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I agree the This American Life stories were pretty good. They were based on a pro-publica story which has background statistics that make the picture more interesting:

http://www.propublica.org/article/ferguson-school-segregatio...

There was also recently this long article in the Tampa Bay times that I found at least as insightful, and with more perspective:

http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...

My concerns with this coverage is that they oversimplify the problems in their desire to find a solution (especially TAL). I'd also recommend the book 'Our Kids':

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Kids-American-Dream-Crisis/dp/1476...

Which is far more comprehensive but spectacularly depressing.

+1 for sincere thanks. bootstrap is one of many factors that had made a lean development approach so much easier.

Off topic, but I never knew that Dash existed. I frequently look up APIs through google, which always involves a few clicks, and Dash is going to make my life so much better! As I went down through the API list, I was amazed how many times I thought, 'adding that will save me some google searches'. I just bought a copy, thanks!

Super funny. You really nailed it. Awesome. Thanks!

Funny!

Yes, I think another way to think of the 'between-taker' idea is that an entrepreneur find ways to use existing resources in a new way that creates more value than those resources could previously create. Sometimes those resources are physical (machines, buildings, etc), but they can also be human beings.

I think it is reasonable for YC to have an investment theory that is something like 'productivity enhancements are making many talented human resources available more cheaply, a business that finds a way to use them could do well.'

But, I think the Uber example is a little unclear. It seems likely to me that driving is going to be automated away in 10-20 years. And, since so many adults drive (even those with other jobs), there is a massive incentive to find a way to automate that activity and make it safer.

I think there is a bit of a paradox - as the number of people employed in a task increases, the incentive to automate that task increases as well. I am not too optimistic that creating large numbers of long-term sustainable jobs is easy, but I think the attempt to find uses for undervalued resources makes as much sense for humans as it does for any other resource.

I really appreciate this poem. I have a two year old and a six month old, and I had no conception of how I committed I would feel to my children until I had them.

I actually took some risks and worked super hard in my mid-20s to mid-30s, prior to having kids. I am so glad I did it then.

Another way to read this post, if you are young, is as a warning - you may think it is scary or hard to take risks now, but go for it. When you have children, it will be much, much harder. Every minute you are working, you will feel torn that you aren't with your kids, and every minute you are with your kids, you will feel torn that you aren't working (to provide for them). If you can use your twenties to gain some financial freedom and control of your time, it is really worth it.

I went through a period of thinking that I had 'wasted' my 20s on hard work, while everyone else was partying/backpacking/skiing/whatever. I now realize that my 20s (and early 30s) were an investment for a vastly better reward - the time and financial freedom to be with my family in my late 30s/early 40s when my children are young. I couldn't be happier with the outcome of those choices, and I didn't really see it coming, because I did not understand the depth of feeling I would have for my children.

But for the young people out there in their 20s - your opportunity cost will never be lower. Go for it. Invest in yourself. Working until 10pm on something you care about won't always be without painful tradeoffs. Forgoing income to try to start something won't always be so easy.

Totally agree. I didn't get the success I thought I wanted in my 20s (some sort of tech mogul). I did get a different kind of success (small business ownership, flexible with direct customer relationships). Now that I have a family, I love the success I ended up with, but I would have been disappointed with it in my 20s. It is very hard to anticipate what you are really going to want.

I have no specific knowledge of airplane systems, but I wonder if the airplane's computers could have been hacked to produce the disappearance? It would explain why so much effort would go into the planning, with the plane then appearing to be dumped in the indian ocean. The hacker would not have been on the plane, and the indian ocean is deep enough to make recovery and diagnosis of the hack difficult. It might explain how such a precisely timed sequence of events occurred.

I wonder if someone on HN has an understanding of what kind of safeguards go in to preventing a fly-by-wire system from being compromised. Presumably systems like communication, cabin pressure, navigation, etc are separated. Perhaps some of them are not software-based, and thus could not be compromised (but maybe their power could?)

It seems really unlikely, but so do most other theories.

For what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. He was very knowledgable about Quark's code.

During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen.

There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant.

I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines.

InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster.

I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation.

I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.

I agree with the analysis above, with one addition: a big reason to pay yourself more at any owners only profitable small business is to max out a contribution to a 'individual 401k', sep-ira, or similar. The rules vary, but if your 'salary' is in the $250k ballpark, you can contribute up to $51k in additional money to a tax deferred retirement plan. Just like a 401k, it grows tax free.

Most SS taxes are capped just above $100k, and if you own a tech company it's pretty hard to argue you salary should be below that, so the SS angle is limited. But tax free compounding on $51k/yr is a significant benefit.

I also found the book 'Selfish reasons to have more kids' interesting on this topic. It uses twin studies to suggest that although parenting does have an effect in the short term, in the long term genetic factors are dominant as long as the child is raised outside abject poverty.

