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sbiskeron The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

Hi borski.

Really? You did? How was it? And could you get a feel while doing it for how popular the option was?

sbiskeron The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

The Curious George thing was confusing; it was hardly even a book store at that point. I'd argue it probably hurt them more than it helped them. But fair enough. A few bookstores have shut down around there, including ones with similarly legitimate differentiation (like that rare book store around the corner.)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that they picked the location to compete with Amazon. In this case, I mean "beat Amazon" to be synonymous with "surviving." Perhaps "coexist with Amazon" would have been a better way to put it.

sbiskeron The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

Oh please. I go to that bookstore all the time, and I can assure you it's not the "digital printing press" that keeps them afloat. I've never seen a single person mention it or use it.

What they are doing, and which the article really skims over, is constantly offering things that you simply can't find at Amazon. They have a comprehensive, well curated staff review section. Their "New Fiction" and "New Non-fiction" is filled with carefully selected books that people wouldn't be able to find just from looking at the NYT Best Sellers list. (Indeed, their NYT Best Sellers rack is given less than prime real estate.) They're constantly holding book signings, poetry readings and other such things to engage the community (which the article mentions quickly, in fairness). And they also have a floor dedicated entirely to used books - the only general used book store in all of Harvard Square.

The competition that Amazon crushed, B&N, Borders, and the like - they tried none of those things.

This bookstore didn't do anything more special than actually work hard to beat Amazon. Oh, and they also picked a location literally across from Harvard Yard, filled with a constantly rotating customer base with a penchant for reading. That helped too.

I'd like to see a chain really try to differentiate itself from Amazon through similar hard work - picking places where people obviously want to buy books, and offering them a great bookstore that differs from Amazon in scalable, consistent ways.

sbiskeron 3 Founders, 1 Round & $.72 in the Bank

Wait, you "closed an oversubscribed round shortly after the events of this story"? How on earth was that pulled off? Was the $15,000 the signal other investors needed to get on board? I feel like I'm only being told half of the story here.

sbiskeron I’m tired of the opportunists and their hackathons

Ok, strictly speaking, YC companies would just post the jobs as regular submissions, and the job posting category came in part to shut off commenting. The point remains the same though.

sbiskeron I’m tired of the opportunists and their hackathons

On that note, I really wish commenting was turned back on for HN job postings. I understand why they were turned off - people trying to expose anonymity for instance - but since they left, I feel like I see worse and worse postings, with little repercussions - or at least community feedback - to the companies who post...

sbiskeron Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

Crap, accidentally downvoted. In too strong agreement to not apologize for the downvote and thank you for saying that.

sbiskeron I'm a former Miso engineer and the founders screwed me out of 10k

"With great power comes great responsibility."

No one is blaming your co-workers - but when your founders take investment money and insist on keeping themselves in charge, they also take on responsibility for the performance of the company and its technology. Just because their legal liability is limited, they aren't off the hook for what we think of them running their product this way.

Blowing the production database is bad, yes - but a LOT of bad days for top shelf programmers start with "rm". It sounds like you owned up to your mistake and put in the late nights to fix it in a way that your bosses didn't...best of luck to you.

sbiskeron Overpriced Developer Conferences

Huh? One of her gripes is that she says the speakers are bad, including herself. She says all this about a conference she spoke at, putting both her reputation and the conferences reputation at risk to help bring more strength to her argument. I'd say yeah, you're seeing drama where you want to see drama.

sbiskeron Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)

Cambridge, MA / San Francisco, CA - Full Time or Intern Web Developer at Locu (http://www.locu.com)

# Exceptional software engineering talent

# Exceptional cross-browser JavaScript/jQuery, HTML and CSS skills, or the ability to learn quickly

# Experience with Python / Django is a plus

# Previous experience building rich, interactive websites

# Basic design skills (Photoshop), ability to work with designers

# Experience in designing dashboards and user interfaces is a plus

# Previous start-up experience is a plus

Front-enders, "desingineers" and full-stack all welcome for this position - as long as you enjoy hacking on cool new products and features. :D (We're not explicitly recruiting for pure backend or pure design positions right now, but we're open to resumes there as well - see http://locu.com/#jobs for details. If you're a perfect fit, we'll find a way to make it work.)

