warrenmar

You can build your own spectrometer following directions from Public Lab. Their goal is to develop open-source tools for citizen science.

http://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometer

You can download The Bootstrapper Bible by Seth Godin for free. It's "Free for 2 weeks only through December 30th!"

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/bootstrap.pdf‎

If you haven't gotten into an incubator, you should think about bootstrapping as long as you can until you find your product market fit. If you burn investor's money before you find a fire that can grow, you will be forced to quit.

You can reduce jet-lag by eating at certain times. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5879/1074.abstract The Science magazine page has a link to the podcast.

Getting an email from a recruiter is a whole lot different than getting a job offer.

I thought the title was misleading enough to warrant a comment. It makes it seem like the Helium-4 isotope is exotic. Losing Helium-4 to the atmosphere is an acceptable research cost. Losing Helium-3 is not.

Norvig teaches a Design of Computer Programs course on Udacity, which helps you think about solving problems.

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs212

Reminds me a bit of coffee meets bagel except instead of a single match, you get a batch. I wonder how facebook fatigue affects conversion. There probably isn't another way to find 2nd degree friends besides facebook login, or is there?

How are you going to hire your first 10 employees?

There's also the Google SEO Stater Guide https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

In the early days of linux I had trouble getting things to work with other distros. Slackware just works. I also learned more, because you are closer to the configuration files.

I would try taking classes on Udacity and Coursera first. If you really want to do something, you'll make the time.

Bars are a horrible place to pick up women/men. Better off doing something you like and meeting people while you're enjoying yourself.

Hmmm... Jeremy Lin or Andrew Luck.

When someone can run Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer, someone will become very rich and the world will change.

Although I think quantum encryption will become common place before someone builds quantum computer with enough qubits to factor large numbers.

Well, if I were the company, I would use that information to automatically reject applicants who submitted your solution. Makes it easier for the company to filter down the applicant pool. I think there are only a finite amount of questions you can use for technical screens and eventually all the solutions to those problems will be posted. There has to be a better way for companies to interview potential applicants. Sounds like a good business opportunity since they are wasting engineering time with these type of technical screens.

I don't think this will be a problem. Apple sells more laptops than desktops. People are more likely to replace their laptops and the Apple ecosystem forces you to upgrade since they drop support.

My mid 2009 MBP died a few weeks ago and I bought a Retina to replace it. My battery life was pretty nonexistent. It feels wonderful to have a battery again. I do a bit of CUDA programming, so having the bigger graphics card is nice. Also having a SSD instead of a hard drive is great. I don't have to worry about shaking my laptop when I use it in bed. I was really reluctant to spend the money since I was waiting for the next Intel chip revision in June. There will always be a better laptop in the future.

I haven't had any problem with not having a DVD drive. I did buy a Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter though.

I am happy with my purchase, but it really hurt the wallet.

I would also recommend the Coursera course on Machine Learning by Andrew Ng and Probabilistic Graphical Models by Daphne Koller. I would also go over some basics probability and statistics review. Maybe some linear algebra too. Python is a great language to do data analysis in. I recommend the scikit-learn and pandas packages and using ipython notebooks. Another book is the Elements of Statistical Learning (http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/). There are also Kaggle contests for testing your chops.

There's also the case of asking for N years of experience where the technology has been around for N-1 years.

I would do whatever I can to reduce the risks of it failing. You first need to identify the things that could keep you from succeeding and eliminate those obstacles. With an app, the most risk is probably product market risk. There's probably very little technology risk. You need to build something that people want. The only way to do that is to show it to people and see if they want it. If you're waiting in line for something, you can show your app to people around you. Watching people use your app also helps a lot with iterating. You have some concept of how your apps works, but other people may not. Also marketing to a specific target niche to gain traction. A good book for this is Crossing The Chasm.

There are so many incubators now. The only way this can scale is that there needs to be an incubator for incubators. This will bring the complexity closer to O(log n) rather than O(n).

There's a phd comic on this. There's no freedom after tenure either. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1436

There are Kaggle contest if you want to get into data. You can also search for social hackathons if you want to do some good for the world. You can go outside and talk to people, listen to their problems and use your programming skills to solve them. You can build tools to solve your pain points. You can try to take classes on Udacity and Cousera to see if you get any inspiration for projects. Maybe make some contributions to opens source projects. Games don't have to be beautiful, look at Minecraft. There are a lot of tutorials online about making 3D models, illustrator, etc. You only get better at things by doing them.