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PandoDaily is a gossip blog that just happens to cover tech.

I stopped for a few months several years ago (to study for the GMAT, of all things). Granted, this coincided with me actively practicing puzzles and trick questions (essentially this is what the high end questions are) but I felt noticeably sharper. Like I'd gained 10-20 IQ points. Prior to this I drank quite often over several years (college plus a few post college years). This break (and my awareness of its effects) caused me to really curb my drinking. Now I drink sparsely and mostly to appreciate a nice wine or beer or well made cocktail. I think there's a balance to strike. Enjoyment in life might be worth a marginal IQ point here and there. I dropped out of bschool but learned this lesson getting myself admitted. Thanks bschool! :D

I made this same discovery the summer before enrolling in bschool and then promptly dropped out of my class. it didn't make sense to take on the debt once I determined I really enjoyed building software (and was good at it).

the problem with economics is its self-conscious insistence on being taken seriously as a rigorous, hard(ish) science which leads to an over use of complex, fancy looking mathematical models that, given the subject, require a great many assumptions to "work". in a dynamic, human-created system with constantly changing rules (society) those assumptions are often massive over simplifications or quickly made obsolete with the passage of time. better to think of economics as philosophy with which statistics might be applied rather than a science in and of itself...(i have a graduate degree in economics)

it is far far easier and cheaper for a landlord to raise rents than it is for an established hotel to convert into residential housing.

google tangotiger and then read his book. baseball prediction has been done to death by the sabermetrics community but this guy is one of the absolute best.

funny this should come up today. the girl i am currently dating happens to be both attractive and asian. i was on her linkedin yesterday and noticed that the "people also viewed" widget was 100% other young, good-looking asian women. so, add race as a vector to the linkedin creep graph...

this is absurd. i'm in Boston. there is absolutely no shortage of support and praise for the doctors and hospitals here.

lots of things went wrong for this to happen. thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious. our police deserve the "pats on the back" (which, by the way, is an extremely condescending way to put it) they're getting, and more.

press for us (and we've gotten quite a bit) has mostly been useful in getting over the 'never heard of you' hurdle which i think is absolutely huge for just about any business conversation. the power of name recognition is astounding. we're a small app - we count our users in thousands units not millions - but our userbase is highly engaged, using our app every time they go to work and our most valuable user segment (bar staff) generally doesn't care about the press and certainly not tech press. mainstream press is mostly a fleeting adrenaline rush and ego stroke for us, it's primary value is street cred.

Please stop with the '10x' bullshit. Using this term makes you sound like immature children.

SEEKING WORK - remote OK. located in Boston. Ruby on rails web apps. mobile apps via Sencha Touch. soup to nuts dev. backend ruby/sql/pg/mongo. front-end js/jquery/coffee/html/haml/css/sass have worked with all the major social apis fb/tw/4sq/etc. ui/ux even some graphic design in a pinch. reference work: http://onthebar.at | gmail: ian.stanczyk

SEEKING WORK - remote OK. located in Boston. Ruby on rails web apps. mobile apps via Sencha Touch. soup to nuts dev. backend ruby/sql/pg/mongo. front-end js/jquery/coffee/html/haml/css/sass have worked with all the major social apis fb/tw/4sq/etc. ui/ux even some graphic design in a pinch. reference work: http://onthebar.at

hhmmm i've had a very different experience. i've never held a full-time working-for-the-man software development job but i've been freelancing for a bit over a year to bootstrap my own products. the money and flexibility is great. i got initial gigs because i'd been building my own product so i had something cool out in the world to point to. i think this is the single best way to get clients. have something that you - not you and a giant team of people, you - conceived of and built. when people see it (provided it looks good and works) they'll want to hire you. now i get gigs because i have happy clients and i'm a sociable person so they recommend me. people like working with me. so, build something you're proud of to show off and be a pleasure to work with. i've never gotten a gig through linkedin although recruiters contact me regularly. i have gotten gigs through hacker news, however, and they tend to be really good clients.

*edit: ALSO -- make friends with other freelancers and share your network! i've sent dozens of leads to people i know around Boston. this buys you social capital. people will reciprocate.

so, i dropped out of Dean Danos' program just hours before moving to New Hampshire.

i have the utmost respect for his program and the people they admit - everyone i met seemed highly intelligent and extremely driven. it may yet be in my future. to anyone interested in an MBA - take a long look at Tuck. i was admitted to several elite schools and this one stood out to me. it felt the most like a family, which is what i wanted. for me, a poor 27 year old (relative to the typical MBA entrant) with a strong interest in early-stage technology, the arithmetic didn't make sense. i had a moment, late in the evening before leaving Boston for good, where i saw into a future in which i was saddled with extreme debt and forced to make decisions about where to work and what career to pursue based upon a pending loan payment rather than a passion. it would take several years post-mba to pay off the debt over which i'd begin adding expense to my life e.g. kids, house, marriage, car... i'd likely earn a great deal of money (by my measure) and i'd find myself in a strange mix of being stuck, due to circumstance, but also comfortable and content. i would pay my loans off but, would i realistically be willing/able to leave that lifestyle? the answer to me was clearly, "no." so, the choice was: take extreme risk now, when i have no baggage and next to nothing to lose or, take extreme risk never. i wasn't comfortable with the latter option. explaining this decision to my parents was a horrific experience.

waaaait just a minute, you would pay five thousand dollars for an hour's worth of advice from paul graham (or anyone, for that matter)??? when i saw the price tag i thought, "shoot, must be a nice restaurant."

