britknight

IANAL, but my understanding is that the fact that the clone was written from scratch doesn't have any bearing on whether or not it infringes on copyright. The clone uses the name "Agar.io Clone" and copies the look and mechanics of the original game, thus making it substantially similar in appearance and use to the copyrighted work. Unless they have found some way to invoke fair use (educational purposes, etc.), the clone you mention is also infringing.

An analogy: if someone were to write a book called "Harry Potter - Clone" in their own words about the adventures of young wizard, you could expect them to receive a notice of infringement pretty darn fast, regardless of the fact that they didn't copy the original word-for-word.

Why? If you spend all day designing and writing code, why not view your commute as an opportunity to relax/read a book/listen to music/whatever you want to do that's different from your day-to-day work? Future you will thank you for it.

When I try to find the Standard Treasury homepage to get a better idea of what it's trying to accomplish (by following the link from OP's blog), all I see is an empty blog site. Is this because they are trying to keep a low web profile? It seems a little odd to me.

I agree with most of what you've said, but I would recommend switching the priority to lifting rather than cardio. Of course, cardio is important for heart heath and overall respiratory fitness, but in terms of "getting in shape" it's hard to beat a good lifting regimen.

I have a couple of reasons for this: 1) If your goal is to look good, then lifting will most definitely help with that. Basically, you'll gain more definition and muscle tone where it counts and lose a lot of the superfluous fat. 2) You'll also feel better. It's a pretty great feeling to pick up something that you know should be heavy and find that you can manage it with one hand. 3) The above talks about diet, specifically burning more calories on a daily basis than you consume. Lifting will help with this in two ways. Firstly, the act of lifting itself is extremely calorie-intensive: you burn pretty much the same (or greater) number of calories lifting than you do running (assuming fairly standard workouts, of course). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, not only does it take a lot of energy to build new muscle during your recovery, muscle tissue takes more energy to keep warm than an equal amount of fat. What that means is that if you replace some of your body fat with muscle through a lifting routine, you will increase your basal metabolic rate (the amount of energy you burn at rest), which will be a godsend for any weight-loss plans you may have.

That being said, don't disregard cardio: work it in on recovery days.

Speaking of recovery days, if your muscles feel good enough to lift more than four days a week, you'll get better results increasing your workloads (higher weight) and keeping to 2-4 days a week. If you do chose to do 4 days a week, a great pattern is:

Day 1: Upper Body (High Weight + Low Reps) Day 2: Lower Body (Low Weight + High Reps) Day 3: Rest (Cardio if you feel up to it) Day 4: Lower Body (High Weight + Low Reps) Day 5: Upper Body (Low Weight + High Reps) Day 6: Rest Day 7: Rest

Low reps means 5-6, high means 10-15. Use whatever weight allows you to do that many reps twice (a.k.a. two sets of x reps). Don't do both sets together; do one set of one exercise, then one of some complementary exercise, then do the last set of the first and the last set of the second.

Whatever route you choose: good luck :)

P.S. A note on soreness: you should be tired after your workouts, and a little soreness the next day is fine. What's not fine is being near-unable to use your muscles after a workout. Too much soreness actually impedes the recovery process, so take it easy ;)

> I thought my taxes pay for that :) . Do you mean "finances" as "machinery which helps moving money"? I think there are several definitions there.

You are correct in that the money used to build highways etc. does start as your tax dollars. However, I would imagine that it is then held (and allowed to appreciate) in the form of a reasonably liquid portfolio of cash, bonds, and equities. I suppose you could technically reduce finance to "moving money around", but that is such a gross simplification that it would be like saying programmers just type for a living.

> Nah, that's those same deposits. I largely pay myself for retirement, by saving the whole life.

If your entire retirement savings are in simple savings accounts (i.e. in a bank instead of a brokerage account), I am afraid you are losing out on quite a substantial return that could allow you to either retire earlier or enjoy a higher annual income during retirement (or both).

> > Funds the college fund that paid for your school > Again, it's either another example of "moving money", or an oddity - as people managed to get educated even without banks.

