puppetsock

You're being a bit unfair. It's equally inappropriate for me to speculate about his motives, but I recall there being an undercurrent of melancholia in Aaron's writings even pre-indictment.

If you were a driver, wouldn't you want to be that awesome of a driver?

  (def check-usernames (u)
    (or (nil? u)
      (and
        (has-email? (user (car u)))
        (check-usernames (cdr u)))))

or something

Try many, keep few?

In other words, we should dismiss a priori the possibility of any racial correlates?

The filtering phenomenon is obsolete; as you note, GM probably still cares because it's old fashioned, but modern companies don't care at all. Even if the filter exists/existed, that's hardly a sufficient or effective motivation to start a startup -- good startup founders don't seem like the type who'd just take a salaried gig and become complacent if it was offered to them.

There's probably some traits useful to startup founders that are more common amongst dropouts than the general population -- like a willingness to take responsibility for one's future into one's own hands.

Find a good therapist (psychologist) to talk to about this. Working through shyness will be a long process, and having a smart caring person to coach you through it will be a big help. Therapists are people who are genuinely interested in helping people in this way, and they have been developing and honing the relevant set of skills. I'd say it's important to find someone who works well for you and your personality, so maybe it would help to talk to a few to see who you have the best rapport/connection with.

Can we declare this "startup scenester" thing to have officially jumped the shark now?

Exactly right, and a self-deprecating meek geek with bad posture who comes to realize that the world works this way can use this information to his advantage. First, observe that social skills can be learned the same way as anything else: by making empirical observations and performing experiments, and combining this with analysis and theory. More specifically: Actively seek out friends and opportunities for socialization and force a constant minimum level of social activity [empirical observations]. Push your boundaries and don't fear unfamiliar social situations [experiments]. Observe yourself in social situations and (dispassionately) note what you could have done better [analysis]. Read everything from pop psych self-help stuff (e.g. succeedsocially.com) to social psychology and evolutionary psychology (e.g. books and papers describing nonverbal communication and social signaling) [theory]. Learn to project confidence yet be your own worst critic. Be extremely aware of the breadth of your ignorance but don't be sheepish about what you have learned and done. Understand when to be a little hubristic and when to be a little deferential. These are things that we all do automatically to one degree or another, but we can all be more effective by actively observing ourselves and deliberately making adjustments. The downside is that getting better at these skills will necessarily involve a lot of fucking up, but the alternative is to just stay where you are without improving things.

Take http://www.flickr.com/photos/35034351734@N01/137275735/, subtract the black sweater and microphone, and you get what I call "canonical PG", in an orange polo shirt and khaki shorts.

A full-time job? Sounds more like punishment than a prize. Mental freedom is worth more than $150k/yr.

Or just use Vimperator (firefox addon), and get keyboard shortcuts for the whole web.

The OP understands that XMPP provides pub/sub message queues. He's asking what XMPP provides over the other MQs.

"stateful xml protocol" makes as much sense as "stateful ASCII protocol" or "stateful bits protocol".

I assume YC owns "Hacker News".

YC's partners are pg, rtm, tlb, and jl. I don't know whether they all have an equal share.

You just need to respect copyright. So if they explicitly allow you to scrape the data, or if you're operating within the "Fair Use" doctrine, then you're fine.

(IANAL)

The problem is that the versions of the non-macports Ruby/Python/etc aren't managed by the ports system. So you're in for weird dependency mismatches if you upgrade your system version of Python.

Self-contained keeps it simpler. Just use a script to set up your $PATH as needed.

When I started asking interesting questions. :)

Yeah, I saw him standing in line right next to Elvis.

Shock! horror! I might see a picture of a human!

"The only thing I can point to is that one great teacher we've all had (or I hope you've had). That one teacher who was able to just turn you on completely."

Yes, I had one of those! I absolutely LOVED going to her class every day. I didn't really learn much, but that's OK!

Those questions belong in a late-night dorm room discussion in between bong rips, not Hacker News...

You're doing a software startup, so your costs should be minimal. You should be able to cover these costs by consulting for a few months at the beginning, then living off of this cash. Just move in together in a cheap apartment, buy food in bulk, etc. It only takes a couple months of consulting to save up enough cash for a year.

John Baez has developed an index for quantitatively judging revolutionary discoveries in physics: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Doesn't look like Wolfram scores very high on Baez's index, although Wolfram does get the 50 point item.

A few years back I was toying with the idea of applying citation-based ranking to ranking webpages... sigh...

"has anyone seen anything written by Casnocha that's in any way remarkable? It it just the age thing?"

He is remarkably good at self-aggrandizement. Hm, wait, no... just remarkably persistent at self-aggrandizement.