Great to see that there is (almost) always a great open source alternative to expensive proprietary IP products! Splunk can become very expensive very quickly if you have a lot of data, so this is great news. Wish they would have shorter release cycles though...
Great overview, but do you think it's possible to compare package managers between different programming languages? I mean they all work quite differently when it comes to dependencies, build process etc. I'm a Python coder & pretty happy with PIP and PYPI...
Yes. I think comparison is possible and important. Of course dependencies are handles in every language a bit differently. But on the other side they all do the same, more or less. The differences are more on the client side.
PIP is a good tool. But in my opinion the definition of dependencies shouldn't be in setup.py file. Because it's too easy to execute random code in a setup.py. A JSON file is the better choice for a project file, in my opinion.
I agree, when you're solving a problem, is package management a big enough issue to influence what language you're going to choose? I think it's an interesting question and not sure of the answer. My gut says no, but others might think otherwise.
Another business guy turned programmer here. It's good to see that there are more of us out there and that I'm not the only crazy one. Some advice I would give to anybody who wants to learn to code from scratch:
- Focus. Don't do it on the side, it would take too long. Treat learning to code as if it was your regular job(I tried to do 40-60hrs per week, I did about 2000hrs of coding in my first year)
- Don't hurry. Don't obsess about efficiency and how you use your time. You will waste tons of time on stupid bugs and knowledge you don't really need, that's just part of the learning process. Focus on putting in those hours week after week and you will see results.
- Work on a project. The only way to truely understand how things work is to actually use them. Don't hide yourself behind books, try to apply everything you learn asap.
- Give yourself permission to suck. This is really hard if you're older (I was 30 when I started to code). If you already have a career, you're not accustomed to be utterly clueless anymore. I had already forgotten how slow and painful it is to learn something from scratch. So give yourself a break and judge yourself the same way you would judge a stranger. Don't expect to become stellar in a matter of months just because you're smart. Hint: so is everybody else who is coding for a living.
It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.
While I really applaud his tenacity, I don't think that this is what Paul had in mind when he said "relentlessly resourceful". I borders on stalking. It's one thing to have a product and try to get YC's attention, it's a completely different thing to just promote the fact that you are applying. The time and money would have been better spent on his prototype. I don't like it.
Appreciate your feedback, take into account that my budget is $100 and it took me 1 day to set this up.
I actually limited the whole YC application process to 1 week, before it and now I'm talking with multiple potential customers, building an MVP and even got 2 investment offers.
Truthfully, I'm not sure if it's stalking or not, and I'm not sure if it was a good move or not, but the risk/reward here was good enough.
For me being an entrepreneur is executing a lot of different ideas I get to reach my goals, knowing that most will fail, not letting it decrease my speed.
Btw, the whole thing was worth it even if I don't get to YC, as it got some people to reach out to me and helped me solve a problem I was currently working on - how to get american parents to be interviewed by me(problem interview).
Again, I appreciate your feedback and if this move fails, it might be because your thoughts are exactly what YC partners think about this - in that case it will be another lesson learned.
no offense taken ;) it's a free course that I created to help others with their applications and to showcase the prototype of crowdcademy. There will be paid courses eventually, but on much more complicated and lengthy topics such as learning Photoshop or a specific programming language.
This. I can't even imagine how founders with families and kids deal with the stress that goes hand in hand with being broke. Being scrapy and hungry is a good thing. But not knowing how to pay rent or having to freelance a couple of days a week is a huge distraction.
I can tell you from personal experience how: If you take literally the advice of investors and startup-ra-ra types and put everything on the line for your startup, your own money, your time... and then something like the financial crash of 2008 hits just as you're raising your round, your $500k Salesforce.com pipeline of business that depends on marketing spend from big corporates in q4/08 and q1/09 collapses and literally 0% closes... You get divorced. Being broke isn't a bonus feature of the startup process. It can be an unfortunate side-effect and one that takes some effort to dig out from. You'll make it out again if you stick at it, but it's not fun and it WILL cost you things in your life that are important to you.
Remember, families didn't sign on for your start-up dream. Not being able to pay the bills is not cool. It's bad advice from people who've either never honestly been there, or folks who've forgotten what it was like there and are romanticizing it, or folks who are insecure about their success and want to build a struggle-against-adversity narrative to feed the myth of the hero-founder.
