dnsworks

Jobs isn't capricious, he's an asshole. I have two friends who both had the misfortunate position of being Jobs' personal IT bitch at Apple. He fired my one friend, and I quote, "because I'm tired of struggling to understand your gimpy voice". Jobs is added proof to the argument that nice guys finish last.

Are people really worth this much money? I can't help but think "$3.5m gets me 15 really good developers for a year, and a swimming pool filled with chocolate pudding, just for fun."

No, your goal is to instill fear in your enemy, not the kind of fear that makes them fight back like a wounded animal, but rather the kind of traumatic fear which makes them unlikely to treat you, or anybody else the same broken way again.

In 9th grade I threw a bully down a set of stairs, then proceeded to beat him with every bit of energy I had (not much, I was a fat kid). After he got out of the hospital, in casts, he stayed far, far away from me. That was the last time anybody tried bullying me. "God" isn't going to stop the bullies, a good old fashioned ass kicking is.

Hey TechCrunch, Penny-Arcade called and they want their burn back.

I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody complain about not being able to get their code away. Have there been any studies which show that a majority of developers wish they could give their code away?

There is no law stating that you have to open-source any of your software. Make the decision based on your company's business needs, not on popular opinion within a small engineering niche that probably doesn't constitute the majority or even a significant percentage of your customer base.

Ride a train? By the time my daughter is 9 she'll be flying alone back and forth betweenOK)

Because it's so difficult to stand up and manipulate a television, or use the gasp remote control that came with it. I'm quite surprised YC would invest in a .. television company.

One of my friends is finishing up her P.hD in entymology at Cal and she's somewhere around $175k in debt now with no expectation of ever making more than $50k/year in her field (if she can work in it at all). Another went to a private university for undergrad, then Temple for Med school, she's just now gone through Match and is around $225k in debt. She's chosen a career path that once through her residency (with a $40k/year salary expectation for 5 years through a triple-discipline program) should land her a comfortable $250k/year salary in the middle of nowhere. The $225k she'll have was a good investment, but my friend who likes beetles?She expects to pay 20-25% of her salary to pay it off for the rest of her life.

Come on, is this really news?

I disagree, especially considering the audience here. Most of us are trained at functioning for long periods of time without sleep, especially those of us in operations. I did all of the middle of the night diaper changing the first month, I got to the point where I could have her changed in 2 minutes without opening my eyes. It was like being on-call but far more pleasant, somehow. In the midst of all this we also moved our Datacenter 900 miles north to Seattle, as well as our employees, and ourselves. I'm saying all of this because it isn't as frightening as you think. The exhaustion isn't so bad because it is born in "purpose".

Ugh, even worse, don't ask the smart parents to bring you up to speed, at least not the ones who are going to start cramming some ridiculous child-rearing philosophy down your throat. I will not reproduce again, because I never want to hear the terms "La Leche League", "Co-Sleeping", or "Attachment Parenting" ever again.

Yeah, we got really lucky with Kaylee, she was always a night sleeper ... well sort of lucky, since I'm not really diurnal, but am rather nocturnal ...

As for the books, yes. I feel that most of them are detrimental and written by quack new-age hippy psychologists. One of the books we were given literally told us to place crystals next to our daughter when she slept to keep her "biorhythms" in check.

NGO's have methods besides getting drunk and flashing their 1st world salary around in the 3rd world?

Actually, as a divorced man, I prefer the empty house.

Oh and hope you get lucky like I did with a daughter who slept through the night from day one. It helped to have a large # of people around the first week or two constantly playing with her (as people do around new babies), keeping her generally awake during the day and exhausting her at night.

Also, don't buy any books. They're all a waste of money, and you probably have enough common sense and natural instinct for the first 18 years.

Hire a housecleaner, don't even think about splurging on this. You want to spend the next few months with your family, not focusing on menial tasks. The $150/month I paid to have a team come and clean my house every Wednesday during the first year was by far the best service I'd ever paid for.

Nannies are also awesome.

Forgive me, "I'm 50% less likely to be unemployed in a bad recession if I go $200k into debt for college". You have me sold, where do I sign up?

"It isn't going to be as bad as the housing market crash, because degrees are revenue producing assets for the overwhelming majority of people and houses are costs for the overwhelming majority of people. Also, student loans do not have any mechanisms in them which are designed to induce payment shock, like ARM resets are. (I am only half sardonic there.)"

Degrees clearly are great revenue producing machines for the portion of the workforce currently unemployed with degrees. I remember a few years ago, "The housing market can't crash, it's impossible, it's the only safe investment vehicle after all of those silly tech stocks".

Expect to spend at least $1,000/month in rent in San Francisco. The competition for anything less is fierce. Essentially you're competing with everybody who doesn't work in tech but wants a room.

Ignore the guy who said "avoid SOMA" because you can find some great deals here. There's a building in this small alleyway on Sumner that has huge 2-bedroom apartments which could comfortably be converted (and often are) to 3-bedrooms for $1800/month. If you realyl want to be cheap, my current building is filled with AAU students who double up the bedrooms and split $2825 4 ways to live in a building with a pool and a fitness center a cross the street from Twitter (sort of).

There's really no need to do that. A large enough BotNet can take out almost any host doing nothing more than connecting and doing a GET / HTTP/1.1. Few websites can handle a sudden surge in traffic from 100,000 bots.

So then, patriotic hackers (riiiiiiiiiight) like to target American websites that are critical of the Chinese government because they feel a sense of nationalistic pride? Bullshit.

I had a good talk with my ex-wife's uncle about this a few years ago. He's a record's archival specialist in Australia, and they seem to be doing a lot of work with Microfiche. Apparently it lasts quite a long time and is highly dense. They encode data in some sort of an xml format, and the first slide on each sheet has a reasonably explanatory description as to how to decode the data.

And who do you think pays these people to ddos sites like slideshare and posterous? (both of whom have been my customers during massive ddos's from China). I'm sure there's like one posting somewhere on Posterous that someone in the Chinese government didn't like, so they paid their team of script kiddies for time on their botnets to bully Posterous around. The same thing happened to Slideshare a few years ago.

It's about China bullying people around and trying to censor the internet.

50gbps is pretty massive. Clearly somebody did something horrifically insulting to China like mention that they could maybe possible consider treating Tibet a little bit more humanely and stop turning it into one big whorehouse.. make a statement like that, and all of china ddos's you.

There's an anti-DDOS service out there, Progent or something. Part of their solution adds all of APNIC's ip addresses into your router's bogon list when you're under attack. It turns out for most DDOS's if you turn off china, the attack just ends.

It frightens me how many of these responses are people describing the scams they'd pull off if they had the cajones to do so.

If a solid month of work for $25k seems like "a big project" then maybe you're not billing enough.

I think Playdom is probably a lot larger than Slide... oh hrm and Playdom was just acquired by Disney for $763M. Slide is definitely small fries in comparison to Playdom or Zynga.

A lot of meaning what .. 250,000 globally? Maybe 500,000? I doubt many of those people are hacker news readers.