It is probably time to change your job. :-)
404 karma · joined January 8, 2009
How do you measure how civilized a culture is? If it is their choice to remain un-contacted, they should be free to live that way. You cannot make an assumption that they would die young. Their bodies would have developed systems to counter most of the natural viruses and other health aspects there. Their upbringing would have taught them the skills to live in harmony with the forest. Their brains would not have developed the adequate techniques to survive in our society. Getting them out of there is the worst possible thing that you can do to them. They have got their technology and we have ours.
What is comfort to you is only a conditioned response? Car is a great comfort only if you want to travel long distances. They have crafted their lifestyle in such a manner that they do not need such comforts. Most of their building materials and techniques would take care of air conditioning and cooling. They consume so few resources that their carbon foot print is probably negative.
As far as education is concerned, we use this education to survive in this society, to earn, to create and transact with goods and so on. Their society is not built on such structures and transactions. They would have different structures and transactions. One is not necessarily superior or inferior. They are merely different.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python vs http://www.google.com/search?q=rails
I rest my case. Don't get me wrong. I like DDG but this campaign seems like spreading FUD. BTW, I use https by default.
Losing a year or two is not a big deal. What is important that this moment completely belongs to you. It is in your control. Dont worry about the past or the people who bother you about the past. Do not worry about the future as well. You shape your own future to a large extent by your actions in this current moment. Friends are important but not the kind that they show in the movies. What is more important than friends are your well wishers. Well wishers come in all shapes and forms and some may not fit your definition of friends.
Start building something. Python is not that hard. Start with Google App Engine and python. That way you can build something quick and show it to the world. Remember this need not be perfect. Shipping something is more important than perfecting it. Start blogging your learnings. They help immensely serving as a reinforcement of concepts. Don't bother about getting friends. Participate in your local techmeets or geeknights or whatever they call it in your area. Find people with similar interests and start hacking on a project. It could be as simple as a todo list or a birthday reminder. Think of all the cool features that you could add to it. Make it and show it proudly. You will find that friends will come searching for you.
Do not try to become extroverted. You cannot do that. Instead, start writing and reading. You have already taken the first step of opening up to the forum. I congratulate you on that. Now all you have to do is to keep writing. Once you gain your confidence back, you will naturally become extroverted.
Good luck and keep hacking. You know we all are.
If you genuinely feel that the non-tech co-founder is not bringing enough value to the table, you must probably be looking at buying out part or whole of the stake. However, I suggest that you get knowledge of the other aspects of the business such as accounting, tax filing norms and such. Most of the other stuff, you can find others to handle for you without parting with your equity.
My scores dropped as well. But I do not think that academic scores are a measure of a person's intelligence. They are a measure of a person's commitment on how doggedly he would pursue a goal. I would argue that letting children play games explore ways of cheating and bending the rules of the system helps them become far better individuals than what today's education system can probably bring out. I guess most adults have gone sour to a point where they are jealous of kids having fun. :-) I remember in my friends place where my friend and his father would have fights about who would play the next game on the computer. You parents have to try it out once. I am sure your will have a better bond with your kid.
So my advice to parents is to ignore this article and be happy that your kid is playing games. Just ensure that the grades do not drop that low that it endangers his/her career altogether. Otherwise it is fine he/she would grow out of it. Or probably not and he/she might create the next world of goo for all you know. Either ways I do not see it as a bad thing.
BTW, I write from the perspective of India. My comments need to be considered with loads of salt.
* Namespaces - Ruby has namespaces but when you are reading some code it is very hard to figure out what got mixed into what. This may be more predominant in the Rails world than others. You can exactly know where each one of the classes and methods came from unless you are doing a 'from x import '
Clean code - I know that with most editors today, you can have clean code. But python's insistence on indentation makes the code appear clean and very readable. This was an excellent design decision.
* Method and class invocations need () - This view is very subjective. While ruby's method invocation style gives rise to a lot of DSLs, python's style of invocation means that there are no silly Proc objects. If you need to pass a function to another function just send its name. I am not saying that one way is better than the other but I like python's explicitness here.
* OpenStruct by default - This is one of the best design decisions ever. Python uses a very fast implementation of dict for its objects. That means you almost get a javascript kind of object without the clunkiness of javascript.
I am biased a little bit towards python as I learnt python first. I do love Ruby's DSLs but I have a heart for Clojure too, in this regard. And I am actually quite happy that Jython 2.5 has come out. I am a little disappointed that Jim jumped over to the IronPython and left Jython hanging. But thanks to him, Python is there on all the major platforms.