Locu is developing technologies to change local search ($35bn advertising market by 2014) by creating the world's largest semantically-annotated repository of real-time small-business data. We are about to launch MenuPlatform <http://www.menuplatform.com>, our first product, which helps restaurants better manage their online presence.

Interested? Drop us a line at jobs@locu.com. Please specify which position you're applying for, as well as "HN", in the subject of your letter. Learn more about our open positions at http://www.locu.com/#Jobs

-------------------------------------

Founded less than a year ago by MIT graduates and researchers, Locu <http://www.locu.com>; has the backing and support of some of the best angel investors in the country. We are looking for more exceptional talent to join our team and help us achieve our vision. We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology giant with a fun and challenging work environment. We have a culture optimized for learning and continuous improvement. We are 10 people with very diverse backgrounds, and growing.

sbiskeron With New Comforts, Growing Complacent

If anything, that describes a bias in the other direction though - a case where your Google perk (the coffee cart) is overemphasizing the importance of technology in your life than that of the average person.

Yes, it's silly to think that somehow Google's mobile strategy is inherently hindered because of corporate culture - but there's no question that the value of creating a suite of services and perks for your employees to live in has different consequences depending on what sort of products you're shipping. It's hardly noticable when you're making B2B software, or an atomic bomb - but as you start building things that creep into the fabric of everyday life, empathy instead of sympathy takes a greater role in product design.

sbiskeron OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

Me too! It's like Mah Jong meets Dr Mario. My only qualm is that it's a little too easy to master - but that could be easily changed.

sbiskeron OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

I'd be curious to hear what some of his "firing practices" were, if you wouldn't mind sharing. You seem reticent to get into details, perhaps not to add fuel to the fire - but these were practices he spoke publicly and proudly about, on the record, if I understand you correctly - and I'm curious just how people like him tick (if only so I can learn to avoid them).

sbiskeron Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2012)

Cambridge, MA / San Francisco, CA - Full Time or Intern

Web Developer at Locu (http://www.locu.com)

# Exceptional software engineering talent

# Exceptional cross-browser JavaScript/jQuery, HTML and CSS skills, or the ability to learn quickly

# Experience with Python / Django is a plus

# Previous experience building rich, interactive websites

# Basic design skills (Photoshop), ability to work with designers

# Experience in designing dashboards and user interfaces is a plus

# Previous start-up experience is a plus

-------------------------------------

sbiskeron Why Can't Startups Find Designers?

Here's his dribbble; you can see his professional work there: http://dribbble.com/maxvoltar

sbiskeron Y Combinator here I come

Sounds good - just wanted to make sure someone asked. Now go out there and kick some ass. :)

sbiskeron List of cool places in 8-bit Google maps

Happy to see that in Boston, you can check out the MIT campus, its nearby Google office, the Hancock Building and Fanueil Hall.

sbiskeron Y Combinator here I come

I'm guessing you've been thinking about applying to Y Combinator for a while, if it was the first thing you did after you were laid off.

That said, I have to ask....are you sure you want to apply to Y Combinator?

There are startup jobs out there where this sort of mismanagement is not the norm. I was in your exact shoes at one point (although I left due to repeated missed paychecks, not due to layoff) - and I began to doubt if any company would be competent, except one I started myself. (This was compounded with my own minor successes in the startup game, having gotten personal momentum with an idea on the side.) It pains me to admit this so publicly...but it took me a year to realize, that my experience there ate away at my trust in anyone as a potential employer.

I guess all I mean to say is, YC is great - but if part of you still wants to join an early startup and learn while you're young, there are good employers out there. They're few and far between...but please don't give up. They're absolutely worth the search.

sbiskeron Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later

Hopefully if it comes to that, he'll consider using a professional data recovery service or paying this guy for his time. It may not be worth a pile of cash to read the disks sitting in your drawer, but it's probably worth the cost for such a priceless piece of gaming history.

sbiskeron Where are the Top 1% of Engineers (from Carnegie Mellon)

I see no reason to go so far as to call the actual students in question "clueless" - but there is definitely serious bias in where certain companies do and don't hire. Apple recruits heavily from Stanford for CS, but recruits from MIT for ID, for instance. Some companies only look at MIT, or CMU, or Berkeley - or hire there "first", for no other reason than the founders might have gone there, and thus feel better equipped to evaluate the curriculums and students from those schools.

