PaulJoslin

I think the real reason people say 'ideas are cheap' - is because in the grand scheme of things - an idea is not worth much.

An idea on it's own, is just an idea - without a really good execution / team behind it - it has little to no value.

Only once a good idea has been executed really well, by a good team - does that idea suddenly have value. Generally the 'proportional' effort of actually executing the idea (in time / money / resources) - compared to the effort in generating the 'idea' - makes just having the 'idea' cheap.

This is not to say all ideas should be valued equally - there are both good ideas and bad ideas, but no idea will provide value (or have much worth) without it being executed really well.

(Hence someone can think of something like 'uber' or 'facebook' - relatively simple concepts to conceive as an idea - but without huge efforts in execution - they would not have become as valuable as they are).

What I mostly notice is that people who have never tried to execute an idea (or don't even know where to start) - are the ones who generally value ideas the highest. e.g. someone may say 'I have an amazing idea, but I won't tell anyone in case they steal it'... or someone else may say something like 'I had the idea for facebook before facebook existed'.

In both of these examples - the person has valued their 'idea' as much as the end execution.

Just looking at his two blog posts, I think that the company's hiring practice worked perfectly and weeded out someone who may be technically competent, but is toxic to the work environment.

His tone is aggressive and completely self centred - imagine trying to have a meeting with him where he sticks stubbornly to his opinion, refusing to listen to other opinions and potentially throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get his own way.

Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I'm not saying anyone should work for free, but sometimes you have to help out, whether it's working a bit later or helping during a crunch time. He comes across like he only would want to work on things that interest him, during the hours he's paid and then be out the door.

I think the company that was hiring did a good job of filtering him out.

I think this is an important lesson in marketing and getting press attention that other start ups or entrepreneurs should take note of.

The key to getting press / marketing attention / viral affect is to do something different that gets people talking.

On black Friday everyone is cutting their prices. If you put out a press release saying you were cutting your prices too it is unlikely to even register on the press' radar. However, do something so different and disruptive that it becomes a unique and funny story and it warrants press attention and share-ability.

Quite often I notice people on HN reading every post about 'Simple guide to marketing your app' or other people's success stories, thinking 'If I follow these steps they used to promote their app, I'll have the same success' - however the opposite is true, if you do what they did you're less likely to have the same impact they originally had.

This applies to anything from the original idea of sending personalised emails to the blogosphere regarding your new app, to the original milliondollarhomepage.com.

TL;DR; - Be different, disrupt the expected and gain press by not following the crowd.

This is why I was unable to buy bitcoins when I first read about them on HN in 2010 and similar in 2011 when the price had gone over $1 and actually showed promise. (I have some emails to colleagues / friends showing my frustration at the time of wanting to get some)

I always wanted just 1 (still do), but back in 2010 I was just going to spend £100 and see what happens. It seems in the US the people who did similar to what I wanted to do in varying forms made good profits (and had an interesting ride).

This is different from 'speculating' (e.g. 'oh I wish I had actually bought some') - I had full intent and wanted to buy them, but just the barrier to entry due to UK regulations were very high. I even tried to arrange peer to peer transactions through reddit or in person but they also seemed difficult. Most people I ever met in person who had any didn't want to sell due to the belief of the ever increasing price.

That is incorrect, London is not like that today. London is an extremely multi cultural city, with both rich and poor living side by side in the same boroughs. A lot of people argue that most of London's unique culture in places like Brixton came from the poor and that's what made London in a lot of ways great.

If you say, everyone in London will need a job, then you are then moving the poor / unemployed on mass out of the city. On paper this may look great, but for social-economic reasons this is a disaster.

You would end up with a 'walled garden' of elite living in London and the poor / unemployed living outside. The city would lose it's unique cultures, become even more gentrified / elite than it currently is and social unrest could start to occur.

1. I address this somewhere else. I agree this is broken, but this is not a problem with the benefit system - it's something to do with wages not rising accordingly with everything else.

2. Perhaps, although if they do something stupid with that money, they still need supporting - so you either let people go homeless / starve or help them (which creates a new layer of welfare)

3. I'm not saying twice the food would be consumed, I'm saying prices would rise accordingly which would mean consuming the same amount of food costs more than it does now. The goal posts will just be moved and the poverty line will be above the basic minimum everyone gets paid.

The idea is nice, but if it causes widespread increases in costs / consumer goods / rent due to the reasons I mentioned, then the only places you may be able to just stay at home and work may not be the place you want to be.

For example, I live in London and enjoy this city. I would love to be able to stay at home and work on my side projects in hope of making extra money, but given the outcome I believe from this, everyone who was to only accept the basic income amount would no longer be able to afford to live in London and would have to relocate to less desirable places in the country.

Yes, you would now be free to work on your projects from your own home, but you would now not live where you want, with the people you are friends with, in an area which would be full of people who also are only taking the basic wage and probably a pretty horrible place.

The on paper calculations of the affect of this is like a snapshot of some code, before you press run. In the first state it is in, it would be fine, but the economic effects from this over the long term both in social and financial terms would be profound.

That's correct Mike, it's not always the case (benefits being cut and working a job can provide you with a worse quality of life) - but I think that is more of a problem regarding the wages people are being paid in jobs, rather than the benefits system.

For a long time inflation, house prices and general costs have beat basic wage increases - leaving many working for less money relatively than they would've got years ago. Meanwhile, the big corporations report yet ever greater profits and the CEO's take ever higher multiples of basic salary in bonuses each year.

