This might be unpopular, this might get me downvoted, but I have comment on this:

> But he cautioned Jobs never to forget that the money was just a vehicle for creating things. "But he forgot," Wayne says now. "He probably won't like me for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business. He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money. What can somebody do with $200 million that they can't do with $100 million?"

That's loser talk. That's fully not getting it. Jobs isn't in it for the money at this point, he is doing things that matter to him, he's got a team of crazy-bright designers and engineers and he's pushing the world forwards. I'm actually much less of an Apple fan than most people, I think the Apple's got a lot more hype and sizzle than steak, but you do have to hand it to them for what they've done.

And Jobs himself? Forced out of Apple. Builds up Pixar. I mean, Pixar! There's a happiness-spreading company right there, maybe even more than Apple. Then Apple gets into trouble, and Jobs goes and digs through the ruins and builds this amazing company.

So typical loser thinking goes, "Oh yeah, well, maybe he's got hundreds of millions, but he lost focus! Yeah, that's it, he's not doing things that really matter!" Like playing penny slot machines?

Never fall into that trap. If you catch yourself making a loser statement about how much someone else has, stop yourself and be gracious. Not for the builder's sake, but for your own.

This actually came up in Woz's Founders at Work interview:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn't he wasn't one of the founders?

Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer Incorporated.

Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super conservative guy. I didn't know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read all these right-wing books like "None Dare Call it Treason" and he could rattle the stuff off. I didn't realize it until later.

He had instant answers to everything. He had experience with businesses and times he'd been gypped out of stock deals. He always had something very quick to say and, wow, it sounded like he was very knowledgeable about this stuff. He sat down at a typewriter and typed our partnership contract right out of his head using lawyer type words. I just thought, "How do you know what to say, all rights and privileges and all the different words that are in there"—I don't even know what they are. He did an etching of Newton under the apple tree for the cover of our Apple I manual. He wrote the manual. So he helped in a number of ways. Steve had 45% of this partnership, I had 45%, and Ron had 10% because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any dispute, and we would trust his judgment.

Then what happened was that we were going to sell PC boards for $20 each and fund it out of our own pockets. I sold my HP calculator, Steve sold his van, so we had a few hundred bucks each. Then Steve got the $50,000 order. Over at the company that was making our PC board, as soon as the PC boards were made, they opened up a closet that had our parts and it started a 30-day clock ticking. We had 30 days to pay for the parts. The parts got stuffed into the computers, we made them work, we delivered them to the store and got paid in cash. The parts suppliers—the distributors in Mountain View—had checked with the store owner and knew that he was going to pay us. So basically, we didn't have the credit; he was good for it. But, here was the problem: What if he didn't accept them one time or didn't pay us? We would owe a ton of money on those chips.

I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn't own cars, we didn't have savings accounts, we didn't have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they'd come after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually tells me it was in a safe—but he was afraid they'd come and get his gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10% of Apple to us for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300, but a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him.

Read it. While the average post on news.YC is better than the average on reddit, there are many diamonds in the rough.

what app is it and what does it do?

It's called "360 Live", it lets you see your friends' Xbox 360 Live stats.

Some other notes:

  * single developer, aged 29, maintains separate day job
  * ratio of iPhone:Android sales is 3:1, but Android is unquestionably growing
  * his sales are ~90% US, ~10% UK
  * he very strongly prefers the Android dev environment
  * but he prefers the AppStore to the Marketplace
  * about 27% of Marketplace apps are "returned" (he suspects they're pirated)
  * on Android, copying an app to your SD card lets you refund but keep the app
  * he likes Java over Objective-C (but reiterates that it's a personal preference)
  * the back-end is written in .NET, which he works with full-time
  * best place for help on writing an app is Stack Overflow
  * the app got traction by being mentioned in a popular industry blog
  * he started the app on a hackintosh
  * evolved from personal hobby (gaming)
  * feedback and a lot of iteration were essential for a good application
  * personal phone is Nexus One
  * Apple's marketplace makes taxes easier
  * he has no plans to move to Window 7, Blackberry, or Nokia (no $ incentive)

My biggest take from it: when you have an industry that is very "tight" and hence easily targeted (gaming platforms, specific games, etc), making a great product into a successful product will require absolutely minimal marketing.

Perhaps, in addition to the artistic aspect of it, he wanted to educate people about what actually happens to video when it is sent to youtube. This is much more relatable than saying, "I wrote this shell script..." Also, having the log of all 1000 versions on youtube is interesting as well.

The other thing about art is that time is usually not a large motivating factor...

They must be blessed by excellent sysadmins to have forgotten them

I'm not sure that I can agree.

1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response.

2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web.

3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for instance Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.) which you appear to have disregarded.

4) Most of the vitriolic posts I've seen on HN have already been modded down into oblivion.

5) Although purely anecdotal I notice the civil air here and censor myself accordingly (in real life I tend far more towards "sarcastic douche" than I do here).