I'd guess for purity reasons. Volcanic eruptions don't always come from the mantle - in fact think convection cells, the rising material actually comes from deep down
Max Levchin put his money into Slide, Elon Musk put it all into Tesla/SpaceX, and I could name a lot of other entrepreneurs who did similarly but you get my point.
Investing in your own project isn't "commonsense," it's just an individual's view on risk management
At Burning Man I met a couple of people who work on the Tor project.
They were brilliant. Honestly it's going to be hard for a govt agency to recruit people like this - people who are incredibly passionate about security and cryptography may tend to care about privacy issues as well, for which the government currently incurs a negative sentiment, and this is compounded by the fact that brilliant people these days tend to work on problems they are ideologically aligned with. This isn't the Manhattan Project era anymore...
But you just never know, people come from all sorts of political backgrounds.
Honestly I'd say this depends on your goals - are you trying to learn? Or just make something (either answer is fine)? If the former, build. The latter, plug something in.
Yeah I was thinking about that too. Though if the limiting factor for switching speed is the impedance of the interconnects (I'm guessing it is), makes sense.
How come not many people are talking about this article in the context of entrepreneurship? Pretty astute advice for people doing startups.
"1) it fits the classic definition of a disruptive company and 2) is an innovative company playing in a large market with unsophisticated competitors."
Of course, everybody who does a startup has to go through the cloning phase. It's just part of learning how to build a business...
You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
RPX is defensive aggregation only - they don't go out and sue people.
There's also value add whenever you have centralized expertise: think PGExperts, Percona, and EnterpriseDB (mysql and postgres consultants) - if I'm running a company whose core business is not in the data, it's usually more economical to outsource that expertise than hire a 'superstar' DBA. Same with RPX: if your core business isn't IP law you might as well outsource that.
This is why consultancies of all shapes and types exist in the world, after all.
Companies spend millions just to defend a suit whether they win or lose - that's why they settle. The genius of RPX is that they basically identified that as an inefficiency aka market opportunity.
A lot of startups could learn from this model: taking an existing market and making it more efficient. That's usually a better bet than building an Instagram or Twitter analytics company - the big caveat of course is you actually have to have domain expertise in an industry to do this type of startup ;)
Paul, how does C fits into the picture? I don't see anything in the source for compiling native extensions, and the implementations src/recommendify.c calls look incomplete?
Of course :) You stepping in and writing NPM was HUGE! Along with Ryan, you and guys like Tim, Guillermo, TJ, Felix, now Bert and others really got the ship pointed in the right direction
I think your question is more intended to ask about seed round - $500k-$1mm ish
Rule of thumb for first round of engineer hires is $85k as of late - they get substantial stock in return, about as much as managers hired after the A round.
Series A you're looking at closer to market wages, with obviously less stock
The threads vs. event loop thing doesn't always pan out to either one being 'better' - who do you think is doing the work when your browser, or Node.js does an async call? They use threads too, and there are certain workloads where it's more efficient to just use multithreading instead of event loop + thread pools. I can't find my references atm b/c I'm traveling, but if you google around you will find numerous case studies in the Java world about threads vs. event loops (the Java world has been wrestling with threads vs. event loops too, for the past DECADE)
Remember as an engineer: spike, profile, benchmark, and determine the best solution for the problem.
I would actually accept a much lower wage than in industry (as long as I could live off it - which I doubt would be very low in NYC haha) to teach at such a school
Dude, Laconian - iOS 5 already enables GC (a generational one at that), which already came out for regular Cocoa in in obj-c 2.0
You can bet your socks a lot of devs for typical iOS apps will be using GC.
I dunno what GC algorithm is used for MacRuby, I don't see how the upper limit of performance will be much different since obj-c uses dynamic dispatch the same, and Google/Mozilla is making strides in type inference.
Dyanamically typed languages might be pretty close to static language performance (with properly written code since the JIT is still dumb compared to a human) pretty soon.
Depends where. You probably can't live in Manhattan working as an oDesker, but you could easily make enough to make a good living if you're in the midwest.
Your strategy though would be to build up a resume with oDesk. You're probably going to hit a limit though - I mean I've worked with $20/hr Eastern European developers that would be $100k developers in the Bay Area/NYC so it will come down to: what is your reputation and how much can you command.
After you build up a portfolio, you're going to have to use it as a spring board to get a fulltime job or fulltime onsite contracting for like $40/hour, etc. at a company.
From there you can basically build a "normal" software career and get the industry contacts, start networking as a programmer and if you decide can go back to remote contracting for a better-than-living-wage.
This isn't the path I took, but I know a lot of developers who have took this path, worked their way up the ladder throughout the 90's/2000's around the US, then 'retired' to a good life with their family in say Kansas/Nebraska (insert midwestern state) doing contracting work and getting to enjoy life the way they want (life Silicon Valley/NYC isn't for everyone).
REMEMBER, software as a career is going to be mostly networking and people skills in the long run - good luck!
It's quite clear not a lot of the posters in this thread have actually used these illegal substances. Which is understandable, as those who have would be reticent to come out.
I'll come out and say that although I haven't used amphetamines (though I know the story of Erdos as well as the military using it), I have been prescribed valium for anxiety issues. It's helped with random things in life like striking up conversations with completely random women at bars by reducing the anxiety felt in a situation.
Anecdotally I know in the SF startup scene, amphetamines are used quite a bit. Amphetamines (of which adderall is one) are basically a better version of caffeine. It allows you to stay up three or four days perfectly lucid (unlike the stress response from caffeine from increasing cortisol levels in your bloodstream), and you also get a mental speedup (quite literally, the clock speed of your brain is increased)
Anyways, I really hope they legalize this stuff someday hah! I'd be a lot more productive, especially with reading the laundry list of books on my reading list...