The logical critic in you will assume I'm offering to do this in order to generate leads or recruits and to counter-act that, I have no problem with you removing your personal details and even censoring company names.
If one single member of this website comes back to this page and complains that I abused this oportunity for my own personal gain then I will officially hold my hands up and accept the title as 'Worlds Biggest Idiot'. If you click my username you can clearly find my full name as well as the name of the company I work for. A quick google search with that info will furnish you with the address of the office I work from along with my direct line number.
Considering the fact that my career would be at stake, do you honestly believe I would abuse peoples trust like that?
Only if HN were to give members a fixed number of upvotes per original posting -- or per day, hour, week, etc. -- and let the members dispense those upvotes as they see fit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Use.
I agree. It's an impressive interface. If this really proves to be a very desirable improvement from an end user perspective, it may take Bing YEARS to be able to duplicate the experience unless they had something like this in the works already. ie: It takes lots of coordinated effort to make something like this possible at scale. Congrats to the Google team!
Technologically it's not very difficult, IMO, once you already have search engines that are as fast as Google and Bing.
The tough part for Bing, is with fewer searches, their predictive engine isn't quite as good. But this is where the Yahoo deal will pay off.
But all they need to do is fire off predictive searches and bring those back -- and of course, each predictive search only needs to bring back ten or fewer results.
Bing already does the predictive text suggestion. They just need to send back queries along with the actual text suggestion. At worst they'd need to get some more servers. But I fully expect they'd be able to roll this out in months if they wanted to.
Although personally I'd still focus on relevance. There's so much stuff both engines suck at, I'd love for them to fix some of those holes first.
Some of them don't, but what he's really referring to are students with IEPs --- and those run the gamut from children who genuinely need constant individualized attention to kids with no medically diagnosable problems whatsoever.
My son (who is and will remain in public school, though we live in a wealthy suburb and so enjoy de facto private schooling) had trouble socializing in 1st grade and was "diagnosed" by a school functionary as having an "autism spectrum disorder". After consulting with my mom, a full-time LD/BD teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, we argued for over a month against assigning an IEP to him. "You need the IEP to get occupational therapy services" (read: handwriting lessons). Yeah, and, we can count on never getting rid of the IEP, or getting him into any selective program anywhere.
(He's concluding 5th grade now, and besides issues getting his homework in, he's doing great. Late bloomer.)
The fact that private schools can be selective about students and can expel them virtually without cause is not a spurious concern. It's a very real issue.
When starting a business, if the idea is even reasonably good in a decent sized market and you stick to it, getting to $1M per year in revenue is not the hard part. In fact, after two companies of my own, it was almost too easy to get that far in each one. The hard part is making a decent amount of money at that revenue level because realistically you are going to have at least a few employees in the company to get there. ie: $1M isn't what it used to be.
In my experience, getting to $10M dollars should be the real goal and that proves to be quite a bit more challenging because this takes some real scale and the skills from 0 to $1M are quite a bit different that say the skills from $5M to $10M range....the job of CEO is completely different between the two and most people don't prove to be good at both types of the "jobs".....so the company hits a ceiling and never quite gets there.
Another way of saying same. If employees are in your future, focus on revenue per employee (RPE).
Napkin math: sub-$100k RPE and your wee company is nominally profitable after salaries, fixed & variable costs. Greater than $100k per employee, profits scale nicely.
While nice to talk about the Goog's RPE ($1 mil '08), I prefer to "fish" for company ideas a little closer to Earth. For inspiration, Inc 5000 companies with 50 or fewer employees, sorted by revenue:
I agree on RPE, but the data on the Inc. website is highly suspect, however, with regard to number of employees.
I did a random sampling of several companies that had tons of revenue with just 1 or 2 employees and checked out their websites and the Inc. data is flat out wrong in many cases.
this company is listed as 3 employees on INC., there's 4 in their management section alone...seems INC maybe has PUBLICLY listed employees, and is not counting the chairman...
As stated by another reply, part of it definitely is the shift from managing people to managing managers.
The other main shift is that the scope of what you are doing goes beyond what one person can keep in their head. You can't know everything going on any more and you can't be telling people exactly what to do.
The closest analogy I can come up with it that it's kind of the like difference between "procedural programming" which you can get away with for the $1M company as compared "object-oriented programming" for the $10M+ company.
You can't possibly know every detail of every object's design and at the same time you need to have techniques to discover how well all the objects in the company are being constructed and acting as the "system engineer" making sure all the "objects" (ie: teams) still interface together well.
