esperluette

I agree that this is dumb of IFTTT.

But I am all in favor of a 'recipe' that consists of "startup does dumb stuff=>Maciej writes a hilarious takedown=>I LOL so hard people ask me what's going on from two rooms away". Can someone implement the API for that, please?

First off -- I'm so glad the OP is okay now.

A couple of things in your story seem weird to me, though. Did they really foreclose on your rental house that fast? There were so many properties going under in 2008 that I thought the banks were backed up for months ... Why couldn't you just stay in the rental property until the bank came after it? (PS have you checked to make sure you don't have a deficiency judgment out in your name? Some people are getting charged hundreds of thousands of dollars years after foreclosure!)

Also: you had no credit cards? With most modern credit cards you actually have to call and ask them to stop sending you checks. You could have moved debt from the car to a credit card pretty easily with those, then paid the mere minimum for months.

Did you consider applying for public assistance at all? You could have also tried to barter your skills for housing or food with a church or social service charity.

Again, I'm glad you're okay, and thank you for sharing your story. So many people don't realize they are a lost job or a bad accident away from homelessness; I hope your story encourages more people to save for a rainy day.

I'd search it for new words to add to Wordnik. :-)

aw, thank you!

You can get Wordnet through the Wordnik API too ... as well as from the American Heritage Dictionary, The Century Dictionary, Wiktionary, and the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

And Wordnik is becoming a not-for-profit, if that makes a difference to you. :-)

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Wordnik. (You might like my TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionar...)

That said, I know the guy behind WordsAPI and he's good people. :-)

Findings from betaworks did something similar, and I really liked that service. They didn't get any traction, though. :-(

Are you going to have an API? Because that would be sweet.

EVERY word is a "made-up word". Some words were just made up longer ago than others. If you held everyone to this criteria you would severely impoverish language.

It's not that wages would necessarily go up without collusion, it's that the companies would become significantly less productive.

If you can keep your top people from being poached by your peers, you reduce the number of opportunities for them to leave (even if they would leave for much the same salary) and reduce your team churn, increasing productivity.

Increased productivity => MOAR PROFITZ, or so I've been told ...

Actually, the lack of women in cartooning/comics is a topic that has been written about quite often, here's an example: http://comicsalliance.com/superhero-comics-women-sexism/

There are also many apprenticeships for women in construction/plumbing, because they are 1) good-paying jobs (at least in housing booms) and 2) ones where historically women have been denied apprenticeships/union membership.

Oddly enough, there is also gender imbalance in the fashion industry, but not the way you're thinking of it. Sure, women models make WAY more money than male models, but more top designers are men: (http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/06/gender-imbalance...)

Maybe you should do a little googling before you sound off about the lack of hand-wringing? Maybe it's just you who don't care.

I don't think you have been paying attention, or maybe you are hanging out in the wrong places. Have you read "Lean In"?

There are plenty of women out there who don't expect their husbands to be the main breadwinner. Go hang out with med students or lawyers. There are lots of women who would LOVE to be able to concentrate on their careers and have their spouse at home with the kids and making dinner. If "traditional society" is expecting you to do X, go find a "nontraditional society"!

Are you doing PUA techniques at bars as a way to meet women? Then yeah, you are competing on looks and wealth. Are you treating women like people and getting to know them as friends?

You might want to look into CBT, because your comments sound like you have some negative thought patterns that you might want to combat. Thinking that everyone is going to treat you rudely or consider you a creep is a great way to act in defensive ways that ... make people treat you rudely and consider you a creep. :-(

Uh, no.

The OP was trying to imply that women are naturally worse at the competitions cited, and I pointed out that women in the age demographic that wins those competitions (usually men 20-50) have less free time than the men.

And ... many women don't "want" to do more housework/chores, but feel they have to do it, because if their house is dirty or their kids don't have clean clothes/snacks for the soccer game, etc., it's considered the mom's fault. The dad often gets a free pass. The social pressure makes it a LOT less than a "choice". The social pressure = society's problem. Think about that the next time you see an ad where a woman is shamed because X in her house is less than sparkling, or one where a man is given a free pass to be incompetent at a household chore.

The average woman will catch much more flak for having a dirty house than she will be praised for playing competitive X, even if she's very very very good. And if she's less than very very very good? She's "neglectful" or "selfish."

If I said a guy "chooses" to wear pants instead of a skirt, is it fair to leave out the fact that a guy in skirt will probably face some harassment? There are free choices and not-so-free choices.

And ... please, I don't want to hear "But yardwork!" The grass gets mown 1x/week. The garbage cans go out 1x/week. The dishes, laundry, general tidying? For anything more than 2 people it's every day.

