Great work! Can't wait to try it :)
108 karma · joined September 14, 2012
Email: vivian@beastpets.com Twitter: @beastpets
So if you're an older guy, having kids with a younger woman doesn't make this problem go away.
This topic hits home so this may end up a long post -- you don't have to read it by any means :) Instead go read Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, it's much more eloquent and compelling than anything I have to say, and he tells a great story about how hard he tried to stay in college though he could not afford the tuition.
I thought I'd share my experience in hopes it would help give some perspective. First, I would never advise anyone to entirely drop out of school, but I totally get how you're feeling because I took two years away from college to explore and pursue a business idea. I grew up in Silicon Valley (or more accurately, I grew up with Silicon Valley) in an environment where your peers expected you to stay on a straight, almost preordained path to an acclaimed university and then a big tech- or science-related company. And should you stray from that path, it had better be to start a tech company with immediately obviously benefits that everyone understood and praised, or else you'd better prepare to be scorned. Even in SV, the word "startup" doesn't always connote glamor, most often people's views of success and fearless entrepreneurship are in hindsight.
I was tired of the social pressure and looking for different problems to tackle so I left school temporarily and went as far away from SV as possible -- I went all the way to a mountain village in China to oversee a teeny-tiny clothing factory -- not the type of "startup" my SV peers would have been proud of. But I always knew I'd come home to SV and I was determined to finish my degree. I took distance learning classes online so I could earn credits for transferring into a good business program. "Distance learning" from a mountainous village in China in meant hooking up a very slow, very unstable dial-up connection (it was a miracle they even had a modem and Internet service at all) at work and doing some random micro-Econ coursework while dozens of sewing machines whirled around me, and praying that the power wouldn't go out suddenly. Sometimes it meant taking final exams at 4am because of the time difference.
That experience was both vastly frustrating and great fun, but it would not have been complete if I hadn't gone back to college. I enjoyed being able to hack out my own curriculum, but those online classes would not have mattered if I didn't turn them into a real degree. I got the credits I needed and successfully transferred into the undergrad business program of my choice. After being away for two years, I had become used to being without many resources, and now there were tons of university programs and people who wanted to know all about what I've been doing and help me take those ideas further. The graduate school had entrepreneurship competition and I even got to pitch my ideas on reforming manufacturing processes in the fashion/clothing industry to some VCs. One thing's for sure-- I would've had a hard time coming by those opportunities to drive my ideas even further had I not gone back to finish my degree. I still had to take quite a few pointless classes but those didn't matter compared to everything else the university offered. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's useful and what isn't till further down the road.
In the case your college sucks, now's a good time to check out some SV schools since you're already coming out here for your FB internship. You don't have to quit school to explore your ideas.
Hope this bit of insight helps and good luck with everything!
Coincidentally a few days ago I was just writing about how Imagineers pioneered UX design. And speaking of Google Glass, the Haunted Mansion at Disney World was updated last year with augmented reality effects so that the hitch hiking ghosts in the mirrors now interact with the visitors (like swapping their heads) -- http://www.wdwmagic.com/attractions/haunted-mansion/news/05a...
Have you been? How was it?
No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.
I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.
I heard that Beijing's trying to phase out the Cantonese language in Hong Kong. Has it been enforced?
This year's unusual because 7 major members of the Politburo Standing Committee are stepping down and their replacements will be selected at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This is the reason the dueling political factions are aggressively ousting eachother, or else stories about corruption would never have made it to major media outlets.
The Congress was originally scheduled to commence November 4th (or sometime just before the US presidential elections) but was suddenly changed to November 8th. I don't think there's been official commentary on the last minute date change, but it's pretty obvious the Chinese party leaders want to know who's going to be the next US president first so they could "adjust" the makeup of of the Chinese political body accordingly.
I'm impressed by Bloomberg's and NYT's coverage. There's so much stuff that gets suppressed, even when tidbits of stories go viral on Weibo, the entire story almost never makes it over to this side of the Atlantic in one piece.
I live in Silicon Valley so everyone here is either going YC crazy right now, or absolutely clueless. It would be awesome to get feedback from someone objective but experienced.
I apologize if this wasn't the right place to ask, but with 4 YC alums in the same thread I had to give it a shot!
Thank you in advance.
I think it's easy to be dismissive when the topic of discussion has little to do with our own lifestyles, at least not on the surface. Old people on Greek isles and fountains of youth are light-years away from stuff that concerns your typically young and techie HN reader. (I'm generalizing, you guys can attack me if you must.) So it would seem that the only intelligent commentary one can make on such a subject is to question the author's scientific approach and to take apart his analysis -- how else could a 20-something programmer/entrepreneur partake in this discussion, right?
But dig a little deeper and you'll find some interesting parallels that maybe most HN readers can relate to and think about. A couple of things that the author and his interviewees said jumped out at me: (1) developing an ecosystem that fosters healthful and satisfactory lifestyles, and (2) adapting work schedules so you can work into the night even when you don’t feel productive during the day.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? A bit like startup culture? Ok, nobody wants their employees hanging out and milking goats all day (unless that’s your industry) and Silicon Valley will never be as stress-free and laidback as Ikaria (I doubt we would want it to be) but the article does inspire some ideas about what makes people tick and what makes people happy -- and those people could be your employees and your users.
That lucky office you mentioned apparently casts it's glow on its surroundings as well. La Boulange opened a new cafe next door, and 1-2 weeks later announced that Starbucks had bought out the entire bakery chain for $100 million. (I'm sure they had already struck the deal, but the lucky locale makes for a better story!)
Too bad about Instagram for Squirrels. I would've been one of their 5 users.
Btw, has anyone used 123D Catch (or any 123D software)? From what I gleaned from Autodesk's TOS, you inevitably end up granting them a irrevocable license to use your 3D models however they please. Perhaps that's why 123D remains a "hobbyist" software suite. I still haven't heard of anyone who uses it professionally.
Now that I think about it, the guy from Breaking Bad could be the perfect poster-boy (poster-man?) for what happens when middle-aged dudes don't have safety nets for starting legal businesses!
But the concept of creating safety nets to encourage more entrepreneurship strikes me as paradoxical. To an extent, the inherent risks that come with starting a new business is a good thing -- it forces would-be-entrepreneurs to assess critically what they would gain or lose before taking the plunge. The inextricable dependency on company health insurance, however, should not have to play a role in that risk assessment.
Maybe I'm just being picky over semantics, but instead of creating a "wide safety net for failure," which to me sounds like something that encourages poor business judgment, I would be in favor of reducing the extrinsic risks of starting a new business (e.g. insurance) so entrepreneurs could focus on the risks relevant to the business itself. But like I said, I might be nitpicking over choice of words, so forgive me.
Knowing there's a risk of failure isn't so bad -- it makes me try really hard at, well, not failing.
It seems obvious, but I understand what Dorsey's getting at. I've struggled with finding appropriately specific identifiers, and when in doubt just lumped everyone together as "users."
Context matters. Square happens to be one of those paid services whose categories of "users" are pretty easy to identify and name. Like you guys mentioned in your comments, redefining specific terms for "users" of free services and search engines isn't quite as simple. I would suggest "freeloaders" or "browsers" but that would take us in the wrong direction :)
I'm content being labeled a "user" for now.