In the startup world right now, there's a lot of evidence of a bubble in privately funded companies, but less of one in the public markets. But there are two differences between now and the .com bubble. Specifically:

- most companies have real cash flows this time
- investors are smarter

As valuations have gone up, investors have started transferring risk back to the founders and employees with things like liquidation preferences. What that means is that if you take funding at some ridiculous valuation, you'll need to exit at an even higher valuation to actually make money as a founder or employee. But there doesn't seem to be the same appetite for these high valuations in the public markets right now.

The upshot is this: take more cash than options right now. There's a good chance your options will be worthless at this point. If you want equity, ask for actual shares instead.

As for worst cases, you'll likely see weaker companies fail and stronger companies reduce headcount to better manage costs.

30 years ago NASA was building space shuttles. If Sierra Nevada were doing that, I would be impressed.

I remember reading this back in the day, but this article has not aged well. Joel is a smart guy, but this advice is frankly ludicrous.

In Joel's world, Apple would have never scrapped Mac OS Classic and launched OS X. And Microsoft would have never scrapped the old DOS underpinnings and started over with the NT kernel.

Starting over happens all the time in software projects, and I'll admit that in many cases it's a waste of time. But quite often, it's an excellent idea. The world changes, and despite what Joel thinks, software really does age.

In the case of Netscape, I would say that their rewrite worked out pretty well. Mozilla was a big jump forward in browser technology, and then Firefox (which itself was a rewrite of Mozilla) has become a truly successful browser.

The Awesomebar is a debacle? Wow. Gee. For me, it's the only thing that keeps me using Firefox. I love the Awesomebar.

I've been telling people that Drupal 7 is coming real soon now for two years! We've developed and redeveloped entire sites, all the while hearing from our developers that Drupal 7 was coming out and that we would need to think about our upgrade path.

As far as I can tell it's vaporware. Release it already.

What defines a "widespread pattern of errors?" In small elections or close elections, changing a small fraction of votes could affect the outcome.

This system assumes three things:

• Everyone participates - voters have to validate their vote afterward to make sure it's still correct.
• Everyone is perfect - people who incorrectly cast their vote will always suspect fraud, calling the entire election into question.
• Everyone is sane - individual voters do not lie about about their vote to game the system, cast doubt on the election, etc.