maxawaytoolong

What Lustig doesn't mention is that sugar is what your brain runs on. Eating too much sugar is not good for actual marathons but it works great for coding marathons.

Sorry, I deleted my stories as I felt they were revealing too much personal information. My last job I was using Ruby and Java doing back-office data munging stuff for a financial firm.

What did you do before?

After thinking about it for a moment, I guess I'm totally wrong. Guys who built an awesome app in 24 hours, then improved it and raised $10M during brief moments of sobriety in between jam band benders... Those guys are superhuman.

Good job on meeting girls in PA. The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina. That may not be your "type" but it's better to broaden your range than hold out for what you think is your best match. It's not like in NYC where there's a match (or 10) for everyone.

Sadly, I think sometimes my posts come off as mean-spirited. I consider myself sort of a forum comedian who tries to throw some wisdom in while being entertaining. I wasn't trying to disparage GroupMe. I actually like and use their service! On the other hand, I also don't think anything I said is factually inaccurate!

I call bullshit on you as I know everyone involved. They are great, but can you deny the part about jam bands and a history of drunk tweets by their engineers? There's a whole website about "things X says when he's drunk" where X is the engineer I'm talking about.

If you don't think it's important to get laid, good on you, you've transcended to the next level of hacker zen. If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com.

As a New Yorker I am allowed to call bullshit, too.

If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.

NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.

Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.

The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid. There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.

(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)

I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.

That's pretty interesting. Do you have a cite? Android (the company) was essentially designed as something to sell to Google. I wonder if the guys at Android bypassed Schmidt because they knew he'd be a tougher sell.

Does Corona still compile the code on their servers?

Is game programming solving a problem?

There is a game to be made, and the problem is that it hasn't been programmed yet.

Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?

But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...

It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.

This is an odd request for Hacker News. Everyone here knows that the liberal arts are stupid. Focus. If you have time to take courses outside of the CS department you should be using that time to write unit tests for your homework assignments or think about how you can work in SEO optimization strategies into next semester.

The key to avoiding this is to stop thinking like a programmer, and start thinking like a sysadmin.

A programmer will automate some tedious repetitive task, and then boast about the automation to his programmer peers and managers. The programmer will then be rewarded with more tedious tasks to deal with.

A sysadmin automates a boring task, and tells nobody. The only way anyone can request work done is to file a ticket in the ticket tracker. The work gets done, but nobody besides the sysadmin knows how it was done. If the sysadmin is good at his job, he is rarely seen at his desk, and often seen playing foosball.

Wonder what changed?

They generally do a mediocre job at best, so their clients didn't renew their overpriced consulting contracts.

Actually there seem to be a good number of jobs in Pittsburgh, but I know nothing about the natural environs that way.

In California, if you work in Silicon Valley you can always live down in the Santa Cruz mountains. If you work in SF you can live in Marin. It is often faster to go from Marin to SOMA than it is to go from the Sunset or Richmond to SOMA. I can't say it's a quick commute from the SC mountains to anywhere, but the option is there. I know Apple has a shuttle bus from Santa Cruz to Cupertino, maybe other firms do, too.

NYC metro is not great for stargazing but I was surprised that there are nice places for hiking upstate, and in NJ and CT. Even Vermont and the Berkshires are accessible for weekend trips.

Why do you think that? I don't believe there is any legal precedent surrounding autonomous vehicles.

I've tried many things but nothing has helped more than turning off the internet.

I'm not Asian but my family changed their family name upon immigration. Nobody since has ever used any "traditional" first names, either. This is because the language of my ancestors uses a bunch of letters and sounds that don't exist in American English. I assumed that is the same reason Asians do it.

However, I have always been curious as to why Asian women have the names of white grandmas from the 1950s. The only Esthers I know are my great aunt and every other Korean-American I've ever met.

Kids aren't stupid and they are mischevious. Little kids in Brooklyn already mess around with older people by yelling "pedo" at them. I've seen more than one dark British comedy where this is a repeated joke. When adults get too neurotic about stuff kids end up using it against them.

Does it really make any difference? I grew up in an anachronistic small town and had at least 50% male teachers from 1st grade on up. I can't say I paid attention to any of my teachers, male or female. If anything, I thought the male teachers were much bigger idiots and losers than the female teachers. In no way did I view them as "role models."

To each his own. Personally, the birthday reminders are the only reason I use Facebook. Also, each year, every attractive woman I've met in the past 4 years wishes me happy birthday, which is a nice ego boost.

What is a concrete example of saying "you're welcome" where it leads to the oppression you're describing?

It certainly doesn't sound like good management practice!

Why not? I worked for silicon valley startups for 15 years and not once did I meet a "product manager" who did anything worthwhile.

Tradesmen provide their own tools if they are independently employed. If they are employed directly through a big firm, the firm often buys all their equipment for them, including a loaner truck and cell phone.

When I quit coffee completely for 6 months I felt completely unproductive and slow, so I started again.

That said, coffee culture has trended towards very potent coffee. I now feel like most drip coffee I get in a coffee shop is too strong, and an espresso is the only manageable dose. This is a weird reversal of the situation 15 years ago, where drip coffee was just dirty water, and an espresso is what kept people up all night.

Just to play devil's advocate...

I am not a moron, and I used to help hire at various startups. We'd always get one or two offers "we couldn't refuse" from engineers of our competitors. Whenever we gave them a second of interest, they'd waste hours and even days of our time. What they were really interested in was not engineering, but escaping their current workplace hell and wedging themselves into our startup as some sort of non-programming decision maker, for a (relatively) huge salary. But, we already had non-programming decision makers. We were trying to hire an engineer. We eventually just dismissed these guys outright, because in every experience they ended up being mildly crazy. Not the good mad-scientist hacker insanity, either... More of a desperate, annoying, stalker-ish insane. So maybe you came off as crazy.

The issue is really that the cities in the US don't have the right infrastructure. In NYC I don't remember ever having a mobile phone call that wasn't dropped. Calls generally don't drop in rural areas in the USA unless it's really, really rural.

Yeah, I would have skipped the startups and taken the job at Google.

I'm not sure there's as much to learn from failure as various self-help business books would suggest. When you remove the specifics all startup advice is trite at best and dangerous at worst.

I shipped things and worked on something every day from age 22 to 35 and was not successful. Silicon Valley is filled with people and the ghosts of people just like me.

OK!