jseims

I find this title misleading.

What this post describes is a 2-of-3 multisig, which adds further encumbrances in constructing a valid transaction.

But any transaction, once broadcast, is irreversible.

I'm building something on top of Hangouts, and I had an exchange that this reminded me of.

I was finally connected with a developer evangelist, and I sent an email saying something like "would love to know more about Google's strategic goals with Hangouts".

Her response was "I'm sure you're aware that Google doesn't discuss its strategies outside the company".

What a striking cultural difference from startups, where we're constantly discussing our strategies together.

Do you have a link that elaborates on N. Zaka's architecture?

Can you allow sorting of movies by rating? That's what I'd need to use it as a discovery engine.

I agree with a lot of the points this article makes. What worked for me was to have a co-founder who basically handled everything that was not coding.

I installed two of these in my house. One of the best uses of money ever :)

I've heard really good things about Braintree.

If you're just at the "idea stage", then no one is going to steal your idea.

If you've progressed further and have some traction, some lessons learned in customer acquisition channels, etc., then you should be cautious about what you share because your information has real value.

What I would find more important than a comparison of technical features is a comparison of their active communities.

How many people are using each project, how active is development, that sort of thing.

I think the negative comments here are missing the fine points of the article.

* Stage of growth is important. In the beginning, success is more about individual effort. When you get bigger, it's more about overall team culture.

* It's not just "being a jerk" that's the problem. It's being a naysayer, working against the culture.

At a certain size, the negative effects of someone's behavior on the culture can outweigh the positives of their brilliance. And when that happens, you have to let them go.

Good point.

As someone who has run a company for a decade, there are several meaningful inflection points:

* Becoming cash flow positive (aka Lift) is wonderful and stress relieving.

* Becoming profitable enough to start hiring lots of people and building a team culture marks a sea change in how you must think about your company and how you spend your time.

* Switching from growing to shrinking (albeit still profitable) changes the company culture, as everyone now feels like they're rats on a sinking ship. It's amazing how much people react to directional changes over absolute amounts (i.e., a company with $100K in annual revenue that doubled from last year is more positive than one with $20M that shrank by 20%).

I was suffering from RSI for a few months, and nothing seemed to work. I tried rest, physical therapy, anti-inflammatory drugs, and acupuncture.

Then I read http://www.amazon.com/Its-Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-Professiona..., which led me to trigger point massage therapy.

And that worked. YMMV :)

I don't think you have to overcome the lobbying of IP holders, as they're also hurt by too many patents.

The tech industry just needs to agree that we'd all be better off with a truce, and lobby to change the laws. Personally, I'd like to see no patents for software and business methods.

Being married is one thing; having kids is another.

As an entrepreneur with two young children, I know it's hard to keep a balance.

The hard part isn't necessarily the limited number of hours. It's possible to build a successful startup while working 40 hours a week, provided you're really focused and not goofing around during those hours.

What's hard is many startups have a youth culture that glorifies in working all the time, though much of that time is drinking beer and playing foosball. That's great when you're 23. But I (and many others with kids) would much prefer a professional culture of focused, intense work from 10 AM to 6 PM.

I'm torn by the prospect of a technological solution to aging.

On one hand, I certainly don't want to get old and die -- at least, not on nature's time table.

On the other hand, if no one else got old and dies, we'll quickly become an over populated, stagnant society. From a more "objective" perspective, there's something beautiful about life because it's so temporary.

Hey Jonathon,

What kind of projects are you looking to have people work on? And/or what skill sets of are looking for?

To add an opinion: the most important factor in a team's productivity isn't the process, it's the quality of the developers.

What's annoying is this isn't the real issue. Of course Samsung felt threatened by the iPhone, and set out to copy the aspects of it they liked. That's how capitalism works.

The real issue is what degree of protection should our legal system provide original innovators against those who want to copy their innovations.

I think the guiding principle should be the least legal protection that would still leave enough incentive for the original innovation to be created. In the case of software, where there is little fixed investment cost and a competitive advantage to being "first to market", I have a hard time seeing the need for any legal protection.

For example, could anyone seriously argue that Apple wouldn't, say, implement a "slide to unlock" mechanism on the iPhone if they couldn't patent that behavior?

We really need an act of congress to rectify this situation.

I recently had an experience that dovetails with this article.

This summer, I moved my family over to London for two months. I intended to work while there, but I was having RSI issues. So instead, I spent two months full time with my kids, the oldest one being a girl of almost 4.

This transition from work to family time was reluctant, but in retrospect was the best thing that happened to me this year. My relationship with my oldest daughter developed and deepened... we are now so much closer than before, she's matured so much since I've been able to focus on her development.

And I was never aware that this deeper relationship was a possibility, and that I was neglecting it in favor of work.

My guess is a lawyer will say "yes, you could sue" but they won't do this work on contingency.

However, if you tell your former employer that you feel 11/12 of your cliff in equity is fair; otherwise, you'll pursue a law suit, my guess is they'll pony up without you having to take this any further.

I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

There's currently no way to modulate your volume in social media posts. So "here's a cute photo of my cat" ranks the same as "I really need some help on this". FaceBook amplifies signals that friends like, but this feature allows the poster to amplify as well.

But it uses money, and it's weird to mix money and friend relationships, so... I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

What surprises me is Square doesn't hold a rolling percentage of transactions in reserve in case of charge backs. Seems like that would avoid this situation.

Interesting. I've never used Lift or Play -- thanks for the info.

I found this article pretty light on substance, but I agree with the <tl;dr>:

Dynamic languages: faster to write something, less code, no time wasted waiting for compilation, but harder to maintain and a bitch to refactor. Need more unit tests.

Static languages: more boilerplate, slower write time, but man it's nice to get compile-time vs. run-time errors...

Another kind of evil (but effective) approach is to allow the user to do all those post-signup activities (like set up a dashboard or create some content), and then say "now sign up" at the end.

They're already invested, so you get better conversion.

An OO JS tutorial should also include a discussion of the this pointer, and how it's not like other OO languages.

In JS, this reflects the context of the caller, not the object (which I think is messed up), so you have to learn call and apply.

If I were to ask 2 questions, I would:

1) Ask something simple, like FizzBuzz. You'd be shocked at how many people talk a good talk but can't actually write basic code.

2) Ask an open-ended question, like "how would you design a multi-player chess game". That leads to a discussion that lets you assess all sorts of traits, the most important of which is communication style.

Fantastic article.

Thanks articulating your perspective.

As the first commenter almost an hour after posting, I just want to say it's ironic* that no one is discussing our flight from conversation. *ironic in the Alanis Morissette way, that is.