The system is broken, but the equality of pay and living standards is not to blame with the government, it's to blame with greedy corporations, share holders insisting they need to do anything for profit and wages being pinned down to the minimum they can be that the work force will stand for (to maximise profits).

If corporation pay was fairer (like it used to be) where perhaps a CEO only makes 10 times the basic workers salary, rather than 100 or 1000 times the basic workers salary, then the wealth from the corporation output would be shared more evenly and the problem would be solved (for people in work).

Not to mention corporations which don't pay tax causing governments to lose out on a lot of tax revenue which would in turn pay to support the poor!

The thing I genuinely don't understand regarding the basic income for all argument is that surely it just moves the goal posts rather than solves the problem at hand?

In the current system, you can go stay at home and get income support, which should provide you with the basics i.e. a home, food, electricity etc. If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working.

[Note the 'should' and 'hopefully' - This system may not always work, but when it doesn't it's generally a fault with wages paid not being sufficient rather than the benefits system being broken]

This therefore means there is an incentive to go work. There is also control, to make sure the money the unemployed person is getting is mostly spent on the basics (such as housing, rather than say drugs).

The problem with suddenly giving everyone a minimum amount of money, is that due to everyone now 'at least' having that amount of money at hand, this becomes the new 'bottom' of the market. If I get a job, I earn money on top of this basic amount, which means I can afford nice things and the person unemployed still can't afford anything.

To clarify, this works similar to pricing of items in different markets. A beer in the UK is ~£3.50 (£5 in London), a beer in Vietnam is about 14 pence. Both costs are fairly relative to what they would have to pay their work force to produce the item (plus cover costs and make a profit) and what the local market can afford to pay.

If let's hypothetically say, you gave everyone in Vietnam this basic wage, the cost of beer would not remain at 14 pence. The first reason is because the work force would find their existing pay negligible compared to the basic pay (so wages would have to rise to be incentive to work on top of basic pay) which would in turn cause cost of manufacturing to rise, but also the market would realise with this extra money available - the price could be set higher and would rise accordingly.

Now back in the UK if this was to occur, you would have slight price rises due to these factors which would in affect move the poverty line up higher, which would mean the people at the bottom are still poor relatively.

What's worse is that assuming the people who are unemployed are given the choice on how that money is spent, they may in fact not spend the money sensibly (i.e. on their housing) and end up homeless instead.

The final problem with this model is that the cost of living and economic output is not evenly distributed throughout a country. £1750 a month in northern England may give you a fantastic lifestyle, where as in London you'd barely cover your rent. (What happens to the unemployed in London in a fixed give everyone a basic income situation? They have to leave London and move where they can afford, which then makes it potentially harder to find a job and splits the country into two halves, the elite / the poor).

I understand what the blog post is trying to convey and I agree that programming is a wonderful craft, allowing anyone who knows how to code an amazing world of possibilities.

However, the way the blog post tried to convey this, it falls down for two reasons:

1 ) If you were someone who had studied media rather than programming you could film your own 'news' channel and upload it to youtube if you thought you could disrupt the news industry. This being the equivalent of sitting in your bedroom at home making a site or an app the way you want to. Thus this freedom to express your ideas does not just apply to programmers.

2 ) Just assuming that the news industry team don't know what they're doing and as a new hire media intern you would know how to fix it for them if only they let you, is almost like being a new intern at a software house and expecting to go in and tell everyone they need to change their methods or practices because you know best.

I expect you'd get similar resistance to making them change, as in both examples you as an intern have little experience compared to the people in either industry. What from an outside observer (or new hire) may seem dumb, perhaps is the most effective methods after years of A / B testing by the people within that organisation.

Am I right in thinking with this design you can only have one app as a point of focus at a time? So assuming I'm doing development, I can't be in my IDE, with a browser open on a particular stack overflow question, while having the app I'm debugging open in front of it all and some other app also in view showing diagnostics?

Instead, I'd have to flick back and forth between the apps like a headless chicken?

[Edit] Actually, take his example apps as a suggestion. He's running VLC to watch star trek, but can't watch it at the same time as say using the browser. In a traditional window set-up, you can just set VLC to stay on top and overlay a portion of the screen while you can continue doing something else (like using the browser).

Although the concept looks pretty, it almost seems to be a step backwards in available functionality.

The idea of it was a smart idea, but the real reason for the success was the marketability of the story behind it.

In a world of internet before everything went viral, this story was just 'crazy enough' to essentially go viral. The concept of a page being worth a million dollars both in a literal and theoretical sense made this quite a popular link to share in the initial phase (when the site was empty apart from a couple of adverts).

This then drove a viral / media engine (including television / radio and word of mouth) which suddenly actually made the pixels on the page worth something!

Companies now flocked to get adverts on the site which was getting a large number of genuine traffic / media attention and thus the media cycle continued (as it was now a profitable, extremely successful site) - this in turn finished when the page was full and months later everyone lost interest.

Unfortunately, I think many of the copy cat sites didn't understand why this was successful in the first place. It was a clever new idea, which was likely to get press attention for being so 'unique' / 'clever' - the copy cats were unlikely to ever get the same 'viral' effect, so were never going to become successful like the original site.

If I remember correctly, even the founder himself tried to spin off a second site based on the same concept with limited success - mainly because people had seen it before.