rick_perez

Well, there is a penny difference in the title. A holiday discount?

I feel like this is actually a disservice to intelligent women in tech.

Instead of basing it on talent, many of these companies just want a token woman to virtue signal to the rest of the valley that they are diverse.

Talent is all that really matters, regardless of your race or gender.

Update: Heh. It figures that fighting for equality would get a down vote.

It's usually 'or equivalent'. I got around this by working on a couple of open source projects and explaining it to my future employer.

A problem with this is that government intervention/subsidies competes directly with local businesses and farmers and they won't be able to compete.

This will lead to a situation where once you start giving them food, you won't be able to stop or it will devastate the economy and people will starve.

It's better to give local businesses and farmers the tools and knowledge to grow the food instead. This way, they won't be completely dependent on another nation for survival.

Many of these poor countries have governments that rule with an iron fist and make it nearly impossible for anyone to thrive. This problem needs to be fixed first, or all of our other ideas will only end up hurting them in the long run.

I've been following Patrick since the old BoS days. He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper.

If any of his companies were making him a good enough living, I don't think he would have gotten a day job at Stripe.

"when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer"

I've been running my own company for almost 5 years after 5 years of side-projects and failures. To actually go from a project to a successful company, you need to do lots of boring work that has nothing to do with technology or development. Most of it is a slog, but is still required. You can eventually outsource this and hire other people, but this will take some time.

You will lose your fire at some point, but you still need to push through this. I've tried to partner with many different friends over the years on different business ideas and ventures. They all failed at some point because my partner (usually another developer) would get bored when things got tough or they had to work on something other than a cool library.

If you can't get through this, it's probably better to stick to working a job.

The other problem with Patrick is that everything he builds is from a developer perspective. Starfighter was a cool concept, but much too complicated for most people (from the business side of things. You need to spend time and money with tutorials attempting to convince business owners why this new concept is better than what they are currently using).

I was a full time employee, then consultant, and now I run my own company.

Working and consulting limits your money making abilities to yourself. I have the potential to make much more running my own company (and I do).

"It's just hard to keep the motivation up when there's a steady flow of interesting projects from clients which have immediate, guaranteed revenue attached to them."

There is, for now. But this will change. It always does. I don't look forward to the roller coaster ride of finding that next consulting client or dealing with ridiculously difficult ones.

This also changes as you get older and have a family (many consulting gigs require traveling to work onsite or for important meetings). Consultants are also usually cut first at any big company, if you have long-term gigs.

The other difference is the type of work you want to do. I enjoy the challenge of starting a business from scratch and wearing many hats (including many non-technical roles).

I don't think I could ever go back to consulting.

Free access to everything is great, but you can't also complain that you have no jobs left when those companies can't pay people to actually do the research anymore.

Most of the information that Aaron was 'freeing' cost lots of money in research and development.

A true hero would create an organization that spent their own money on research and development and then give out the results for free. This takes real sacrifice.

Most of the people that propose that everything needs to be free are talking about the hard work of other people and freeing it against their will.

This is not my definition of a hero or even someone we should admire.

The no-fly list doesn't get any of the same attention. People are put on the no-fly list today, have their rights taken away, and have little to no recourse if they are innocent and no formal appeals process.

I also seriously doubt it's going to be based on religion, which can easily be faked. It will be based on country of origin, which we have had to some extent for decades (especially those countries with defunct governments where passports and identification can easily be counterfeited).

Many Trump speeches were taken out of context, butchered, and converted into easy sound bites that misconstrued what he was actually saying. This is some of the fake news that Facebook claims it is attempting to curb. I just wish the rest of the industry would follow suit.

This doesn't give me any confidence that this will be used to actually combat fake news and not as a tool to suppress opposing political views.

During the election, I saw so many 'fact checkers' used by the mainstream media that were laughably biased or outright wrong.

"I don’t accept payment by check or Western Union and I don’t accept returns."

If you sell me a broken phone, it gets broken in the mail because you didn't package it correctly, or any other thing that can happen between the time you send it out and when I receive it, you should refund my money or accept my return.

I buy hundreds of thousands of products per month for my business on Ebay and Amazon and many people outright lie about the products they are trying to sell me. A good return policy is a must.

My theory is that it's one of the only reasons Amazon and Ebay became the kings of the online marketplace. I've tried to purchase from the other sites and because there are barely any protections in place for buyers, I always go back.

It may lead to innovation, but it also leads to a landscape where large businesses destroy smaller startups before they even have a chance to succeed.

This used to be my favorite Christmas movie. One year, I fell asleep during one of those 24 hour marathons they have every year on TBS (not sure if they still do this). I forgot to turn the TV off and kept waking up during different parts of the movie.

I haven't been able to watch it since.

Many people have gotten fired by saying something politically incorrect on Twitter or Facebook. When free speech is called into question, the standard response is that it's not protected because a company is not the government and can do as they please.

This is the other side of it. Based on this same thinking, a company can also fire you if they don't think your marijuana usage looks good for their image.

This is exactly why we still need the copyright system in the US.

I find this part of the main problem with the recent US election. You only want political discussions when you agree with it. No matter how civil a person is, it's considered 'uncivil' when it's against San Francisco politics.

When this happens, many people are forced to get their news from the sites deemed 'fake'. The mass banning of opposing viewpoints (which has been happening for a couple of years now) has pushed more people towards these sites and may have actually won Trump the election. If you want to change it, stop silencing all opposing views.

The problem is that politics is in every part of our lives. If you ban politics and religion, people still get political and religious about other things. It's part of human nature (GNU VS BSD), (VI VS Emacs).

I think it's more complicated than grades, IQ, or test scores. I know plenty of people that had mediocre or terrible grades, but had many successes in life.

How do you define success? ability to support yourself? Retire at 40? support children?

It also has to do with: drug/alcohol addiction/consumption, personal choices and life decisions (If you have children before you are married/can support them, you will most likely), and if you actually graduate from high school (grades reflect this, but you are pretty much destined to low-paying wages/jobs with no high school diploma in the US).

Do you have any savings? If you don't have at least a year of savings in the bank, it's better to just go the traditional route and look for a job.