Construct

I've worked at a couple VC-funded startups where the VCs had us hire one of their analysts part-time. The only catch is that you must prove yourself to the VC firm first, which usually requires a strong track record and good networking skills.

Now whether or not such a risk exists is another question entirely.

This person stumbled upon a 100+ year-old cinema lens and thought to adapt it to a modern DSLR, take some excellent pictures with a wonderful vintage feel, and post them online for all of us to share. I would most certainly call that unusual.

Let's give credit where credit is due. This is a wonderful and novel piece of work and I'm definitely grateful that s/he chose to share it with us.

Still, I'm not going to hire someone who has poor grades and personal problems over the smart kid, as in your example. No matter how you cut it, someone who can complete college with a solid GPA has already proven that s/he can set goals, handle deadlines, deal with multiple managers (professors) all while learning the material and completing the homework and tests.

Your aversion to the 'smart kid cruising through' is a bit perplexing. I usually work hard to get and keep the smart kids on my side.

Judging someone on their financial background instead is heavily subjective, prone to all sorts of prejudices and pre-conceived notions, and doesn't actually tell you anything about the person's abilities.

After all, a driven and motivated person from a troubled financial background can achieve a high GPA. Your theoretical 'Person A' who lived a cushy life yet isn't motivated won't be able to achieve a high GPA without working for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

The ocean is a substantial sink for atmospheric CO2. Our best guess is that 1/3 of the CO2 we produced is absorbed by the ocean. As the ocean absorbs CO2, however, the pH of ocean water drops. Unfortunately, we don't know how this will affect all of the different species of marine life that live in the ocean, but early experiments show that shellfish in particular do not tolerate more acidic waters very well. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the ocean's CO2 absorbing capabilities will decrease as the pH decreases, leaving us with even more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Basically, there are a whole lot of unknowns in the whole debate, many of which could have unpleasant (to say the least) consequences. Brushing the entire field of climate science aside and declaring that all of our problems can be solved by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere is wildly irresponsible.

Basically, NASA made a blanket statement about a possible solar storm occurring at some date, and journalists are doing everything they can to force that date to be 2012 so they can play off of all of the apocalypse prophecies.

NASA has since rebutted those reports, saying it could come "100 years away or just 100 days"

Although that doesn't have quite the same ring to it as a 2012 disaster.

http://railstutorial.org/

It's not perfect, but it does walk you through the process of setting up a proper environment, using git for version control, and pushing to Heroku for rapid deployment. He even explains different basics and features of the Ruby language, so you can start here without learning Ruby if you so desire. Definitely complete the additional tasks at the end of each chapter as they are very helpful.

Also, I found it helpful to browse through the many open-source Rails projects you can find online, particularly on github.

Indeed.com shows no such drop in Rails job offers. Both Rails and Django are showing growth in the percentage of job offers: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails,+django&l=

If you fall back to a language-only search, then Python shows a bigger slice of the pie, but the original question was about web frameworks. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python,+ruby&l=

Without any concrete examples, I'm inclined to assume that it's some variation on the "get rich quick" scheme. This makes the numbers even less believable, as the ebook author has even more incentive to claim extraordinary sales numbers. No one wants to buy a get-rich-quick book from someone who claims to sell 10 copies per month. If an author claims to rake in $5,000,000 per month, then people are going to want to hop on the bandwagon and buy his ebook.

Simply interacting with employees either in person or through e-mail updates every once in a while goes a long way toward making people feel appreciated. Employees do want to hear about the company's latest big sale, the possible new direction for the company, etc. in a personalized or semi-personalized manner. Furthermore, these things provide a motivation boost and unified company vision, as well as open up the possibilities of feedback from lower level employees.

Then again, it's rather easy to be granted a patent. It's much harder to make it hold up in court. Still frustrating when app developers have to be afraid of implementing simple and obvious functionality like this for fear of being sued!

If you do have an idea, you should get to work on it ASAP. There is no better time than now. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that someone else is going to implement your idea and execute it well before you even get started.

If you don't have an idea, then finding an idea should be your first step. You can't really focus on picking up certain skills unless you know what you're going to accomplish. On the other hand, if you know you want to do a web application startup, then you should start learning PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. right now.

Moving is a tough one. Don't discount your network of friends and family in your current city. They provide a lot of support and friendship that you will have to do without while you settle into a new city. If you live in or near a large city you should look for networking events aimed at startups. Startups love to present their product, and it's a great environment for meeting like-minded people. Check LinkedIn for groups in your area.

On the other hand, if you were already looking to move then the change of scenery could be just the thing you need to shake your life up kick you into startup mode. Also, you won't have any pesky friends or social engagements to occupy you for a while after moving, so there's even more time to work on your code. Really, though, you just need to pick a big city that you enjoy and can afford. Definitely visit several cities first and spend some time there before you make a decision.

Most importantly, however, you need to remember that planning and thinking are great, but doing is what gets things done. Focus on doing.

Still, Groupon is really raking it in.

In any company it is difficult to find ownership and recognition at the lowest levels of the corporate hierarchy. If you only work for the company for less than a year, as the author proudly admits to, then you should not expect to be given substantial influence in the company.

Influence and recognition must be earned, and that takes time and hard work. The bigger and more established the company, the more time this will take. If you're impatient, then you're going to have to work at a startup or start your own company.

From my experience, the trick is to get engaged and routinely demonstrate that you care. If you begrudgingly implement or design every request that comes your way from the confines of your cubicle, of course you will burn out. If instead you ask your boss about the customer's needs or take the initiative to track down and talk to the sales person in charge of the account for some additional detail, you've effectively taken a small piece of ownership and showed some initiative. This rarely goes unnoticed, and definitely factors into decisions involved influence, ownership, and recognition in the future.

Our tour guide, who was an investor in the facility, explained that the employees really hated going through all of those scanners and double doors, so in the morning they just prop the back door open. If a customer or potential customer comes for a tour, they make sure to close the door.

The other highlight of that visit was the generator room, complete with some truly massive diesel storage tanks. Our guide (the investor) proudly explained that they could run the facility for several days in the event of a natural disaster which knocked out power to the facility. Out of curiosity, I knocked on the side of one of the tanks, only to be greeted with a hollow echo sound. The investor then explained that the tanks are mostly empty, but they'd fill them up if they thought a natural disaster could occur.

This part hits very close to home. Every single one of the executive, sales, or biz-dev people our VCs pushed on fell into this trap. Without fail, they would dig into their network until reaching an impressive contact, put together a powerpoint proposal with shockingly good projections, and then expect someone else to make it all happen. However, in every case they were ousted by the board and the VC firm after 1 year of not producing results.