gersh

Focus more on what your customers want than what your competitors are doing. It is possible to get into a race with your competitors to implement features that your customers don't care about.

In growing markets, you can both be acquiring customers, and have different niches. If customers are switching from your competitor to you or from you to your competitor, it can be more contentious. Other times, the same people may use both products for different needs. Also, you may have shared needs with your competitors, politically or other wise. Further, if both your customers are switching from an older solution, your real competitor is the old company.

Google doesn't have all that many low-level employees. They are mostly only hiring engineers, who are likely get more money and perks than Apple's retail employees, or the people, who load trucks for Amazon.

It is also worth a lot more for Google to recruit the top employees than many other employers. Hence, they can spend more money on PR and perks to make themselves a more desirable employer. If Google spends 5% of their employment costs on perks, it will go a lot further than Walmart.

How about charging for longer tweets, or let you make your tweets have a larger font for a fee.

It shows the highest readings away from Fukushima. Why?

How many developers does hacker news have?

Would he have been cultural fit? Google seems to be an extremely analytical, numbers driven company. Doesn't Steve jobs reject this approach?

What if Larry Page decides he wants the future is to colonize the moon. Then, he decides to invests all or a large portions of Google's money in colonizing the moon. Will anyone stop him? Would this count as a startup again?

How about a charter-school incubator? You probably have to be a teacher to apply. The incubator would provide you with a classroom, and help you recruit some students. If you succeed, then you get to start your own charter school.

I assume the idea is to create American jobs. So, couldn't you just require the company to have so many US citizens on their payroll at a certain minimum salary.

If you want any sort of physics in your 3d, you pretty much gotta know some calculus. You need calculus to understand acceleration, gravity, etc. Statistics also uses calculus. For example, the normal distribution, is \integral{e^(x^2)}. If you want to do any A/B testing, regressions, machine learning, etc. you will need it.

Map/reduce comes out of algebra. Is your operator associative? If not, you better be careful how you map-reduce algorithm executes. If you don't understand, associativity and your operator isn't associative, it can cause problems.

Finite state machines are important too. It can be really hard to write a parser, if you don't understand FSM. I suppose that ties in with design patterns.

If you can write a good proof, I don't see how can be that terrible of a programmer. How many CS graduates do you know, who can write a good proof, and aren't good programmers?

You may be able to code some stuff without math. However, you need math for a lot of computer science, computer engineering, and programming.

If you want to do 3d animation or vector graphics, you really need to know vector calculus. If you want to work with a codec, or do video processing, you need math for the encoding algorithm. Analytics are useful for a lot of things. It helps if you understand the standard deviation, and such. Encryption and hashing algorithms use a lot of math.

Have you tried programming in Scala? Have you used generic functions? A lot of this stuff ties back into Abstract Algebra.

I haven't started with talking about discrete math. Are you going to literate enough to understand the difference between a hash-table and a b-tree?

I think it is a lot easier to teach yourself to code, than to teach yourself math. Thus, universities should focus on teaching math. If you know math and some basic programming, you should be able to learn the rest by reading the coderature of good open source projects.

There are different types of service. If your time is valuable (I.E. you have money), you want to hire someone, who already knows what you want, what you need, and how to deliver it. Now, assume you have such a product.

Then, you talk to potential customers, and you tell them what you are offering. If somebody calls up, and asks for something stupid, you don't do it for them. Obviously, if somebody discovers a problem with something, you fix it. Obviously, if you realize a lot of customers need something, you probably want to add it to what you offer.

The point is that you have your own quality standards. So, your customers know when they deal with you, they can expect a certain quality. If you are just desperate to do whatever your customers tell you, you will have no quality standard, and you will need to ask a million questions.

People often ask for things they don't really want. You want to understand your customers better than they know themselves.

A few issues. Does he actually benchmark? Things don't always work in practice the way you would think.

If you are going for ultra-high performance, do you even have error-checking? Do you write it in assembler?

Accounting gets interesting when you get derivatives and the fed involved. You own a volatile asset, so the price can go up and down, everyday. However, you don't necessarily know how much said asset is worth. So, you have no P&L. You can possibly borrow against said to cover cash flow, but if asset declines in value, your creditors can demand payment.

