Briefly opened up Visual Studio today to see what you can do with modding Cities: Skylines, which was made in Unity with C# and lets you develop mods by just building a DLL. But jesus, even though I can type in a symbol from their game library and IntelliSense will auto complete it, and I can click that symbol and hit F12 to go to the source code definition for it, there's no way (that I can figure out) how I can look up objects of theirs in a symbol search window. Their "navigate to" search only seems to care about symbols defined in my project. If mother****ing MonoDevelop can do this right (and it does), why is it so hard for Visual Studio??

Come on Microsoft, I WANT to like your product, but you make it so hard.

but some thread that hasn't had a post since early october might be pushed off the front page!

we have way too many people using this thread exclusively obv but no real way to move them out.

The mechanics of moving out derails is easy. It's just if that's what people want.

I had zero clue that would be such a hot and controversial topic. If I had known, I would have made it a thread.

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas.

Way back when Microsoft was looking for a new CEO, there was a post about who it might be, and probably tongue-in-cheek, a listed prospect was Richard Stallman.

I posted that they should bring in Stallman so they can open source Visual Studio and make it a decent editor.

I lost a lot of karma points that day.

there was a post on HN the other day from a startup guy whose call center software went from 1k in the bank to something in the millions in a matter of 3 years or so, iirc (hundreds maybe?)

in the story, he talks about how all he had to do was persevere, not take no for an answer, oh and of course it kinda helped just a slight amount that he had connections who could put him in contact with funders who would write 6-digit checks without so much as a working model of the product.

But yeah, all you need to do is work hard and persevere!

Yah the story would be more impressive if his 1k grew to the millions without the big check investors.
Still is impressive to convince people with money, to write such large number checks and have faith in what you have. Connections don't necessarily translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars given to you for nothing.

what did i tell you about commas?

I didn't really take much time writing that post and only used one.
So i'm not sure if you're trolling me at this point.

The one was pretty bad though in LKs defense

much like every single person itt wrt you, I was legitimately trying to give advice that might help you in your life and career

like, if i don't know how to use semi-colons and I sent a resume and CV chock full of misused semi-colons, I'm vastly worse off than if I just stuck to the basics of the language

I'll make a sweeping generalization myself (and I don't mind the discussion, I actually think it's interesting).
I think people are too eager to raise money. I mean we're talking about software businesses. The capital requirement is fairly low if you're the most important factor of production (well opportunity cost might be really high but capital requirement isn't). The typical counterargument is that you need money to power the magic growth engine...I'll call bollocks for most software startups. It's way more valuable to validate your idea by bootstrapping than to potentially get a head start on mass customer acquisition. I'd even go as far as arguing that mass customer acquisition too early can be a huge disaster even ignoring the monetary cost.

I think it's really strange and twisted that one of the most flexible and low-capital-requirements industries (your production facility is basically a laptop than can be almost anywhere+yourself, ideally close to key customers though) that can scale almost for free due to the nature of the product seems to be one of the industries that is one of the most capital hungry.

tl;dr: More bootstrapping.

I basically just use commas to split points in a sentence of a post.
Sure, this post could have went without the comma but the post you nitpicked in the conspiracy thread, I would love to see you analyze how the commas are misused. My resume is proof read by friends that are good with English. I grew up with multiple languages and basically my brain processes language structure differently I believe or I'm just stubborn at being how I am.

Relax no need to not pick Roonil is just a troll who likes to make fun of people can't wait for school to start I'm running out of things to do only so much programming you can do

That comma usage was imo incorrect. For example:

I would like to go, to the theatre.

I will, eat.

I am, hungry.

These are (obviously?) not correct. I realise your English is hilariously better than my French, German or whatever I may have attempted in the past, so this is meant in the spirit of education and encouragement.

shouldn't have dropped out of college, one english course shy of a degree

Last english course that I had was 3 years ago.
Basically just crammed a semester worth of papers into two weeks at finals and ended up with a B. Wow, was that an experience that was epic.

I appreciate now knowing why its incorrect to use the comma in that post. The one in question is the post in the political unchained section of the forum. I realised by looking at the post in here, doesn't look correct but its not like i'm attempting perfection on this forum or commenting on others' posts.
The semi-colon is like never used by people and so I basically just adopted it for when I want to attach a short sentence to the end of whatever that is connected.

I agree with this somewhat. But you're talking about the 99% who think that Homejoy was awesome, rather than a dumpster fire of poorly allocated resources, and idiotic decision making.

What jj mentioned earlier about positive signaling is very important. Ultimately startups have a problem where they need something to happen to help drive everything else. (Do you buy a B2B product from a guy with a laptop?) Sometimes that really is selling someone a vision of your company to build a team, that can turn whatever product you have into a business.

I think you're also vastly oversimplifying the process. Raising money in ideation or without any semblance of PMF is pretty dumb for most people. (Theranos says hi tho.) And obviously raising growth rounds without solid unit economics is terrible. (Hi homejoy.)

Keep in mind that everything upto Series A is idea validation. (And even later as companies in some industries iterate. Hardware for example.)

Also, the idea that software scales for free is just wtf. This is very hard, and people who can do this are easily paid 500k+.

Comma splices are the neck tattoos of writing.

B2B month-to-month contracts are definitely 5 figures and often 6 figures a year from each customer. The P&L on those kinds of companies are much different that B2C, and due to the fact that there are magnitudes less business customers than people who want to share pictures of their food, scaling out isn't as difficult, and not necessary in many cases.

As far as I've been able to observe, most B2B companies are like 10 sales people to one developer, and many started up as singleton or pair business. I've used many products that were essentially build on a laptop.

Pretty much every product is built with a laptop, except for high end graphical games.
I personally would not hire someone, if they only worked on a desktop machine.

Yep. I think Salesforce just become profitable? Dubiously profitable? I dunno. But profitability for B2B SaaS is just so far off in the distance for most companies.

Facebook was profitable by like 2005?

So ya, the models are entirely different. I was thinking more in the lines of something like Artomatix, where you're scaling cloud based AI. But unique businesses are unique. My overriding point is that a product isn't a business, and that scaling anything meaningful is very difficult from both a technical and operational perspective.

Are there some good examples of bootstrapped businesses built in the last 5-10y that need meaningful engineering to scale?

There's a guy in politics who had been throwing ellipses all over the place. People had a chat with him, he worked on it, and his writing has been much more readable since then.

Feel free to call it trolling, but I have and always will try to help people out if I see an opportunity to. Maybe others see it as trolling because they think being corrected is embarrassing, but I'm definitely not part of that crowd: I want to know early and often if I'm making mistakes. :shrug:

This is mostly a selection bias. You don't hear about the ones that aren't raising a lot of money because raising a lot of money gets the press and companies that raise a lot of money also spend a lot of money to get more attention. Tons of people and companies do exactly what you advise - most of them don't grow big enough for you to hear about them.

Joel Spolsky covered this 15 years ago:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...000000056.html

Oh the 2000s

Edit

Also linked in that article is this gem: