obviouslygreen

Talk is only cheap if you're lapping it up in bulk from poor sources. If talk were always cheap, advisory boards and mentors would never, ever provide any value. So by all means, throw it away; disregard people based on who they are and not what they say. It's your own loss.

Just have the decency not to mislead people who are looking for guidance with your own cheap talk.

...our mission of connecting the world through games...

...just about the most ridiculous bullshit ever? Zynga is about one thing: Profit. That's not necessarily a horribly evil thing (though the ways they go about it might be), but it's most certainly a very clear thing. The only thing they're interested in connecting the world to is their bank accounts.

By "I'm sure" do you mean "I assume" or "I am certain, they have explicitly stated it?"

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tact! I'm also all for explicitly stating your opinion as an opinion, which often has the effect of softening things in the way you suggest, but even that should not get in the way of actual, valid, useful criticism that isn't excessively hostile.

We baby kids (and ourselves) far too much. Everyone gets an award, everyone is a winner, no one is necessarily wrong. It's crap, absolute crap, and this kind of universal communicative pacifism is a symptom. It harms our expression by limiting it.

When you internalize these lessons, your approach to programming will completely change.

You can know which parts of a language are heavier without knowing how they're implemented. Granted, this is certainly not the same, but in a practical sense it is certainly close. Your approach to programming will only "completely change" if you've been doing things with absolutely no understanding of the performance impact of the choices you make.

There are certainly people in that situation, but anyone who has had to do any profiling to find bottlenecks in code (which I would guess means most people who have been involved in professional development for more than a year or two) likely has at least an idea of which data and control structures are going to cause issues in languages they've used at length.

So yes, I agree that understanding what's going on is good... but not everyone has the time or inclination to delve into the depths of C, and there are other ways to come about a useful understanding of language internals (e.g. actually reading about a language's specific features rather than simply guessing at their implementation based on the assumption that they're written using standard C idioms).

Don't get me wrong -- good work! I'm glad good things came out of it for you. I just don't think this generalization is valid.

Assuming you want to simplify spending choices to this degree, be realistic:

If it's Netflix, it's closer to $10 a month for unlimited usage. If it's a latte, it's more like $4 per day.

If you only buy one latte, and only on weekdays, that's in the neighborhood of $86 per month.

So if you accept the idea that you should select the thing that brings you the most "joy" for the lowest expenditure, then unless you plan to get Netflix and then just not use it at all (or if there's nothing on it you want to watch), it's clearly providing more value for a lower investment.

As I said... the whole thing strikes me as a bit silly and seriously presumptuous, but it's also pretty unambiguous which option "wins" if you consider it past "x and y cost the same" without bothering with the frequency of payment for both of them.

Well, for a lot of reasons... if photography is what you're good at and what you enjoy, the make-money-on-ads model makes no sense unless you're also very good at generating traffic.

It also at least partially removes your income from the quality and quantity of your output. Of course the latter will be one important factor in building and maintaining traffic, but the reality of your business then becomes driving traffic, with photography as an ancillary requirement.

Plus you're now dependent not only on your ability to take good pictures and drive large amounts of traffic, you're also at the mercy of changing revenue. Great, you're making a living wage... but now suddenly your ad service isn't paying as much as it used to, so the same volume of traffic brings you less money. Oops.

There are tradeoffs, but I would not say this is a viable alternative at all unless you're also doing other things and driving traffic is as much your primary skill as photography.

The choice of language does have the potential to deep six a project; however, it's rarely something that can be blamed on the language itself.

I've seen projects fail because of the language the chose for at least two reasons, but I think these two are the most obviously harmful:

1. Choosing a language that isn't just unsuitable, its design goals and tradeoffs should make it an obviously poor choice in terms of your requirements.

2. Choosing a language for use by a team that has no experience with it, no time to learn it, and/or lacks the discipline to learn it in sufficient depth to use it efficiently for the project's purposes.

Again, these are not failures of any given language. They are, however, potential project-killers that are only possible based on the choice of programming language.

Downvote this one, too. Go for it... no one's stopping you.

Is it? Is 'programming' really like running a lot, from one place to another (no matter what those places are, simply for the fact that one place is not the same as the first)? Is it possible that this pursuit is so fucking stupidly simple that we can dilute it to "hey, programming is like walking to the fucking grocery store, regardless of which one we were going to or what we intended to get ingredients for, or how we wanted to prepare them"?

No. No, it's not, and this person is doing everyone who actually knows what the fuck a programmer DOES a disservice. If she stays with it long enough she'll realize this, though whether she'll bother to acknowledge it or apologize is another matter.

Being a competitive runner takes a lot of work, a lot of discipline, and a lot of conditioning. It is in no way something to laugh at. What it does NOT take, however, is the mental discipline and logical aptitude to build and maintain structures and paradigms in which concepts can be realized and business can be conducted.

It also takes a lot of time to conceive of/design a program, develop or have someone develop it, debug it, distribute it, and get people to download and install it. But this has happened, and on a grand scale, due to a steady progression of improved demand and increased efficiency of supply.

I do not mean to suggest that 3D printing will find the same reach as computing, or in the same way. I simply mean to point out that we do not yet have the perspective to see where it might go or how it might make itself indispensable (or at least invasive) on a commercial level.

The way I'm reading it, the point is to concentrate on your product and making it, in reality, better than the product(s) of your competitor(s) rather than... pivoting? Building a different product? Making your product into something else? Changing your target audience? I guess the only real lesson I'm taking away here is that "if you have product, sell it; if it sucks, make it better." Not exactly groundbreaking, though certainly true.

If the desire was to communicate something more general, taking it out of the context of existing product-based businesses with market share and competitors would probably be necessary (but would have probably killed the anecdotes... which is why I'm guessing the article didn't really get off the ground in this regard).

So yeah, it's mostly true... but where it is, it's sort of trivially so.

This person made mistakes. Yeah, we all do that, and some people's have worse consequences than others, but we're all pretty much stuck with them. In this case, someone went to law school, made some very contradictory life decisions (having kids -- and failing to prevent having more -- kind of takes away whatever victim angle might have been there), realized they were doing very poorly but kept going anyway, and then... for years and years... did not pursue a career that could possibly have any chance of addressing the debt before the rates ballooned.

So we end up with someone who screwed up, screwed up some more, and then decided she'd screwed up so much that she's going to screw up again, by just not even trying to address the negative results of the previous screwups.

Not very responsible, in my opinion, and certainly not a good lesson to pass on to your kids (along with your debt, because guess where that's going when you die, since you've decided not to pay it off?).

I guess I'm still just not sure what the article is going for.

I'm glad this works for you, but keeping track of and searching through years of emails -- and chats -- with dozens of disparate people and clients makes labels, or something similar, indispensable to me.

Going overboard and having a label for everything under the sun would, for most of us, decrease their utility. But in at least some use cases, having many labels definitely is not in and of itself a bad thing.

I'm not suggesting he's being dishonest or that it won't last, but even the statement you cite indicates it's not currently for sale, and even then, what's the guarantee?

This is almost always good advice, but I think it bears repeating as the crux of this extremely insightful post. And honestly: HN is NOT the place to look for this. I think you're lucky to have someone like kvnn responding up top but you're likely to soon be mired in god knows what.

Go be a dad. Do it the way dads have done it forever: Off the cuff, the best they know how. He'll benefit a lot more from your honest attempts and interaction than anyone else's poor attempts at Best Practices for Other People.

Good luck, and as an adoptee, I thank you for being a good dad to a kid who needs one!

[edit: I guess it must be worse still that it's a GN (I love the format) and yet still died under what couldn't have been more than a few hundred requests... time to wonder about that shared hosting.]

I can't speak to ageism in the market, though we all know it exists... hopefully your skills speak for you. My best weapon in the last decade has been the interview; if you enjoy and excel at that, plan on getting most of what you want. :)

I don't know what your qualifications are, but if you are interested in freelance web/Android work, please drop me a line. Info is in my profile. I have nothing waiting at the moment, but I do get a fair amount of leads.

Jobs have ups and downs, and no situation is perfect for anything, whether it's raising kids or maintaining your own particular sanity. Expecting a prescription for "being happy while doing thing x I have not done" to work for you is setting yourself up for failure.

Normally I'd say this is likely to help many people a bit along the way, but raising kids might be the only thing too personal and individual to warrant any kind of "well hey this worked for entrepreneur X in The Ess Vee so it should work for me."

There's nothing wrong with coasting when you know you're moving in a good direction, which it seems clear you are. In your situation, you have the chance to sit back, observe, and carefully consider the environment (in addition to consulting whatever oracles you consider the most wise) and then decide when or whether you should strike out with any given idea.

Unless you're throwing yourself on the mercy of an incubator on the strength of your resume, which in my opinion is a laughable gamble for kids who don't know better, you will want to think long and hard on what you want to do and how you want to do it. Once you can answer those questions for yourself (as you are the only one to whom you answer, and you'll never find a more forgiving situation), you'll have your direction.

Once you take it... well, that's another story. ;)

Regarding the article... there is no consideration given to lessening our nation's commitment to all its various wars. There is no discussion of whether we should continue to send troops. There is not even the suggestion that -- holy shit -- maybe we should reconsider our current engagements and decide where our existing, and substantial, resources would be better spent.

I'm anti-war, but I'm not anti-military. And anti-war is a ridiculous stance that ignores all of human reality, so it's not something I can honestly take seriously and argue in favor of.

This ridiculous diatribe ignores both the causes of our current situation and the potential results of sending everyone in the damn nation out to fight, or support, regardless of their skills. Yes, by all means, let's inflate the military and support ranks! Not only will it burgeon all sorts of military posts, it will drain all the service industries those people previously occupied.

Another silver bullet with a lead lining, shot straight into the heart of our economy. The author fails as an economist, a strategist, and even a nationalist.

Might be a strong contender for President.