bsirkia

Right (and thanks for the response), so I would expect "Mastering Bitcoin" to go in to great detail...

I've never read an O'Reilly book but have obviously heard of them, are they generally effective at communicating more than general principles?

If I regularly read blog posts and essays written about Bitcoin, would this book be worthwhile? If not, what audience is this book targeting?

It totally blows my mind that Wordpress powers (or claims to power) 19% of the web. I had never used it until this year (after using other CMSs like SquareSpace and Statamic) and wanted to blow my brains out. I really wonder how the CMS landscape will look in five years.

cool! I had to get 5 interns spun up on a few dev environments last summer and this definitely would have made it easier. I can also see this being useful for sharing output like logs or errors.

I'm sure as the developer you've thought of a lot more applications for nutty (great url btw), what sort of things do you see it being useful for?

Right, I think it's worth it to take a job that pays you, and you can use that money to develop your passions.

All true ideas, none particularly helpful. No one reads this and thinks: "Wait, I can be happier if I work on something I'm passionate about and get paid for it?! I had no idea!"

The problem is that its really hard to 1) identify what passions you have, 2) filter those by which you want to pursue for the rest of your life and 3) figure out a way to make money on that passion. Most people I know my age (mid 20's) are happy to "waste life" and make money for a couple years while they answer those decisions.

Right I think that in a lot of ways it's actually an advantage to do CS at a Liberal Arts school. The key point to this article seems to be that you can always learn to code regardless of what you've learned in the past.

A more accurate title would be "Studied Humanities, Will Code". I have a liberal arts degree from Middlebury College where I studied Computer Science, so it shouldn't be too surprising that I will code (and do code full-time professionally).

This is an awesome article explaining carsongross's point on survivorship bias: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/

I would add they were also a bit lucky (whether with timing or virality or some other factor) at some point in their lifecycle.

Haha ya, I guess that's really on the low end. I was thinking of old people who seem to sleep like 4 hours a night for the last 20 years of their lives. Plus people are generally sleep deprived.

It blows my mind (pun intended?) that we still don't really know why we need sleep, even though we sleep for like 20% of our lives.

We know some stuff, like if you don't sleep, bad stuff happens to your body and you don't form memories effectively, but like the article says we haven't figured out why it's so essential.

That's amazing. At least intrusive security measures give us great fart videos!

I don't get why pg felt the need to write this post and don't think he should have. The last post clarifying his out of context comments was enough, but continually emphasizing "I am not a sexist" (when the majority of people don't believe it anyway) makes him seem self conscious and actually dignifies the argument that genus a sexist.

I think he should have written that last post, then released a post about how he expects 2014 to be for VCs or something and changed the conversation from this ycomb sexism foolishness.

Rather than smarter, at least better at accurately assessing risk.

In one way, words are hard because it's difficult to communicate all the ways your program is unique just through its two word name. In another way, words are easy because in just a few hundred words, you did exactly that.

Ahh that's interesting. Was the overlay un-dismissible?

So, was the overlay more effective at conversions than no overlay at all?

I think this is a great article about how to measure overlay timing effectiveness, but didn't convince me that overlays work at all in general.

Definitely agree, if you're in college and thinking about being an entrepreneur, take some computer science classes. Even if you don't learn web dev specifically, you'll learn the principles and meet some technical people.

I agree that the "Shake Alarm" is the only feature that I think uniquely helps with waking up.

Is there any evidence (other than anecdotal) that having a laborious alarm clock actually helps people get up? I feel like making it harder to hit the snooze button might only accomplish that, and either way people just go back to bed.

It cracks me up that the most implausible part of this story is the idea that everyone's privacy would be so well protected.

"I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them."

Isn't this the exact opposite of trust-building behavior? Trust defined as "a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something." So the author is arguing for more trust in our regulators and laws, because we can't trust the people we are regulating.

I don't think that you way to build trust with a person or group by creating stiff rules and penalties for cheating, you do that after they've proven they can't be trusted. I think a more convincing conclusion for the article would be something along of the lines of: we've learned our lesson that banks can't be trusted, so we need to impose heavier regulation.

Definitely, it's not always easy knowing what to search for and it can take awhile to narrow that down.

Definitely a good idea. I'm thinking about writing a post at some point about how valuable outsourcing certain facets of the process can be, provided you have some cash.

That's a fairly bleak view of entrepreneurs simply as "takers" from innovators. Do you not feel they can be the same person?

I still do it, though you might be right that it's deprecated and just doing "rideshare carpool service startup app" would be the exact same.

EDIT: Just tried it, and it does return different results. The search modifier OR seems to work, but the + might not be doing much. I definitely find the search with the modifiers to return more relevant results.

I agree, the amount of time you spend can really vary. If you're going after a space with major incumbents, it should be much longer, because you really need to drill into the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of your competitors.

I reference CrunchBase and AngelList not because it's only startup-startup competition, but it's a great place to look for new entrants that you often won't find through Google alone. If there are major incumbents in your space, you should find them with that initial google search.

That's a great question. I think the only thing you can do is address who your competition is, even if they're only tangentially related. I usually follow a pattern of "X competitor is doing Y, which helps our target customer solve A and B need but not C and D".

I think it's worth finding the closest competitor no matter how far away they are, even just to signal that you've done the research.

Right, I had a hard time figuring out exactly how long to put there time-wise. I think the amount of time you put in actually looking into what they're doing (figuring out what they're doing well, not well, their traction) can vary it quite a bit.

You're right about the pitch-killing. A few times I've seen investors pull out their iPad during a pitch and google potential competitors. Then they ask the entrepreneur about them if they weren't included.

"You should know who your competitors are, but focusing on them is a waste of time." I agree. The point of this post is that entrepreneurs very rarely actually know who all their competitors are and this is a way to get a complete picture. As I say at the end, then it's time to move on and get going.