I say build a company. Go where it takes you. If it takes you to a billion dollars, fine. If it takes you to a million, fine. If you aim to achieve a given number, I suggest you question why your ego, as opposed to your business, needs you to achieve that number. Are you aiming to become number one or two in your business because you have substantive reasons, or is it becaused you once read about Jack Welch saying GE businesses had to be number one or two, and you took that message to heart for no other reason except Jack Welch said it? Are you aiming for the low millions coz you have a substantive reason for it, or are you doing it simply coz you admire Paul Graham who exited at those low millions and you want to be like Paul Graham when you grow up? Life is fluid, people and businesses change, goal posts get shifted all the time, businesses that shunned evil start being evil. These are just the places where businesses take people. Go where yours takes you. And if you don't like where it takes you, then by all means come back, shift your goal posts. Change your sport, even, if that's where your business takes you.
I think the primary problem is the inability to measure performance, and thus have empirical values for what someone actually brings to the table. In sectors where measurement is comparatively easier, such as in sports, you can have players earning orders of magnitude more than their teammates for doing arguably the same job. Sports have their issues too, but I doubt you'll hear Yaya Sanogo at Arsenal FC in London complain about all this money that his teammate Alexis Sanchez is being paid yet both are attacking players. Geoffrey Colvin of Fortune magazine once wrote about this some years back, you could probably find it with a bit of google.
It doesn't matter how long Kneen has sat on his domain. The only reason the domain has value is because Kneen found it worth registering, and Harsh now wants it. If Kneen had registered www.:-mgpdgwcpdgw.con instead, he'd have been perfectly in his right to do so, and no one (presumably) would be interested in taking his domain. So why should someone else get a chance to take it away just coz he wants to? As long as there is no company called workbetter, the domain might as well be gibberish, and gibberish.com is not valuable to society.
I meant what is it do they actually measure? Turns out it's capacitance of the sample, with some compensation for temperature being made, so presumably they also have a thermometric function in-built. The devices my potential clients currently use cost about US$ 1,000, and are only typically found at grain collection centres (we're dealing with small-scale farmers). So I guess the challenge is not so much to build a smartphone app, or to even get the moisture readings into a phone, but to build a cheap moisture measuring device.
The way I see it, life is basically a long-winded effort to get loved. To get loved by ourselves, by others and by our gods. Everything everybody does in life boils down to this. From Hitler to Mother Teresa. From Osama bin Laden to the Dalai Lama. You want to do things that matter, to change the world? Why? How do you know they matter? Because those to whom they matter love you for it. You love yourself for it, others love you for it and by your own spiritual presumptions, your gods love you for it, or they will some day. And so, it is not the big things or the small things that matter. It is not saving the lives of millions or attending your kid's play that matters. The only thing that matters is you finding love, however you find it. If there is no love feedback for you, it doesn't matter. That's why nobody is trying to save the starving children in the planets of the Andromeda galaxy, coz there's no feedback for it. And if you think that's a poor analogy, well, there was nobody coming to the slums of Africa to do the things people these days come to do.
I think he means it this way: "...if you're talking to corp dev (as opposed to anyone else, or the person you expected to talk to), it's because they're the ones in charge of buying other companies...."
This sounds like hooey to me. I mean, fasting may trigger some survival/distress mode mechanisms, but do such triggers actually consist better health? All other things being equal, to the the extent that you can experimentally make all the other things equal in this case, would I have a higher overall white blood cell count after fasting than I had before fasting? Does fasting (starving?) weaken my immune system initially? To what extent? Is that extent recovered, and exceeded, by the new WBC production that wouldn't have been triggered otherwise? I'm comparing this, admittedly based on zero evidence, with the flight response. Adrenaline makes me run faster, but it doesn't make me a faster runner. That's how I mean when I say this sounds like hooey. Of course, I could be totally wrong, and I really have no basis to make this claim in the first place.