Furthermore, your balance sheet can look great. However, if your debtors go bankrupt, a solid balance sheet can quickly deteriorate. If your customers pay late, and you can't borrow money, the delicate balance can collapse.

How much infrastructure did it take for Google to run wave? They could put adwords on it like every other product they've done.

They may have used some of their technology in Google Docs. However, they could have refined the Google wave model more. Instead, they hyped it up, and then quickly dumped it.

Why did Google give up so quickly with Wave? If Wave were an independent company, would they have given up so quickly? How can Google win if they give up so quickly?

Are the United States and Iran already at war? Iran held US displomats hostage.

Are Israel and Iran at war? The president of Iran called for the destruction of Israel. Does the count as a declaration of war?

Who actually wrote the worm? Was it Israelis? Was it Americans? How was it a join operation? It could have been just Israel involved.

I love github as much as anyone. However, why is it that Git still drives non-technical people crazy? Why do those people prefer dropbox over Git?

What was the startup? Did you write code for that? Is there a website? How did you manage to spend 6 years with nothing to show for it?

If you gain traction, you should gain SEO. If you aren't an SEO expert, it may be tough to gain a foothold in tough keywords. However, if you are an SEO expert, I'd assume SEO would be quite a good strategy for you.

What does this mean? If you found your own company at 20, then 20 years later are you are 40 year old founder? If you are a serial entrepreneur, some companies will be started when you are young and others will be started when you are old.

If you can do it earlier, why wait?

Monopoly is good game to learn how to negotiate deals. You can work out a deal to exchange properties, or buy someone else's properties.

I bet he isn't the only. If he got $20m, somebody else probably conned the government out of a lot more. How much money is wasted on this sort of bullshit?

The US government spends $793B on medicare & medicaid, and give $215B in tax deductions for health insurance. This total $1.008 trillion/yr on healthcare costs, which totals $3272/per capita/yr.

Japan spends $2249/per capita on healthcare. The UK spends $2317/per capita on healthcare. Sweden spends $2745/per capita/yr on healtchare. You get the idea.

You are already paying the government for healthcare. You pay higher taxes to offset the loses for the health insurance deduction. The IRS collects medicare along with the Social Security.

However, you don't get the healthcare you pay for. Instead, you have to pay again to actually get healthcare. In some countries, they call this a bribe. However, America has institutionalized it.

Has anyone actually run the numbers? Does GPA predict founder success? Do SAT scores? Does IQ? How much does each matter? Is there a negative correlation?

You want to diversify. So, if you have a significant portion of your money invested in a startup, I think you would want to be a lot more conservative with the rest of your money. You can real safe with bonds or cds. I also look for old, boring mutual funds, that have been around a long time, and get good performance.

Although, I haven't gotten around to implementing it, I think there could be a powerful concept, which I'll personal hedging. The idea is to think of your investment as a hedge against the costs of things you want to buy in the future. So, suppose you are investing to retire. 1) Track your expenses 2) Figure out what your expenses will be when you retire. 3) Buy proportional share of the value chain for all the companies you will buy stuff from. Presumably, you want it waited to cover all your expenses. Now, this can get tricky because you may spend a lot of money with companies that aren't public, and some industries may be in a bubble. Further, you will have to shift your investments to reflect industry shakeups. For example, if you change your mind about what products you like, you would also change your portfolio. Industry changes would also affect, who in the value chain gets the profits, and conglomerates or weird capital structures can make this a bit tricky, but I think it is a powerful concept.

How do you know who the people are? Presumably, the app would create blogs, facebook pages, linkedin, twitter, etc. Passing a phone interview would be harder, though not impossible. You might need really good voice recognition. Speech generation probably wouldn't be insurmountable.

In person, this might be trickier. This might require a robot mannequin. Alternatively, you could hire an actor with wireless ear plugs. Presumably, the computer would tell the actor what to do.

I propose the ycombinator turing test. Can you generate an application which will get accepted by ycombinator? This may require generating additional content to establish team credibility including twitter posts, blog posts, etc.

Some would disagree "The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2219cc-7c86-11df-8b74-00144feabd...