clue how to stop websites from tracking them or to protect their privacy on any device. Most people have no IDEA what a cookie or an IP address is.

You happen to be familiar with software. To many people putting a piece of thick tape over the TV screen's camera, and microphone might be much easier than installing TOR. Dealing with the underlying embedded OS is probably super annoying, but hopefully you can still use your TV as a direct display using something similar to a Roku.

If a market for do-not-track devices exists someone will fill it, but I worry that the general population will have no idea that it's necessary or even care.

Out of curiosity how many aspects of this TV could also be applied to your laptop.

1) It has a webcam

2) It has a microphone

3) You install software all the time that has access to both of these things.

3) Practically everything you do on it is tracked, cookied, and shared. (Sure some companies probably respect Do-Not-Track, but everyone?)

4) Do you realize that facebook knows your age, all of your friends, your demographics, and has like buttons on most pages on the internet. They are also about to launch a big ad platform to help others leverage that knowledge to place ads.

5) Google knows everything in your inbox.

Your Xbox has gesture control and voice command too.

If you are going to smash TVs, you probably should smash your laptop, and your xbox.

I don't think a few burning TVs in the streets are going to change anything. You'll need to think bigger :-)

Congrats as well, it's been a long road to this point. I am curious to see where this product goes, in particular who outside of startups ends up using this tech.

It's hard to be a web hosting company, and atlantic.net has been in the business since 1995. I am impressed that they are fighting to stay relevant, even if it is a race to the bottom.

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and Registrars. Domain Name: ATLANTIC.NET Registry Domain ID: 1092612_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.tucows.com Registrar URL: http://tucowsdomains.com Updated Date: 2014-09-16 11:43:09 Creation Date: 1995-05-17 04:00:00

At first I thought this title was a poorly timed April Fools Joke.

I would imagine there are only a few decisions the founders make that ever come down to votes based on shares. Off the top of my head: Selling the company, firing the CEO, electing a new board, diluting existing shareholders, dividends.

The impact of this decision is probably heavily based on how often Felicis has a big enough stake to be a factor in shareholder voting.

Thanks a ton for doing this interview :-) This has been on my todo list for a long time.