The advice is great for bootstrapped businesses who are looking to get profitable. It's probably not so great for "raising a round" venture backed "startups" who are playing the startup lottery.
If you're building a business, then being broke is a pretty great incentive to make things work.
I understand what you're saying, though i think the characterization of startups as a lottery is a mistake. There is some luck involved with startups but smarts and execution count far more. But for lifestyle businesses too I just don't buy the argument that being broke is a great asset. It just makes it more likely you'll fail. Ask anyone who's tried opening a store or a restaurant. It's better to take a job and save some $$ before starting and having some runway. If the writer is going for the narrower case of a consulting or contracting business then founder is misleading, or at least being used in a very different way than most HNers are using it.
That sounds pretty sweet. Does the network of advisors only cover the traditional education space, or also e-learning/self-teaching? Because for the latter it's a whole different ball game when it comes to marketing and customer acquisition.
If they don't personally know the answer, the partners have a broad network of education insiders and experts to tap from, both on the educator and investor side. IK12 has funded companies in the e-learning space, browse through the companies page: http://www.imaginek12.com/companies.html
His LinkedIn states that he graduated last year and worked for a startup for a grand total of 3 months... nothing against the author, but he seems to be too young and inexperienced to fully understand the big picture of something as complex as boom & bust cycles in the startup ecosystem. I certainly don't understand them. Too bad that his startup-experience seems to have been a bad one. For some(most?) people a big company is just a better fit. Life is too short to be wasting it on something you're not passionate about.
What you say is true, and I may generalise more than I should, however I don't think you need a phd in astrophysics to see that this is a bubble. Or that's what I think it is, will see, I hope I'm wrong because many of my friends depend on the start-up ecosystem.
Yeah, but you're too young to understand the first one. I only caught whiffs of the tail end of it. Read some of the stories, some of the stuff they were trying to do was nuts.
The massive difference in this one is there really is a load of money to be made. Everyone is now online all the time. Back in 1999 there were bugger all people online and you wouldn't put your credit card details in for love nor money. Business wouldn't buy critical tools online. A lot of the industrial tools are moving cloud based rather than the old server install method. It's expensive to have your own IT team for a couple of massively overpowered servers
that still seem to go down every day.
And a lot of consumer faced products are making massive sums just because of the sheer scale of the marketplace now. Google is profitable and there really was a time when it wasn't, Facebook is profitable. Match.com, craigs list. You've got businesses like netflix and spotify. People buy digital goods online. There's a lot more opportunity out there.
Some industries have gone crazy in that they're not charging, the one I look at and shake my head at is the diet industry, what on earth brilliant tools like myfitnesspal and their ilk are doing I do not know, that seems like a sad race to the bottom in an industry traditionally worth hundreds of millions, if not billions. And others, like the newspapers, seem to be regaining their senses and are now charging (personal opinion, let's not derail the point :).
Your field, big data really is meaningful and it really is worth a lot of money to the right people. You'll usually get opportunities in the right startup to advance your learning far beyond what you'll ever achieve at most big companies.
There are exceptions to every rule, but big business often gets bogged down by conservatism and politics.
But in the end, do what makes you happy and find the culture that does. And there are plenty of great jobs out there with a CV like yours.
I partially agree there is a bubble, but only in certain startup sectors.
I don't think that we disagree. I'm not talking about the valuation of the well established companies like spotify, netflix, match.com or even instagram and evernote which I use as examples in the post. These are not the problem, like Amazon was not in the dot-com bubble. I'm talking about the numerous "1 website - 1 app" paradigms that seem to proliferate based on VC backing with ridiculous amounts of money. And from my (very short) experience I've seen how that works and defines the start-ups objectives.
The companies I admire most now, used to be start-ups, however the term tends (for me at least) to get synonymous with something that's easy, temporary and quick money.
Maybe I should write another post talking about the good parts of working in start-ups. The parts that attracted me in the first place. So I can balance my opinion and not generalise so much.
I'll get some corporate experience soon (hopefully) and then I'll be in position to make a small comparison from a totally subjective point of view. After all, who knows, I may miss the start-up environment :)
That being said...I think there is a proliferation of crap ideas and crap "companies"; however, I think there are some other really interesting startups attacking some big and interesting problems.