The conclusion of the book is: provide a healthy environment, but don't agonize over violin lessons and other 'enriching' activities.

That said, I went and bought another book with advice on how to talk to your child to stimulate language development ('look who's talking') and we read to him a lot. So, I believe the twin studies in theory, but not in practice.

Finally, on this general topic, 'how children succeed' points out that character traits like grit (willingness to keep trying something hard and unpleasant) and conscientiousness (desire to do the right thing) are more important than intellect in success, beyond some modest intellect baseline. I suspect my son is plenty smart, but what really interests me is trying to foster grit and conscientiousness.

I recently read Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses. RM built most major highways and parks in NY state, and effectively became an absolute ruler in his domain. For 40 years he exercised near total control. It made me understand the political process completely different way.

For RM, the 'broken' differencing format was a feature, not a bug. It allowed him to slip though all kinds of law changes without people understanding what he was up to. The book has many, many examples of exactly this differencing format being put to use to gain power.

The point about the differencing format is more broadly true - prior to reading the book, I thought politics was about having the right ideas, and explaining them clearly. But the book compellingly argues that politics is really about obtaining and wielding power. The people who thrive in politics are more interested in power than ideas.

It is a book that is well worth reading, especially if you are an idealistic programmer (like I was) who cannot understand why we can't just 'clean politics up.' (Also, Caro's LBJ biography is awesome, with similar themes.)

I mostly agree with this. I have owned three mac pros. I use them for development work. I like them because they are fast, well-built, run OS X (which I like), I can put lots of RAM in them, and put a few extra hard drives in with software RAID.

There isn't much about this announcement that excites me. I don't think I need two graphics cards (though maybe 4K will be nicer than I realize). I don't need it to be smaller and I don't really care what it looks like, as long as it is well built. But:

* I have had really good experiences with past mac pros, and poor experiences with hardware from other vendors, so I am reluctant to switch.

* The cost differential of a mac pro vs. an imac is not that great, relative to the cost of development time, so I am likely to give the mac pro the benefit of the doubt. If the benchmarks show it is significantly faster, I will probably just go with it.

I do wonder who is excited about this machine. I think another commenter is right - it is the video editors and high end graphics types this machine is truly built for.

If you are interested in this story, here is an interesting podcast from an economist studying this issue:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/autor_on_disabi.htm...

Wow, beautifully executed! Quite an achievement. Looking forward to trying it out.

From my perspective, this comment has some truth, but is a little off also.

When I was single, I found the Epstein article compelling. Then, I met the right woman, and I realized the article missed the point. If a woman you love feels good because you got her a diamond ring, then the diamond has served its purpose (to communicate that you listened to what she wanted, and got it, and that she is important). I listened to my wife, I got her a diamond ring she liked, and she has fond memories of our engagement.

My sister wanted a ring that didn't have diamonds. My brother-in-law wisely listened, got her one without diamonds, and she was happy.

If you got a great marriage out of it, and your wife has fond memories of getting engaged, then nothing about the ring really matters. If you can overpay a few thousand dollars for a ring, and get a great marriage in return, you just made the best trade of your life. What matters is that you listen to what your fiance wants, and got her something that communicates your attentiveness to her.

Whether the ring has real financial value, or diamonds are a marketing invention, is entirely irrelevant.

I had a very similar attitude to yours about 6 years ago. I sympathize with your frustration. Although I am not denying that it may be harder for you to find someone, I think your current attitude/self-perspective is not helpful to you.

I highly recommend this book, in absolute seriousness:

<http://www.amazon.com/Self-Esteem-Cognitive-Techniques-Asses...;

It was a real revelation to me. Don't dismiss it as psychobabble-nonsense just yet, buy it for a friday night when you are dateless, then honestly consider what it has to say. If nothing else, it will make you happier while you continue to have limited success dating. Also, when you find a woman who will look past the height thing, you want to be in a healthy place to actually make the relationship work from there.

For what its worth, I married to a truly wonderful, brilliant and amazing woman a few years ago. The person I was before reading that book would not have gotten past the first date with her, and certainly wouldn't have been a good partner in a relationship.

I did not read the full post, but the basic gist reminds me of the book 'How to sell at margins higher than your competitors.' I wasted a lot of time in my early 20's reading business advice books, but that book is well worth the time. It transformed my perspective on prices, what customers you want, and how to sell. Although it was written for salespeople in commodity markets (think lumber supply), it transformed my small software company. I highly recommend it.

I really like the sentiment of the post, and the quotes. It's easy to waste time on things that are not important when starting a business.

