This experience reinforces my belief that it's better to be quick than brilliant. If we had wasted a lot of time trying to build some really smart, super-scalable system right from the start, it would have inevitably been over-optimized for the wrong things, since the product and requirements have changed quite a bit since launch. By continually rebuilding the system, it stays relatively simple and close to our actual needs (plus it incorporates everything we learned from the previous iterations).

I think people should at least try a couple years of college, if they can, if only so they know what they're missing if they don't finish.

Titles like this are not only terrible generalizations, but they are completely misinformed (the 2 not being mutually exclusive).

I live in Tokyo, and I can tell you, more than a few people have an iPhone. It's popular to the point that its ridiculous. Now you may wonder why are the sales are so poor. A casual walk into a mobile shop will show you. It's variety. There are too many phones to choose from. While the iPhone still wins hands down in sleekness, there are a host of other decent phones (with greater capabilities) to choose from.

So there is no 'hate' involved, it just boils down to market saturation of comparable phones. Apple took a piss in the sea...no surprises on the results.

The usefulness of a degree depends on what field one is working on. In the Software arena, smart kids out of high school can do a lot if college is not holding them back. But try to start a laser / semiconductor / biotech company with high school kids if you dare ;-)

One might not need a degree to be a good software entrepreneur, but there are many other entrepreneurs who don't live in the software world. Sure, HN is focused on software, but it seems to me that it's irresponsible to promote the idea that all that entrepreneurs need is passion and hard-work. Necessary but not sufficient.

Exactly. We've inadvertently created a culture that rewards extremely shallow achievements. Thirty years ago, brilliant 20-somethings wanted to send men to Mars and build super-colliders. Today, the smartest college kids are trying to build social networks for dogs.

Frankly, that's not a trend worth celebrating. A society where an advanced education isn't an economic advantage is a society going the wrong way.

Then he laid off half his staff again.

He's spending 20 hours a week on the phone with irate creditors he's trying to renege on.

His investors are saying they're going to ruin him.

He laid off half his staff again.

He's being sued 6 times over.

One of his creditors is physically stalking him.

The press is writing stories calling him a fraud.

He hasn't slept in six months.

His customers aren't paying.

And he's pissed that his staff is accepting other job offers? Because he "made" them?

I helped kill a startup in 2001 too. I didn't tell myself I had done a favor for the people I brought along for the ride.

I mean whatever, I'm being a drama queen about this. I just hate the meme that startup employees owe founders anything. Most of them have no idea what they're getting into, and founders like it that way.

Before Prop 13, property taxes were assessed based on the current value of the land. So when a housing boom hit, people's property prices shot up, and their taxes followed suit. This was a somewhat flawed system, as land prices were skyrocketing, and people couldn't afford to hold their houses. As a result, prop 13, a piece of citizen legislation, was enacted in 1978 and basically stated that the property tax of a piece of land would be fixed at 1975 levels with a maximum of a 2% increase each year, regardless of change in property value. Though reform was essential, prop 13 was NOT what California needed, and was a classic example of the "Tragedy of the Commons."

By capping property tax, Californians did get more money in their pockets. But only 13% of savings actually went to the citizens. 87% of that tax money went to coroporations with large tracts of land (agriculture, warehouses, ...). Because these funds went directly to counties, the counties were pretty much rendered broke instantly. Most local services (police, education, firefighters) come at the county level, so their budgets were destroyed as a result.

To remedy this, counties began to lobby the state for more funds. Remember, the state still had income tax and sales tax. Unfortunately, income tax is a much harder amount of money to predict when compared to property tax. So now there's a central state government that needs to fund its counties with money it doesn't really know it has. On top of this, a state government is not as responsive to local needs as a county, so the ability for a government to recognize and respond to the needs of its constituents was crippled. Competition for state funds became fierce, and counties hired lobbyists to gain traction. Bigger, richer counties could afford better lawyers. Smaller counties were left in the dust.

Currently, prop 13 still weighs upon California industry. Older warehouses and smokestack industries are still paying 1975 property tax (with 2% increases every year), whereas industries that want to move in can't, simply because they would be paying so much in property tax compared to their longstanding competitors. It has created a monopoly on organizations that needs space.

The perfect model for a county to actually make money today comes from an unlikely source: Emeryville. They limited their population so there are less constituents to pay for. They are located next to a freeway that is payed for on the Federal dime. They kicked out smokestack industries for big-box retailers, and take in all the sales tax they can. Finally, their workforces commutes from the impoverished Oakland next door, so that can pay peanuts without affecting their own populace. It's clean, attractive, safe, and exploitative on so many levels.

[Sorry, I can't give you the specific references, as they come from lecture notes of Kerwin Klein's "History of California" course at Berkeley. An amazing course, I might add]

I've come to the same conclusion during the past year and a half of working on Justin.TV. If I was writing a list of pieces of startup advice, this would be #1.

You could just as easily argue that thirty years ago (I was actually around then and old enough to be paying attention), technical people just wanted safe jobs solving circumscribed problems for large organizations.

The truth is that, all other things being equal, each generation of people is roughly equally ambitious. Past generations weren't golden ages compared to the present, or vice versa.

We store data in a really similar way at Spock, pointing all our reads at a big MySQL table which essentially just has an id column and a really big text column containing all the values, JSON-encoded, w/roughly the same number of rows as the FriendFeed table. Our DBA wrote a blog post about it a while back: http://www.frankf.us/wp/?p=17

The way you guys create/delete indices and avoid all the replication nightmares sounds super cool.

All of these solutions ultimately end up sounding like a poor man's Big Table.

Federal spending per federal tax dollar paid (2005):

South Carolina: $1.35

California: $0.78

Who is subsidizing whom, Gov. Sanford?

See: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html