haploid

I am assuming he lives in a Western nation, in which case a decision to forgo contraception, and a decision to not abort, is planning to have a child.

I think you may have missed the point of my question. The OP is wondering how he can maintain his productivity with a little sprog monopolizing his time/attention( he was more diplomatic than that, but that's the crux of the issue ).

I then asked why he didn't consider this possible impact on his livelihood( the productivity aspect )before deciding to have a kid.

So, to use your response as a template, I would rewrite with the following:

Let's say in 10 years he fails to get his company off the ground because 4+ hours per day that would have been previously available to him to work on his project were not, due to the presence of a child. The kid has to take out student loans, parents who have nothing to show for 10 years of stress - and if the OP had to, he could take a second job and spend what would be kid-hours with his work.

What does this even mean? Considering the 18+ year impact that a child would have on one's livelihood/career/business/passions is thinking long term.

Downvoted for downvoting a comment that merely strikes a personal, subjective pet peeve.

The comment added to the discussion, and the "protip" in question was a good point.

Last I checked, karma is to be given/taken due to quality of content, not whether or not it hurts your precious feelings.

Um. Why did you elect to have a child before considering the impact it would have on your livelihood?

I am primarily self taught( with some minor help from my father, when I was a child ). I don't work for any of the "cool" places you mentioned, but I do have a reasonably successful ecommerce business.

I did go to school, but I began programming tiny asm programs at ~8 years old out of my dad's 8086 book and my obsession with software expanded from there.

Central banking. Balance sheets have never been larger.

This is a question that usually resolves itself.

If your SO went into a relationship with someone who he/she knew was extremely passionate about building things, and they somehow expected this to "change", they are delusional, dishonest, or both.

Did you really want to spend the rest of your life with a delusional, dishonest, controlling individual anyway?

Yeah, didn't think so. In this event, you move on and find someone who doesn't try to hamstring your dreams and crush your soul. They do exist, and your life will be richer for it.

You're thinking 1999. Today it's different.

Now you have to have at least 10k twitter followers, at least 5k HN karma, posess at least one Arrington-stained blue dress, and win any number of other Silicon Valley popularity contests. It's all about "networking" nowadays.

Get with the times, man.

You're not the target audience of the article. It's referring more to the people who spend all day hanging out at the trendy SF cafes and going to all the "networking events", waiting around to catch the eye of anyone who works near Sand Hill Road, instead of actually getting shit done.

It sounds like you're getting shit done.

I'm guessing the initial downvotes are by anti-porn crusaders, and the subsequent downvotes are because you complained about being downvoted.

First of all, stop tailoring all your efforts to a single funding source. If you're going to invest the effort of putting together a pitch, make sure it is generic enough to be used on N other funding sources.

You have limited time to bring a product to market. I suggest spending this time developing the product and pursuing funding sources that have far less bubblicious attention than YC.

If you already have an engineering degree and you are numerate, then pick up Knuth and start reading. After that, Abelson/Sussman.

It is advisable that you do this before picking up "Learn Ruby/Erlang/Clojure/node.js In 13 Seconds" or whatever the latest shiny toy is that the startup groupie kids are fapping to this month.

Between Knuth and Abelson you will have a solid foundation that 90% of web app hackers lack, and will likely be capable of becoming good with whatever tool you choose to use.

Hahaha. Oh good ol' post-merger SoftLayer.

This is nothing new for them. They have a long history of violating their own TOS and shutting down customers, without warning, for arbitrary and capricious reasons, then blaming/citing someone else for "making" them do it.

See Wikileaks and SimpleCDN for the most visible examples; there are many more, though.

We left SL last year and couldn't be happier.

The motivation of pro-gun people generally falls into one of three categories:

1. Self/property protection 2. Fun/sport/hunting 3. Assertion of constitutional rights( and sometimes duty )

That said, this thread is in danger of political derailment.

You won't "come back and finish", or at least it's very unlikely. Your brain will never be more plastic than it is right now.

To echo the other comments here, what prevents you from working on your idea without dropping out? Is it the kind of project that requires 16 hour marathon hacking sessions every day for months on end?

This is interesting. We're located in OC, and with the exception of the many "startups" being incubated by entertainment giants like Comcast/E!, I'm not aware of any SoCal tech/web startups.

I will bookmark this.

I wasn't even aware that there was a SoCal tech scene. Must have missed the memo.

