gersh

Service and product companies typically have a different mind-set. Service-based businesses typically do more waterfall-style development. Product-based companies do more agile development. Service-based businesses build what the customer asked for. Product-based businesses build what the customers will ask for.

While some service companies have made the transition, I think it is a very different focus and mindset. While some companies like 37signals have made transition, it is not easy for many.

You could be a good writer or designer. Video skills can be useful. Research skills can also be useful.

The workers need to be able to automate stuff or manage people, who do. Many high-paid, unskilled factory jobs have disappeared. The jobs are doing things that can't be easily automated. The more automatable the lower the pay.

A non-developer needs to have some skill, which can't be automated by a computer. Such things include: design, writing, managing people, talking to customers, investors, money and relationships. If AI becomes capable of automating such tasks, their job may become obsolete.

In high level texts, the "obvious" problems often aren't easy. I think there is a strong element of mathematician arrogance. If you can't figure it out, you don't deserve to know. This may go all the way back to Pythagorus, who ran a secretive cult.

There are actual exercises, where solving it is just a matter of applying some concept. However, a lot of math books have things where you have beat your head against the wall to figure them out. Although, the internet has made it easier to lookup, nowadays.

School textbooks often try to make things simpler. However, when these texts are written based off of older texts, which skip steps, they may inherit the style of the older works.

This goes against math tradition where classical math texts say things like "this is obvious and left as an exercise to the reader". Implicitly, I think many mathematicians believe students should be made to struggle for their own good.

The problem is that this approach requires patience, persistence and hard work. Do this help students in the long-term? If you learn math without struggling, will you learn to think in the same way? Is this teaching to the test over teaching you how to think?

It always depends on the circumstances. If people don't like the term rewrite, you can just call it re-factoring or adding unit testing. You are probably using something from the old codebase, right. If anyone asks why something that used to work is no longer there, you can explain that you found bugs, and so you temporarily took it out to add more testing.

Although, rewriting can be a lot of work. While there may be a temptation to rewrite everything overnight, it can be quite difficult to pull off. Although, I think devoting some time to a rewrite attempt may help you gauge the total time it will actually take. If it proves easy enough, you can go for it.

A big part of it is that the page loads FFFFFAST. They never went for clutter. They engineered the pages, so you can do what you want to do quickly. Do not underestimate the importance Google places on page-load times.

The basics are: 1) Get good clients. Low-end clients typically aren't worth your time, and it will be hard to make money. 2) The best way to get new business is via referrals. The best business can found through happy customers 3) Don't try to compete on price, or hire the cheapest the employees. It doesn't work well in this business. 4) Have contracts and get everything agreed to in writing 5) Pay careful attention to your costs, and learn basic accounting. Overhead for offices and such costs money. You also need to overhead to cover downtime, sales, project management, and collections. You may need 100% overhead.

If you agree to do a project for $3000, make sure you can really get it done for that prices. You also need to figure out how to deal with change-requests. If you allow too many free change requests, you will lose money.

When setting the prices, you need to think like a businessperson. A lot of designers and programmers don't understand how to price their work very well.

Throughout much of history many top scientists have devoted their lives to finding better ways to kill people. Advertising is merely a more humane alternative.

There isn't be a bubble until Facebook IPOs. If there were really a bubble, Facebook would have IPOed already.

I think there are few things they should do to make this work: 1) Limit the amount of money per investor for non-qualified investors. If someone only invests a small amount, they aren't losing all their money on one investment

2) Requires disclosure all of company officers and major investors through an official SEC filings. Additionally, disclose any criminal record of securities violations and civil suits relating to misrepresentation and securities fraud for previous companies

3) Improve SEC enforcement, and be pro-active in going after fraudulent misrepresentation. Where companies appear to be making fraudulent misrepresentations, the SEC should prosecute companies that go too far.

Email me. Lets make it happen.

Lightbank and Sandbox have their own enclaves. The ITA (Illinois Technology Association) has offices, and some stuff. There is the lean startup circle. You can also out built in Chicago. Midventures also events. Entrepreneurs unpluggd seems to putting on more stuff, lately.

http://www.raydash.com - We provide live-video on your website.

BTW, who is going to the hackathon, todady, http://www.nuhackathon.com/

I'd look at how different users respond to different articles? Do they click on the article? Do they comment? Do they come back to the site after they see the article? Do they vote for the article.

Next, you can correlate how various people voted with whether a specific person will like the article and/or comment. Finally, you should be able to tell who will like or not want something to get voted up. At this point, you can customize for everyone or weight the influence of people based on well correlated their taste is with the top karma people.

From that chart, it appears the problem is the healthcare industry is getting too much money. Medicare is expensive along with the tax deduction for health insurance. If we could get down healthcare costs, it would solve the problem.

Slashdot isn't what it once was. http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot.org

He says Facebook is a New York corporation. Aren't they a Deleware corporation?

I'd distinguish between consulting and a product company. Product companies license software, sell physical goods, or off-the-shelf goods. Consulting companies sell time to their customer's requirements. They may do fixed-bid work, but the client writes the specs, possibly with help.

There is already the C++ shell for root: http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint

Go ahead and start working on your idea. Recruit other students to help you. Put together prototype and a team. Try pitching investors. Try pitching potential customers. See what happens.

You will only get a conflict if working on your startup starts interfering with getting your degree. It doesn't appear that has happened yet.

Everybody has ideas. If you really want to start a company, start making it happen.

Good writing is important, which includes finding typos.

As a technical founder, should I bring in a business co-founder? I think the article is pretty good. I'd want someone who is:

- Can sell without BSing.

- Knows how to get in touch with important people

- Good at pitching to investors

- Real personable and good at communicating with customers

- Can write well

- Has an eye for UX

- Has enough technical knowledge to communicate technical issues with customers

- Understands startups

A non-technical co-founder needs to have skills. They just aren't technical. I think the term non-technical co-founder is misleading because it defines someone but what they can't do. I'd rather say sale founder or biz-dev founder.

Didn't their auctions appear to make money hand over fist? Were they rigged? Did they start doing poorly, recently? If you just multiplied the price of their bids by the number of bids, it would seem they were doing very well. What was really going on?

How many customers do you know? How close are you to potential customers? How much time can get your potential customers to spend helping you with the product? Now, take the ratio of the amount of time you can get potential customers to help with your product to the amount of time it will take your technical co-founder to develop the product.

Contracts are written and signed. Specs should wikied.

Is this site becoming Slashdot? Visual Studio does have some features that can make you lazy I suppose. ASP.NET web forms does suck, but ASP.NET MVC is good. Is Java supposed to be better than .NET?

How did Mike Tyson do it? He reportedly blew $300 million.

I think compilers today have much better error messages, and you can always turn to sites like Stack Overflow and Google. Back then, if it wasn't in some undecipherable manual, you had to figure it out by trial and error.

When I first learned to program, I recall struggling with run-on loops. I'm not sure if that is even really an issue with modern compilers. There wer things that it was just hard to figure out.

Today, I can just go to Google.