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esw

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I'll just add that even if you are able to perform superhuman feats of parenting and coding simultaneously, you will eventually get burned out. I was able to handle both for quite some time, and I've now stretched myself so thin that I don't feel like I'm doing either thing particularly well.

The context seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Here's what I was responding to:

I have a brother that works in a pretty normal job earning $42,000 per year (not an outsized salary in the US), he pays $27 per month for his health insurance through his employer, and it's a nice plan. That isn't unusual in the US

My point is that most people in 'pretty normal jobs' pay considerably more for healthcare.

I spent the last decade living in a struggling city, and I was actively involved in city government. In my city, it was a case of limited resources more than anything else. There were something like 300 miles of roadway, but only enough money in the budget to pave three miles a year.

I'm self-taught, and I've been playing guitar for 25 years or so. If I hadn't picked it up as a teenager, I doubt I'd have gotten as far with it. I was obsessed with reproducing the sounds I heard on records, and it didn't feel frustrating at all to spend hours working on a riff until I got it exactly right.

Honestly, everything is more difficult when you have kids - showering every day, for example - but the flip side is that it's a total procrastination killer. There are no more wasted days, or lost hours. I work harder and more efficiently than I ever have in my life, and while I certainly get frustrated that I don't have as much time as I'd like, I don't resent my daughter in the least. I doubt you will either.

Agreed, and it's so subjective. I was a long-time Apple keyboard user (I had the flat chiclet board for years), and struggled with whether a mechanical keyboard would be too loud, or the extra key travel would bother me. I ordered a key/switch sampler, but even with that it's pretty hard to get a sense what they'll feel like on a board. I obsessed about keyboards for probably a month before breaking down and ordering a WASD with Cherry MX Blues. For what it's worth, I found that the loudness of these keyboards was wildly overstated, and I think you probably get used to whatever you've got after a few weeks of use anyway. I never really think about my keyboard until one of these threads pops up, which is funny considering how much mental energy I devoted to choosing one.

I sincerely hope that this post is an awful joke, because the way in which you're talking about your girlfriend is appalling. If this isn't a troll, then it sounds to me like your girlfriend agreed to be a part of your project because she loves you, not because she has some burning desire to [do whatever your startup does]. If that's the case, then no management technique is going to inspire her - she's doing it for you, not for the startup.

Great. Your website says, "Response times from our Support team are fastest from 9am-6pm ET, Monday thru Thursday. Support requests submitted outside those times may receive delayed responses." How is the "delayed responses" part handled? Do you rotate 'on call' people, and if so, what are those hours like?

3D printing reminds me so much of the early days of personal computing - it was an expensive hobby for techies, the equipment was hard to configure, and the everyday (practical) uses of the technology weren't immediately clear. But like personal computing, I have no doubt that 3D printing will become an essential part of our daily lives in the decades to come.

I absolutely love this:

Are Pinegrams really made from pine? They're actually made from domestic Maple plywood, but the MapleGram domain name was already taken so I had to settle for PineGram

Their site was up and running, receiving traffic for the duration.

Would you get your money back if you called up the cable company and said, hey sorry I didn't watch TV for the last 12 months, so I'd like my money back please. It is the same thing they are asking you to do.

I've had the same thought, and I wish there was an elegant and professional way to communicate that sentiment.

It's a month-to-month service, so they're asking for a refund on 12 billing cycles. The TOS is clear that there are no refunds for services rendered. I try to be as accommodating as possible, but this just seems absurd.

Ditch the free plan and make it a subscription service. Make it clear that some data can't be automatically extracted, and charge a per-page premium for manual extraction. If you don't want to do that work yourself, farm those jobs out to people on mechanical turk.