This could be partially because 10 years ago, PG thought startups were undervalued in society and wanted to preach them as a valid alternative route to success. Now startups are the new Pogs, with everybody in Intro to CS wanting to be a part of their college's official startup program. So maybe now he thinks they're overvalued and wants college kids to know that even if they could reach that "The Social Network"-ian dream (which, by definition, a majority of them can't), it wouldn't be worth it and they should enjoy their carefree life a little more before they bite off more than they can chew.

Or, like brudgers said, maybe it's a sign of personal progression. The overactive young PG wanted people to live the obsessively fast lifestyle like he did, but now the older and wiser PG thinks it wouldn't have done him too much harm if he spent a couple of more years crashing in random hotels around Beijing. Certainly the more amusing of explanations, I guess.

To get the triple-A companies on board is a tougher problem. The most-thorough and simplest solution is to get more Linux users. Triple-A companies use engines built on top of DirectX because DirectX works much better than OpenGL on Windows and everyone uses Windows (like, everyone. Windows still has 90%+ market share). If you pulled the rug under that logic by having everyone use Linux, you would force triple-A companies to support multiplatform engines and graphics APIs. Just because this solution is simple doesn't mean it's easy. Linux market share is currently pathetic. There are more Vista users than there are Linux users. While on forums and discussions and other virtual agoras, evangelists annually preach "the year of the Linux desktop" and with each patch to every WiFi driver pundits will make blog posts about how better Linux is getting and how no one likes Windows 8 and just-you-wait, the fact of the matter is, before Linux topples Windows in the market share graphs, it has to start toppling "Other" in the market share graphs. And it's pretty obvious why Linux isn't getting the market share it deserves. 1. No one wants to install a new operating system on their computer, and the fact that people have to know what an operating system is at all is a tragic case of a leaky abstraction, because people don't want operating systems, they want pictures and videos and music and Facebook and e-mail, 2. No one wants to deal with WiFi and graphics driver issues, and 3. No one wants to think for a single second past "Best Buy" when they want to buy a new craptop for their lovely little girl going to college (which I think is why Win8.x is beating both OS X and Linux combined despite being an objectively worse OS), and you sure as hell won't be finding any Linux at Best Buy. Marketing exists for a reason. Older computer geeks with long beards remember buying the Macintosh 128K for being the first computer with an effective implementation of a GUI and a mouse; many other people will remember buying the Macintosh because the 1984 ad caused Apple to explode in the public eye and turned Steve Jobs from one of those computer people into a heavily publicized rock star. Apple would continue to master and practically define hype, and while OS X isn't faring as well in the market share war, what Apple really is focusing on -- iOS -- is killing it. Until the Linux folks discover how important marketing stuff is, they won't capture the people who don't care enough about their machines to think past "what's the most popular thing being used right now?"

These are huge issues, and until they get solved, you won't be seeing Linux with a high marketshare, which means no triple-A company will bat it a single eyelash.

The easiest solution, although less effective than the first one, is to increase marketshare in platforms that are not Windows. This is because most platforms that are not Windows will require use of APIs that are multiplatform, making it frictionless to port to Linux. Somehow get people to game through the browser by making it possible to run triple-A games in Chrome? Good. Linux has Chrome. Get people to game mainly on OS X? Good. OS X games usually use OpenGL, and that's easy to port to Linux. Because this isn't as direct, you will always get some people who give so little shits about a set of OSes that have less users than "Other" does that they won't go through the effort of clicking the checkbox next to Linux in the engine project setup page, but it's somewhat of a solution.

http://www.techonsolution.com/which-is-the-best-operating-sy...

Isn't rabid Facebook hating getting old now?

I think that the argument that facebook adding "tacky social media" components to oculus would be bad for business is incorrect. Facebook has done quite well with the model, as their company shows.

For many of us, we realize that facebook will likely succeed with oculus in some way. It will just be a different kind of party than we want to go to, is all.

There's only one camera though, so you don't have any stereoscopic effect.

Benefit gained from cancer cure is far higher than detriment from some idiotic comments online an a semi-spammy marketing campaign that was swiftly punished. Net effect is very positive.

"I'm not supporting this by principle!" people vary from legitimate and caring to just pretentious and snobby.

