Fliko

It is easiest for a lot of people. I know someone who did this a lot and ended up with an extremely high salary just a few years after dropping out of school. He would look for different companies after 1-2 years of working at his current one, apply, and try to get a better salary. It got to the point once where the companies he was working for were bidding for the person with the companies he applied to. This wasn't at Silicon Valley, and wasn't with startups, and he never quit his current job unless he had secured a better job.

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you... Derek Sivers shares a different opinion, can't really argue against it for you if it works for you, but it's good for other people to be mindful of all their choices.

It might be even more beneficial to read good code then try to find a way that it could've been done better.

They redid their calculations and reported an estimated piracy rate of 82%, instead of 90%.

Minecraft may of had huge piracy rates, but it still made a huge profit. You won't ever get rid of piracy but you can still make a nice profit.

r/gaming has about 850,000 users on it as well. The communities that pirate because of DRM may not be huge, but they are of a decent size.

No clue on why you are getting downvoted. I make a point to only buy things from musicians where they get most of the money.

I really like Taleb, but I think his quote is a bit wrong. I love to just pick up my guitar and try to learn songs by ear but I usually find myself procrastinating against doing such things. I try to take procrastination as a sign that I've been doing too much of one thing and need to start doing other things (The thing I've been doing too much =/= what I am procrastinating against).

I've experienced this form of procrastination a lot and I've found out that the best way to overcome it is to clean my desk, remove everything that isn't relevant to the work I want to get done and then dive into it. I'll usually be put in the zone within a few minutes after doing this.

I don't think it is as common as it should be, I know plenty of kids in school who claim studying while high helps increase their grades, only to watch them scratch their heads in confusion when they've nearly failed a test.

At 7:32 Seth mentions how someone said this could be placebo effect, and he said that his friend (Tucker) stopped taking flaxseed oils and that his gums got worse. I feel like placebo could easily throw away all his results into nothing, and can only hope that maybe one day he will try experiments to try to confirm if placebo is just as effective instead of trying to disprove placebo effect ineffectively by stopping flaxseed oil for a bit.

I've experimented with several sources of omegas and antioxidants, and have in turn become very skeptical about these sort of things. I've noticed a lot of people really talk up a lot of different supplements and how they greatly enhance certain abilities only to be very disappointed after paying buckets full of money for them.

I think exercise and a good (varied) diet are way more important then supplements (or uber strict diets), but even then haven't noticed any huge performance gains from such things.

When you say overcoming cognitive bias, do you also mean it will help being able to step back from a problem and think outside the box?

Seeking things out doesn't just mean you read these things on articles or stumble upon them in libraries, it can also detail things like conversations with other people. Either way it is just an example that a guru might have a path that someone can follow that will get them somewhere quicker then a non-guru.

Hahaha, yeah that's why you aren't a very good musician yet. I think it's important to make a distinction though because it removes forms of elitism and encourages a friendly environment. People don't learn from "You can't play Flight of the Bumblebee on guitar therefore you aren't a real musician.", rather they learn from observing and participating.

The book was written for an introductory programming course at MIT. It is more rigorous of a book then most and may not be for everyone starting programming, but the right people will seek it out. It is also invaluable in that it teaches the programmer about programming more then languages.

A musician is someone who can communicate to other people via musical instruments. You are a musician, you just might not be a very good one.

Similarly a songwriter is someone who creates songs, so you are a songwriter, you just might not be a good one.

Ahh I misread into your post. Yeah, the article wasn't well written and could've gone into more detail about different things but honestly I feel that an experienced programmer would know a better route for someone to take, for example I know a lot of programmers suggest people start with SICP.

No, it isn't a puff piece, he's not going on about how awesome he is, he is just saying "Hey look, you can get a entry job programming without learning how to program for 4 years.", and then goes on to say how he does it. If he spent all of his time documenting everything so you could be satisfied then he wouldn't of turned up where he was, and in no way was he actually planning on writing that blog post until tons of people on Hacker News started messaging him after he mentioned it in a post.

I haven't had to budget anything hardcore yet just food, tuition, toiletries, and entertainment but it might be better if you find out what you can be frugal about.

An example would be that I pretty much live off a diet of beans, rice, vegetables with the occasional pizza thrown in and it helps me save a lot of money in a given week. This isn't really hard for me though because I love beans, rice, and vegetables.

Totally makes sense, part of the reason why I play musical instruments so much.

I think I'm gonna try doing it for a few minutes every day and see what happens. When I was younger I used to be able to remember everything vividly very effortlessly and I envy that again.

Well it's great that they would be creating more jobs but it wouldn't fix the fact that people got bailed out and then used that money for their bonuses.

He has very childish points. He complains about people who want to be paid for work they were contracted for (and then hires them again after not paying them only to complain about it). The client didn't pay is not a good excuse, unless the terms of the work specifically said "Will not get paid until client pays".

