2,223 karma · joined April 25, 2010
Don't fool yourself into believing that Best Buy deserves success because they are useful. You don't owe Best Buy anything. Best Buy does not care about you. Best Buy is not your friend. Best Buy is a business and should be treated as such.
Take your Harry Potter example. The people who are anti-Harry Potter aren't really against it because it trivializes black magic. That's just a rationalization. These people certainly don't support something like the works of Aleister Crowley, even though they're much more serious about their treatment of the occult. They're against it because it contains -- in their view -- black, satanic magic.
It recently occurred to me, though, that some companies may prefer to contribute to GPL'd projects over BSD'd ones. When Red Hat contributes to the Linux kernel, they know that their competitors will not be able to create a derivative without also releasing it under the GPL. Red Hat's competitors can't create proprietary derivatives that would compete with Red Hat so, in essence, it's safer for a company to contribute to a GPL'd project than a BSD'd project.
This is a really interesting and non-obvious property of the GPL that I never see mentioned.
The book won't transform you into a blogging sensation overnight, but it does have a lot of good information on technical blogging. If you're thinking about blogging about technical things, you should buy it.
Whenever I'm low on sleep, I'm mostly just irritable and more prone to making mistakes, although once, when particularly sleep deprived, I found myself reading the back of a shampoo bottle as if it were a cooking recipe. A couple minutes in, I realized it wasn't a recipe, thought to myself something like "Snap out of it!" Not more than five minutes later and I was reading the "recipe" again.
Anyways, personally. I'm certainly neither more productive nor more talkative when sleep deprived.
Further, it's important to distinguish lying from being factually incorrect. A lie implies deceit, being incorrect does not.
If you're writing HTML, you should be validating it: http://validator.w3.org/
Or my first Gentoo install, which was my first time compiling a kernel. That was a grueling process. Had to go through it twice since I'd messed up something the first time through and then, of course, I had to spend a couple of days compiling a desktop environment afterwards. I always have a blast trying out a new system, though. :)
1. Life as a founder is often incredibly stressful.
2. Prolonged periods of stress exacerbate/cause mental illness.
> Just good design.
Your comments regarding the community were dead on. The ad hominem and personal nature of so much, well, I hesitate to even call it criticism since it's really just thinly veiled hate, has got to stop. It's absolutely a recipe for creating unhappiness, for making people feel bad, and for turning off potential contributors.
HN traffic isn't really that much. I was watching the stats under the new Google Analytics realtime mode and the site was averaging about 3 - 6 requests per second.
One you missed: really horrible auto-correct feature Apple added. It will replace a word when you're in the middle of typing it. Completely broken and totally transparent. At first, I thought that WriteRoom was just buggy.
Oh, and the "Home" folder isn't exposed under the Favorites section of Finder by default anymore. You have to go to "Go > Home". Took me a little while to figure that one out.
If you choose to be offended when someone uses profanity, that's your problem, not mine. It's not my responsibility to protect the world from potentially offensive things.
The source is available here: https://github.com/holman/holman.github.com
More info: http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/
It's my understanding that HN's algorithm rewards articles that have lot of comments and discussion. I've observed that I typically enjoy articles that feature a high upvote to comment ratio, while I'm unlikely to enjoy articles with more comments than upvotes. I would be interested in seeing what the front page would look like if articles were penalized for having more comments than upvotes. Maybe this is just a personal quirk, I don't know.
I'd also like to see the community flag more comments than just those that are spam. Personally, I flag any very mean comments/ad hominems. I've been on the receiving end of such often enough that I know that those kind of comments can easily ruin somebody's day. I think, as a community, we should actively discourage comments that are mean. All criticism ought to be constructive, otherwise what value does it add to the discussion?
At day's end, though, the most effective way to influence the community is going to be leading by example. Long-time members of the community need to show newer members what is appropriate. pg needs to show the community "this is good" and "this is bad" and he has to participate. The entire tone of a community is decided by its most senior and most active members. The majority of a community will follow the lead set by those few.
I don't believe that the proposed honeypot solution would address this.
My point is that dropping out isn't a particularly easy path to choose. It's not a good default for most people.
I'm not trying to say that you can't be successful as a drop out. If I believed that, I wouldn't have dropped out myself.
As far as money goes, I made some cash from participating in Google's Summer of Code, but currently I'm not making any significant income and I'm living at home. I've got some projects that I'm working on and I've had a couple of interviews so, hopefully, I will soon be able to support myself, but not currently.
When considering dropping out of college, you're the one who is ultimately responsible for that decision, you're the one who will live with the consequences, and you're the one who has the best information for making that decision. It's all on you. You have to ask yourself if you really believe that you can live with the consequences and, if so, take the plunge.
Now, I've only been a drop out for 3 months, so it's impossible for me to comment on the long term effects, but -- if there's one thing you need to realize before dropping out -- being a drop out is hard.
For one thing, everyone thinks that kids between the ages of 18 and 22 should be attending college, and they'll be happy to tell you so. Lots of people attended college and, since it worked for them, they will believe that the system can work for you. Further, these people have a vested interest in telling you how important college is and what a worthwhile experience it is because, frankly, they are trying to justify spending however many years attending college and paying off their student loans
Basically, don't expect a whole lot of support.
In addition, being a drop out in today's climate is a little bit more difficult than it was in the past. Computer Science is now an established discipline and schools actually teach it, so being self-taught is less of a necessity and more of an oddity. Further, while the common wisdom seems to be that the current economic climate is not so bad for programmers, it's certainly harder to get a job now than it was during the dot-com boom.
The final, and hardest part of being a drop out, is that it's incredibly lonely and incredibly difficult to stay motivated when you're on your own. I imagine that it's similar to being a solo founder. There are days when it's hard to find the strength to get out of bed, when you'll be filled with self-doubt, when you'll wonder if dropping out was the right decision. Hacking on your own for four years and building a portfolio, instead of attending school, might sound great on paper, but without your peers to support and motivate you, it's very hard.