I would understand not supporting a lot of the biggest hardware OEMs for prioritizing machine production cost over the quality of human life (Foxconn and other very popular, very cheap Chinese production manufacturers that employ some really sketchy tactics to keep that production cheap). Obviously for you to make such a strong decision, I'd expect you to have read a lot, way more than whatever Apple-scapegoating bullshit you've read in mainstream media and on Reddit (the whole Foxconn thing is very popular with, like, every OEM, by the way, not just Apple), making sure you knew who and who wasn't actually breaking your very strong principle and to what extent you can expect a company to provide "quality of human life" and what that even means, etc.

But when you boldly declare you won't support a company, no matter what they do, because a co-founder made some stupid and tasteless comments (said company later fucking fired said co-founder) and because they unwittingly executed on a really spammy marketing campaign (which caused them to get kicked off of Google for WEEKS as punishment)?

Where were you when RapGenius made apparent some glaring inefficiencies in Heroku? Where were you when RapGenius was building the most accurate, most well-designed, most comprehensive repository of lyrics and text annotations on the web?

You're really deciding to wave your huge "muh principles. I HAVE STRONG BELIEFES" cock on the Internet because of a couple insensitive comments?

As for the general culture on HN regarding hating the general culture around RapGenius ... so what if their general behaviors are different than yours. What's unprofessional to you is just fun to them. Everyone behaves in different ways; ivy tower academics from researcher academics from front-end web developers from game developers from humanities majors from STEM majors from musicians from DJs from ... there's nothing objectively worse about the rap culture behind RapGenius.

Sure, that culture may sometimes throw around otherwise offensive remarks. But remember that the context behind a word is infinitely more important than the word itself. The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that.

The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.

But when the RapGenius cofounder says offensive stuff (I heard one of them insulted Mark Zuckerberg at a conference?), often the context is just lighthearted jabs.

They may be unprofessional and insensitive jabs, but given that they're A) just meaning harmless fun and B) building one of the most comprehensive and well-designed text annotation sites on the Internet, we give them some cultural license to have their shitty taste in humor. In this specific case, obviously, they really overexploit that cultural license by saying such insensitive things on such a raw , emotional topic, but again, the guy got fucking fired.

Also, the most successful companies hire the most capable programmers, so the most successful companies have to be aware of the fact that whatever stupid status you posted about getting arrested for a night in your freshman year at college is not at all correlated to your skill as a programmer. So they wouldn't even bother wasting the legal effort and time to get their hands on your digital profile from Google or Facebook.

Most of this tracking stuff is just going to be used for targeted advertising. All this social and personal stuff is pretty much useless for the workplace unless you're like, a murderer or rapist or something (in which case you're already in records far different than Facebook's or Google's and it really doesn't matter what they do). 70K NSA employees aren't going to randomly stalk the intricate life of some random Average Joe to figure out what color underwear he's wearing. Another irrational fear is that you're unwittingly breaking some stupid bullshit tiny law and all this tracking will allow you to get in trouble with that. howevermanyK Google employees aren't going to hunt you down and get you in trouble because you did something technically illegal because that costs resources to develop the technology to automatically detect those crimes and then legal resources to accuse you of them, and Google really doesn't get anything out of spending those resources (I doubt the government would pay off Google for that information, either, because if it's some insignificant, mundane, bullshit traffic violation caught by a Google Car, the government wouldn't care because they're too busy spending their resources towards more important stuff, like murders or kidnappings. Big companies already cooperate with government on large scale crimes like that, if that qualifies the trend.) No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in no one's incentive.

All of this data is just going to be sold to advertisers because all of these companies don't have any other source of revenue because we all decided we'd rather get ads than directly pay money for Google products. In very rare cases, the government is cooperating with regards to stuff like murders or kidnappings or such.

I mean, if you don't like that, fine. Go ahead and petition to get the ability to pay $30 a year to use Google products (which is the revenue per user per year that they're making off advertisement). Just recognize that this data isn't going for some James Bond-villian-esque desire rooted in pure evil. It's advertisement.

Many countries---China, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea---were increasingly influenced by fervent advocates of utopian Big Government social engineering programs and ended up with "1984 clone" governments as a result. The evil government of "1984" was modeled after real life. Those who brought these governments to power lived by the theory that further social progress required a significant expansion of central government control. Their preferred form of government was Big Government domination of people's lives as long as the domination favored them and their preferred political identity groups.

The US has plenty of such people in positions of influence, and the notion that it is so ridiculous to be concerned about ending up where others have gone before is unsupported by history.

Do the least amount required in your current job to pay the bills, then, on the side, improve your skills. You don't need to climb up the corporate chain and suck dick until it's your dick being sucked.