He hires interns to do jobs that their job description probably didn't mention. No one has to stay at some shitty job just because someone believes you have to work your way from the bottom up. If he bitches about not having a maid, then hires an intern to do a maids job maybe he should have just hired a maid instead of an intern.

He hates how people want credit for their work, but this is hardly unreasonable to ask. It also isn't very hard to do, we do it all the time in school so I'm sure he can find a way to manage. I find it funny that he complains about people not wanting to start from the bottom, but then refuses to give photographers credit for the little things that they do. People do build careers off of passport photos.

Often a lot of people get screwed royally on work because they were told that they just might maybe get commission if everything works out good. It's not unreasonable for someone to not accept work that isn't guaranteed to pay, he shouldn't be a bitch about it.

He also complains about young people not being able to handle the simplest tasks, but he was probably the person that hired all those people that can't do these tasks. Some older people have just as much trouble finding things on the internet.

No dude! It's cool if what you value in your life is work but plenty of people work to live. Jobs shouldn't require you to put in 80 hour work weeks, that should be the choice of the individual.

MBAs have a place in businesses, but most of the good points argued are just as easily (if not better) argued for engineers. Good engineers are way more analytical than MBAs (that's what they do!), and good engineers are often more ambitious and driven than the average MBAer.

Most of the successful MBAers I have met are actually engineers who have had a company pay for them to get their MBA to 'traditionally promote' them to a higher position in said company.

In my opinion MBAs are like glue that hold a company together, the glue is absolutely critical for the company but you also don't require an army of it.

I posted this as a reply to Goblin, but I missed the subtle point about it being a point system to 2 decimal places. I also made a point that I think it really depends on what type of thing you are trying to measure, as for bands a good point system is the amount of fans you have. With that said I think it's totally awesome to say that the best point system for startups is $$$.

Ahh, I missed that very subtle point. Most of my experience with business comes from a taste of the music industry and reading on (most) bands struggling to make a dime, so my bias says that a good point system is the amount of fans you have, but! this clearly doesn't work for most things in life. I think the point system depends on what you are talking about, so perhaps for startups $$$ is the best point system we have available right now.

I think that if the music loses any of it's value to the consumer by being on Spotify, it is that a 'good' artist's music is just as available as a 'bad' artist's music, and all at a small flat fee. This is most likely debatable though as it's hard to measure things like this.

Don't get me wrong, I also think that music is a lower $$$ commodity than most people think but that is easily side stepped by bands having a wide variety of cheap products to offer (merch, live shows, dvds of live shows etc.). I think a large part of this is due to the economy of today but I don't have much basis for that.

I have mad respect for Sean Parker, but when he said "I don't think we're ever going to get it completely right, the world is changing so quickly that it's very hard to get anything right for long.", I think he was wrong. Him and Spotify focus too much on changing the whole music industry, and they focus too much on the music listener instead of the actual artist.

Spotify removes a lot of the personal ownership of music (not buying albums and owning them even if it is digitally), and that is an important bonding experience between an artist and their fans.

More importantly Spotify offers terrible royalty, Lady Gaga made $167 off 1m plays of Poker Face. Word on the street (aka indie label gossiping) is that Lady Gaga pulls in more money because she is on a major label. I don't think Spotify can afford to pay more royalty because of the large volume of artists they deal with, and that sets them into a huge bind.

Spotify has preached about how they care about the indie artist/label, but they are really just enforcing the major label and this is pushing against the huge movement with removing the middle man and getting your music out directly to the fans so you get 90% of the album sale instead of 5%.

Companies like Topspin Media, Bandcamp, and more recently TuneCore may become a much bigger player with their recent steps in becoming more appealing for the artist.

These other services are all convenient for the consumer and offer more for the artist then Spotify will ever offer. The reason you focus on the artist more than you focus on the consumer is because the consumer is willing to bend to the will of the artists as long as what they provide has a good price tag and is easy to obtain.

Zuckerberg didn't get his "I'm CEO bitch" business card until he was rich, so why should I?

In all seriousness I'm 100% sure people care more about the product/idea of your startup more than the gold lettering on your business card. If you can prove me wrong than I'm going to get gold lettered business cards to get people to invest into my (fake) startup.

You talk about (on topic of why you need 500 karma to downvote) understanding the community and not posting contentless posts 5 posts ago and now you post this. The irony levels are off the charts!

A big mac would only keep the starving man alive for a few more hours. At least the man with the book could get some good entertainment before he starved to death.

It means that money isn't a good point system. The simplest way to reason this is that many people around the world make tons of money for selling something that isn't useful/valuable. Scams are probably at the bottom of the 'point system' but pull in tons of money.

For money to be a good point system, everyone with a wallet would have to be sensible and make good market choices but unfortunately the case is, for the most part, the exact opposite.

On top of that I would argue that (for example) Khan Academy is much more valuable than most of the investment firms, but investment firms are worth more $$$ than Khan Academy will ever be.

Youngest member of current parliament and female, it's awesome to have variety in the seats.