9 ms·
"Nah, who needs another search engine?"
- lionhearted 16y agoOuch. I think you've got to judge opportunities largely by the people executing them. Lots of pedestrian opportunities with great execution do well. Lots of great opportunities with pedestrian execution go poorly.
- sown 16y agoSimilar thing happened to me in 1999. I realized Google was way cooler than alta vista and better at finding unknown things rather than Yahoo's directory. Truly the future, I thought. I sent in a resume to do some kind of work not development related; data center & sys admin stuff. They called me twice but I convinced myself that they would not have hired me anyways so I never called back. I was probably right, though, given how their interviewing process is (or was).
- coryl 16y agoCome on now, at least let THEM reject you.
- sown 16y agoMy whole life is pock-marked with failure and rejection. I can't imagine they would have been any different.
- lrm242 16y agoWhose life isn't?
- DevX101 16y agoReminds me of a timeless quote from @shitmydadsays: "That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."
- chriskelley 16y ago"The only thing stopping you from getting what you want, is the excuse you keep telling yourself about why you can't have it." - Tony Robbins
- sown 16y agoI don't know what to say to that. It seems like uplifting but empty advice, the kind of stuff you'd expect from Tony Robins. Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoMy father-in-law was an astronaut. He's a smart guy, but he grew up in some podunk town in Virginia, his family was decidedly middle class, and he went to a public high school. But he worked hard, got accepted to the Air Force Academy, and eventually became an astronaut. Then the Challenger blew up and NASA and the Air Force parted ways, so he was no longer an astronaut. Instead, he's spent the last 25 years reaching his current position: 3-star general who will most likely be promoted to 4-star and end up running Air Force Space Command or something similar. The trait that I've observed most in him since I met him ten years ago is his unshakeable belief in his ability to get the job done. He's probably the most quietly confident person I know.
- burningion 16y agoAgreed. Sometimes being borderline delusional about your ability to accomplish complex things is crucial to actually getting them done.
- spiffworks 16y agoAgreed. Self-doubt has gotten me nowhere.
- sown 16y agoWell...not everyone can grow up to be a 3 or 4 star general, either.
- travisjeffery 16y ago“You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.” - Gretzky In my experience all it takes is just one success to turn it all around and get a on roll. But that's not going to happen if you never shoot for something.
- sown 16y agoQuitters never win and winners never quit, but we're not all born with Gretzky's talent and also: if you never win and never quit what does that say about you?
- travisjeffery 16y agoGretzky wasn't born with that amount of talent, his talent grew out of doing nothing but spending as much time as he did practicing on the rink his father made him, day in and day out. Practice, practice, practice. Get the idea out of your head that people are on the outset better than you. You're always going to lose with this kind of attitude you have, though. Even if you won I don't even think you'd know it.
- sown 16y agoThat's nice, but you're ignoring the rest of my post. What if Gretzky never got better? What if no matter how much pushing and training and practice he never scored a goal? I'm sure there are many people out there like that. I happen to be one of them.
- rick888 16y ago"What if Gretzky never got better? What if no matter how much pushing and training and practice he never scored a goal? I'm sure there are many people out there like that. I happen to be one of them." Then he's doing something wrong. If you spend hours upon hours doing something, you will get better at it.
- sown 16y ago
- Zakuzaa 16y agoHindsight is 20/20.
- thought_alarm 16y agoThe first time I tried Google I did a search for "foo bar" and it returned web pages that only contained the phrase "foo bar", and I promptly deleted my Alta Vista bookmark. What's funny is that I remember it so vividly, like how someone would remember where they were the day Kennedy was shot. It would be really great if Alta Vista kept their old search engine and search index circa 1999 on-line, so we could periodically remind ourselves what the web used to be like.
- leftnode 16y agoBummer, I was just about to point you to the Google page of their index from 2001, but it looks like they took it down - http://www.google.com/search2001.html http://www.google.com/search2001.html
- FluidDjango 16y agoAnd, sadly: www.archive.org: >0 pages found for http://google.com/search2001.html http://google.com/search2001.html >Sorry, no matches.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoBut in Altavista, you could have searched on foo bar, "foo bar", or foo NEAR bar; I still wish Google had the latter option.
- losvedir 16y agoI think it does! You probably know that an asterisk stands in for a single word in a query, but if you add more asterisks then it stands in for more words. However, there's not a one-to-one correspondence between asterisks and words skipped. A "few" asterisks means skip a "few" words, and more asterisks means the words can be farther apart. So you can search for foo NEAR bar with something like foo * bar. At least, that was my understanding, but I can't seem to find that spelled out anywhere online after a quick search just now, so I could be way off.