There are so many complexities to this debate. For example, if you oppose foreigners coming to America, do you also oppose America exporting stuff to these foreigners wherever they currently are? Presumably no. If not, how are they able to afford your exports, which in turn keep you, an American, in your job? Their ability to create value, and trade this value for somebody else's value. What if, then, their ability to produce this value is magnified by their coming to America? You know, like that example given by a commentor, of a fashion designer from Oklahoma moving to Paris or Milan? Or my friend from Thika, Kenya? He has done design work for Daimler Trucks, but was denied a visa by the American embassy in Nairobi, having been seconded to the American branch of Daimler's trucks business by their German business. The embassy simply didn't see how this Kenyan kid landed this gig, despite all the supporting documentation and opportunity to verify, so they alluded his paperwork was fake and denied him the visa. Would he have made more money over there? You bet. At any rate I bet. Would he be able to buy more American stuff, keep more Americans in their jobs? Yes. But now he can't, coz your govt won't let him come over. Who is the loser here? Remember, the reason he caught Daimler's attention in the first place, despite his lack of formal design training, was his work. In fact, they wanted him to come to America to formally study design at Daimler's cost, since that formal education was part of Daimler's hiring policy. So it wasn't merely that he'd have taken an American job, or that Daimler can train plenty of the available Americans. He was a "great programmer", and I'd say America is worse off for not hiring him.
Paul Graham's entire argument rests, as far as I can tell, on the assumption that the distribution of great programmers maps to the population distribution. Can this be empirically established or refuted? Because doing so would bring this matter to a close pretty quickly, I think. After all, is anybody arguing about whether America needs to import middle eastern oil? Of course not, because the global distribution of oil has been empirically established, and the need to meet local deficits with imports meets little, if any, resistance. I feel that the intractability of this immigration debate, such as it is, is due primarily to the fact that the global distribution of top quality "digital talent", as Graham calls it, hasn't been established. Some people say most of the best is out there, others say the best is just a matter of training.
Anybody who uses computers is relevant to talk about how they are made and legislated. Being a researcher, or any of the other roles you mention, doesn't give you relevance. What gives you relevance is what you say, and saying isn't limited to authority figures. If he needs to STFU, then do you not also need to similarly STFU? Coz what authority or relevance do you have to speak about CD that CD doesn't have to speak about computers? As for refusing to brainlessly applaud, what you're actually doing is brainlessly shouting him down, which is basically the same thing in the opposite direction and not intellectually superior in any way.
Well, a platform like freelancer is designed intentionally such that you can't, or at least shouldn't, build contact with clients off the platform. Otherwise you and your clients have no use for freelancer.
I probably feel the way I do because I have the benefit of hindsight, whereas the people of the time the Model T came out couldn't see what a future built on oil meant geopolitically and environmentally.
But for those of us alive today to look back and read that once upon a time, humanity chose oil and it's attendant conveniences when they could have taken electricity with a few limitations...
I mean, if we were the ones making the choice for 1909 people in a time travel world, I want to imagine we'd go hell for leather getting them to "vote" electric car.
I actually submitted this hoping it'd already been submitted and discussed and HN would redirect me to the thread, but it turns out it hadn't been submitted. I'd searched to no avail.
Anyway.
If they had a working electric car in 1909, I have no idea what to think. Because there's so much to think:
How different would the world have turned out if vehicles powered with electricity, rather than gasoline, had become the main mode of 20th century transport.
How differently the development of and investment in electricity generation and transmission would have developed if the point above were true.
*How much better off the world would be today, in terms of environmental pollution.
I'd love for somebody to burst this bubble for me, coz the idea that we had a working, production electric car in 1909 but still somehow fucked it up is depressing for me.
So you're happy with the NSA spying on you? I mean, the only reason you've never attracted the NSA's attention is because you're not the kind of famous the NSA is interested in, right? Are you saying that anyone with the capacity or opportunity to invade your privacy is justified in doing so?
I will make an analogy with music.
If you are a complete novice in playing any musical instrument, I could teach you the three guitar chords that you need to learn to play "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountains" in two minutes. Depending on how long it takes you learn how to hold those chords and change between them, you could come from having no clue whatsoever to playing something recognizably related to a girl coming round the mountain inside two hours, perhaps even less depending on your learning speed.
I could then teach you the other remaining five major chords, as well as how chord progressions work (play the 1st, then 4th then 5th chord in any progression for example), and once you've mastered how to hold and shift between all seven (in a week? a month? three months?), I'd now have you coming round the mountain in seven different keys.
The advantage of this approach is that it gives you, the complete guitar/music novice, the satisfaction of being able to play something you and your dog recognize as music almost as soon as you start out.
