nbashaw

Ahh thanks so much.

So Sproutcore 2.0 split into two camps, Ember.js and Amber.js? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, this is confusing.

It's sad that this actually made it to the front page of HN. What is this world coming to?

Just explain exactly what happened, and apologize profusely. Who knows what could happen? I think that's all you can do.

What was the original title on the HN post?

I used to be a lot like that. But then somehow I slipped out of the cycle and started being good at things, and I've been truly consistently happy and working hard on fun projects for the past 3ish years (I'm 22 now). I saw some people asking others to share their stories, so I thought I would offer up my own life as an example. It's just a data point, take from it what you will.

When I started high school I thought I wasn't good at anything. I was pretty rebellious and took up smoking / drinking at a young age. Then I started debating and found out I was pretty good at that, but it wasn't enough to pull me out of my slump. Turns out, winning debates is only cool to other debaters. I remember riding the bus full of idiots to school, listening to Modest Mouse on my first iPod, just wondering why life generally sucked.

When I went to college I tried to be one of those thoughtful types. My subconscious goal was to make everyone think I was tormented by deep thoughts. It was my way of trying to get people to like me and to feel special. (I was not conscious of this at the time). I smoked cigarettes a lot, became a vegetarian, and thought about how nothing matters. Reading Nietzsche for fun made me feel profound, and truly I learned a lot from it, but if I'm honest with myself I did it because I wanted people to respect me.

That's what I was missing in my life, what made me feel so bad for so long. I just didn't feel respected. I didn't think people took me seriously enough. I quit college debate, joined another student organization and became known as a friendly and smart guy there. Almost overnight everything got better. As I started getting happier and more respected by my peers, I also started becoming more ambitious. I dreamed about becoming president one day, about starting massive companies, about changing history.

That was about 3 years ago, and I've been mostly happy since that point in my life. Gradually I shed my old bad habits, like smoking, and picked up some good ones, like eating healthier and exercising. I no longer want people to think of me as someone who is tormented by his genius. I realized that people really don't relate to or respond well to that. I still want to be respected, but now I'm capable of getting respect because I learned the first step is to be a warm person towards others - not by trying to project any sort of image. The problem is that we all project an image whether we want to or not, so we have a tendency to try and control it. I've found that I'm happiest and I feel most respected when I'm focusing on the matter at hand rather than myself. Whether it's designing an interface (my job) or talking to a friend, I find I am happiest when I'm not thinking about myself.

Hope this helps somebody who's feeling like I felt 4 years ago.

Agreed. The first thing you need to understand is that this is targeted at Michigan people, not Bay Area folks.

He's basically saying "Look guys, we're outside the TechCrunch universe of big VC money flowing to tech startups, but that doesn't mean we're not on the right track to creating a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. Keep doing what you're doing - building cool shit."

It's nice that he followed his own advice. None of us knew we were reading a sales letter for his new book until the end of the blog post!

Well, PHP was certainly a frustrating choice.

I totally agree. That's why democracy is so hard.

Also: For ~5 minutes the reply button wasn't showing up. I guess PG coded in a little feature to make people take some time to calm down before getting into arguments. Beautiful.

> It makes no sense for your brain to re-evaluate the same thing over and over again

But we don't ever get the result of our query - we never know the true answer to the problems facing society. So I don't think caching is a good metaphor. It's more like we just give up thinking because it's uncomfortable and it's easier to be like everybody else and make up our minds.

I don't think it's misleading at all. Here's a direct quote from the page:

"While we focus on the Metro Detroit area, we do include entries from throughout the entire state of Michigan. For us it’s about the cause, not about drawing lines in the sand."

True, our kids won't grow up hacking the same systems we did, just like we didn't grow up hacking the same systems as our parents. But there is something basic to the human spirit that guarantees as long as this branch of the gene pool is still around, we'll still tinker and build and create. It's just that the blocks are constantly changing. Which keeps things interesting, and is a good thing.

It's always interesting to me what makes it up and what never catches on. Apparently more HN people are intrigued by the mere title "lights" than a title with more explanation.

I thought the post was meant to be ironic.

You realize they all have this sort of thing prepared ahead of time?

See my comment above - the image is using fixed-positioning and has a default z-index above that of the links. They can fix it by setting the image's z-index to -1.

Edit: looks like they fixed it.

Great site, but the image of the kid on the left should have a negative z-index so it doesn't get in the way of the sidebar navigation.

But "I am nothing" is so much more poetic! :)

I don't think Paul's saying he's an altruist when he says "I am nothing". It's about not assigning attributes to our identity.

That's my bad - I'm the designer at Olark who forgot to make our WP theme look good on mobile. Fix coming tonight.

Sorry about that!

Sorry our blog is down now - we're trying to get it back up ASAP!

I have a few friends that are in it - I can probably intro you, they might be able to give you some good advice since they're in the trenches with this stuff. E-mail me if you're interested (nbashaw at gmail.com).

It's a wonderful book. I read it before I'd been exposed to too much other philosophy and I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been written. Then in college I started reading a lot of other philosophy and didn't ever quite reach the same passionate reaction I had with ZAMM. It's both engaging and deep.

Yes - haha we actually do have that now, but admittedly not as well-integrated into themes as groove has. It's something we'd like to work on more, but there are a couple other items on the roadmap that are much higher priority.

Thanks so much for the feedback :)

I work at Olark - just out of curiosity, what could we do better?

Fair enough, but I still don't think a business that is wildly successful would fail by discontinuing IE6 support -- even in a "random niche industry" where IE6 users make up more than 2% of their customer base. In fact, I doubt any of those businesses are currently wild successes. But I guess that all depends on how you define success.

I seriously doubt IE6 support can be the difference between "wildly profitable and failing" for any business. Can you name one example of a failing company that started supporting IE6 and then became wildly profitable?

Borders closing != no more bookstores. They'll survive and morph into even more fun places to hang out and browse content. The reason why borders closed is because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to just hanging out. I always wanted to leave as soon as I walked into one. I don't get that feeling at cool local bookstores or even Barnes and Noble.

haha that's exactly what I use it for too. I just keep a big #startupidea list in it.