However, from a bootstrapping perspective, I think it is useful to look at the value of your time in a different way. If you are thinking about leaving a job that pays $100K at big company X to bootstrap something, you might think of your opportunity cost as $100K. But a lot of that $100K will go to taxes, so when you quit your job you really only loose $60K. What's more, you might spend more on living expenses with your big company job (vacations, etc), that you would give up while bootstrapping but not really miss. So, maybe you are really giving up something like $30K/year in true lost value.

I quit my big company job about 9 years ago to bootstrap a very small company. It has worked out well, and proved quite profitable by whatever measure of opportunity cost you'd like to use. But because when I quit, my taxes went to zero and my expenses went way down, I found that the actual cost to me of forgoing income for a period was much lower than I had imagined.

Couldn't agree more with everything said here. I have had a very similar experience.

The only thing I'd add (more in relation to the comments above) - I think people are too quick to discourage a direct sales model for bootstrap B2B companies with products in the $1K to $5K range. If each sale generates long-term recurring revenue, if you can visit several customers per city, and if initial sales tend to lead to word-of-mouth sales later, direct sales can be a great way to get started.

You can do it on the cheap compared to a big-time enterprise salesperson. Its an investment. You learn a lot, you build relationships, and you begin to develop the momentum that the comment above discusses.

I've been programming since the early 90's. I went through three stages of excitement:

A. Hardware/OS/experience. At first, I was excited by the experience of working with computers. When I got access to a special computer lab in college that had Suns with big monitors, I used to go there and program just to use the computers. I loved the excitement of learning new commands, playing with different desktop managers, mastering various editors. All of it was in service of programming, but it was fun on its own.

B. As that stage faded, I was excited by specific technologies (Java! XML! Whatever!). During this phase, I would write something in one language, or using one technology, and then get excited about re-writing it in a different language or using a different technology.

C. The final, and most lasting, phase for me was getting excited about the problems I work on. Now, the hardware and the technologies have become tools for me, but the problems are infinitely interesting. What excites me most is working on problems that I believe matter.

Of course, I sometimes go back to stage B (MongoDB! AWS!) or maybe even stage A (general purpose GPU programming!), but mostly its stage C that keeps me passionate.

Awesome and delightful!

About 8 years ago I quit my job at a great company to start a business. I had no idea what I was doing. About 2 years later, my co-founder had quit, I had not seen a drop of income from the business, I had burned through a good chunk of savings, and I felt like a failure. I was living in a studio apartment in san francisco, using my closet as an office (the desk fit in there, but I didn't when seated at it). I was so upset about the whole thing that I would wake up in the morning at 5AM, be nauseous, then be so miserable that I would go back to sleep. There was a 3-4 year period where I was working so hard, and then so ashamed, that I turned away dates because I didn't want to answer the 'what do you do' question. It was definitely the lowest point of my life.

I decided to apply to law school, and I had just missed the cycle, so it was going to be another year before I got a response. I kept working on the business because I couldn't think of anything else to do. In the next year, the business improved enough that I decided not to go to law school. It kept getting better and better. About 3.5 years in, I stopped telling people it was a failure. The truth was that by that time, it was a very good deal and I could no longer deny it.

My point is not that you should keep doing what you are doing (or that you should apply to law school). Its just that bad times get better. I think the number one thing you can do for yourself is keep moving forward. It doesn't have to be big, just a small step each day in a positive direction. One great thing you can do, in my opinion, is work out. Even if you are unemployed for the next year, at least you will be fit and trim at the end of it. You can jog for free.

Mostly, I wanted to communicate that things will get better, just keep moving forward...

In my view, GWT is for creating large/robust web-based applications, and that is where machine-level optimizations really pay off. If you are writing a tiny utility on a page, hand coded javascript might pay off, but if you are writing a large/complex application, it becomes impractical for a human to do what a optimizer can.

I am not saying that GWT is perfect for everything, but it pains me to think of writing (and debugging, and refactoring) a large application in javascript, or any weakly typed language. I've tried it, and found it difficult to maintain.

I am also disappointed, but in a different way that most commenters. I don't mind java syntax, and I prefer strongly-typed languages. My concern is that Dart seems to give up a lot vs. gwt, and not add much.

That is, with gwt you get

- strongly typed java syntax

- it abstracts away browser differences, and supports many browsers

- it lets you run mostly the same code on client and server, and gives you access to lots of java libraries on the server

With dart, it seems you get a weaker java syntax, and you lose access to all the existing java libraries on the server. You also seem to get a new interpreted server side environment. Maybe that will be better/faster than the JVM, but that is not obvious to me.

Overall, I agree with a commenter above who said that they should have defined a general VM for web browsers, similar to the JVM, but simpler/faster/more appropriate. Then, all kinds of languages could be cross compiled into it, while you could use the language natively on the server.

I think their original memo got many of the problems right - javascript has become a limiting factor in advancing web development - but I think the solution lies in a more general VM approach.