
Kinds of hacking involved in startups - ecuzzillo

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ecuzzillo
So, as discussed elsewhere, I'm not immediately planning on starting a
startup, but I am in favor of the idea in theory. One thing that bugs me about
it, however, is that one of the advertisements in favor of starting it is that
you can get real, serious, no-kidding hacking done, in at least a quarter of
your time, while you aren't running frantic errands.

That sounds pretty good to me. However, all the hacking I hear about in
relation to startups is either a) UI design (e.g. Wufoo) or b) server scaling.
Server scaling is about as boring and unhappy to me as you could get without
mandating that it be in Java; UI design is better, but still not appealing.

There are obviously exceptions; search engines come to mind. But overall, the
average successful startup seems heavy on nasty little problems and light on
big, hard problems. Is this perception correct? Anecdotes for or against?

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andybourassa
As either Alexis or Aaron of reddit said "it's just a website, it's just a
list of links."

In building our startup I haven't come across any monumental, super
mathematically/computer science involved problems, but it's still been
extremely challenging and fun. I'd say the challenge/fun comes more from
trying to do all the things you listed at once, instead of any one of them
singularly.

If nothing else, CSS and IE will teach you patience.

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bigtoga
Oh God, the CSS/IE patience comment is true but also for Firefox. I bet that
I've spent more than a week's time in the past two years just dealing with
these issues on my various sites :( Part of that is a learning curve but the
other part is just the various browsers deciding to implement "standards" in
unexpected ways (or ignoring them all together).

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kogir
It seems you forgot the most important part: your service :)

The UI presents your service, and the scaled out servers power your service,
but without the service, all you have are some pretty pictures and a bunch of
hardware.

Also, scaling is not a solved problem in the general sense. You have to find
ways to elegantly and efficiently solve _your_ problems specifically. I say
with confidence that if you aren't willing to be very involved in the scale
out of your service, you'll likely design a service that won't scale out.

(For an example of an elegant tool used in scale out, see Facebook's thrift.)

Also, if service agnostic scale out is a small problem for you to solve, I
encourage you to get rich by solving it. I'll buy your solution if it works.

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jaggederest
I think what he's referring to is not so much 'small nasty' vs 'big hard' but
rather the work to reward ratio.

If you solve P = NP, your work and reward are high.

If you solve 'My website is having performance issues' the work may be hard,
but the reward is getting to do it again next week (if you're lucky)

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awt
You really shouldn't do the parts you don't find interesting. Pay someone else
to do those parts. I like internet startups -- imagine what it must have been
like to own one of the first printing presses... that's what I feel like when
I'm working on a website. Imagine you're writing a novel, except that you know
what page every single one of your readers is looking at, and you can talk to
them about the page.

