What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that-Larry-Page-and-Sergey-Brin-made-in-the-early-days-of-Google <comment><USER2> The highest ranked answer on that thread, though it contains some interesting details, is way off. Managing VCs well was not what made Google successful-- or what makes any startup successful. The real key decisions were things like realizing search itself was important, at a time when all the other search engines thought it was unsexy, and were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead; designing the architecture to work on large numbers of unreliable, cheap computers; understanding how important speed was; making the site uncluttered; deciding to hire only very smart people; etc. That's what made the company valuable, and if it hadn't been valuable it wouldn't have mattered how well they'd avoided dilution.

<comment><USER3> It's also full of inaccuracies. The "interesting details" are largely wrong. Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.

<comment><USER4> Agreed re voting systems.

I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

<comment><USER5> That's an _interesting_ idea.

The problem is preventing this leading a site dominated by a group of people who share a set of extreme opinions of one sort or another. There's no now site where you can't get karma for reinforcing some commonly held group opinion and if Karma became self-reinforcing, the problem would get harder.

It might not be impossible - maybe you could have secret algorithm for rewarding people only for making well-respected non-polarizing posts. But it would be quite tricky.

<comment><USER4> Ah, yup, there's ways around that.

The Q&A PeopleRank idea will probably be my next start-up, if Vark doesn't beat me to it. Reading <http://blog.vark.com/?p=352>, it seems that they're on the right track. (Although their UX is a little clunky).

However, even if Vark builds a kick-ass product, you can still apply the PeopleRank idea to _news_ -sites like HN.

Anyone interested in building a Q&A/news site feel free to message me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow.

 _LOTS_ of useful stuff here. In addition to a lot of the usual stuff, most especially keeping control, there are these not unrelated gems:

" _Retaining control over the company proved to be crucial to Google's success. Most of the early company revenues came from enterprise search, and the investors and Eric Schmidt pressured the company to drop consumer facing search and to focus on the enterprise market. However Page and Brin disregarded this advice as they anticipated the growth of a market for online advertisement. At the time this decision was being made, the New York Times was quoting experts as saying "No one will ever make $250 million dollars a year from online advertising." It has also been said that Page and Brin disregarded pressure from investors to copy Yahoo! and diversify Google into a portal site, deciding instead to focus on the core search and advertising market._ "

We also now understand their particular style of secrecy: avoiding getting crushed by Microsoft back when that was the fear of every high tech company it could possibly compete with.

The comments as of now are also of high quality and some are not to be missed.

</comment><comment><USER7> It was surprising to learn that Larry Page's brother already had successful startup experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a customer I know these key decisions: i) Self managed ads system. Before AdWords it was impossible to buy $ 5 of ads. Even years after AdWords Overture (Yahoo) and AdCenter (Microsoft) couldn't even copy the smooth process (I remember Overture charging me a minimum of $ 15 and their staff changing my keywords) ii) Text Ads instead of banners as a more respected way of advertising.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lots of entrepreneurial navel gazing going on both in the linked site and in these comments. Everybody has their own theory about the reasons x y z why company a b c is successful, be it Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The problem is every opinion is partially correct, no one can disprove anything, and there is no right answer.

The stories of successful companies are inspirational to some degree, but as a way to vicariously learn how to be successful they fall woefully short of the mark.

The best thing for entrepreneurs to do, is simply to make something happen. Build something people want, and if you fail, learn what you can and try again.

You never know and can't know which decisions are the ones that matter, so forge ahead.

<comment><USER10> God bless you.

This is the most reasonable thing I have seen said here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think none of the answers in that summary really say it. Google won (in the beginning) because:

      1. It *just* searches. Really well.
      2. Ad auctions.

That's basically it.

It's the same way Starbucks won in the beginning:

      1. *Just* coffee. Tasty coffee.
      2. Charge for it.

Or Apple:

      1. *Just* the user experience.  A great one.
      2. Charge for it.

(Google, Apple, and Starbucks have now all diversified widely, with mixed results).

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent set of answers, this was my first foray into Quora, btw; if other answers are half as good, it's a great resource.

Among other key decisions they got right (and some lucking out), the one thing they got _absolutely_ right is the culture. Not just perks, food, etc. because during the boom almost all cool startups had these (or better), it's much more than that. The culture components ones that I think were most influential were the 20% time and committee decision making (with actual engineers, not suits).

Having the right culture is not sufficient for success, but without it, I think, all most certainly will be lost.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are many factors that lead to Google's success, but I know what made me switch to Google back in its early days. It was faster (probably because it was sparse), it got good results, and I felt cool for using it (maybe because it was the underdog, or maybe because it had a "for geeks, by geeks" feel to it).

</comment><comment><USER14> Provides a good reason to downplay having a fancy interface - avoid tipping off the competition.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nobody was really serious about web search prior to Page & Brin.</comment>


Ask HN: Formal HR warning for swearing in a casual chat room – is this normal? - <AUTHOR> So, I was in the wrong and had built up a lot of steam one day around some ongoing problems that an organisation had failed to address many times over and I stupidly said something along the lines of 'I'm so sick of all the issues for project X always being last minute, unplanned and untested... I'm really sick of this shit!'
Obviously I shouldn't have sworn and I should have been more professional (despite raising the issues formally on many occasions previously over several years).
So while I know I was in the wrong and said something stupid, I was wondering if this is common place for petty sentences like this to be sort of 'bureaucratised' by HR?
Even the team in question said any formal warning was totally over the top and not at all what they wanted to occur but it seemed HR had made their mind up already.
So, I'm not trying to expose or have a go at any organisation here, I'm genuinely interested to hear if anyone else has a similar experience, especially anyone who's not in the US where I believe it's very easy to fire people etc... which is (I can assure you) not what they're trying to do with me. <comment><USER2> That seems extreme -- they could be in CYA mode to document reasons to fire you.

