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I brought up something in my last post about friend/follow relationships that I think deserves more attention than I gave it: the social graph -- as it is currently constructed at least, where all relationships are equal and mean the same thing -- is not the same thing as an interest graph. The implication is that using a standard unweighted relationship network to predict what content should show up in my activity stream will result in me seeing a lot of content that I'm not really interested in. That's inconvenient at best. As Hunter Walk so charmingly put it, "I like you, but not everything about you."

Today I came across a post on Twitter (via Hacker News) called Cars Kill Cities. It uses Atlanta as an example, and since I grew up there, I feel compelled to explain why the author is way off the mark.

First: is Atlanta -- the 9th largest US city, world's 15th largest economy, and 4th-largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies -- dying? Not at all. Atlanta was hit hard by the collapse of the real estate bubble, but it still has a rapidly expanding, very highly educated population. It's a global economic center with a significant concentration of high-tech and white-collar industries and good local universities. This suggestion is silly, probably a poorly-researched one made out of convenience rather than conviction.

So let's address the topic of the article instead:

I participated in my first (!) hackathon this weekend, a 48-hour student-run event at UPenn known as PennApps Hackathon. A friend and I wrote UnStock.Me, a stock trading game that -- at one point at least -- was intended to be educational. "Codecademy for the stock market" was the original idea, which we intentionally chose because it wouldn't take very long.

I talk to a lot of startups. I have a lot to say about what (not) to do if you are on the hiring side of this exchange, but for now I'll cover the minimum set of information you should be prepared to discuss if you want to hire a developer for your early-stage company. This is the first real interaction you'll have with a potential coworker. If you struggle with convincing someone to join your company, you can bet you'll struggle with convincing someone to buy your product or service, so you should be prepared with the information a potential hire will want to know. These are questions I will pretty much always ask you about your startup in an interview, and they're pretty similar to what a VC would want to know. When I say "I" below what I really mean is "any developer" but it's more convenient to write in the first person.