Your main beef is that Alan was "either naive or not truthful" or that things changed over the course of 7 years?

I love this article and it is a pretty great handbook on a variety of tactics you normally don't get much depth about. But I wish the whole thing was prefaced with, this mostly matters after you've found an audience. (Or product/market fit if you're pmarca)

"Why did group therapy work when individual didn’t? Part of it was that having nine different mirrors reflect back my problematic behavior brought into brilliant and incontrovertible light what I had been able to avoid confronting"

Sometimes we aren't aware of how badly we want and choose ignorance and avoidance

You know how in the innovator's dilemma, the point at which the new innovator gets a foothold is also the point where the old firm has peak profits? I think there's a similar thing where the best time to user a particular service is when the service is least profitable.

That's what the 2012 nostalgia sounds like to me. Back when Twitter was hosting revolutions, but still having issues with uptime (not to mention revenue). And Project Loon was alive, but mostly getting mocked by both Wall Street and charities/nonprofits (With Bill Gates being the most visible).

I also suspect 2012-2014 was when SoundCloud had huge amounts of traffic and, without any way of making money, at its least profitable. I have no actual evidence of this.

Personally, Project Loon always sounded like some crazy way of getting more people to use Google than actual charity. Like some weird extrapolation from, "the more people that use the Internet, the more money Google makes" and "Google's reached market saturation in current markets, we need growth in developing countries"

Going off memory for all this. Sorry if I get some details wrong about Innovators Dilemma, Twitter in 2012, Project Loon and such.

What? I had no clue this was comming. I'm surprised there wasn't more signs

More of a logic question, though at its core math is logic and pattern recognition.

I'm certainly going to need a lot more practice if I want to place in Singapore's top 40% of 14/15 year olds

I don't know the context around which this was presented to students, but it's much easier if you think of it as a set operations problem than a pure logic one.

Also nice to see that the age old act of providing irrelevant distracting information in word problems is still alive and well.

A neat problem, though. I'm curious whether I would have gotten it at that age.

I don't think it ever was a chocolate factory of awesome. It's just been around long enough (and had enough people work there) that we hear about it more

And a small matter of making some of the most successful and well-loved family films of the last generation.

According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?

I can say from my interactions with CS students at top schools that this attitude is common. Google is no longer seen as innovative; everyone wants to work for Facebook or Apple now. Google isn't seen as a bad company to work for, just not sexy like it used to be. It's like going to work for Microsoft: you'll make good money and get some interesting projects, but major engineering decisions happen in an ivory tower and you just have to roll with the punches.

Should recent grads be making major engineering decisions for any established company? This article smacks of entitlement.

A very few recent grads may be able to make major contributions. How do you know if you're one of them?

Some are, yes. We're talking about the top CS students at schools like Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and MIT - these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1% of students. They may not be making major decisions on day 1, but they expect to be able to grow into a role where they are at least a voice at the table within a year or two.

> these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1%

And the unit is... ?

What I see in attitudes reflects what you've seen as well. (This is a longer way of saying "me too!" to your comment)

In 2005 I saw people lining up for Google T-shirts and feeling cool when they had invites they could hand out for new Google products. Wave and Gmail people immediately jumped me for invites and then when I was out my friends for invites. Inbox? Nobody cared.

... it seems to me like all that would be true for Apple and Facebook as well?

Yeah, these are 21-year-old kids. But Facebook is still in heavy growth mode, and their options packages for engineers are no joke. Facebook also has enough money and talent that they will build a few more blockbuster products before they're done. Apple is seen as desirable because their core product engineering teams are treated like royalty and they don't hire very many people, so it's seen as a badge of honor if you can get hired.

This will be interesting to see how many people use a stand-alone web client for messaging rather than just facebook.com I wonder if they'll also tear this out from the core facebook website

Angry much?

You lost me with the "code isn't a good that spoils" line. It is a great phrase, but perhaps you could re-explain?

A restaurant requires continuous inputs: fresh food, labor, electricity.

Code is a purely digital good. What was in the repo a few days ago could be released at no ongoing cost to FoundationDB/Apple and it will stay exactly how it was, forever.

I disagree. Code gains technical debt over time, bugs are found, compatibility with other libraries and the OS fray, security vulnerabilities are exposed, and what were awesome features 6 months ago become commonplace or superseded by the new awesome.

Essentially, code starts to rot after a while.

Its utility diminishes as the difference between its original environment and the current technical environment increases. However, given a replica of its original intended environment (e.g. an OS image in a VM) the code will run just as well as it always did.

So code does spoil. And it doesn't.