pjlegato

69 ms·

691.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Satisfying mortgage/kid constraints actually works better if planned and executed in light of the truth of the situation; the lack of stasis. Skipping the philosophy leads to pleasant fantasies and irrational decisionmaking and plannin
692.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Leaving people with severe mental illnesses who cannot take care of themselves in any sense to rot on the streets and fend for themselves is far more sordid (and has a far longer history.)
693.
by pjlegato 11y ago
There is no need for scare quotes around "the problem." When people regularly walk up to you on the street and start ranting obscenities at you for no particular reason, that is a problem, full stop, no scare quotes. Source: it ha
694.
by pjlegato 11y ago
According to the article, the City of San Francisco spends $242 million annually to do just that, and the City of New York spends over $1 billion to do just that. It's not that nobody wants to. Apparently the ways they are trying to ta
695.
by pjlegato 11y ago
I've talked to a lot of homeless people in SF, often involuntarily. Anecdotally, roughly half seem to have severe mental problems and/or severe drug and alcohol problems (these often overlap.)
696.
by pjlegato 11y ago
What San Francisco needs is a free, high quality, in-patient psychiatric hospital. No, I am not talking about a stereotypical 1960s Nurse Ratchett type dungeon psych ward. I am talking about a modern and caring facility where homeless peopl
697.
by pjlegato 11y ago
It's still anecdotal, unless those 384 people were chosen in a statistically rigorous way from the total population.
698.
by pjlegato 11y ago
I think the fact that we are posting this on a thread about how freelance web designers have had increasing difficulty finding work over the past few years is evidence to the contrary. It's no longer just the very bottom of the market
699.
by pjlegato 11y ago
That's true. Most businesses still need their own website. But now they build it in Squarespace, talk to their customers on Twitter, and send physical goods with Fulfillment by Amazon.
700.
by pjlegato 11y ago
40% of ecommerce spending is a staggeringly high percentage. There are very few large industries where a single player controls 40% of the market. For comparison, Wal-Mart, the largest US brick and mortar retailer, has about 11% market sh
701.
by pjlegato 11y ago
I didn't make the original statement. Someone else wrote the grandparent post.
702.
by pjlegato 11y ago
> I'm simply writing about my experience of what I'm hearing ... That is the definition of "anecdotal."
703.
by pjlegato 11y ago
They can't make a living because Wix, Squarespace, Facebook pages, and Amazon shops are now considered "good enough" by most of the middle market (small and medium businesses), so there is not much need now for custom work in
704.
by pjlegato 11y ago
It's already happened. Whether we want it or not is now beside the point. Sure, there will always be a few specialist sites, but the vast majority of commerce and interaction for most people has long since moved to Amazon and Facebook.
705.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good enough,&q
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PostgreSQL Cheat Sheet [pdf](databaselabs.io)
3 points by pjlegato 11y ago|0 comments
707.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Bear in mind that this advice is for companies in YC that are trying to raise a VC round. The failure rate in tech startups is so high that VCs are mostly only interested in investing in the potential to have an outsized Thielian-monopoly r
708.
by pjlegato 11y ago
It's not a prerequisite for success. It's a prerequisite for raising an insane VC round. Plenty of profitable businesses take a different path and don't try to be a Thielian monopoly. That's fine, it's not invalid a
709.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Startups aren't (and have never been) about the hacker ethos of doing things just because they're intrinsically cool and interesting. There is a small bit of overlap (as in a Venn diagram) between the spheres of "doing things
710.
by pjlegato 11y ago
What would I propose to do about what?
711.
by pjlegato 11y ago
The parent comment proposes that Nazis as such are not the actual problem, that Nazis are merely an extreme case of typical in-group/out-group behavior, and that "21st century intellectuals" need to avoid all the badness of N
712.
by pjlegato 11y ago
It is neither vacuous nor illogical to point out the inherent internal contradiction in someone's proposal for how society ought to act. It only adds to the discussion to show that what seems on the surface like a nice idea is actually
713.
by pjlegato 11y ago
What you propose is inherently paradoxical and irrational. You say people (or intellectuals, at least) should make a conscious effort to avoid the psychology and biases of in-group/out-grouping. But what you are proposing is simply the
714.
by pjlegato 11y ago
More typically, the company has the "right of first refusal" -- when a stockholder has an outside offer, they are first required to let the company buy their stock back at the price that the outsider is offering before selling to
715.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Yes, though in San Francisco it isn't, because the cost of living is so insanely high.
716.
by pjlegato 11y ago
I'm not sure what you are calling for here. The YC interview process is a merit-based system. It doesn't matter who you are, where you went to school, or what family connections you have. It's an open application available
717.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Cash is by no means "very uncommon" in Europe. It's used for 82% of payments in Germany, for example. - http://qz.com/262595/why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everyth... - http://www.swissinfo.c
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by pjlegato 11y ago
Yep, this. I <3 Clojure! Lein is one of the simplest and sanest build tools I've ever used.
719.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Reasons why I stopped coding in Java: Set up 15 Eclipse plugins, download 23 jars, and then configure 57 XML files in order to write 'Hello, world'.
720.
by pjlegato 11y ago
Yes, that's the point. Most households in the US have what you call serious money issues, and cannot easily save 10k on a 51k income. They need almost all of that money for living expenses. When they do save up some money, it's an

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