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It's very hard to extrapolate from stories like this to know if the actual instance and intensity of abuses is increasing, or if reportage is increasing (i.e. landing on HN front page) because of folk's irritation with other aspects of the US government.

For my money, TSA is right after HSA as far as FUBAR government agencies go. Seems like quality control is right in the shitter. As for solutions, I'd like to see a customer satisfaction survey implemented across the board. You might actually be able to implement something like this in a favorable political environment (there's no law saying that TSA has to attempt to piss off every person that comes through our borders). I've noticed that some of these completely dysfunctional agencies seem to attract the worst sort of bad eggs, so with something like that you could at least weed out some of the most underperforming TSA mob squads.

Completely agree. AirBnB de facto bribes you to not leave negative ratings. Last cancellation I had was from a no-show host, who left me without a place to stay in Canary Wharf in London, had to shell out AirBnb price + $100 for a last minute replacement, minus the 3 hours I spent waiting for the host (she was mysteriously in Russia instead of London). Host wouldn't give me my money back unless I promised not to give a bad rating. AirBnB offered me a $50 credit for my next stay. W00t.

Guess what? That no show host still has perfect ratings...

I think you can often simulate this by having a good advisor or two. Make decisions frequently and rapidly, but leave a door open for critique. Presumably you need to document your decisions for this to be optimally effective.

Good points. I tend to do a poor job at context switching. Once I get in a coding mood I become extraordinarily anti-social and vice versa. Also, frankly, I'm not that great at sales, at least compared to watching friends of mine who are professionals. But yeah, I'm going to try this anyways.

This is a bit true for me. I expended a lot of effort looking for a co-founder, even though it was not obviously true that a co-founder would help me with the particular project I was in. To a certain extent, it was Mark Suster's insistence that a co-founder is not necessary and you can just "go it alone" if you have the cojones/stamina that made me say f' it, I'm just going to do it on my own.

Actually, the breaking point was when the "co-founder" I found told me on the day after I arrived in Berlin to work on the project full time that he wouldn't be able to join in. In this case, he had a totally legit reason (his wife was in the hospital with cancer), but it was probably the case that aligning things as far as a "co-founder" was never necessary from the beginning. Either way, it was a bit catastrophic mentally for me for a couple weeks, toying with merging with a different startup in the same space instead of going full stop ahead on my own. Even now loneliness sometimes takes its toll.

Thankfully, in the end I spent a lot more time on product than worrying about finding a new co-founder, and we have a pretty d* good product now and 30% growth across our KPIs for the last two months. Not really a lot of cash in the bank account, but hell, this is Europe and investors like to sit on their money instead of invest it.

This has been a long standing problem of my own. I think finding a true co-founder if you don't already have someone immediately present in your pool is extraordinarily difficult. The sub-optimal thing is especially difficult if you've already started (I'm 8 months in myself), and then it doesn't make sense to divide equity equally any more either, so you effectively end up with a "first employee" rather than a true co-founder.

I don't have an obvious solution to this problem. Looks like pushing forward alone (w/ a few odd employees) is the most likely option.

Also, it's not immediately clear to me that I would have been better off with a co-founder. There are so many value and design decisions to make early on that need to be established, and being able to make those fairly quickly and push forward with the bulk of the effort (first development, now sales) I think was a good position to be in.

That said, it is considerably easier to get in a funk as a single founder working longer hours than anyone else, constantly pushing forward without any discernible support. Having a girlfriend helped me with part of this for awhile -- although I had somewhat minimized working hours because of her, I also avoided any major "slump" periods.

Also, tracking all progress (lines of code written, tickets closed, commits, user adoption) has been great since I have weekly metrics that I'm always seeking to achieve. I think that's been the best way to keep me focused, and also to direct my focus at the most important goal at any given moment.

Also I still have lots of equity to give away -- if anyone reading this wants any, please let me know ;)

We provide this.

Yes, but you will also see useless minutia about the lives of the people who re-tweeted the originals.

Well, I would say one large reason that micro-transactions haven't taken off is they are so bloody difficult to implement. Basically you are always dependent on someone's payment network, which usually is not geared towards supporting micro-payments. Take Paypal's fee structure for micro-payments, $0.10 + 10% -- basically kills the idea in the womb.

Also, the idea of paying one penny to read an article might not make sense if it is user initiated, but it could very easily happen if you had an "drip" effect from a connected faucet (i.e. account of virtual currency). I'd be more than happy to pay $.05 for each NYTimes article I actually read, but I have no desire to pay a monthly fee for the Times. If I could have one account that worked across a bunch of different websites and automatically implemented the "drip," I'd consider that a major improvement.

Personally my bet is on other virtual currencies as opposed to Bitcoin (i.e. my own), since the Blockchain stuff ends up being your enemy rather than your friend.

Very interesting concept. Are there any write-ups of this?

I think the web definitively needs a good tool for delivering annotated texts. It's been on my 'list of startups to make' for a least half a decade.

SEEKING FREELANCER

Distributed team currently headquartered in the Umbrian countryside (Italy) with staff in Berlin and S. France seeks:

  (1) Clojure devs
  (2) Mobile wizards
  (3) Security mavens

We are bootstrapping at the moment. Equity in large supply, cash on hand is minimal. Preference given to folks with some flexibility who are eager to try something new.

info@evr.gr

In many ways the problems people have with RoR are the same problems people have with ORMs. They abstract away a lot of the clutter, but then, just as you become totally dependent on the abstraction, you find you need something that you can't get in the abstracted layer.

