20years

I like this!

Yes, I agree. I am not proposing spending all of your money living it up, but to find a healthy balance. It doesn't have to go in the extreme in either direction.

This is a good counterpoint and something my Dad points out often. He was very frugal, worked long hours and saved as much as he could so him and my mom could have a good retirement. She passed away at 42, so that never happened. He has so many regrets and wishes he invested more of his money & time in experiences with her while she was alive.

I think there needs to be a balance. The trend of working crazy hours to save as much as you can, living overly frugal, etc. will not always lead to happiness or fulfillment. I like to think of it as how can I optimize my time and finances for "life" rather than retirement. That doesn't mean I don't have a nest egg, it just means that not everything is going into that nest egg.

Working 70 hours a week does not have the positive return you think it does.

"What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads."

Yes this is exactly what I see in my sons school. Some of the kids actually know more than the teachers and end up providing support to the teachers. Then the kids do silly things like duplicating icons on the home screen 100+ times and change folder names to things like "poop". The teachers freak out thinking they hacked into the computers because they have no idea on how those simple things were done, or how to disable them from doing those things.

"What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art"

Yes!!!

Congrats on being a new dad!

I have 2 kids of my own and grew up in a family with 8 kids. The #1 thing I really appreciated when I reached adulthood was how relentless my parents were with all 8 of us when it came to working hard for what we wanted and treating people around us with respect. They didn't just preach it, they lived it so we learned by watching them. I may be a little biased but all of us turned into really good people and we all make pretty decent livings.

I carried that on with my 2 kids and so far am pretty happy on the people they are becoming ;)

The other thing I do with my kids is get really involved with whatever they are interested in at any given time. I look for learning opportunities in those interests and leverage those wherever I can to teach them new skills in a way where they don't realize they are being taught.

Mostly, enjoy the ride! It is an amazing ride that goes by so fast!

Maybe she is not lazy at all. Maybe she just doesn't want to work on things that don't motivate or interest her. It is my ultimate goal to never have to work on things that don't interest me if only I can figure out a way to automate all of that ;)

The fact that she has succeeded in getting A's with waiting until the last minute and not putting in much effort, indicates that she is very smart. I have noticed that really smart people seem to lack motivation and get bored very easily. The two closest people to me are like this. The thing is though, when they find something that does interest them, there is no stopping them. They turn into the hardest working people around.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Very interesting. What country are you from?

"However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were in my school."

Oh wow! Yeah, that seems like a little much for middle school. I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript. Let's not scare kids away at this age just yet and it sounds like the program your school had did just that :(

"The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years."

Honestly, I am not even so sure that requiring it will necessarily increase the count of women that go into this field. If anything, it will at least introduce it to more women showing them possible opportunities. I as a women in tech for 20 years have my own theories on why many women don't go into this profession but they are unpopular opinions here.

The main reason I would love to see it included as a main subject is because I want our youth (men and women) to be prepared for the jobs of our future. I truly believe that almost every profession will require programmers or tech specific roles in the very near future and our education system is not preparing our youth for that.

Sorry just now saw this. The article here goes into things pretty well for my situation at least http://www.lifeextension.com/protocols/metabolic-health/thyr...

I don't want to give any kind of medical advice especially without knowing the situation of others. If you are concerned though, it doesn't hurt to get blood work done. Following are the common things to test for if you think you may have Hashimoto's or thyroid issues.

Vit D, Ferritin, Thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO), Thyroglobulin antibody (TGAb), Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), Free T4 Test

I think the drag/drop tools are great for the younger kids but once they reach middle school age they are generally ready for something more.

I periodically teach middle school coding workshops. One of the top questions the kids ask at the start of a new workshop is will they be using scratch or hand coding. They associate scratch with the young kids and want more control by this age.

Yep! I avoid these like the plague. I feel a lot of these types of events create more exclusion than inclusion.

Totally agree with you here. I think middle school is actually the prime age to start teaching it but not the drag/drop scratch/block type stuff you see in the lower grades. It should be a requirement just like Math and English.

I have used intercooler too for a couple of apps. It is a joy to work with in comparison to some of the Angular apps I have worked with.

I really liked Pitch Anything. Good actionable advice in it but I also found a lot of the neuroeconomics discussed in the book very interesting. Helped me in other areas too.

Yes it completely changed my entire well being. Muscle twitching stopped, major back aches and leg cramps went away, headaches went away, brain fog went away, concentration went up, sleep improved, skin improved. To be fair, I made other lifestyle changes too in addition to the regimen of supplements.

This is similar to my lived experience. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's 3 years ago. I was lucky to find a great doctor that specialized in it. He put me on 15000 IU / day for 3 months because I was so severely low in addition to having high antibodies. Within 3 months my levels were so much better. I still take 10000 IU / day along with selenium, iron, fish oil and good diet/exercise and all my levels have been in check for 2 years :)

"She thinks kids should develop their passions and act on them early, instead of waiting to grow up to be “disruptive,” as the entrepreneurial set puts it."