Are you an accomplished musician yet? NOT EVEN CLOSE. How far do you have to go? Very very far. Eventually, when you understand how music works in general and in particular on the guitar, you'll get to see how and why I taught you those three first chords, and why a I, IV, V chord progression works but a I, II, III makes your dog go for a walk on it's own. You'll be able to build your own chords! You'll even be able to argue with me about the correct name for some given chords! You'll be able to play melodies from chords, maybe even play both chords and melodies at the same time! [0]
So, if you wanted to learn how to play guitar, would you want to first get a years worth of music conservatory work under your belt before you can belt out the simplest of tunes, or would you rather belt out "Coming Round the Mountain" in a few hours and then figure out later how she got round the mountain? Which one do you imagine will be more satisfying?
I reckon it's the same with programming. Python may not teach me how to write my own "chords" or enable me to get into arguments (valid ones) about stuff, but it enables me to do something visible almost immediately, and I can take pleasure and motivation from that initial success. Then as I go on, I'll dig into how the stuff actually works and develop a better understanding, and this deeper understanding, just like in music, is a lifelong pursuit. Just as guitar masters are still learning, so are those of you who are, by any measure, programming masters.
So I'd say, if you're teaching someone, or learning, start off with something where it's easy to produce something tangible easily. Then develop a deeper understanding as your progress demands this deeper understanding.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vCcZIARw9k
Can it (or could it be made to in future iterations) record the sort of data used to produce the output of an ECG (echocardiogram)? That would be quite the application for people with actual or high risk for hear disease, I think?
While typing this "ask", I tried something in excel to illustrate what I wanted, and realized, "oh wait, excel can actually do this...", but I figured to ask anyway, coz I don't want to argue with all the pop singers who've said to live and learn :-)
If the question was whether or not to ban lobbying, how do the benefits of lobbying stack up against the damage? That whole cost-benefit analysis thing...
Suppose part of your motivation for understanding networking was the desire to set up a "last mile" sort of ISP in your neighbourhood/town, where you lease fibre capacity from someone with fibre in the ground, then you build out a wifi or wimax network that, every so often, terminates into this fibre; is this the correct learning path to take, would you say? How helpful/essential is the knowledge?
I suppose, but all the other sites I typically visit that use SSL (twitter, facebook, gmail) are all working fine. This failure is specific to HN as far as I can tell, and I was wondering if something had been done to the HN backend over the last couple of weeks or so that makes it inaccessible to me.
The thing I try to think about in the context of me being the owner of a successful business, and not necessarily in software, is profit sharing, as opposed to equity sharing. Profit is a degenerate case of equity, in the sense that a large (albeit not whole) part of why you want to own equity is to own a share of the profit. At any rate, at the level of employee options, you want own enough equity to play the decision making role that holding equity enables you to. Beyond that, the value a market assigns to equity you own is (should be!) ultimately dependent on the profit that will accrue to that equity. At the same time, profit sharing is a lot less messy and much more rewarding to employees than equity. Sure, you're not getting a share of this asset that you've helped build, but from what I'm hearing, the story is the same with options. And profit should be easier to "give away" than equity from the founders' perspective, I think. I realize that sharing profit is complicated when businesses are in the red, but on the whole, I suspect there might be better value in the idea for all involved. Not that I have any idea about how exactly to go about sharing this profit, assuming it exists, I don't. I just happen to think it might be a more satisfactory path to take, assuming the fork on the road reads "Equity Sharing" this way, "Profit Sharing" that way.
If an app "wants to do x", where x is a defined do-able thing, then it shouldn't be too complex to say no. It's not like an app wants permission to drown my puppy in the aquarium in the living room; it wants to do things set as do-able in android. I don't see what's so complex about that. Instead of a blanket permission policy where an app fails to work because I didn't install it coz I don't like the permissions it wants, let apps fail because I denied them permissions I didn't deem necessary. An app can simply tell me it won't work unless I allow it to drown my puppy in the living room aquarium, and once I say "leave my puppy alone", it stops working and sulks away. Mind you, I'm not a developer, so I don't know what I'm talking about at a technical level. I just want to be able to say no when a flash light app wants to send sms messages. Or when a flea extermination app wants to drown my puppies.
I think google do sloppy shit whenever the "sloppiness" suits them. Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis? That is downright sloppy, only it isn't really sloppiness, it's a state of affairs that one way or another suits their needs.
Coz think about it: even after they've seen plenty of apps asking for permissions that are none of their business, apps that they've approved seeing as they're on the app store, they still don't change their permissions policy. I call that intentional slopiness.