evaluating competitors in a startup

From Paul Graham's essay on Lisp and hacking: Beating the averages

If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they'll get the wrong candidates.

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

I just had a "D-Uh" moment when I read this.

The main focus of the essay is Lisp and the regard hackers have for it. Lisp was something I learnt in my undergrad for a few weeks (/days?) and wasn't very enthusiastic about. May be it was because the instructor gave the impression that it was a dead language and just a quirky little way of doing things. Maybe I should give it a shot again.

Personalized craigslist RSS feeds

Here's a less known feature of craiglist. Say you are looking to buy a car and are looking for a particular type/price-range etc. The url for honda civics costing less than $5000 in Los Angeles looks like this "http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/car?query=honda+civic&minAsk=&maxAsk=5000". All you need to do to convert this into an RSS feed is add "&format=rss" at the end of the url. This gives the listings in a RSS feed format and can be read by a feed reader. So, you can stay on top of the listings and be notified within minutes of a relevant posting.


This works for other craigslist searches as well: e.g. the following provides a feed for rental listings for a 1BR apartment in Mountain View costing less than 1500 per month:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sby/35?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=1500&bedrooms=1&neighborhood=35&format=rss

Perl one-liner for testing prime numbers!

perl -wle 'print "Prime" if (1 x shift) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/' [number]

See http://montreal.pm.org/tech/neil_kandalgaonkar.shtml for an explanation
of how it works.  It basically involves backtracking.

Wireless problems