abstractbill

I remember being very young and starting to think about death, and thinking it the most horrible thing imaginable. That the beautiful experience of life as a human should end in annihilation. That we would just stop existing at some point.

Now I'm watching my oldest daughter suffer the same realization. I tell her that there are a few people who are working on solving the problem, that I hope they can figure it out fast enough, that I understand and share the same fears she does. I tell her to live each day to the fullest anyway, and to enjoy life and not dwell on death too much. I don't know what else to say.

I've been in extreme pain, and I've been pumped full of enough morphine that I've been pretty incompetent. At least I still existed! And even in all the pain and incompetence I still found my own existence precious and worth hanging on to. Assuming we don't solve death in time for me, I have an eternity to not exist. Why would I be in a hurry to get started?

(Still, I found the article interesting and respect the decision of anyone who decides they actually prefer annihilation to pain and incompetence, even if I don't understand them).

I'm glad patents don't work. I've always felt there's something very deeply wrong with owning an idea.

If anything I think it helped that his rants were rude, since that made it clear how much he cared about the problems.

Startups are different though. What you wrote is probably a lot more true of a company the size of Facebook.

To be honest it's not something I'd ever advise someone to do, even though it did happen to work out for me. I'd advise most people to join one of the big giants and enjoy a predictably comfortable life, and those with a certain temperament - like myself - to found a company instead of joining one.

If some of it seems generic and obvious now, that's because they've succeeded - more than anyone else - in discovering and sharing some actually repeatable strategies for building startups.

Are there physical limits that would prevent us from building a bigger one and using it to launch small things into space? Or "just" engineering problems?

How might I contribute to making Basic Income happen? I've been seeing more and more people talk seriously about it, which seems like a great sign, but perhaps not enough to change anything. Are there any advocacy efforts I could donate to?

(as did the woman who made the shirt in the first place: https://twitter.com/ellypriZeMaN/status/533287464497332225)

There are some biotech companies too, but I don't know much about those.

Have there been any aviation/aerospace companies yet?

About a year ago, my family had a car crash that shook up my 3-year-old daughter so much that she still talks about how scary it was. This technology is important.

Congrats to Kyle and the Cruise crew. I'm very impressed, and you guys should be very proud.

I don't think so. The people fixing the obamacare website most likely want obamacare to succeed, and are aware that there's a hungry media out there ready and waiting for the next story revealing just how awful the original website (and, they'll insinuate, hence obamacare itself) is.

Right, I think we don't disagree that much. In particular, if you don't anticipate your code being used or maintained for very long, don't document it! Both of us worked on a lot of throw-away code over the years after all ;)

This situation is very common at startups, for example.