michaelochurch

244 ms·

1501.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I go back and forth on name-and-shame with this one. I made that mistake at Google by exposing some mildly embarrassing information about the company, and it hurt me pretty bad in the long run. Admittedly, Google is a good company with some
1502.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
VC pitfalls have been covered several times over. Most of my knowledge of that world is through friends who've tried to raise. I was technically a co-founder in my first startup, but the CEO had raised before (~40M in the '90s) an
1503.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
VC sucks but I wouldn't recommend bootstrapping unless you're wealthy even by HN terms. (You're an angel investor in yourself.) I lost about $300k (opportunity cost) bootstrapping a startup over almost 3 years. I burned up ab
1504.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
No one dropped any fucking ball. The failings of society are deliberate. Housing bubble? Consumer credit replacing Fordist/Keynesian wage increases? Tuition catastrophe? Those "incompetents" who make health insurance innaviga
1505.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Equally terrible. The fact that most people, all else being equal, will prefer maximal reward for minimal sacrifice is hardly news. It's nature. When my cats hear a can open at 7:00 am, they rush out and start demanding food. They also
1506.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
This is terrible analysis. “Don’t let people get things from you if they aren’t willing to compensate you for it,” goes the thinking. What the fuck is wrong with that? Why should anyone give their all (in the workplace) to someone who doe
1507.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Mutable state is an optimization. Sometimes a powerful optimization with little loss of clarity, sometimes utterly ruinous to any hope of understanding the code. Usually it's between the two extremes. But I think the default should be
1508.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to bac
1509.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
The age discrimination culture (see here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th... ) is an artifact of a few bad-apple VCs with some really ugly intentions. It's there to put this
1510.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
That's the cruelty of age discrimination. By the time you're any good, opportunities start disappearing. (At 30, you're still quite hireable, but you do start losing options. Most of the options that disappear from 22 to 30 a
1511.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
If the housing prices are increasing, it would mean that demand is increasing. But if so many people are leaving, demand should be decreasing and prices should be soft. Housing has a few problems. One is that it's price inelastic. If
1512.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Many companies have a "manage or be managed" environment, in the sense that you're either on a narrowly-defined team doing drone work, or you're a boss man. The appeal of being a manager to an engineer is the ability to
1513.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I do not know why US education keeps getting more expensive. What's killing the middle class in the US is the Satanic Trinity: housing, healthcare, and tuition. Healthcare is an obvious need, usually bought in crisis. With housing an
1514.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Abstraction is the wrong word, I agree. It's more of an abstraction of experience. On a freeway at 75mph, you're actually traveling extremely fast by a natural standard, but the experience is designed to feel more like a brisk wal
1515.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I really despise the way HN is moderated-- there are childish vendettas, there's filtering of inconvenient truths to the VCs and the startup world-- but I never thought PG was sexist or racist. In fact, I hate the fact that, despite be
1516.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
"Growth hacking" is like an SUV: an attempt to take something stigmatized as effeminate (minivans) and masculinize it, to the point that it develops its own mancult.
1517.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
But, as a more generic category, the fundamental pillars of wealth seem to me to be health (including youth, energy, endurance), education (including work ethic, general knowledge, wisdom, self-knowledge) and intelligence. Health is extre
1518.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Driving scales horribly. That's its first problem. If there are a few cars on the road, it's safe at reasonable speeds. At congestion, it becomes unsafe, slow, and miserable. It's also a leaky abstraction. It's surprisin
1519.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I would support "perfect enforcement" if the laws were revised, at least with regard to highway speed. Residential zones should be lowered to 20-25 MPH with traffic calming (which is far more effective than posted speed limits)
1520.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
This is why I think the mid-risk / mid-growth segment (that VCs don't like, because their career needs demand being early in the next Facebook) is a better match for top talent. We can grow things at 30% per year reliably up to a
1521.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
I think this is why PG hits so many top posters (including myself) with rankban and slowban. PG gives us the story we want to believe: that highly intelligent people (I'm no PG fan, but the man wrote On Lisp ; he's fucking sharp)
1522.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Just relaying the response you will get from most practicing scientists who are not trained as programmers. Is it that hard of a gap to cross? I was a math major who took a couple CS courses, and wouldn't say I was "trained as a
1523.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
My reply, which had to wait because of childish moderation ("submitting too fast"): https://gist.github.com/michaelochurch/8339582
1524.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
What are your thoughts on Clojure's suitability as a go-to language for scientific computing (except in lower-level, high-performance scenarios that might recommend Julia)? I think it has serious potential in this field. It's not
1525.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an edu
1526.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.
1527.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
The old model of education is a cathedral, and DIY is the bazaar, and each approach has its weaknesses. MOOC is about as silly as "horseless carriage". The old model of education similar to a mathematical proof, with technical lem
1528.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about t
1529.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
You seem to have missed what I am saying completely.
1530.
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Networks equal access to jobs, funds, and deal flow, and the networks that run silicon valley are Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Google, HP, Ebay, Facebook, Apple, and PayPal. This is precisely why Silicon Valley is past peak. When it was becomi

More ›