Beautiful. This is the correct answer. I'm sure well over half the developed world is currently "in a band".

My own anecdotal evidence shows no link at all between musicians and developers.

Good advice.

And after you're done with the chiropractor, check in with an acupuncturist, a touch therapist, a reflexologist, and a holistic bowel cleansing expert.

Do NOT do this until you've had your fortune told by a Tarot card reader, though! It's also advisable that you do not begin homeopathic treatment until Venus is aligned with Scorpio in transit to Pisces.

Depression is something that can only be cured if you detoxify your aura, so be sure to begin a daily pineapple-juice fasting regimen before emailing the undoubtedly medically qualified bpourriahi for the kind of life-saving diagnosis that Evil Corporate Big Medicine doesn't want you to know!

tl;dr: You are not a medical professional. Stop giving mystical new age quack advice to a person who could quite possibly have a real disorder.

We did this for our most recent front-end hire, actually.

We gave him a two-day project to complete for us, and compensated him with what we thought to be a fair stipend for his time. He completed the project, we hired him, he cleaned up the project, and we actually put it into production a week after his hiring date.

Everything worked out fine, and the developer in question is quite competent, sane, and rational.

I'm not sure what your point is. If the parent doesn't follow the VC-driven "get big really goddamned fast at all costs" model, he's not successful?

There's nothing wrong with growing a business steadily for 5 years. Speaking for myself, we've been doing it for 4, and somehow I don't feel like a miserable failure.

Too bad this site's domain name wasn't issued by the Iceland TLD registry.

Where's the insult? You mentioned that you are a journalism major, so I suggested a course of action that could parlay that into a startup job, which is exactly what you're asking about.

Excellent copywriters can make very good money, and can be integral to the success of any company. I don't see any way that this is somehow "insulting".

If you're hellbent on doing something from the tech side, then I offered advice on the foundational skills/knowledge you should start with.

Why did you go through the expense of marriage, to a woman you have to support, when you can't even support yourself?

This is not a troll, I genuinely don't understand why so many people make life choices like this.

At first, I was ready to tell you that the answer is definitely no, if you are a genuinely skilled developer.

But then I realized that you consider markup and stylesheets with some CRUD scaffolding to somehow be "coding".

So I will tell you this: You don't need a CS degree to be a fantastic developer. But you DO need a fundamental understanding of algorithms, data structures, and how to analyze them. You need to have a fundamental understanding of how computers operate, regardless of how many layers removed from the metal you will be focusing your work. This is not the kind of thing you're going to find in a Django or Rails book.

If you really think computer science is all about writing markup + CRUD declarations, you should focus your energy on journalism. That kind of a degree could easily get you a job at a startup, writing copy for sites, press releases, etc.

No, I meant duck-typed. A lot of languages popular with the HN ooh-new-shiney-language-of-the-month crowd use duck typing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing

Also, Java is not pure OOP in any real sense of the word. It still has primitives, and plenty of other reasons.

All I was saying that if you're accustomed to statically-typed languages with pointer/reference passing semantics and limited FP usage, the manner in which you think is likely to mesh better with Java. And in that sense, you'd probably be more productive out of the gate with it than with Ruby.

Or maybe not - learning about servlet containers and how Wicket overlays it, and Wicket's own component-oriented stateful approach could be fairly steep.

This is not an easy question to answer, and is almost entirely dependent on your experience and disposition.

This answer won't be popular here. If you're well-versed in C++, a jump to Java would be less of a cognitive leap than a jump to the dynamic / duck-typed languages that others have cited here.

Java has some excellent web frameworks. My personal favorite is Wicket, but there are many others.

I find that WHEN YOU gratuitously use CAPITAL letters in your HACKER NEWS posts, it radically lowers READING speed and annoys THE everloving shit OUT OF most people trying to parse WHAT THE hell you're trying to SAY.

That said, I agree that minimal variation of blood sugar levels tends to result in greater focus, though the route to getting there doesn't necessarily have to be through starvation.

Sure, but that clearly falls into the domain of personal choice. If you make the decision to raise a family, you presumably do this with awareness of the costs, consequences, and compromises that are likely to result.

You don't ask for cancer( although lifestyle choices do contribute ), but you do choose to say "I do", and either "Let's make a babby" or "Let's keep it", so this is not a material concern with regard to ethical consequences of availability of health insurance to startup founders.