run4_too

Regardless, I agree 100% with this comment of yours. I can't extend the rational to not supporting contraceptives, however. To me it doesn't connect.

Allowing a young couple to increase their earnings/career potential by delaying childbirth directly relates to making the smart investment over the long term, as you relate. I should know, as I've done this myself. My children are much better off now and in the long term with a solid roof over their heads and two loving parents in a committed marriage than they ever would have been with a 20 year old father who was in the army and dating a woman that really wasn't good for him at all.

Your intentions don't seem to connect with the methods you are suggesting; I don't see any issue with your intentions however.

Although I'm a father of two, I look around me and I see that we could probably benefit more as a society if fewer people didn't bow to that pressure to procreate. Most people that choose not to have children are doing so for very good reasons (whether it is "not now" or "never").

Perhaps you are influenced by an immediate circle that shares a rather harsh view of children, but I can tell you that from my experiences, there is rather little bias in our society against the next generation directly - I will allow that we do a lot of things that indirectly cause harm to our children, and theirs.

You and I are both a result of chance. To the level that your grandparents decided to have sex at 7PM instead of 7AM, and that your grandmother didn't shift to the right afterwards, allowing a different sperm to be "the fastest".

Is our existence a denial of the person that would have been created had the other fact occurred? That's a rather strange position to take.

Conversely, suggesting contraception is squandering our human capital is not much different than suggesting abstinence is. Is a young married couple that chooses to have sex with a condom different from a couple that chooses not to have sex at all?

Perhaps I'm not properly understanding your point though.

What you are doing is providing example to buttress op's point as being correct. Best to leave that attitude on reddit.

This belittles your argument in a way nobody else could even approach.

When someone asks you why you have come to a conclusion, they are looking to understand you. That is automatically counter to your assertion that there "is no chance for a fair debate".

More people disagreeing with you than agreeing with you is not the measurement of the validity of your opinion. There are many things that I believe that I know are unpopular but I still believe them, and if you ask me why, I will give you my reasoning.

Basically stating that you have no reason (or do but refuse to share it) is something that is bound to be ridiculed, and deservedly so, since it doesn't demonstrate a thought process at all.

I encourage you to share your reasons, so that we may understand your point of view better.

That answers your question, really.

However, what YC presents is a series of preferences and options that everyone knows appeal much more to a certain personality and - in this case - stage of life, than others. Jumping across a country to live in temporary stasis for three months (or whatever) isn't something a 45 year old woman with two kids and a career is likely to do. It's something a lot of 20 something college kids will consider though. Are they targeting college kids with that stance? Not particularly. Does their offering appeal to one demographic much more than another? Most certainly.

Overall though it's irrelevant, as I said. YC can target or not target as they choose.

The bigger point is that it's pretty hard for that 45 year old woman to gain traction in the tech world right now, and there could be an opportunity cost there that may be pretty large, considering how the demographics of entrepreneurs spread out over other industries.

You could do pretty much the same thing with a law degree and earn a ton more.

YC targets the young male college student demographic, partly because that demographic shares the different components that you two are arguing about. This isn't really relevant though.

If they were targeting suburban boomers that vote republican, it's silly to point out that some of their investments are actually women that voted democrat.

cookiecaper's point is that the effect of targeting a particular founder profile means that there are a lot of other high potential founders that are under served by the "Aquire Funding, Kill Yourself, Profit!" model. I would tend to agree with that, particularly when you see that across the spectrum, most businesses are started by people that are 40+ and have over 10 years of experience in an industry.

YC was started particularly because the "college dropout" demographic was under served. Now, at least when it comes to tech, they have become the norm and the "career switcher" has all but been ignored.

I don't think YC needs to address this in any way, but as a tech community I think we're missing an opportunity by not tapping in to what has traditionally been the strongest segment of new entrepreneurs.

Don't knock rote mathematics. 'Busy Work' in most other fields is called 'practice'. And like all things, practice is the key to improving a skill. Repetition, memorization and muscle memory are all key fundamentals.

If your son wants to be a quarterback, you practice throwing a football. Over and over again with slight variations to the angle, distance and speed. A meaningless procession of skill building that builds the muscle memory and "know how" required to be successful at the more complex task of managing a game and leading an offence, which is what a quarterback really does. You can't be good at throwing to a receiver on a button hook or on a screen play if you are still mastering how to manipulate the speed and position of the ball as it leaves your hand.

We would laugh in the face of anyone that suggests otherwise.

Your brain is no different. It needs practice in the basics before it can progress to more advanced topics. You need to spell before you can write a story, and you need to know addition and multiplication before you can perform calculus. The basics for math need to be implanted in your brain for immediate retrieval, so that your processing power can focus on the higher level task.

