I don't even think that was the point. I think the geographic comparison is more a novelty than anything, and I don't even think the author takes a viewpoint in writing his article. I clicked the link because I'm at an Excelerate Labs company now in Chicago, and I'm sure other Chicago Hacker News-ers will click on the link too, but I don't think there was really any point to the article. So un-succinctly put, I don't think you're missing anything.
As both a programmer and a poker player I have strong opinions on the subject. In turn:
"Math is useful
I see a lot of people around telling “I don’t need math”. In poker (and in programming) you need a lot of math, even for simple operations."
I think the importance of math is overstated in poker. When you look at a hand you must determine your chance of your hand improving, which is a straightforward mathematical exercise. You must also determine your opponents chances of improving his hand, which is also a straightforward mathematical exercise, but is complicated by the fact that you can't see the cards your opponent has. So once you have pegged your opponent for a certain hand based on his or her behavior earlier in the hand as well as any previous knowledge you have of the player, if applicable, then again straightforward math. Finally, professional/skilled poker players always calculate the odds the pot gives them versus the odds that either their hand will improve or the odds that in the specific situation they can expect to win the pot, and they further must consider what odds they are offerring to their opponent by their actions. Weighing those factors pretty much completes the degree to which mathematics plays a role in no-limit Texas Hold'em.
"Be fast and precise
In online poker you can’t think hours for your next move. If you are a programmer you should be fast-thinking and precise. Fast and no errors."
While this resonates much more for me in vis a vis poker, I think this is borderline idiotic in the sense of programming. In poker you must act fast because it is forced upon you in the context, you have no choice. Think of it like using Javascript before Douglas Crockford came along and enlightened you to the good parts of the language, the only reason to use it was because you had no choice! But in programming, to say that you have to be "fast and [make] no errors" is stupid insofar that it's an obvious goal of which stating serves no purpose. It's like when I tried to explain to a non-programmer friend of mine the concept introduced by Jason Fried of "getting good at making money". He thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard, like as if someone saying "I'm going to work hard to improve my skill at making money" is going to in any way have a causal relationship with the actualization. I probably didn't do Jason justice in setting the right context for my friend, nevertheless I think this phrase exhibits the same logical fallacy.
"If you want to try poker there are a lot of free poker games on facebook, iPhone, etc… Don’t waste your money. The fun is the same."
You'll never get good if you're money is not on the line. Now, I'm not saying that one should get in over their head, or even wager large amounts of money, especially when learning to play poker. However, you will simply not see the real scenarios and wrestle with the real hands that make you a great poker player, unless you and your opponents are playing for money. My impression of free poker games is that they mimic televised poker. Televised poker is for entertainment, not education, so the hands that are shown are epic bluffs, balls-to-the-wall all-in wagers, and other 5%-ish hands that provide the greatest level of excitement to viewers. I'd do the same thing if I was a TV producer, but it's not real poker. My point in this tangent is to illustrate that 95% of winning and loosing in poker comes down to average-plus hands beating average-minus hands. And while no hands are trivial in poker, playing an average-x hand against an opponent who holds the counterpart is ridiculously challenging. You will not have the motivation to really wrestle to find the answer without your money on the line, and getting good at finding out how to induce small mistakes in your opponent is basically synonymous with becoming a good no-limit Texas Hold'em player.
And finally, a gaping omission in my mind:
Poker is great for programmers (and maybe more accurately entrepreneurs) because it is a game where the perfect amount of information is available such that a skilled player, in the long run, can expect to have a positive ROI when playing against players of lesser skill. No-limit Texas Hold'em in particular, is the epitome of this. At the height of its popularity when big no-limit tournaments were attracting deep-pocketed beginners, a skilled player could expect his tournament entry fee to be worth 5 to even 10x its value in terms of expected value each time. The concept of imperfect information is resonant in entrepreneurship I think for sure, and as for it's benefits with programmers, I believe the best way to think about it is that poker in beneficial because it ostensibly uses the same cognition as design patterns in software engineering. You have a problem to solve with a variety of factors, and you apply patterns to solve those problems based on your knowledge and the past experience of others who have blazed the trail before you.
