spolsky

34 ms·

301.
by spolsky 17y ago
Jeez, I hate this attitude... that the only way a company can succeed is if you suffer. You spend all friggin' day at the office. It doesn't have to be a coalmine for the company to succeed. On the contrary. When a startup gets to the point
302.
by spolsky 17y ago
Absolute rubbish. I can give you just as many anecdotes to the contrary, viz.: Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, all of whom had reasonably perfect offices two decades ago.
303.
by spolsky 17y ago
I finally figured it out. When reading headlines, s/could/won't/g and s/\?$/? No./g
304.
by spolsky 17y ago
Yes! I like this. One problem, from the VC's perspective, is that if the startup starts selling successfully, they may not NEED VC.
305.
by spolsky 17y ago
YC terms are a price. A price is set by a market. Asserting that "YC terms are poor" is like saying that YC's price is too expensive. If the price were too expensive, YC wouldn't have enough applicants. YC does, indeed, have applicants beat
306.
by spolsky 18y ago
This stuff is never very smooth and never looks very clean. I would recommend calling a glazier and mounting a sheet of tempered glass on the wall with small stainless standoffs. See http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#5
307.
We've got a million dollars and we want to buy your micro ISV(blog.businessofsoftware.org)
56 points by spolsky 18y ago|25 comments
308.
by spolsky 18y ago
I'm totally confused. Doesn't this mean that Gmail only works when you're online? Which means... higher battery usage than a native email client, higher bandwidth usage, slower response time, doesn't work in airplanes, etc.?
309.
by spolsky 18y ago
No. In New York the only thing that would be illegal is if they responded to street hails below 96th street.
310.
by spolsky 18y ago
I keep hearing this meme that "it's very easy for users to switch search engines." This is true for one user. But BILLIONS of people are using Google. And it's NOT easy for all of them to switch. Google's position is not tenuous at all.
311.
by spolsky 18y ago
It doesn't infer type information from variable names. (An old version had to do that in one particular case to work around a VBScript ambiguity). It does type inference like Haskell, from the actual types that are assigned to things, so DI
312.
by spolsky 18y ago
Yeah, otherwise my boss never would have let me spend the money ;/
313.
by spolsky 18y ago
In FogBugz 6 the compiler output was PHP and VBScript. In FogBugz 7 the compiler output is .NET/CLR bytecodes. It also emits compressed JavaScript which runs on the browser.
314.
by spolsky 18y ago
No matter how much you speed up a 30 second build, you're not going to save a month on the release process. Be realistic, now. SSDs provide so many other performance benefits--even just launching apps--that they're going to make our develop
315.
by spolsky 18y ago
Seriously? You would gouge your eyes out? Most good hackers that I know actually prefer to work on compilers. We like the fact that we can change the compiler and control our destiny... we've added code generation, active records, lambdas,
316.
by spolsky 18y ago
If disk sizes are different, which they almost always are, AFAIK dd doesn't quite hack it, otherwise I would have just booted off a Ubuntu live CD and done that.
317.
by spolsky 18y ago
How long did it take you to "roll your own"? QuickBooks pro was $199. Based on the time you spent rolling your own, how much is an hour of your time worth?
318.
by spolsky 18y ago
QuickBooks is reasonably priced and extremely mature. It does what it does for reasons that you may not realize now, but you'll be extremely happy that it does them after a few months, like, the first time you need to file corporate income
319.
by spolsky 18y ago
Steve Blank is awesome... I highly recommend that book.
320.
by spolsky 18y ago
Exploding offers are a sign of desperation, but they also serve to filter out young entrepreneurs who have a modicum of business sense. The VC firm that extends an exploding offer and won't negotiate it is guaranteeing that they'll only fun
321.
by spolsky 18y ago
For what it's worth, chipmakers been saying that flash drives will catch up with hard drives in price for about 17 years now. I first read an article about solid state drives catching up with rotating drives in 1992. Right now a terabyte ha
322.
by spolsky 18y ago
It's way earlier than Extreme Programming. Believe it or not, it was once considered a part of Object Oriented Programming. Here's an article from IBM Systems Journal 1993 where I first learned the idea of ship early and often: http://www.
323.
by spolsky 18y ago
Google sort of has a preprocessor that does stuff like this. Probably not as much as Wolfram. You can see it when you search Google for things like: "What time is it in Las Vegas" (notice that it knows, and it also knows that you probably m
324.
by spolsky 18y ago
Yes, good catch
325.
by spolsky 18y ago
The CEO has decided that you have technical ability but not management ability. He doesn't want to lose your nagios-installation skills but he thinks that an imaginary person whom he has not yet met or hired will be better than you at leadi
326.
by spolsky 18y ago
Hoo boy, this is what everybody was saying at the end of Web 1.0. Evan Williams started a website called theendoffree.com ( http://web.archive.org/web/*/theendoffree.com ). Then Web 2.0 happened. Ev starting doing free things again. Coincid
327.
by spolsky 18y ago
Because Fried makes a big deal out of "not doing functional specs' when he's, essentially, doing functional specs, just not calling them that. He's opposed to BAD functional specs, which is fine, but too many people read his title and decid
328.
by spolsky 18y ago
Excel has a cell format called "TEXT" that prevents all of these problems. If you plan to use a range of your spreadsheet as text (and not as numbers or dates), format it as Text and excel will never misinterpret what you type. You can also
329.
How accurate are the arguments in JWZ’s 10-year-old "java sucks" article?(stackoverflow.com)
30 points by spolsky 18y ago|11 comments
330.
by spolsky 18y ago
Pardon me for stating the obvious, because nobody has yet: Nobody PLANS to close down within a year. If you really want to give customers confidence that you're going to be around for the long run, you have to charge a lot of money. More th

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