It's not enough just to know that "there" can be spelled three different ways. To be a good writer, you need to know instantly which one to use when, otherwise you just simply aren't very efficient. Likewise, a person needs to know instantly that 8 and 64 have a distinct factor/product relationship to be able to understand that a rectangular floor with an 8 foot length, 3 foot width and total area of 64 square feet cannot possibly exist and has been measured incorrectly before you proceed to buy all that carpet.

The most skilled in any field have the greatest mastery of the basics. Mathematics is no exception.

I'm sure some of them will do well, but personally I'm interested in companies at the least tackling the "frighteningly ambitious" ideas pg has written about, even if those alone seem far to insular.

Home automation, robotics, Medicine, 3D printing, renewable energy, etc, etc. That's what I want to "watch". I couldn't care less about the next t-shirt maker.

Define "disparagement".

If anything ever goes to court, from case law it seems to be all based on whether or not an action is "disparaging". So, define what constitutes disparagement in advance, and if that is acceptable to you, go ahead and sign.

Personally, I'd sign nothing for 2 weeks pay, and then make sure everyone knows that was the offered severance. Seems disparaging enough to me. ;)

Nobody is going to color code repeating paragraphs in CSS on every project. You wouldn't use that javascript on every project either. (Perhaps these days you would I guess, but I'd argue its overkill for basic websites, to be honest) I can guarantee you're farting around with the box model though, and odds are you could be using a framework to do it for you. Which is precisely why I'd want to test it.

In the absence of definitive evidence, recommendations must rely on professional judgment. No data suggest that sugar intake per se is advantageous, and some data suggest it may be detrimental. The studies above, taken in total, indicate that high sugar intake should be avoided. Sugar has no nutritional value other than to provide calories. To improve the overall nutrient density of the diet and to help reduce the intake of excess calories, individuals should be sure foods high in added sugar are not displacing foods with essential nutrients or increasing calorie intake.

Can you point me to something substantial that suggests I should not consider the above accurate? I appreciate that evidence in support of the Lustig claims may not be complete, but evidence against them seems non existent. Why should I ignore what seems obvious?

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/106/4/523.full

Admittedly, This isn't my area of expertise. However that's a 30 second google search compared to your "people I know say he's a buffoon" argument.

Given you are an anonymous voice in the inter-webs who may not even know how to get to UCSF, I'm pretty comfortable with my current assessment.

I can certainly be convinced otherwise, but "my buddies think he's a kook" is not exactly doing it for me.

(I'm confused ~ downvotes? There is absolutely nothing beyond ad homenem provided against me by dekhn, and yet I'm downvoted? Am I missing something here?)

Robert H. Lustig, MD

Nationality: American

Education: MIT, Cornell University Medical College

Medical career

Profession: clinical medical practice, teaching and research

Field: neuroendocrinology, pediatric endocrinology

Institutions: University of California, San Francisco, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital

Specialism: childhood obesity

Research: biochemical, neural, hormonal and genetic influences contributing to obesity

I don't know too much about him, but I'm curious as to whether or not any of his detractors have similar specialties. On the surface, most of the data would seem to agree with Dr. Lustig.

"If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it."

Seriously though, if you have to contact a salesperson, it's likely that the product is a "reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product" type of service. Ergo, if that isn't appealing to you, you aren't the target market, and therefore a waste of time to them. This assumes a "smart" approach as nostromo mentions, of course.

I'll add the caveat that I see several "idiot" approaches to this simply because the "talk to our sales rep" approach is the default in many industries, particularly B2B. You can often hear it expressed as "If we publish our prices, our competitors will know them too!". In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all.

There isn't a 'right' approach, but it depends entirely on the product being sold and the target market whose needs are being addressed.

1) Check your internet connection. 2) Check if the website is broadcasting (assuming you control it).

99% of all instances of this issue solved right there. :-)

Fizzbuzz for websites would be to have someone code two paragraphs side by side with a header and footer in CSS.

Your view is hampered by your ignorance of the definition of the word value.

If people are making money (i.e. selling a product or service for a profit) they are by definition creating value by default.

The fact that you may not find what they are doing valuable is as irrelevant to the equation as the fact that I don't like broccoli.

I think most people consider growth of their investments and savings "valuable".

>And even those in the value-creating category often attribute much of their wealth to right-place, right-time luck rather than an unusually high ability to create value

Irrelevant. Point is that the value has been created and thus so has their wealth.

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Are you aware of just how valuable this piece of software is? While I commend you for open sourcing it and giving it to us to use, a part of me feels that you are undercutting yourself.

Let me highlight a problem for pretty much every company (that is larger than a few people) in existence: The information needed by administration and accounting teams to register a new client is never properly collected by sales teams, so you have haphazard implementations and processes and all sorts of weird and wonderful ways of making sure the various business specific answers to questions are delivered to the people that need them to be.

You've created a solution to that problem. The upside of it is, well, HUGE.

I'll simply thank you for giving me that solution to run with, and hopefully I'll be able to do so within my space. Personally I don't think you should have done what you did if you were to look at it selfishly; you didn't though and for that you should be commended I think.