For Facebook, exclusivity was a feature because it was directly related to craved social status (belonging to an elite university). For GMail, exclusivity worked because it was directly related to craved features (large capacity for email attachments).
I don't see "lack of ads" as particularly craved by users. My wife actively wants to see ads (to the suffering of my credit card). Unless they find something else to latch on to, this will end up being yet another also-ran social.
I think the decision is a lot harder than a lot of people here are making it out to be. I immediately equated the question to one of my mostly unsuccessful startup ventures (to which I would immediately take the $10 million).
But the premise of the TV show emphasized the potential of the algorithm he developed. He had some serious IP on hand. Granted it's all fictional, and $10 million is not some trivial amount of money, but if you came up with an algorithm that proved P=NP (to put it in perspective), I'd say selling that IP for $10MM would be foolish.
And if I had that sort of IP, and if I was a person clever enough to come up with that in the first place, I'd take the $200k easy.
I don't cat files too often in my workflow so I guess I don't have that pain point, but I find find iTerm2 has this minor annoying latency (kind of like typing on a wireless keyboard on low battery) that ultimately drove me away from it.
Odd. I have never experienced that problem. I don't cat files, but I list git diff output, view log files, etc. Even a large-ish git blame introduces a noticeable lag.
I agree with this response. Specifically highlighting the problem being a matter of practicality vs idealism. One of the things you learn as a young programmer is that bad code is inevitable when your resources are limited.
A practical generic solution, for example, that takes an extra 10 days to do, sounds fantastic from an engineering perspective-- we're trained to think this way. But on the business side of things, you may have a timeline for a feature to nab a client, or not enough budget for those extra 10 days, etc.
My opinion on these matters now generally falls into the it depends camp. Take his mentorship, because it sounds like he understands that every engineering solution is accompanied by a business solution and they must be agreeable for both parties (that said, he does seem a little jaded, so you don't have to take absolutely everything he says to heart-- there are companies who will give less weight to the business side of things, but the reality is that the consideration will always exist).
> every engineering solution is accompanied by a business solution
This cannot be stressed enough. Replace "business" with X. Engineering is rarely isolated. More often than not, constraints on time, budget, usability, customer relations, etc... are just as important as the down-and-dirty engineering constraints themselves.
This applies to all engineering. It is much more obvious, in some fields than others, though. E.g. material costs are easy to perform a cost/benefit analysis on, whereas software is generally more abstract.
It's negative, but I can definitely appreciate the honesty. Those who don't like it can ignore it, but I'm happy to see comments like this peppered about rather than a series of congratulatory messages and "obligatory" pats on the back.