The guy made a model that he (and the nytimes) think is reasonable. The model takes inputs and spits out a probability. As the inputs change slightly so does the output. He's well within his right to publish these changes. What's the problem? That you just can't accept the validity of day-to-day basis-point changes in 'chances of something happening' when the inputs might be dirty? Can't you just say 'oh, that's nice' and take it as a directional signal without allowing it to irritate you?

I'll take a thoughtful statistical analysis any day over the words of a single television journalist giving me second-hand information from a 'source within the campaign' especially when any campaign insider has an absurdly strong incentive to manufacture public perception in his candidates favor.

to the OP: can we get a real example of a sales proposal you've written recently that was effective and fits into what you're ...erm, proposing?

if you read the answer to that very question on their application it falls pretty much in line with your parent's characterization: "did a bunch of research and spent a bunch of time on [drafting some legal documents]"

the guy asked for feedback on his product, not his life decisions. to make the leap is presumptuous, pompous, and, yes, unnecessarily negative. there are polite ways of giving negative feedback, for instance you might have said: "hey thanks for posting. looks like you've done a good job putting it together. i worry that there isn't a market for it, though, given all the competition that currently exists and people's general inability to monetize these sorts of products. maybe use this as a jumping off point for something else?" instead, your original comment is full of vitriol and, in one fell swoop, you've managed to put down the creators of "thousands of project management apps, hour tracker apps, wannabe social networks, twitter sentiment tools, accounting apps, photo filter apps, a/b testing websites, etc." you, sir, must surely be without flaw to make such broad and sweeping generalizations about your fellow community members.

it continues to amaze how certain members of this community cannot recognize the vast chasm of constructive criticism that lies between the extremes of '[telling] him that the idea is awesome and that he will become a millionaire' and telling him he has wasted his time working on an idea that "isn't even a real idea" (and we won't even address the absurdity of that last sentence...).

unnecessarily negative, belittling, and mean-spirited. has putting this person down made you feel better about yourself?

every time i see a negative, holier-than-thou comment like this, it makes me think very poorly of the author.

i guess you've never had a site/app/product/lemonade-stand go down? you don't think the OP knows her blog is having problems? she needs you to call her out publicly? stop being such an ass.

in my experience more often than not the only people who can tell a well-done app is phonegap/cordova rather than native are nit-picky, self-righteous developers. if it works as advertised, users are generally happy and cannot tell the difference... and, unless your app is built specifically for developers, that's all that really matters.

SEEKING WORK - boston. remote OK. backend: ruby on rails; frontend: js/jQuery/sencha, haml/html5/sass/css/bootstrap; db: postgres/mongo/mysql; misc: ux/ui design, location-based mobile apps, have worked with all major social apis (fb, tw, 4sq, etc); reference work: getonthebar.com; blog: monkian.com, writing has been published on nytimes.com/huffpo/freakonomics/etc.; contact: ian.stanczyk at gmail (no recruiters, please)

Here's the bit i never understood with this 'growth hacker' meme: if you're working on or for an early stage startup then everyone is a 'growth hacker', right? if your people aren't working to grow your product/service/community then what the hell are they doing?

To the self-proclaimed and aggrandized 'growth hackers' - the OP is right: You're a marketer who took (and absorbed) a stats class. Stop being so fucking pretentious. Joining facebook (or whatever) after the inflection point and claiming responsibility for its growth is like joining apple four years ago and claiming responsibility for tripling the share price.

never considered that. is this true? were banks giving mortgages using stock as collateral / proof of credit-worthiness? how widespread is this?

i think the uber service is great. that said, we (collectively, the startup community) can't keep using this "we're an innovative tech company and the laws we're breaking weren't written with our great innovations in mind" argument. it doesn't hold water. it just sounds childish and pompous.

still unclear to me why i would/should pay to publish my runkeeper data into the ether or why i would pay to consume yours...will every user of app.net pay for the service? or is it only some subset who opt-in as donors? if the later, doesn't this create a free-rider problem? also, in that case you wind up with a small minority of donor users who are the customers and who set the agenda, not the majority user base, right? ...if the former, how can this become a mainstream consumer product? normal people don't care about any of these 'problems' and why will they pay for something facebook/twitter gives them in exchange for 'viewing' ads they've learned to ignore?

anyone else have this experience: reading this article on an iphone only to notice that the thing in my hand - perhaps the most successful consumer electronic device in the world - was as close to jet black as anything else I'd seen today? :\ ... what about black turtle necks - are those OK?

if you freelance and do remote work no one need know how old you are. the surest way to get started freelancing is to build something of your own and just start showing it off. If it's good people will ask you to build things for them. So as you learn you should be hacking together something tangible and useful. When you're done you'll have become competent and you'll have a portfolio project to show.

kind of adorable... whatever we imagine life to be like in the year 2100, chances are we'll look just as silly in retrospect as these illustrations

edit: gracias