I'm lucky because my spouse does 80% of the housework, because I have a demanding startup job (uh, with time to read HN).

And this couldn't be in part because women have less free time across the board, about five hours less?[1]

Hard to get to tournament quality if you don't get as much time to practice.

[1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...

It's okay to be privately surprised, as long as you think about WHY you're surprised (e.g. "girls don't code" vs. "there aren't as many women coders as you might expect given the # of women in the US"). The dick move is to belabor the point and treat the programming woman as a performing dog instead of a person.

Think of it this way: you meet a woman at a meetup about a technical topic, and you find you have projects/interests in common. If you spend the whole conversation interrogating her about how/why she learned to code, asking her questions about what her boyfriend/significant other/husband does or what he thinks about her coding, or asking for her "feminine opinion" on your consumer startup, you are a dick.

If you treat her as a PERSON, not a novelty, and talk about those interests that are relevant to the meetup, that's decent behavior.

It's about the coding, not the gender (stupid).

And of course the handy Time Traveler's Poster from Topatoco ...

Only if your wife doesn't have paying work ...

what does "her writing style is masculine" even MEAN?

Wow. Feeling pretty good about my HS Pascal class (yeah, I'm old, so what) now. I was only ignored and dismissed, not harassed and told to make sandwiches (!).

The OP's daughter sounds awesome. The OP's daughter's teacher sounds like a real idiot.

I don't agree that tablets are terrible for e-reading. I love reading on my iPad, and hate my e-ink reader. The page refresh times are terrible in e-ink, they really slow me down and are disruptive.

Sorry, I only know what would work on me (and my friends). Didn't think I was that much of an outlier ...

would something that's 100% OSS be smarter for people just getting started? Swagger jumps to mind. :-)

https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-core/wiki/Downloads

(Node inspector recently added for command-line happiness.)

Maybe you should try talking to technically-inclined women? We do exist and I would probably pepper you with tons of questions about what you do if we met at a party. (Of course, I'm married ...)

Why not say something like "I make computers go harder, better, faster, stronger?" Funny, doesn't make you sound like you're apologizing for what you do, and if someone's really interested ("how does that work?") you can follow up with an explanation. I'd try for some metaphors, too, like "Servers/computers are always juggling tasks, and what I do gives them more arms to juggle with."

I know your last question was rhetorical but if you start doing something that makes you unhappy just to find a partner then you will have a partner who loves you when you're unhappy. Not a great idea.

I'm pretty sure that you could do that, the only problem is that it would accelerate the sun going nova and the eventual engulfing of Earth ...

It's all a matter of priorities. :-)

Wow, all I can say is that it is wonderful to read a "can you do a startup and be a parent?" article that is not about MOMS. (Although since the original post didn't mention anything about school responsibilities, doctor's appointments, bedtime, or birthday parties, I'm assuming that all that is done by his wife.)

The ESL-voice was part of the charm. It adds a note of authenticity. :-)

I generally don't mind being hugged (given adequate cleanliness of the hugger and absence of anything that could be considered creepy, e.g. lingering groin contact) but I prefer the two-handed handshake (the "full Clinton") as a way to express more warmth than a plain handshake and less um, intimacy than a hug.

their rules include "supplies," which include fabric. I have bought fabric on Etsy, both new stuff and vintage. (I have yet to buy handwoven fabric on Etsy, but it's just not my style.)

So cool! I've been waiting for a bunch of bike-apps-in-progress to come to fruition (415bike, I'm looking at you: https://github.com/415bike) but now the wait is made much easier with this!

I can't be the only person who wanted to write this:

tl;dr

oh and one more thing ... have you tapped UVA's alumni network? I went to a good (but "wrong" for the Valley school) & I get calls quite often from people who want to leverage alumni connections into startup introductions. There have to be some UVA people in hiring roles out here!

1. Finish just one project (not to shiny-perfect, just to functionally complete) and put it on GitHub. This is to show you can finish something. It's a huge risk mitigator if someone can look at your code. Nobody's code is perfect, but some code is always better than no code.

2. Put the rest of the stuff up on GitHub, with suitable disclaimers, e.g. "I was working on this to learn X ..." Everyone understands (well, everyone I like understands) that creative people have lots of projects in various stages of disarray.

3. Target a few small/midsize startups, not the super-hot ones, and spend 1-2 hours to learn their product. I would be THRILLED to get an email from someone who said "I love what you do, here's three things I would like to work on with you to make it better, are you hiring?"

4. Put up front your willingness/unwillingness to relo. If you have remote working experience, give an overview of that. "Worked remotely for company X for two years, with daily standups, weekly sprint meetings, monthly 3-4 day visits, and two visits of 2 weeks duration 2x/year." That lets me know what you're up for.