Investors shouldn't like acqui-hires unless it is an agreed upon goal in the first place. In fact, I guess that investors wouldn't appreciate any misunderstanding of goals on any level, and it seems to be an oft-cited reason for entrepreneurs losing their jobs at the behest of venture capitalists. But if I had $1 million to invest into a business, and from my experience I had a reasonable expectation that a company I'm investing in could be acqui-hired for $50 million, and we agreed upon that from the outset, then I could see myself making that deal and being happy when the result came to fruition.
A lot of Acqui-hires are a choice between 98% chance of total failure vs. x% of their initial investment back. It's not a goal it's simply a way to cut their losses when the company is on their last legs.
This is true, but as has been pointed out repeatedly, even if a company faces a 98% chance of total failure, many investors would prefer they chase the 2% chance of success rather than recovery of X% of their investments. VC investments either win or they don't; salvage isn't interesting to them.
One observation. I posit that in certain situations, when from the outset a startup sets out to attract a microsegment which is the subset of an existing market that is owned by a major competitor, and furthermore has the explicit goal of being acquired for somewhere between $5 to $50 million by one of those major competitors, that this is valid. Being that in select situations this is a valid undertaking, it must follow from this that the actualization of this explicit goal represents success, and not failure, neither on the part of the founding team nor in terms of product development. Perhaps the dollar amount I cited here is what the OP would consider to be a "buy-out offer [that] is spectacular", but to the extent that it isn't, it's ostensibly wise to consider the opposing viewpoint.
If you made this as a 'Farmville' style game, I think if I called it 'Startupville' that name would convey ostensibly everything that I would like to see in a game like this, I guarantee you that you'd at least be able to monetize me through advertising. This might be out of scope for what you are suggesting though, but I'd definitely be interested in seeing it done. I've had this idea for a long time, but I always manage to convince myself that I'm just weird and that my tastes for games don't reflect an addressable market of who's size would make it worth my time.
The article starts of by saying that a lot is at stake when a company rolls out a new logo. I'd like to point out the Microsoft has, either intentionally or unintentionally, been piloting this logo-style in their products for the past few years, which is ostensibly a lower-risk proposition. Rolling out their parent brand logo to conform to this arguably successful re-branding that their individual software products have underwent over the past three or so years seems like a reasonably sound decision. Furthermore, if Microsoft has intentionally been piloting this new brand on parts of their business that are subordinate to the brand as a whole, then I'd have to say bravo for likely reducing a huge business risk in the making of a relatively permanent, long-term decision.
If you're just going to send plain HTML over the wire, why are you going to even bother thinking at the level of abstraction that most developers (well, at least me) tend to think of when "developing an API"? I'll give you that it's a loose notion, but there's another issue. If you're building a non-trivial web application, how does sending HTML as a media type help you to decouple your data from the DOM? I believe the answer is that it doesn't. You could make the argument that decoupling becomes less of a necessity when you are providing more "fine-grained" access by controlling exactly what HTML is generated from the server at each endpoint. I say it could be argued, but I wouldn't argue it.
I think it's somewhat of a benefit to make the clients expect to do a little searching to find the data/links/forms they want to use--it makes them a little more robust and adaptable (I guess because they have lowered expectations!). Contrast this to a client dependent on an XML or JSON Schema. Yeah, that client is easy to write, but you've now locked the server into not changing its format or you've doomed the client to break when the server decides to change anyway. I'm shooting for something a little better.
You can't totally decouple the clients; they have to understand in some way the vocabulary the server is using, but you can do a lot to decouple them from the structure of the markup.
I've done customer development on things along these lines and I basically have the following to share with the class:
Any app that is at its core assisting people to hack their current behavior is inherently asking people to change their behavior beyond that point at which it would be reasonable given the difficulty of such a task to attempt this feat.