- sp332 16y ago
- hristov 16y agoThat is pretty sad/funny. But to tell you the truth I actually thought that we did need another search engine towards the end of the 90s. It was around that time that search got totally broken. I remember usually if I would search for X, I was sure to get a lot of "hot sluts taking X up their asses" links no matter what X was. Right before Google became popular search was totally and completely useless. I remember I actually went back to using the old Yahoo subject matter directory trees to find stuff. It was not very helpful, their links were mostly outdated. And for a while I was trying very hard to bookmark or remember any URL I found interesting because I thought I would never be able to find them again if i closed my browser. And once I learned about Google it was like my eyes were opened once again. So yeah, if they offered me a job in 1998 and I had tried their website, I would be all over it. But alas they did not. It was funny, they actually were looking hard for someone in my field (patent attorney). They needed a patent lawyer so much that they actually listed the position in the main Google page, and this was the only time ever that I know of that they have listed a job position on the main google.com page. Unfortunately, I was still in law school then :(.
- zxer 16y ago"search was totally and completely useless" Often I feel that in recent years the quality of the results are declining again. Now if you search for X, you get a lot of webshops, which tell you the price, but not any other useful information. Or if X is not a product, more and more of the results are pointing to all kind of aggregator sites which are again linking to each other instead of useful content or links. Or the similar case is when all the results on the first page are the same content on different pages. So perhaps there is a market opportunity again. Anyone? :)
- access_denied 16y agoThe market opportunity is here all the time. It's called qulity content. There are many fields were the only usefull web page is the wikipedia stud. Yes, things like desig, tech or the usual stuff like sports are overrun. But even in sports: there are not many sites with quality content compared to tech. And IRL sports is so much bigger than tech in terms of 'press' in general. If aggregator sites manage to be the top hits in Google, chances are there is no real competitor.
- cstross 16y agoDifferent field, but ... I'm a novelist. For some reason, folks in the graphic novel biz seem to think that novelists have a usefully transferable skill set. About six years ago I got an email from a guy at Marvel comics. "We're looking for a novelist to take over writing this superhero property we just rebooted, and Warren Ellis, who did the reboot, suggested you. Wanna Talk?" We talked, I did some recon on the superhero in question, decided I really hated him and life was too short (even if it was an opportunity to make a big break into comic writing) ... and turned down "Iron Man".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ajtaylor 16y agoI think the only proper response here is: "D'oh!" accompanied by a face palm.
- krainboltgreene 16y agoHow does a HackerNews user not like Tony Starks? ;)
- cstross 16y agoTony Stark is Donald Rumsfeld's Mary-Sue. I am a British center-left -- liberal democrat voting -- Volvo-driving organic-eating media luvvie. (I'm also a self-employed businessman and a sometime dot-com veteran; let's not get too carried away with the socialism here.) Muscular two-fisted violent imperialism lacks appeal. I could have written Tony Stark as an anti-hero, but the risk for pushback from the fans would have been significant. When you're looking for a project to work on for possibly several years, you should pick something you love. As I was simultaneously looking at two multi-book contracts from major publishers for books that I would have complete creative control over (and retain copyright on -- don't forget, Marvel and DC insist on work-for-hire!) I went with the "do what you love" option. (The books in question, for what it's worth, were "Accelerando", "Glasshouse", and the last three Merchant Princes books.)
- auxbuss 16y agoI turned down a meeting with Bill Gates in 1982. It was a personal connection, and we were going to meet at his house; maybe his dad's house, maybe he was still living there, I don't recall. MS was ~150 employees at the time and hiring like crazy. Bill had my cv. I was visiting from the UK with my girlfriend who was raised in Bellevue. I think I instead opted to jam with a band called Myth in a barn in Redmond. Myth morphed into Queensrÿche soon after, so I guess I missed two chances!
- enjo 16y agoI met a guy who had a double digit Microsoft employee number. He ended up taking another job for like a $5k/year pay raise in the mid 80's.
- MikeCapone 16y agoDo you often think about those "what if"?
- auxbuss 16y agoNo, never, honestly. Life is a sequence of half chances. You make your choices, and you make them for good reasons at the time. Looking at the past doesn't mean that the present would be as it is if you'd made different choices. That's a theme used in almost every time-travel movie.
- mkramlich 16y agoIn a choice between joining Microsoft or Queensryche, I would have joined the metal band too.
- sagarun 16y agoReminds me of how i screwed up my recent interview with a big internet company. Every morning i wake up and regret it! #FML
- muon 16y agoWhether we like it or not, chance plays big role in major decision making in life.
- joshu 16y agoHa, I know that guy. He is completely awesome.
- dholowiski 16y agoNah, who needs another search engine? Nah, who needs another groupon clone? Nah, who needs another social networking site? Nah, who needs another virtual currency based game? Seems like there's always room for innovation, if you're willing to ignore the nay-sayers.
- uxp 16y agoAt least for Google, Facebook (and MySpace) and Groupon, their products became popular because of how they implemented it, not because of what they built. Making a better product, successfully, is what sets apart clones from revolutionaries.
- btilly 16y agoI met someone who says, Every time people ask me for career advice, I tell them they shouldn't ask me. I had the opportunity to be in the first 5 employees at both Yahoo and Google, and finished my PhD instead of doing either.
- mortenjorck 16y agoPerceptiveness and luck are all you have in a situation such as this. You would need an extremely rare caliber of at least one.