python123

How do you know your team is strong? What are your achievements? Strength is a relative thing.

I think you can found a company at any age. Just go do it. But you're not gonna create a game-changing company if you're past a certain. Old people simply aren't able to see the world correctly anymore. I have yet to see a single person over 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. I don't really feel bad for you older people. You had your shot - heck, you had the best chance ever with the dotcom boom. Completely talentless individuals were building garbage products and making big bucks. The bar is much higher now than it was back then.

Can someone post the actual text of the rejection letter. I'm curious what it says.

Can someone post the actual text of the rejection letter. I'm curious what it says.

Another one of these. And this one seems to be used by older people.

The only one of these that's really good is mylifeisaverage

"thi sis" is clearly a typo. "you're/your" may mean that the person wasn't smart enough to figure out what to use

Can you (or someone) explain what Tim Ferris' muse concept is?

Nobody cares enough about Google in China for there to be grassroots anything for it. They are the Yahoo of China. I know most Americans love to imagine that Chinese people are so horribly oppressed. It gives them comfort in the face of a rising economic power. There's lots of oppression going on, but internet censorship is grossly exaggerated by the American press.

Lots of YC applicants these days view YC as the starting step. If they get in, they will "do a startup". If they don't, they won't. They are really more in love with the idea of being part of the startup community than the idea of actually building a company. They're outsiders peering into the walls of Silicon Valley and thinking there's some magical formula for success waiting there for them. Of course, they won't tell YC this.

I can cut and paste just fine.

Why would you think that? The domains chatroulette and chatroulettemap don't seem to be related. The real site has is own nameservers and is registered out of the UK. The map is served by Dreamhost and is registered out of Colorado. The real site was created by a talented young person. The map site was probably created by a talentless old person (sorta like the HN demographic).

LOL. If Apple came out with some study claiming Safari was best or Mozilla came out with some study claiming Firefox was best or Google came out with some study claiming Chrome was best, you guys would be eating it up.

I'm pretty sure you people made up your minds the moment you saw the title and just decided to read to search for any validation of your presumptions.

Clearly your website stats paint a clearer picture of what's going on than the combined stats of many websites.

I pay thousands of dollars for tuition, and you don't. I earned my right to attend my school, and you didn't. I deserve access to my course material, and you don't. I would be so pissed if I went to MIT, and they just started giving things away like that.

LOL. I love this example. An absolute genius looks at his own work and thought process to conclude that one does not need to be a 'genius' in order to succeed in math. It's difficult for someone that brilliant to understand that while the things he does may seem ordinary, they are far beyond the reach of the vast majority of human beings.

And he's trying to convince the people who were only Putnam honorable mentions or whatever not to give up on math. This has nothing to do with people with a 120 IQ (I know IQ is a BS measure, but when people say 120 IQ, they mean someone who is above-average, but modestly so).

I wonder what Terry Tao's definition of genius is. Would he consider himself a genius? Everybody else would. But he might not.

@pw0ncakes

This just shows that IQ tests are garbage. Top level math contests are a much better indicator of your intelligence. I don't know what tests you're talking about because USAMO and Putnam don't have internationals.

And what mathematicians are you talking about? Take time to look them up because I can think of no examples of great mathematicians being "bad at proofs". That would mean they were bad at logic, which would mean they were bad at math. Being more famous for a conjecture doesn't mean you were bad at proofs. To even produce those conjecture requires deep understanding of the math leading to it. I can almost guarantee that there are no great mathematicians who would zero Putnam. I don't even zero Putnam, and there are plenty of people way better than me who still have no chance of becoming a great mathematician.

Do you realize how brilliant a mathematician has to be for you to even ever know his name?

Ummm..... wouldn't such a test be something like Putnam or IMO? As you said, those exact tests that let us distinguish at that level.

That only means IQ tests are utter bullcrap. I'm talking about real intelligence. Feynman was an extremely gifted mathematician from a very early age. He won lots of math awards and was even a Putnam Fellow. Those are far more legitimate tests of his intelligence than whatever garbage exam produced his 127. It's good you take a single example and try to generalize without looking at any other facts. Sure, most people with 120 IQs can win Putnam or go on to become great physicists.

Quit trying to suck up to the people on here. They are not talented people. This would be obvious to you if you had any talent at all. These people are mostly 30-some career software engineers who fantasize about becoming entrepreneurs and like thinking of themselves as hackers even though they lack the skills to justify that term. There's some good domain technical knowledge here, but very little actual intelligence. Just read any math links (everybody upvotes to look good, but nobody comments because they don't really understand - or they write really dumb comments).

If you can read Outliers and not understand the horrible science and generalizations behind it then you are an idiot. 120 IQ?? Are you kidding me? Maybe it makes you feel better because you only have a 120 IQ, but that precludes you from achieving anything meaningful in math and science. High IQ does not mean you will be a high achiever, but only those with exception IQ's are able to achieve in certain fields.

This is the problem with America. This is why America will lose to China in the next decades. We are trained to feel better about ourselves be devaluing those with superior intellect and ability.

The key takeaway is the bit about 'inspirational' books. It's very true that people use these types of 'resources' as another means to procrastinate. So many wantrepreneurs think if they just read a little more TechCrunch or Hacker News or watch another Mixergy video, they will have what they need. WRONG.

LOL that blog post certainly didn't do anything to dispel the notion that conservatives are less intelligent.

I actually think of it like this: being liberal doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent, but being more intelligent makes you increasingly likely to be liberal. This is why the student bodies at all the top colleges in the US are overwhelmingly liberal. No, it isn't because the teachers there are lefties; the students were that liberal the moment they stepped on campus and smart people are much less likely to be manipulated than dumb people. Once you reach a certain level of intelligence where you are able to process news from a variety of sources and interpret it critically, you easily see that moderate liberalism is right on almost all issues where there is some notion of an objective right or wrong. This is why top colleges can be over 90% democrats.

Now if you aren't intelligent enough to understand the world, you could become either liberal or conservative. It really just depends on where you grew up and your experiences. It's sort of like taking a multiple-choice test with two possible answers. If you are bright and can understand the material, you will choose the liberal answer the vast majority of the time. If you are not smart enough to do so, you have to guess at the answer. Half pick the correct liberal choice while the other half picks the incorrect conservative choice.

The only intelligent conservatives either are libertarians who have simply done the mental gymnastics necessary to conclude that other human beings do not matter or are people who have been severely indoctrinated into conservative teachings at a very early age.

"Rich Dad Poor Dad" - wow. Do you also make vision boards on Youtube and ask others if they know The Secret?

"The part of the answer on why I want to learn functional programming should be clear to almost everyone here"

It isn't clear to me. Why don't you explain why you want to learn functional programming?

This thread just confirms that HN are just wantrepreneurs. If you were a real entrepreneur, you would be running to pay for the education that Mixergy provides. This is an absolute bargain because learning from Mixergy will greatly enhance you chances at that dream exit. $25/month won't seem like much when you're the next Zuckerberg or Bezos or Gates. But it takes money to make money, and you're not going to become a great entrepreneur by avoiding resources like Mixergy.