I wouldn't shower more praise on this game than folks have already done. Great article. Great HN thread. A happy day.

Signature Monkey Island writing style . Ron Gilbert wrote one of the greatest all time scripts - one can read the entire game here: https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/562681-the-secret-of-monkey-isla...

Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)

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Their growth has been quite phenomenal -- infact, they are probably the fastest company to reach $1B in revenue ever -- which isn't a small feat. But as size grows, doesn't growth inevitably slow down (for almost every company)?

Also, as another commenter has pointed out, they really are a internet of things company, more than a smartphone company. Seeing them just as a smartphone is missing the big picture.

Edit: typo

Some consider him to be in the same league as Einstein and Newton. Meeting him for lunch -- just a random opportunity that I got due to a common friend. I want to make the best use of this time -- so sourcing ideas on what I should ask him? I will post his responses back here.

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Reading these two types of writing side by side (as in this ama), convinced me that 'write as you talk' can seem quite odd.

The advice does work fantastically well with people who feel compelled to use very formal language to make their point. In those instances, Write like you talk could mean: write in a simple way.

[1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...

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Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

He was born to make us laugh. I think instead of focussing on his shortcomings and marriages, it is far more important to focus and discuss his craft.

The lookup Hanna speech [1] at the end of the great dictator is must read / listen. One of the best monologues in movie history. Tell me if this speech doesn't move you!

[1] http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechthe... (added link)

Depending on the size of the team, this is a good thing. As long as you have one "alpha", a designated or undesignated person who makes a call when contentious views are blocking progress.

I believe that a flat structure would be best You'd want to be careful of premature optimization here. I know what you are trying to get at (i.e. ensuring that you are setting up titles and roles that people can grow into), but this may not be the right time to do it.

Any structure is good, bad, best depending on the situation you are in, the size of the group, the problem you are trying to solve etc. The point is not to see hierarchy & structure as inhenrently good or bad -- but to work back from what you are trying to accomplish to the structure you need. Lets say you were trying to organize a 6 month expedition to a remote area with a group of people that you just met. How would you or this group go about it? I don't think you'd setup titles or hierarchy -- you'd probably go with "role clarity", and doing things that engender "excellence" in their respective tasks.

In a startup, one expects an organization to be driven by passion, creativity and very little structure. This is an important part of why people are there. Traditional forms of motivation or organization often don't work very well (e.g. hierarchy money, title or fear). Once the group is large, then there are companies that go for military style "command & control" structures. Even military is organized differently during war time and peace time. This comes back to the context of your particular situation & what you are trying to do. Are you in war time or peace time? :)

The most important thing is that you have a process that everybody understands -- you may never codify that process, but everyone on the team should know that it is there. And the process is: "To get things done & make a difference". What is the best way to do this?

You want to give a sense of progression, via money & title etc. These are good things, but there are more levers you can pull. In a small group, it is obvious who is kicking-ass and who isn't. You should let them, create an atmosphere first where they can do this -- and then, when they are. Talk to them about what they want. Do they want to run a team? Do they want more money? Do they want a more senior title? Do they want more free time? Do they want more flexibility? Do they want more responsibility (e.g. looking at 3 workstreams, instead of one)? Your answers will evolve. But don't take your eye off the prize -- and the prize is to create an atmosphere where people can excel.

Judging merit You make this sound hard, but is it? In a small group, isn't it obvious when someone is kicking ass? The problem you are worrying about is that when somoene is kicking-ass, how do I make sure they are rewarded, so that they continue kicking ass. I would say, let people kick-ass first, and understand why they are -- lets say they inherently love 'solving problems', then give them problems to solve that honors & respects their talents.

"This project was fun. It was very exciting to bring it to life step by step, and such a pleasure to see it working after we put so much effort in it. But this is nothing compared to how much we learned thanks to it. What seemed to be pretty easy from the beginning, turned out to be very tricky in details. I could not imagine I would have to learn statistical methods and clustering algorithms, dust off my school notes on electronics (though we only need the basics here), and discover a number of useful tools and services on the way."

These are exactly my feelings after reading through this marvelous blog post.

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Bethe describes his meeting with Schwinger: "I entirely forgot that he [Schwinger] was a sophomore 17 years of age. . . His knowledge of quantum electrodynamics is certainly equal to my own, and I can hardly understand how he could acquire that knowledge in less than two years and almost all by himself.” Bethe concludes that “Schwinger will develop into one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists if properly guided, i.e., if his curriculum is largely left to his own free choice."

"he published his reformulation of quantum electrodynamics in three long papers in Physical Review, Quantum Electrodynamics I (1948), II (1949), and III (1949). They include several of the results for which he, Richard Feynman, and Sin-Itiro Tomanaga were eventually awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics."

A life well led.

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