The "Good HS grades -> Good college -> Good junior level job at a corporation -> stick at that corporation until you get a good senior level job" is firmly stuck in the 60s, 70s and 80s for a reason. The highest salaried jobs in programming are going to kids job-hopping from company to company in the Bay Area, graduating from average colleges (some minority not even having a degree) working at top companies who's HR departments publicly disavow the previously worshiped legitimacy of the GPA (word is, Google HR isn't even allowed to look at your GPA).

I recently glanced over this test Andreessen-Horowitz was giving out to recruit software engineers for some in-house development thing they were doing. In the description for the application, they said : "A resume is a plus, but you don't need to have it."

I know that, obviously, people with college degrees from top colleges have a higher rate of success in the corporate marketplace. Killer resumes and years of experience will likely get you very far. Sticking around at a successful company for a lot of years will likely get you a very respected senior role with really awesome stock options.

But the point is, for whatever very small but still existent minority, 19 year old college dropouts that have done 3 6-month jobs are still getting hired. Which means that a killer resume and corporate ladder climbing aren't hard-and-fast requirements anymore -- the only hard-and-fast requirement is merit. Obviously years of working within a single environment will get you a lot of merit, and obviously Google will start locations in Ann-Arbor and Pittsburgh just cause UMich and CMU are there, but that's just because Google values those areas for their high rate of merit, not for their pre-existing prestige.

And what OP is describing certainly shows that he is not properly developing his merit.

Now, in the 60s through 80s, there weren't really too many resources available to improve your merit on your own. So if you were in a shitty position you mostly just grit your teeth until you got in a slightly better position to improve your merit that involved less teeth-gritting and more enjoyable skill growth, and then used that skill growth to get into a slightly better position, ad infinitum where the base case is your retirement. So the best advice was to stick in a single corporate environment until you stopped being a junior and started becoming a senior because there was no more efficient way to develop your merit.

But nowadays, there are resources aplenty and much more efficient ways of developing merit. It's very easy to get cheap access to field-defining textbooks and online lecture videos and PDFs and ebooks and cheap personal computers with which to tinker around with and yadda yadda yadda, all of which can be done by any reasonably smart and dedicated but unexperienced young person, all of which is a much better use of said young person's time than climbing the corporate ladder until you got a job that didn't make you want to kill yourself.

So it's very possible to develop your skills and your merit without the prestige that you used to need in the form of a killer resume or long corporate history or stellar college grades.

So as long as you mastered your data structures & algorithms, your theoretical computer science, so as long as you mastered programming principles and can really say you're an expert in a language because you spent many man hours hacking away with that language at home, so as long as you know your OO, so as long as you prep up with the plentiful blog posts there are about mastering interviews (even for specific companies -- Steve Yegge has written a couple blog posts about mastering the Google interview, and for specific languages -- and I've very recently come across a very useful and thorough blog for knowing the ins-and-outs of Java for mastering interviews that demand expertise in that language), you can get an awesome job. Even if you never land a interview with Google or Facebook (because at that scale, so many hopeless hopefuls apply and you couldn't possibly scale HR with the rate of applicants, so you sort of have to rely on less-than-perfect prestige requirements like college degree from a decent college or networking with other good companies in the Valley. But I'm saying that the modern age allows for extremely low barriers for finding quality applicants and getting quality knowledge to become a quality applicant, and while there are certain institutions where you still sort-of need to reply on prestige, for the most part the industry is becoming a lot better) , you can definitely land a phone screen with an awesome software shop at least better than whatever shitty position you're currently in, and then you can get the interview after you display competence in the screen, and then you can land the job. And after that, it's all improving : improving your skill with awesome workmates in an awesome environment, and then eventually moving on to greener pastures at ... greener?... companies if it is your desire to do so.

Note that I'm not saying getting a more fulfilling job is easier by any means. Top companies will still only take top people. Just that, as barriers between companies and applicants lower and modern technology makes judgment of qualification more efficient, "top" is going to rely more on merit than prestige. And you do not gain any merit from staying at a shitty job.

I live in Manhattan. Within some 2-digit amount of minutes, I can experience the Tribeca Film Festival, I can visit some of the best museums and galleries in the world, I can get involved in the thriving nightlife, dozens of top restaurants, hundreds of huge retailers, and a massive tech scene. Whether we're talking conferences or weekly meetups or user groups or opportunities like Hacker School, there's just a higher chance it's going on in NYC than in a smaller city. Obviously when it comes specifically to the tech scene SF+SV+Bay Area is the juggernaut, but comparing NYC and SF to some small town is comparing some top college football player to some NFL players to your local middle school's quarterback. Yes, if I lived in the Midwest, I could get a McMansion and slightly larger numbers in the bank account if my industry's salary doesn't scale well between city sizes (again, programming does), but is it really worth it to give up all the other opportunities and stuff in bigger cities?