When this thing is a substantial increase in speed, sometimes you are totally f*ed, since to get it you need to toss away a lot of the detritus. For an ORM you can gradually phase away parts of it, but for a web framework generally you can't architect away the box into which your app is placed.

I'm unaware of any RoR that has successfully scaled, except by removing Ruby (Twitter). Github is probably the largest existing Rails app (at least that I use), and there are Unicorns aplenty (the new fail whale), or weird caching issues that seem to arise regularly.

It's a good question to ask yourself all the time, not only when you are working on a startup. "Am I failing? How?" The more you ask it, the more evaluate your own progress according to whatever goals you have, the better you get at managing your own progress towards goals -- and the less you need other people to manage you.

That said, kudos to pg and team for being honest and to the point.

Didn't zedshaw already design something like this? Where is he when you need him?

I fail to see where in the original article it mentioned any costs relative to parenting. So turning this to talk about the costs of single parenting seems a non sequitur.

also, when you say 7.25/hr is not a living wage, I think you have to take into account the location. In NYC you are right. However in many parts of the world this would be considered a very good wage. Cities generally deal with this by raising the minimum wage within the city, something I think is a very good policy.

Btw, in my original example I wasn't living in a rural area.

At the moment we are sorting through some legal issues, but we plan to make this transparent very soon.

It seems like McDonald's was providing an additional service for its low pay workers, so it seems a bit rude for the Atlantic to jump on them. Clearly it is difficult to live on $1K/m but I'm sure its possible -- I've done it myself ($300/rent $60/utils $180/food $150/books). Eventually I saved up and bought a car for $700.

The real question is why someone making only $1K post-tax had an apartment that costs $600 a month.

Since you ask, I happen to run my own asset-backed digital currency w/ an open REST API. See profile.

I think there are a few things that are awesome about the Gittip model and a few things that are flawed:

Awesome things (1) fills a huge need (2) we should be in the habit of giving back (3) promotes long-term thinking

Bad things (1) dependent on CC processing (2) weekly only (3) A bit too much Github lockin.

What makes words easy to figure out is by putting spaces in between the words.

Iamafrog <- you can figure that out what that means, but it certainly isn't easier than modern orthorgraphy.

Aamafrog <- you could figure that out if you know that "i" + "a" sometimes combines to form "aa" -- but why would you want to do that?

In what way is that easier?

This is very true, although one minor nitpick is that you should say "formal written rules" for grammar. The rules appear in fact appear to be more formal and consistent in the centuries before Panini, and the need to write them down (including the aforementioned sandhi rules) was partially due to inconsistencies derived from the evolution of the language.

I know both Classical Chinese and Sanskrit and have no idea what you are talking about.

"It's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means."

Err, yeah I guess you can guess from the morpheme of a Chinese character that a particular character is a type of tree or has something to do with trees, but that's about it. Similarly with Sanskrit, because of sandhi rules often times you can't even figure out what the word is in advance, and I'm not sure how you are suppose to "guess" the meaning absent looking it up in Monier Williams (unless you are guessing backwards from other Indo-European languages, in which case your potential guessable vocabulary will be quite small).

So there are several things in this article that are flat out wrong:

  (1) "No wonder so many languages are derived from it."

Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived. So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people, but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).

  (2) "It is more expressive"
 

I assume by this he means you can do more with less. To a certain extent this is true.

  (3) Very systematic

This is only true to a certain degree. Classical Sanskrit is itself not the original language, and probably the largest single pain point is the "sandhi" rules, in which words are combined together. Although someone eventually wrote down a large number of rules that shows how these changed together, they are more the product of slurring of speech over time, rather than "design" per se.

  (4) "Excellent grammar"

Is a lot of grammar "excellent grammar" ? In Sanskrit, it does allow certain structures that are not available elsewhere (like the existence of a dual case), which presumably facilitate density, and, consequently, presumably also facilitates efficiency. If so, one could argue that the grammar of Attic Greek is more "excellent" than that of English. However, to me "excellence" is something that depends more on the specific use case -- a language that someone can speak and use is better than one that one cannot.

TLDR: Startups that try to focus on big launches are generally lazy. Success comes from putting in extraordinary effort to putting your customer first. This means you get super-enthusiastic users. This works by the principle of compound growth as users tell their friends.

Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:

(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever

(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why blub is bad and lisp is great)

(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more

Pro typers frequently remap Caps Lock to backspace. Backspace/delete is in an inane position on most keyboards.

Frankly, reports from doctor-friends who work in ERs indicates that a large part of costs are treating people who are dealing with preventable often drug-related problems that create emergencies because the people involved are basically incapable of prevention. Seeing other people on the street homeless is apparently not enough incentive to keep people from becoming homeless themselves. I have no idea why seeing other people dying from internal bleeding because they didn't have the foresight to buy medical insurance to get the appropriate medication to treat their issue would curb behavioral patterns which seem to be flawed at a very fundamental level.

-"remuneration would likely improve"

why?

-"artificial competition for jobs would decrease drastically"

why is artificial competition important? You are saying that it will be easier for qualified people to get jobs because unqualified people won't bother to apply any more?

In fact, you already see this in places like Israel and the perpetually "studying" ultra-orthodox who refuse to do military service, have lots of kids, and, of course, take massive state subsidies.

Doubly true if you are talking about a globally applicable basic income.