It's interesting to see where the top 1% of CMU kids go, but looking at the top 1% of every top CS school independently of each other would yield dramatically different results.

sbiskeron Pinterest founder kept going to avoid embarassment of failure

I'm impressed with Pinterest, don't get me wrong - but the article is painting over a much more normal, steady trajectory - a long, quiet bootstrap, followed by a steady rise amplified by the megaphone of VC funding.

The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest)

I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few "mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could easily bootstrap to success.

Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article - written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly raised a 10 million round another six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...)

No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)

sbiskeron Why I Left Google

It's sort of a cultural thing amongst a lot of Microsoft employees, especially older ones (or in this case, ones that have returned), to run their blogs off of Microsoft's blogging platforms.

In this regard, Microsoft's culture actually does a very good job of encouraging its employees to blog from the inside - I've never felt quite the level of direct engineer access and communication working on Google platforms as I have on MS platforms, even in cases where Google's platforms are actually superior. (Chalk it up to Google groups being a little opaque and Google product blogs being run by product managers.)

sbiskeron [dead]

Interesting - this article was titled "OkCupid Labs 'No Complaining Week'" a minute ago. Was that changed by the mods, or by the author in response to the negative response it seems to be getting here?

sbiskeron Why a career in computer programming sucks (2007)

Most of software development is making CRUD apps, integrating APIs, and other tedious but non-complex stuff like that.

Isn't that sort of like saying that most of the restaurant business is flipping burgers? Just because something is more common, that doesn't mean you won't be able to move up the food chain a little after 40 years of programming. Companies still have plenty of hard problems to solve in network performance, hard drive performance, UI architecture, cryptography....

sbiskeron The 'Startup Boom' is a disguised jobs fair for big corporations

I didn't read the article, but...the intelligent discussion around it meant that I didn't have to waste my time reading what sounds like a lousy article. Had I found this article on my own, I would have both had to suffer through the article and been deprived the intelligent teardown of it we get here. That alone makes me glad it was submitted. (Only half kidding here.)

sbiskeron Ask HN: What successful startups started as "Show HN"?

...ok, I think I just got told. I actually had forgotten we did that. :P

sbiskeron Ask HN: What successful startups started as "Show HN"?

Actually, I asked more to learn about which Show HNs became successful. I was curious if I could detect any common differences the startups themselves that posted on HN in their infancy, as opposed to the total pool of startups or the total pool of Show HNs overall. (Of course, as someone pointed out, there's also the fact that startups who posted Show HNs are going to be much more likely to have gone through an incubator like Y Combinator. That may be a distinct enough difference that it washes out anything else about their initial product or submission. Still, I can't imagine EVERY success from Show HN was a result of subsequently doing Y Combinator...)

On a more selfish note, I also figured that people discussing this would cause me to learn about more interesting companies with ties to HN that I hadn't heard of before.

sbiskeron Zocial CSS3 Buttons

Am I the only one whose eyes are really hurt by the brightness of the colors chosen here? (Seriously, I may be the only one - they do seem a little unnecessarily bright, but I've also been feeling tired today.)

sbiskeron All Adsense are now anti-SOPA

Click on any article on TechCrunch, and you'll see that they're not showing the anti-SOPA ads against actual content pages. I'm guessing that they're only doing this at the top level pages of these sites; possibly paying the sites for the space themselves.

sbiskeron Why I Won't Hire You

Hey, lovelyLaney - I noticed that your HN account is probably tightly linked to Golem Technologies in some way (given that you've only submitted twice, both articles from this domain). There are over 100 comments on this article, and not a single one is from you. If you wrote this post, I think I speak for a large portion of HN when I say - we'd love to hear from you. Yes, seriously.

I know some people will probably downvote whatever you post without thinking, no matter what you say - because judging from the comments, you seem to have angered the mob. Indeed, I disagree with this article strongly myself - and would be happy to chat with you about why it doesn't resonate with my personal experience. However, if you have thoughtful answers to what people here have to say, the community only wants to help you, and see its own succeed.

If you want to stand behind your article, please do. If you want to recant or clarify parts of things you've said, you can do that too. You're a one person company - are you hiring right now, and what sorts of positions are you having trouble hiring for? We'd love to hear specifics - and to hear you engage in the community about something it obviously feels passionately about in a deliberate, measured way. Many may disagree with what you have to say, but no one here should fault you simply for your attempts to say it, for contributing to the discussion around your own ideas. Hope to hear from you.