How did you manage to outplay the dozens of very smart, very experienced, and very successful VCs and investors that have spent dozens of man-hours thinking about whether they should or should not dump millions of dollars into Snapchat? You are aware, that, as of now, Snapchat has raised more than $100M total in funding, from initial seed to it's Series C, and that some of the biggest players in SV have offered to buy it for upwards of $4B? I'm quite shocked to see that your little quip regarding it's long-term potential has somehow out-qualified all of this money and time and thought that went into it's current state. Especially since investors value long term potential over everything else : the whole deal with economics is finding value before anyone else does, otherwise you're just a bandwagoner. Early bird gets the worm, so the most successful early birds are those that look the furthest for the worms with the highest long-term potential.

They berated Google for making a bad decision when they acquired YouTube and they called Facebook a trend that was just "MySpace for college kids". Maybe you're not in the right demographic for using Snapchat, so that's why you don't see it's long-term potential?

You're probably dealing with a lot of confirmation bias.

If not, you're probably going to pull statistical data regarding the dot com bust. Failed companies during the dot com bust were a lot different than Snapchat. They had no users and were funded by clueless empty suits who thought that business success was the combination of a half-assed idea you thought up during dinner and waaay too many code monkeys working on your terrible idea with a forced deadline.

That's not what Snapchat is. Large amounts of funding from very respected investors with high success rates of investment in companies with a lot of users ... show high correlation with success.

Snapchat has a shit ton of users, runs pretty lean cost-wise (low amt of employees, small offices, efficient database/server management, etc.) as any tech company worth a shit these days will run (compared to dot coom bust, that is), continuously rolls out updates and features, and has a lot of funding. All of these very important factors when discussing a company's success.

For every example of a company that has failed with 1. had a shit ton of users, 2. didn't blow it's money on stupid shit like Aeron chairs and way too many employees (as companies during the dot com bust did), 3. has rapid development, and 4. has a lot of funding, there are 1000 companies that has succeeded like that. That's because those things are pretty good determinants of success.

User data is the current currency in Silicon Valley.

When you can't charge users for GET requests and everyone in the nation is too reluctant to spend a penny on iOS apps, the only real source of income for companies that focus on web/mobile markets is advertisement. So you work on optimizing ROI for advertisement. One way of doing such is optimizing user data analysis. Know your users' demands better -- their location, their demographic, their interests -- advertise stuff they're more likely to click on, get paid more by ad agencies. In order to analyze user data, you need, 1. "analyze" : accurate and thorough aggregation algorithms (I'm speculating that this is why Google bought Deep Mind and Zuckerberg/Thiel invested in Vicarious), and 2. "user data" : shit tons of raw data regarding your users.

And companies with a lot of users have a lot of user data. Even if Snapchat advertises ephemerality, they're really storing all of those pics on their database after they're deleted client-side (why else would servers even exist, there's no reason, technically, something like Snapchat couldn't work in pure P2P if you're really getting rid of the user data). Not to mention the metadata regarding your phone number and your friends list. While the first bit of advertisement optimization -- "analyze" -- may seem like it's not good enough at analyzing pictures and social graphs (your friends and your friends' friends and your friends' friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends that happen to be in your friends and also your friends' friends, etc.) just yet, 1. this is why AI is becoming so popular, and 2. this is the risk the VC is taking by investing in Snapchat. Obviously every sound investment takes some risk, or else it'd be so objectively obvious that everyone would make the investment and you wouldn't get a high ROI.

The risk here is saying "user data in the form of pictures and social graphs, and whatever something like Snapchat can reasonably evolve into if we keep it surviving" is valuable.

What you're saying when you say "large amounts of funding have historically shown little correlation with success", you're talking about clueless, unexperienced investors saying that "my vague business idea when paired with hundreds of programmers and really expensive Aeron chairs is valuable".

Not only is the former much more believable, given the high success of companies that, 1. initially seemed like useless toys to short-sighted people on the Internet, but had a SHIT TON of users and a very fast development cycle and 2. gone from no-revenue to some-revenue YEARS after initial success, this is also a prediction being made by motherfucking Andressen-Horowitz.

So, no, I'd say cases like Snapchat have HIGH correlation with success. Sorry you don't have anyone to sext.