I've worked at places like this -- they didn't have the balls to fire anyone for worry that they'd get sued for wrongful termination; so to get rid of a problem employee, they'd spend 6-12 months building up evidence or working on a "performance improvement plan" or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know exactly what you mean and I've seen it happen at other places but I can assure you this is not the case here, I won't go into detail but you'll just have to take my word for it, but thank you for the warning just incase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious, what language did HR use?

I'm surprised by that response to what seems legitimate expression of frustration, but not aghast.

In all likelihood, it was someone on your team who was discomforted by the chat and mentioned it to hr. At that point, they don't have much of an option but to discuss it with you, especially if there is no explicit policy for swearing.

<comment><AUTHOR> No it was someone working on one of the project parts but they didn't complain to HR they mentioned it to their manager who then brought it up but didn't lodge a complaint for a warning.

That same manager then apologised and said that he didn't intend / want it to be something formal like that at all but it seemed too late.

<comment><USER4> I suggest just taking it at face value - it's a warning. Don't swear again. Make it clear you regret swearing and being unprofessional in that instance and it won't happen again. I think that's the best way to go whether they're "building a case" or only wanted to issue you a warning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really know. I'd guess it depends on the type of organisation. In a casual startup I would hear coworkers saying fuck a good 20 times a day and no one cared.</comment>


Befunge, a programming language designed to be hard to compile (and read) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge

<comment><USER2> I actually think the 2D layout of the code is interesting... But more suited to a GUI than a text-based programming language.

Of course, the point wasn't suitability, but rather inscrutability, so they accomplished their goal.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not a patch on Brainfuck: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck>

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++ ..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.</comment><comment>.</comment><comment>--.>+.</comment>


Nothing much happened - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/nothing_much_ha.php

<comment><USER2> I had this conversation at work last week. Google makes trivial data trivial to find, and yet mildly less trivial questions like "what is a good introductory textbook on typography" result in pages chock full of useless link spam. You struggle to find mention of anything predating 1998, before which a few useful things happened... even by Hal Varian standards.

<comment><USER3> i'm drawing a blank on how to find introductory textbook recommendations faster than google.

i just googled "typography introductory textbook" and found at list one list of 15.

of those the earliest publishing date was 1999, but if something worthwhile happened in the field of typography before then i suspect it will be reposted in newer books. plus reference to any recent issues in typography.

<comment><USER2> _i just googled "typography introductory textbook" and found at list one list of 15._

Are any of those good? Which of them is best? And most interestingly, what list are you looking at, as my Google results are a decent looking Amazon link, an empty Amazon link, a "Personality Quiz", a blog post with a few books, _this comment on Hacker News_ , something on economics, something on typography on the web, et cetera.

Given the results, you could guess that the first link on Amazon might be okay, but this is garbage compared to actual research. At least the random blog post mentions a couple of options, but who is this person, and why is there only one such blog post? This is a really old subject, with lots of material - hiding somewhere.

More importantly, with Google we play keyword bingo. Your search of "typography introductory textbook" returns more authentic results than "typography textbook", which returns publisher links and promotional pages almost exclusively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr search engines reframe the types of questions we ask.

And prior to the Internet, the physical limits of information didn't equally determine the types of questions we asked?

</comment><comment><USER5> _but they seem blind to class-related phenomena such as the rapidly growing divide in wealth_

It's still true there's have-now and have-laters. This is especially prevalent in technologies. Your smartphone will someday become common in third world countries.

<comment><USER6> but, in spite of that, all evidence seems to suggest that the divide between rich and poor is getting bigger and bigger.

<comment><USER7> This might be of interest to you: <http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html>

<comment><USER6> To a point, I agree with PG. It's perfectly ok with me to have superstars getting paid like, well, superstars. I certainly do not want everybody to be equally rich, or, much more likely, equally poor (let's call this "equality of arrival"). But I would like a more equal society at the starting line ("equality at the start"), and not only for reasons of justice, but because a system of haves and have-nots that in fact makes it much harder for the sons and daughters of the latter to make it is also depriving society of people who could make a contribution, and sometimes never get the chance to. As a result, society will end up being poorer. I do not at all think it is by chance, as a counter argument, that countries and societies where women, who make up 50% of the population, are on a more equal standing with men - think Scandinavia, or Holland, or Germany - are also among the richest, not to mention happiest and most peaceful, in the world.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When do you escape your data? - <AUTHOR> http://n0tw0rthy.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/when-do-you-escape-your-data/

<comment><USER2> I've just been implementing a comment system, which allows limited subset of Markdown formatting. I decided to store both original document and the resulting html, which goes through escaping, markdown and htmlpurifier, which strips everything unwanted. When the comment is edited, user gets the original document and the html version is shown on the site. It would be safer to do the html when outputting, but I decided this way for better performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. Performance requirements do justify what you're suggesting. Preprocessing when possible is a great principle to follow.

The point is that you're keeping your original data around is the key part.

<comment><USER2> The thing here is that if something goes wrong and malicious code ends up in the db, I have to go through every comment and clean them vs. just changing the code which cleans them way out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most applications these days are more read-intensive, so there's a good pay- off for performing data processing as it's being prepared for storage. And I've been reminded (the hard way) time and again that the sooner I clean/correct data, the less likely it is to hurt me later.</comment>