Just wow! How about let them be kids before they grow-up. At this age their passion is transformers, paw patrol, my little pony and playing at the park. They do not need to be disruptive or being pushed entrepreneurial crud this young. That is just plain dangerous.

This would be a better fit for middle school aged kids.

Don't get me wrong. I think the education system is broken but I don't think these "entrepreneurial billionaires" have the right solutions. They are so out of touch.

Keep your hands off my kids.

I would not consider working for a company that required a 2 minute slack response time, especially for a role that required uninterrupted focus. Different story if you are in a "put out fires" role

Is it more important to actually get stuff done or to be available for every distracting slack message that comes through?

If you need people to respond within 2 minutes to every message, that is lack of organization imo unless it is an emergency.

Good remote teams are very organized, prioritize documentation, have weekly and sometimes daily kick off meetings and then for the most part get out of the way for their team to get stuff done.

Maybe consider acquiring a small SaaS that is already modestly successful but has a ton more potential.

Using this as a teaching platform was my first reaction too.

I don't think I would use it for anything production though without an option to export the app (database & source for my app). I would pay the listed monthly subscription fees in a heartbeat. That is a no brainer for the time this appears to save but I have learned the hard way too many times in the past on being locked into a platform for business crucial stuff.

I would be fine even paying a one-time fee of few hundred dollars to be able to export my app if I need to. Simply for the peace of mind of not being locked in if something happens.

I suppose it's a quick way to kill of the competition.

If you purchase with a loan, you can get a much better deal and it can make sense.

A lot of the solar companies were selling their low interest $0 down lease programs and they themselves were benefiting from the credits/rebates not the homeowner. Homeowners didn't really have to have a great credit score either. Once the credits and rebates went away, the lease programs weren't sustainable for the solar companies.

This doesn't really surprise me. A few years ago we had lead generation software that catered to the solar industry. We had some decent sized clients and it did really well for about 2 years. Once the tax credits started going away and the power companies started killing off their rebates, a lot of these solar companies were not able to survive.

One of our larger clients who was heavily funded went bankrupt this year and many of the smaller/mid sized clients have folded within the last year too.

It is risky basing too much of a business on tax credits and rebates.

This leads me to believe that Mozilla may have recently been caught up in the same spamhaus spam-trap debacle as many others and was backlisted. They decided to send a permission pass email because if an open or click hasn't recently been recorded, there isn't really any other way for them to know which emails in their list are no longer active.

This also confirms my belief that one or more of the big email ISP's (yahoo, gmail, etc.) may have sold a crap load of their inactive email accounts to spamhaus recently. Doesn't matter if these once active emails did opt in to your list in the past, you will still get backlisted now that they are in the spamhaus spam-trap database.

I don't understand why the email providers don't simply shut down the inactive accounts. This would then result in a hard bounce to the sender allowing them to remove the emails from their list.

Exactly! SQL was never dead.

My now 13 year old son first started at age 9 through Minecraft hacking away at mods. More recently he moved into creating JavaScript games and creating Raspberry Pi projects with Python. Our latest project is a retro arcade system built with the Pi.

So games and fun projects that we work on together. Also don't try and overly force coding standards at this young age. Let them hack away and have fun.

I think a lot of this comes down to the sector they were going after.

Speaking from experience, software for Plumbers, Roofers, Pest Control, Cleaners and most home improvement type sectors are really hard to scale. It really is an up-hill battle getting them to spend more than a couple hundred a month and the churn was so much higher than any other sector I have worked in.

You have HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, etc. who are heavily tapped into this market and understand the challenges that come along with it. We developed a lead gen, crm and follow up system targeting this sector. So many of the Plumbers and Roofers we talked to would complain about HomeAdvisor and other similar providers. How bad the leads were, that they were shared (sent to 5+ others), etc. but were not willing to pay for a higher priced offering that fixed those things. Most that were willing to invest were horrible at even answering calls from prospects. They would call prospects back 2+ days later to discover they went with someone else who actually did answer their phone and would then say it was a bad lead.

The experience gave me a much better understanding on why the competitors focus on shared leads. Hopefully at least 1 of the 5 roofers the lead is sent to will actually respond in a timely manner.

Yes to all your points :)

3 of the 4 are making money.

Honestly, I don't really understand it when people say they have a hard time coming up with ideas. Ideas are all around you if you are willing to pay attention and look around. IMO ideas are easy, taking action is the hard part.

I tend to look outside of the tech sector and try to even stay away from things I am interested in. I have learned the hard and costly way that my interests don't make me money. I pay attention to un-sexy, niche markets or subsets of larger markets/products. A few markets I am currently tapped into are:

- Niche learning platform mainly advertised to homeschoolers

- Math tutoring

- Niche real estate product

- Roofers

I also run 2 ecommerce sites selling niche products. Products that are really not on anyone's radar because the volume isn't there and it isn't a huge market. I get 30 to 50 orders per month and net on average $200 per order, so it is a nice passive revenue stream.

I literally have pages of ideas jotted down that as time permits I will dig into more. Lots of ideas end up getting removed from the list after I do more research and see the market isn't right or that it will take too much time or money getting it going.

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