haploid

I think the reason you see those kind of posts is that those kind of applications are low-hanging fruit. The development of Yet Another File-Sharing App or Social Media Service can be accomplished by anyone with a "Learn Rails In 21 Days" book and a credit card.

Companies that are also getting tons of funding right now are biotechnology and solar energy startups, but I have never seen anything along the lines of a "Ask HN: Review my research on getting 3.3% more current per solar flux unit by doping gallium with boron" post, despite the fact that such an accomplishment would likely garner extremely good investment and/or business prospects.

I do speak from long experience, here. This isn't a crazy idea I read out of a dogfooding blog entry.

Visualization will not get you beyond 3 dimensions, nor will it get you understanding systems in terms of Lagrangians/Hamiltonians, nor will it give you the ability to read texts geared toward actual mathematicians.

Speaking for myself, it was surprisingly difficult un-learning the "slope of a tangent line" type of conceptualizing in order to understand math with sufficient rigor to be able to actually read math texts correctly.

What? I have never seen this. This could just be a NYC/SF thing( as the author points out )but outside those zones, I can't imagine this to be even remotely true. Nerd groupies? Ha.

To quote Ballmer's character in Pirates of Silicon Valley, "..they were moaning, 'oh, computer language, Oh Fortran! OH FORTRAN, OOOHHHHH!'"

The ratio of "we just got funded" to "we actually developed a valuable product" stories I see in the tech press is getting to astronomical levels. I view this piece as being in response to this trend that really ought to be clear to anybody.

When the bubble pops, having a working, profitable product will be far nicer than having a contact list stuffed full of VC contacts that are now( post-bubble ) scared shitless of doing any deals for any valuation whatsoever.

Then again, pg says there's no bubble, so disregard this and party on. It's different this time.

Error #1: Using whitespace as scoping syntax. Status: WONTFIX

To be fair, though, we're a few too many years in to really be called a startup any longer.

I think many people would be surprised at the caliber of people who idle( usually as ops )on the various programming-related IRC channels. Of course, these channels also attract droves of newbies looking for help, often with elementary homework projects. But if you use a decent vetting process, sorting signal from noise can be fairly trivial.

Start with $500k.

Application Factors: If it has anything to do with "social", multiply by 5. If it's written in a functional language, multiply by 2. If it ends with -ify or has a .ly TLD, multiply by 3.

Personal Factors: If you live in silicon valley and hang out at hipster bars, multiply by 2. If you're far better at name-dropping than you are at producing actual value, multiply by 4.

If none of the above are applicable and you have an actual product or service that people actually use, figure 12x annual earnings, plus a premium for growth expectations.

Yeah, it was totally their fault. What a bunch of assholes.

Is the premium developers put on "but it's open source!" really that compelling, or is there some key feature of Eclipse that I'm completely missing?

I've been with a lovely woman, who enjoys being treated like a human being instead of a deity, for over four years.

The man in this article has already castrated himself for his wife; this +15 comment suggests that unquestioningly bending to the indomitable will of his wife was not enough?

What's next? Recommending cuckoldry as a solution to satisfying his wife's sexual needs?

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleColleg...

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/indicator11.as...

To wit: Females have dominated academia for a couple decades now.

Also, it should be pointed out that many founders are college dropouts or even high school dropouts, so I'd be interested in some sort of citation of evidence that one can assume most founders will be a subset of academia.

Athletic activity causes actual physical microdamage that takes rest time, nutrition, and hormones to repair. The elevated secretion of human growth hormone during REM sleep is a significant reason why athletes perform better on more sleep.

No such analogue exists for the human brain. Mental activities, at worst, deplete neurotransmitter levels. I have seen no evidence to suggest that massive dosages of sleep do a better job of restoring these levels than minimally adequate amounts.

Normally, I get 5 hours per night and I rarely experience low levels of functioning or excessive fatigue.

And as other have pointed out, the methodology of the cited experiment in the article is highly suspect. Any normal human being, locked in a room with no stimuli, is likely to sleep as much as possible to pass the time.

V/MC Non-Qualified: 2.89% + $.30

Cybersource+WFB clocks in at roughly half that for V/MC( although Amex rates are around that level ), with per-transaction at 10 cents or less.

Physical conditions, or cognitive events such as stroke, that make you unable to work are NOT analogous to losing motivation or getting bored.

If the only thing standing in your way is attitude and motivation, it's fairly trivial to get over it, sack up, and get back to work.

Wait, and this was a bad thing?

"He says it's like riding a bike. When you start falling on one side, your natural instinct is to turn in the other direction."

No it isn't. Not at all. My natural instinct is to steer in the direction of the fall. I can't imagine this even being remotely true for anyone else, either.