determinant

I saw that you got some flack for this comment, but I think your comment is very insightful. If it were possible to construct a regression on start-up inputs vs success, I suspect average hours worked past 6 hours every single day would not account for much in explaining success. (The occasional crunch time is a necessity, of course.)

Working hard is definitely a must, but I think market timing, number of competitors, and other features have more of an impact on success than whether you put in another 4-5 hours a day. In some new markets, there are so few competitors or such a huge distance between the leader and the laggard that hours worked doesn't even matter.

In some cases, capturing mind-share does enough to get you further resources and that alone buys you luxuries that free you from 14 hour days.

Get a better chair, better shoes, and a better bed. More money doesn't necessarily get you a better model. I know there's a bunch of other suggestions on here for other things to do, but sometimes the solutions are really basic.

This was my frustration also. It surprises me that they haven't worked out an arrangement to either make that feature an upgrade or worked out a way to make financial arrangements with (I'm guessing) the people who have broadcast rights for a market.

I found your post really insightful so I went over to Dice and Craigslist to read through some of the job listings. I tried to read in-between the lines to figure out what kind of organization was behind the ad.

If it isn't asking for too much, I wonder if you could list a few job ads that would be the sort of thing worth applying for. You seem like someone who has experience sifting through non-sense.

A big problem is keeping people in school instead of letting them go work to support their families. Can technology solve this? Maybe. Perhaps when an ed-tech company wants to test the effectiveness of their product, maybe they could pay students in developing countries to test their products instead of dropping out of school. This might be cheaper than doing similar research in developed countries.

Education research could happen in developing nations instead of developed countries. If the alternative is no education or jobs that are dangerous, this approach might make a lot of sense.

It really depends.

In one case, I started with the back-end because I figured that, to make money with the product, I could coast with a minimal front end for quite some time. Then, in another project, I thought the front-end was the selling point so I went with a minimal back-end.

The core idea behind your concept is basically breaking risk-management apart. However, a good team should be on the same page with regard to risk management. So, wouldn't the player-end-refinment of sorts on this game just be teams who more or less have a uniform, systematic view of assessing risk?

I think you have an interesting idea, though.

Maybe it would be better for poker teams to transfer chips to each other in between hands as a two-player mechanic instead. If there is a tournament and both team members are seated at different tables, then the optimal strategy might be to allocate more chips to the table where both players think they have a larger edge. However, by moving chips to the other table, that becomes a signal to other players that would could cause them to shift gears.

I think there is something to your rough concept though, and it could be a lot of fun.

This looks cool. Is there more or a development web site for this?

I kind of view "failure" as just another folded hand in a game of Texas Hold'em. At some point, you might take down a pot to make up for past failures. You might not take down that pot and you might end up broke and penniless, but the outcomes don't really define whether or not you played the hand properly.

You always have to play your hand to the best of your abilities, even if you get dealt life's equivalent of 7-2 off-suit.

Past: A sundial

Now: a digital watch/alarm clock/iPad with time showing

Future: A robot (maybe with an iPad for a head)/terminator coming out of a portal.

I highly recommend the Acer Aspire S7. It is a pain to get Linux onto, but once you do get it on there, it's an absolute pleasure to work with in Ubuntu. The keyboard will take some getting used to. I have literally written tens of thousands of lines of code on this device and can't imagine using another laptop anymore.

To get the thing to run Linux properly, you have to disable some bios settings, create a software raid device, and play some games with a recovery CD to get the installation to boot properly. It took me a week to figure it out. I wish it weren't so painful, but the hardware is so light and thin that it was worth the pain.

Highly recommend!

The Raspberry Pi blog has some good projects to inspire you. I skim it routinely even when I'm not building anything, just because the people who make stuff are pretty creative and interesting themselves.

Whatever action you take will generally come back down the multicast feeds back to your own systems to process.

1) Totally normal 2) Big Nerd Ranch Guides are quick and painless 3) Go to the library for the books (old books for iOS 6 and better are good enough to learn from); use the simulator for code. Don't worry about getting it on the device first.

With iOS, ignore older tutorials and always start with the most recent stuff. If you find code that's from, say, pre-2013 even, you'll find non-ARC stuff, people going through all kinds of hoops, a resistance to use storyboards, and in some cases, you'll be solving problems Apple already solved.

I think there is some online Stanford course that is pretty good that'll take you 2-3 days to get through to not feel so "hello world."

Also, one last note: Don't read everything and then try to make something. It's painfully boring. Try to build something complicated right off the bat and read to make that happen. A lot of iOS stuff is painfully boring to read about, but crazy fun to rip apart and break in XCode.

I like Nate Silver's book, "The Signal and the Noise." If you read it, you shouldn't focus on the scenarios he describes specifically. You should try to take his mindset, walk away from the book, and try to decode the signal from the noise everywhere.

It's a helpful book, perhaps maybe even more so than your typical self-help book. I would have liked for such a book to have existed when I was a teenager.

You might have to be domain specific.

I feel like people are A-players when the environment around them lets them shine. To date, I have not found a single person who hasn't impressed me in some specific domain. Of course, sometimes it takes me longer to figure out what domain a person is an "A-Player" in.

It doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition with C# or C++ anymore if Windows is your target environment. You can write the portions you want to write in C# and mix it in with C++/CLI. Yeah, I know, a lot of people think C++/CLI is ugly, but in the .NET world, it is a very clean glue language if you can get past the strangeness of having two different type systems (native and managed.)

You can essentially choose and manage how you want to deal with memory by virtue of how you choose between native and managed types, as well as control the behavior of the garbage collector itself.

I am a midwesterner. What startup communities should I be looking at to observe what you have observed?

(This is a serious question.)

Well, the arguments in the thread so far aside, I thought the reminder that being determined was important.

When you're sitting around in a room at 3AM in the morning in front of the glow of a monitor slaving away on code with no paycheck in sight, random inspirational tidbits on the internet make a difference -- particularly from people on the side of success. Even with funding, sometimes those 3AM silent moments can be scary.