tastybites

Thanks for explaining America, captain obvious. I said "What's funny" because it's supposed to be a joke.

What's funny is most of the people in Indiana ... are German.

I've been here for years, they kept deadbanning my original accounts because I say things people disagree with. I imagine it'll happen again fairly soon.

By the way, your average karma is kind of low, you might want to try bringing that up. You've had over a year with this account!

Is Vanity Fair really the best place to air this kind of grievance against wealth and decadence?

This kind is logic might work with coca cola stock but it certainly doesn't with apple. How do you measure the roi of a Mac Pro?

So what if they call you lazy? Are you going to stop getting invited to the parties they are too busy studying to go to?

You can get any of the sauces they put in the burgers on the side to dip your fries into also.

On a related note, I recently at at 5 guys and it was 2x as expensive and about 1/2 as good as in-n-out. Anyone who says it's better is absolutely nuts. They expanded too fast.

Continue running my company, probably.

Cognitive dissonance of realizing a lowly engineer (you know, something those immigrants do) can make more than an attorney. Apparently he wasn't paying attention during the last 20 years.

I hear people whine about their VPS hosting costs at the same time as enjoying $100 of booze and cheese at the bar.

I swear half of the web is just re-implementing stuff like IRC and finger and ytalk that have been around for nearly a quarter century.

Wish I had realized this 10 years ago.

They do, but camouflage themselves as private equity firms.

Even small-scale stuff that nobody writes articles about like putting a personal guarantee on a 2-year commercial office lease or a line of credit qualifies as sacrifice and is actually quite risky.

I'd offer a small edit on the premise and say that it isn't necessarily a willingness to be poor, but a willingness to go broke for your convictions that is important. Being poor/impoverished is a mindset, being broke is a temporary condition.

Somewhat tangentially related is the derivatives trader mindset which I have been reading about recently.

Do you have an e-mail address? I think we can help you out - I run a managed hosting company and would like to offer you some help as a member of the HN community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nixon_visit_to_China

Glad they chose 'pipe' over 'hose'.

I would also add - sometimes a smart person just doesn't give a damn about impressing others.

When I deliberately dis-engage in uninteresting conversations with "smart people" I can see them judging me immediately. Sometimes I just don't want to faux-argue over inconsequential bullshit. The older you get the better you get at letting your ego go in these kinds of meaningless contests.

They generally remember to shower every so often

Oh, come on.

So people are voluntarily buying and putting tracking devices on their wrists to update Mark Zuckerberg with their location in real time?

Somebody should make one for pictures of corporate stock art. You know, the glass skyscraper shot, the white-guy-wearing-glasses-standing-over-laptop, the empty board room with leather chairs, etc...

Those people aren't creating a startup in a weekend, they're creating a web app in the weekend. There's a big difference.

Web apps don't need legal structure, a brand identity, customers, revenues, profits, hell they don't even need a name.

A private office is very different than working from home, I'm not sure why that's the same option.

In school (UC system) I met people who are now doctors, CPAs, attorneys, investment bankers, top engineers, scientists, and various PhD candidates. I also learned that their parents are a variety of very accomplished and impressive people. To say that knowing these people is valuable would be an understatement since I am now a small business person and having professionals you can truly trust (as good as it's going to get anyway) is incredibly important. It factors into confidence and decision making in business.

For me, personally, I would not have met these people if I had not gone to school. I would have been sitting in a cubicle programming computers for the next 4 years, severely handicapping my social and professional life. I also probably would not have learned the basics of Econonomics, something that fascinates me almost as much as technology. I also didn't spend much time doing schoolwork, but I certainly didn't get A's like some others here. I actually was on academic probation twice and spend most of my time socializing.

Not sure that really matters. They offer a service, it was down, there was a shitty response. This is an indictment of the response to the downtime, not the fact that downtime occurred. Downtime occurs in every computer system.

the right niche

It doesn't even have to be a niche. If you provide basic infrastructure stuff (email, hosting, IT, whatever) there's billions to be made on business customers.

It really just comes down to marketing and sales prowess and the know-how to deliver stuff for less than the big players.

The way to make the pain stop

No, the way to make the pain stop (and when I say pain, I mean hours and hours of downtime) is to work with a real managed hosting vendor that cares about your servers and your business, and to move your mission critical software off of commodity shared servers where it will get lost in a sea of customers, none of whom have an account executive, a sales representative, or assigned engineers who understands your stack from top to bottom.

Cloud services are great for some things like elastic computing power and rapid prototyping, but having my business' front door hosted on a service where I can't even call someone up in case of trouble seems like absolute craziness. I mean, how would you even implement a disaster recovery/business continuity solution when all the damn servers are in one building?

Sometimes I forget that there's entire armies of geeks that do crazy complex things other than compyooterz.

HTML/CSS is a standard - you can't tell what generated it because it's all the same, unless it sucks.

URL structure will give you clues sometimes.

Not that I'd know, but it must be a lot of fun lurking in the shadows/periphery with a bunch of mysterious money.

It's the hedge fund vs. web startup mentality :)

A nice place to live, a nice car, and frequent restaurant meals. Easily done once you escape the gripping fear going broke and never making money ever again (irrational).