The statement that college funds, loan programs, and scholarship endowments (all powered by "finance") pay for the education of practically every student in the country is true, unless you save for college in a piggy bank.

> you ought to share risks and benefits

If you want to share the risks and benefits, there's an easy way to do that: get a brokerage account. If you have deposited your money, the basic assumption is that you are willing to accept a lower rate of return in exchange for a (practically) risk-free place to store your money.

depends on how much you want to rely on the FDIC

(In response to above as well as parent)

> What's the magic that happens at zero that causes otherwise nonsensical projects to make economic sense?

The bulldozing-mountains example is purposefully over-the-top (I believe I first heard it in an article by Bernanke[0]). The point that I am trying to illustrate is that at a 0% interest rate, the traditional marginal cost/marginal utility analysis breaks down, since as long as the marginal utility of the last investment dollar spent outweighs the marginal cost of spending that dollar (the interest rate), traditional economic thinking would have you spend that dollar.

> Exactly. I think he's assuming he'll never have to pay back the principle.

The rocky-mountain example does assume this, but it doesn't make a 0% interest rate any more ludicrous. Imagine that you could take out a loan for $x at 0%. Simply because of the fact that time gives assets the opportunity to grow, the future value of that loan when it is to be repaid is greater than the value when you received the loan [1]. Of course, the 0% rate would remove some traditional investment options (savings account, Treasury bonds, etc.), I think it is reasonable to assume that investments will still be able to appreciate to some degree.

However, this appreciation would be constrained in reality by inflation if the real interest rate is 0%. If, on the other hand, the nominal interest rate is 0%, then the loan effectively counteracts the headwind of inflation, and any return, no matter how small, winds up in your pocket.

[0 (7th paragraph)] http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben-bernanke/posts/2015/03/31... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money

Banks don't necessarily borrow at 0%. Granted, they are able to borrow at a much lower rate than you or me (closer to the Federal Funds Rate managed by the U.S. Federal Reserve), but they still pay interest on their loans.

Of course, real interest rates have gotten close to zero, but in general real interest rates of 0% are nonsensical in stable, developed economies. Economically speaking, if rates were 0%, it would in the long run make sense to bulldoze the rocky mountains to save money on gas, because there is no marginal cost to consider.

[deleted]!

> If you're a programmer and you feel like curing malaria is more important than Uber

Um, this, for one. I see no possible reality in which a disease that kills almost one child every minute[1] could possibly take a backseat to you not being able to get a taxi when you call for one. The above could be put in the dictionary next to "first world problem".

I would love to hear your reasoning if you have some opinion to the contrary.

[1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

> "society needs more people working directly on problems that matter"

This does not imply that "we should al be working directly on more worthy causes". My impression was that the author was simply making an observation about the relative distribution of labor (specifically: that there are not enough people working directly on causes that "matter"), which should by no means be reduced to the absurd by saying that all people should be working on those causes.

> "If you feel like curing malaria is more important than Uber"?

I'm sorry, but that strikes me as a pretty privileged sentiment. Would you say that everyone who feels a calling to work in the nonprofit/humanitarian sphere is merely doing so to assuage their "teen angst"?

If someone else feels compelled to work more directly to help those in need, and he or she is perfectly respectful of others' work (as OP clearly is), why do you feel compelled to reduce their desire to "standard liberal guilt" or "teen angst"?

I think that by Apple's "level", the above comment was referring less to design elements and more to manufacturing processes that would not be feasible for a company operating at smaller scale. An article a while ago [1] had a list of examples, such as CNC milling at scale and laser drilled holes.

[1]: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like...

It's not just npm. A while back I had to set up a Rails dev environment for a client who used Windows. shudder.

You might want to give this a read: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html ("Do Things That Don't Scale").

