I think plenty of people tend to vastly overestimate Google's (or Facebook's, ...) hiring bar. I know quite a few people who would be happy to work there and (I believe) can easily beat the hiring process, but they self-eliminate themselves from the game, so I definitely recommend to folks not to make a prejudice about whether they can get into, because they generally don't have many data points, and go interview anyway. Let them figure out whether you are smart enough or not; don't self-eliminate. Never let the widespread propaganda lead you to believe that everyone hired by a successful company in the valley is a genius. They collectively hire many thousands of people; it's hard to believe they are all geniuses.

Taking into account that this is not what happened between Google and Cyanogen I doubt about the knowledge of him

I'm always sad when titles get edited to "match the post" in a way that actually removes clarity as to what the linked material is.

Upmarket where the real volume is, it is very hard to convince medium-sized businesses to pay a premium processing rate just to get a slightly enhanced POS, which itself has huge switching costs. For example we now know that the Starbucks deal turned out to be a loss for Square, a discounted fee probably justified as a marketing expense to get mindshare. Starbucks didn't value Square's product enough to actually pay a premium rate.

This is why I think the article is essentially spot-on in calling it a commodity product. Square is often compared to Apple, but Apple successfully decommodifies products through actual fundamental innovation (phones, MP3 players, PCs). They make stuff people actually want to pay premiums for. Square did innovate a cheap card reader, but beyond that it's mostly been beautiful design and attractive but unprofitable terms for the individual and micro business market.

Square Cash for example is pretty simple but it must be a money loser, since they charge no fee it costs at least 21 cents to do a debit transaction. Would it be as compelling if they charged 50 cents to send money? Beautiful design and all, probably not.

The moral to the story is that IPO-aspiring companies need to make products people actually want to pay premiums for, not just cool executions of commodity offerings that don't move the needle much in terms of actual utility.

Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.

You only need one sample to make the point that it may be slower, and that's very much contrary to expectations.

Iron law "might be"?

I don't think I'd ever invest in Box, but I see Square much differently. I think the author arbitrarily pooled them into the same category, and then stumbled over his own argument throughout the article.

Square is in a market where once you have a customer, you have the customer. There's not really a reason to switch your payment processor unless your experience with them is particularly terrible, or processing fees dramatically change in the market (not likely at all). They're building a solid revenue stream, and their numbers back it up. Unlike Box, they're hovering around profitability, not hemorrhaging money. They certainly have some stiff competition, mainly Paypal, entering the market, but Square is offering a more comprehensive experience for business owners, not to mention a much smoother product. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a whole line of customers stumble over how to complete a transaction on Paypal's offering.

I was curious, so I went to bitbucket.org to try to find coverage.py. Experience was awkward to say the least:

1) Bitbucket homepage does not have a search bar, nor is there a link from the homepage to the search [1]

2) Guessing that the URL is /search puts you in the team profile for account `search`. finally you see what looks like a search bar at top [2]

3) Searching for coverage.py doesn't show `ned / coverage.py` in the first page! There are lesser-known forks of coverage.py that show up higher than the original project. [3]

I'm sure these will improve over time, but discoverability is still incredibly difficult on bitbucket.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/soRXB98.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/z5YmcL2.png [3] http://i.imgur.com/uhg8rbc.png

* Do you love to report the news? In most jobs as long as you continue to be a reporter you will likely have a limited set of promotions you can get...

* Do you love woodworking? In most jobs as long as you continue to be a carpenter you will likely have a limited set of promotions you can get...

* Do you love photography? In most jobs as long as you continue to only take photos you will likely have a limited set of promotions you can get...

Even in you look at areas like law, the top 10% of earners in the profession are not the ones who do all of their own legal research and brief writing. They're the GCs at publicly traded companies or equity partners at large law firms, where they're responsible for the work output of tens or hundreds of lawyers. Which means, yikes, they're managers too.

This is odd considering those in the aquarium hobby have known this as common knowledge for a long time now.

Maintaining reef tanks has made it extremely apparent to me just how badly we're harming our oceans even with small changes in chemistry. I hope articles such as this can help make the general public more aware of the dangers.

Honestly, to be in the top 95% of incomes at the entry level and then to complain that you're in a dead-end job . . . it just smacks of a lack of awareness about what a real dead end is like.

"purchase professional app translations through the Google Play Developer Console" "select a professional translation vendor"

That said, translation vendors tend to just translate automatically first and then have a human clean it up.

Then, new management comes in or your boss makes crazy development decisions and your project becomes a sinking ship. I just dropped a contract that was exactly this. I got tired of being forced to make bad decisions, which I know will lead to the failure of the project/company.

This is why I started my own company. There are no limits to my salary.

If you're just going to arbitrarily pick some hypothetical comparison, sure, it's limited. But that isn't a useful contrast.

Most managers are in dead-end jobs themselves (the mere facet of the pyramid dictates this). Very few rise higher, and are more likely to have young upstarts jump above them. Most make fairly poor pay -- I worked as a dev lead at a bank and was at a pay scale that put me above every single non senior VP or above in the entire organization.

50,000+ employees. My pay as a developer was in a band normally reserved for a small handful of executives. The very, very few who went the management route and won the lottery, so to speak.

I absolutely love this profession, and have resisted all paths that would pull me out of it. I make great money for doing something I love.

Imagine for instance that you don't know what electricity is. Now read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity. There is no useful information there. Looking around now, I can't figure out any way I could come to any sort of reasonable understanding. This is a familiar feeling for me - it's the same feeling I get whenever I look up some new (to me) mathematical concept on wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not meant for teaching. Now, a wikipedia of textbooks (wikiversity?) would be extraordinarily helpful in an apocalypse, as well as every-day life.