comatose_kid

Just to be clear, I am now in Silicon Valley after spending a couple of years in Ottawa. Miss: 1) Close to friends & family 2) Really great activities/camps for younger kids 3) Lots of parks, green space 4) Canadians are really more polite, and the pace is more relaxed. 5) People lead healthier lives, many more people outside (this does not stop me from doing same in SV, but culture is more work and convenience/car oriented). 6) Cost of living

Don't miss: 1) Tech scene is anemic. Tech companies (even the shiny new ones that are moderately successful) are conservative and can be a little arrogant when it comes to hiring. It doesn't matter how capable you are, as an employee you have little leverage. 1.5) Investors don't know much beyond telecommunications. 2) After the valley, Ottawa seems really small. 3) Um yeah, winter (although I surprisingly enjoyed taking my son to hockey on early mornings) 4) Not a lot of ambitious people.

Silicon Valley: Likes: 1) Much greater depth of talent, not just in new technologies, but in product, strategy, business development, etc. 2) More going on culturally. 3) More wealth. 4) Weather. 5) Environment which seems to germinate most new ideas in tech, probably due to employee mobility which has a cross-pollination effect as they move from org to org.

Ottawa finally makes Hacker News. Too bad poop-drones are the reason. Some day I have to write a blog post on why I left Ottawa for Silicon Valley.

I would read this article but I am busily typing my name over and over into a word document.

Woohoo - that was me, except it was the Atari 600xl that a really nice uncle shipped to me :). Far too much time spent pounding out basic programs on that crap keyboard and learning about the intricacies of the hardware (GTIA chip!)

I like this - it reminds me of advice when creating an early stage prototype: the higher the fidelity of the prototype, the more chance that your audience will think it is a final (hence set-in-stone) product.

The parent comment is helpful. If it was my product, I would wAnt to know if I was losing people over messaging.

I am now waiting for the Zen of Oculus Programming.

Very nice work, really great to see how it's improved as a result of your sustained effort.

Also - I remember that Nova Logic game (Commanche?).

I worked on a VLIW processor long ago and it had a theoretical peak of 700 MIPS (iirc) back in 2000. It was a neat architecture but required fairly low level knowledge to get the most out of it.

FB gets a lot of hate on HN, but I think this is a really important strategic deal for them.

Consider:

* No one really knows how wearables will play out yet

* It is within the realm of possibility that as headsets get better (end goal: stylish), they will enter the mainstream. This means more content will be consumed there (cellphones are an obvious analogy)

* FB pays to play in this space with a world class team which has shown an ability to produce and iterate on hardware in relatively short time.

* This also gives FB more consumer h/w chops, something it will need as FB integrates with devices that are ever more personal in nature.

It shows that FB is playing offense, working to invent the future, not just resting on its laurels.

Okay, thanks for the clarification. Definitely agree that research institutions have an important role (alongside VCs) in fostering innovation.

Would you care to add a little more detail to your opinion?

Wozniak's genius might never have been exposed to the broader world had he not paired with a Steve Jobs.

Reminds me of Amiga which funded development of its PC by first bringing to market an Atari 2600 peripheral called the Joyboard.

Anecdote: the head of a 3000 person tech company that I chatted with for over an hour thinks of Europe as a flyover continent because most of the disruptive change is happening in Asia and America.

I don't understand how this seemingly random bunch of statements strung together is the top-voted comment in this thread.

In b-school, we talk a lot about political risk - mainly in terms of emerging economies. The US government's actions are resulting in events that will heighten investor perceptions of political risk here too.

That's funny because you kind of did the same thing here :)

Wonderful comment. Please write a book so I don't have to search HN posts for nuggets of wisdom.

I implemented Bresenham's algorithm in ARM assembly on the gameboy advance based on reading his 'zen of graphics programming'. Great writer, the anecdotes at the beginning of each chapter really hooked me in.

I've written production firmware (computer engineering background). In my experience EE's don't usually write production firmware, but are responsible for writing non-production verification loops and code.

Usually a computer engineer or software person works with the EE who developed the board level hardware + ASIC engineers.

Of course, there exist EEs who are talented at writing software, but I wonder how often EEs are tasked with writing production code.

Based on your reasoning, why don't all other automakers (all have large marketing budgets, GM spends even more than Toyota) have similar reps for quality?

Toyota's rep has been well earned, there's plenty of literature in operations about this, as well as popular trade coverage (i.e., http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/automobiles/japanese-autos...)

Their software process wasn't given the same attention, and they've been burned by it. Embedded systems are really tricky, and a good process (design through end-of-life) is key.

This is an excellent framework Slava. Succinct and pragmatic. Thanks for sharing it.

As you state, a big problem is developing enough of an intuition about how to slot features into these buckets. Founder preference for given features can be a good thing, but we have to be aware of this bias as we slot features into these categories.

Slotting properly is especially important when you don't have many 'feature arrows' in your quiver due to a lack of resources, morale, etc.

The other side of this coin is in measurement - each feature is in some ways a test of a hypothesis. And you should have some idea of which metric matters and how a given feature will move the needle.

It would be cool to hear how you approach this for RethinkDB -- since you are appealing to developers, perhaps tracking how quickly devs move to a new version for example.

Very cool. Also, check out and sign up for Matt's link (at the bottom of the page) for his upcoming OReilly book - AFNetworking the definitive guide.

This list is so good, I should memorize it to the point when I can look at what I'm doing wrong and shout out one of your numbers! I've made many of these mistakes (#1 in particular).

Here are my top picks by number referring back to the article, for some of the sections (YMMV of course!):

PEOPLE: 1.

FUNDRAISING: 12.

MARKETS: 18.

PRODUCTS: 24 (and 27 which to me is a subset of 24)

MARKETING: 32, 31 (I wonder how RethinkDB or companies like it can do 32??)

SALES: 40

DEVELOPMENT: 45 (and 46 which is a subset of 45)

Yes, this was a really well written book that told the story of how Harrison, a carpenter, accomplished what even Newton thought to be impossible.

Science vs engineering distinctions aside, it is pretty cool to see the attention to detail + effort put into solving this problem.

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennesey and Patterson is the definitive text, and it is good (at least the 3rd edition I read back in 02).

One way to put the ideas you learn into practice is to try to write an optimized large NxN matrix multiplication routine. Start in C, converting the kernel to x86 code. Also disassemble the generated C code in the kernel to see what the compiler is doing. See how close you can get to the theoretical peak CPU performance.

It is fun stuff. While this kind of optimization is rarely needed, doing so (like learning lisp) will make you a better programmer.

If only he had gotten the domain for his first name, he wouldn't have to worry about legal issues.

happy OVH (Canada) customer here - good price, good h/w, no problems so far (just one box so definitely on the anecdotal side)