It's the best piece I've ever read dealing with the question of attracting users to an early-stage startup. The gist of it is this: your first 100 users will be completely different from your last 10,000. The first 100 have to be courted - you're going to have to bend over backwards to make them happy. If that means customer support emails from the founder, so what? Those first 100 users, the ones who are overwhelmed by your support, will be the most valuable customers you'll get, because once they're through the door, network effects can really start to kick in.

The apocryphal story I've heard (but never verified) is of how PayPal broke out in the eBay marketplace. Instead of trying to convert customers with advertising and the like, they pretended to be customers on eBay, offering to buy inexpensive items from popular sellers before asking if the sellers accepted PayPal. This got the first few sellers through the door, and once they started using it the network effects propagated through eBay and beyond, turning PayPal into the giant it is today.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

And the fact that they just got funding means that they don't have too much of a head start on you. If you already have an MVP, you should be able to catch up fairly quickly, as fundraising should hopefully be much more productive now that the space has been validated.

Just a side note though: you might want to consider slipping something extra into your slide deck/whatever to mention the competition in the space and how you plan on adding value over your competitor's product. Good luck!

What would you suggest?

All-time favorite: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Recent favorite: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

"give themselves rights to host and slap ads on any of your other public output"

cough cough Facebook cough cough

"Terms are offered. You can accept them or reject them"

Isn't this the exact opposite of a negotiation? By definition, doesn't "negotiation" imply that both parties enter into a discussion in an attempt to reach an agreement.

When you buy a cup of coffee, Starbucks doesn't force you to sign a legal document saying that you will only drink Starbucks coffee for the next five years, or that whenever you buy a cup of coffee from somewhere else you must simultaneously buy a cup from Starbucks. Also, if you refuse to buy the cup of coffee, Starbucks will not post your picture in every branch in the country to prevent you from ever buying a cup of coffee from them again.

Exactly. The above comment could be just as easily applied to a penalty shootout in soccer.

Loda also had a good performance at the Summit recently, standing in for Tinker. Even if Alliance may not be so hot on the scene right now, the talent at the core of their team is still present.

Correlation in not a death sentence. No one is saying it can't be used, merely making a observation based on the gathered statistics.

First of all, don't worry about them stealing your idea when they can't even get their own off the ground.

Secondly, if your working relationship with the founders is "let the lawyers decide" you don't owe them anything, much less any more time out of your life.

Thirdly, staying on longer would give them room to maneuver you into a bad legal position with respect to the non-compete clause. If you give final notice of leaving and the next day the company unexpectedly pivots to your idea, you're left in a bit of a jam. Sooner might well be better than later in this case.

What you decide to do is ultimately up to you. But be wary of being manipulated into another 4 month notice period, and another, and another. Your time is the most important resource you have (up there with your health); be wary of wasting it.

Why are you separating the idea from the execution? Ideas are just multipliers for execution[1]. You can have the best idea in the world but if your execution is terrible no one will use it. Conversely, a lot of effort focused on an average or even so-so idea can result in a great product.

If you're unsure whether to start building something, the answer is usually to start building anyway. You can refine your idea as you work, and once you have a basic prototype you can start asking people what they think of your idea and of your execution.

Prototypes are cheap, and as soon as you have one you can start validating what really matters: your product.

[1] https://sivers.org/multiply

dawsonc

I don't want to discourage people from playing around with snarky comments, or even from trying to make people feel bad with their hands tied behind their backs. It's good for people to challenge themselves in all kinds of creative ways. But this is supposed to be Hacker News. Making hypocritical comments hasn't been newsworthy in a very long time, and I think it's laudable that something like this is at the bottom of the comments page while vastly nicer things (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8229841) revel in the limelight.

For an example of how this can go horribly wrong, look at the keyboard required to code in APL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)).

"suffer an electric shock…at the hands of your friends"

This seems to be confusing masochism with self improvement. There are ways to reinforce a routine without putting on a twitter-enabled shock collar, and I'm not sure being Pavlov's dog is a psychological ideal many people aspire to attain.

Seconded. If your commits consistently fix things while his consistently break them, that will be noticed. Just focus on doing your work as best you can and try not to let this guy get to you.