earlyresort

The author's intentions are not remotely obvious. It just as easily could be an anti-Semitic double entendre referring to both the kik situation and Jews, and I'm still not at all certain HN isn't being deliberately trolled with this submission.

Determining how I respond to ethnic slurs against me or my people really isn't up to you, either.

Yeah, I'm thinking you don't have to live with 4chan and Twitter tolerating and increasingly normalizing anonymous bigots calling your ethnic group, which has been the target of genocide before, the equivalent of a nigger.

Do you have any idea how telling me to 'smile a little' about this comes across?

Perhaps my background makes me a little more attuned to this particular word, but 'kike' practically leapt off the page to me.

In English, words ending in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant double the consonant before adding '-ed' to form the past tense. That's the grammatical rule.

I still can't tell if this project is by someone with bad grammar or some 4chan-bred bigot trying to make a double entendre, but either way, it's fucking obnoxious to see it on the front page of Hacker News.

Well, you should start by stopping reading Hacker News, because it's clearly not good for you in your current mental state. I promise, you won't miss anything important.

Next, take some of your time and go volunteer somewhere - go tutor a child or teach someone to read or feed the homeless or whatever else you like, just go help someone out. You're now accomplishing something way more important than interning with some 'top company' somewhere. Congratulations, your existence is now justified.

Finally, now that you're doing something worthwhile for humanity and you're not tormenting yourself by wallowing in everyone's self-promotional bloviating, you can happily focus on learning new things, gradually improving your own skills, and figuring out how to make a big dent in the universe on your own personal schedule, which is different from everybody else's.

Hey, I spent my entire twenties fucking up left and right - whatever you end up doing, I guarantee you're way ahead of me.

Hard drugs are one of those things that have different consequences for different types of people.

An intelligent, wealthy, employable person can dabble with them, have a good time, and usually get away with it. Should they get addicted and screw up their lives, they can usually get help and bounce back without permanent consequences.

People who're a little less well-off intellectually and economically aren't so resilient. Should they get addicted to hard drugs and screw up their lives, they usually don't bounce back from it - their lives are ruined forever.

Since HN is full of intelligent, wealthy, employable people, the comments on this thread don't surprise me a bit. And yes, I agree that drug policy in the United States could stand to be reformed a little. But when evaluating the harm a person's actions can cause to society, I wish people would think a little more about not just themselves, but that vast chunk of society that's not lucky enough to not be as privileged as we are.

It's actually surprisingly easy to get a 'good' reference to give honest feedback about your shortcomings as well as your strengths. This has worked about 90% of the time for me:

Me: So, how would you rate this candidate on a scale of 1-10?

Reference: Oh, around a 9.

Me: A 9? That's great! Tell me, why not a 10?

Reference: [... here's what you actually listen to here ...]

Sometimes it goes this way:

Me: So, how would you rate this candidate on a scale of 1-10?

Reference: Absolutely a 10, no doubt about it.

Me: Outstanding! But seriously, there's got to be something he's not perfect at...

Reference: [... again, the truth generally emerges here ...]

Once people have given you what they feel is a good reference, like a high score out of 10, they're generally fine with talking frankly.

In addition, if the role's really important, you don't stop with just the references they gave you - you note them and then you continue digging, especially if there's people they really should have given as a reference but didn't.

Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating. Cheesy title, great book.

Living in another country is way, way different from going on a vacation in another country. You're removed from the tourist infrastructure that caters to foreigners and you've got to deal with all of the country's bureaucratic procedures and regulations (even simple things like renting an apartment vary ridiculously from country to country). The same places that are fascinating and fun for foreigners to visit are often stressful and annoying for foreigners to live in. Not speaking the native language makes this all the more stressful and bringing people with you that speak your language makes it a lot less likely you'll learn the native language well.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but there's a reason packing off to a completely different country and successfully 'going native' is usually done by single people right out of college who haven't yet experienced a lot of success in their own country. Yes, plenty of older, more-established people do migrate for economic or political reasons, but they usually end up living in ethnic and linguistic enclaves.

My advice? Pick another country that uses English as their primary language, so you don't have that stress going for you, and pick one that's economically developed, so you don't have that stress going for you. You'll still have to adapt to the local bureaucracy, but at least you'll have a fighting chance to understand it. Many English-speaking countries use a points-based system for immigration that favors skilled workers, so you'll also have a much better chance of getting permanent residency.

If the author thinks 'the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents' is the reason people are against conspiracies, he's got no understanding of the issue at all.

Some of us object to conspiracy-mongering because we know people are only human, and have a limited capacity for outrage and action - there's only so much we can do beyond taking care of our families. At the same time, we know that plenty of objectionable things that deserve our attention are happening every day - things that are known and acknowledged to be happening, things that may be perfectly legal and constitutional but are nonetheless repugnant.

When the public's attention is drawn to an entertaining and sexy conspiracy theory, something that might have happened but very very probably didn't, the public's attention is no longer focused on the absolutely-100%-objectionable things taking place every day. That's why conspiracy-mongering is a net loss for society, and why I'll happily crack tinfoil hat jokes at the author's expense - it's not because I think the government's a big group of lovable folks, it's because all that time we're collectively spending writing the script for a future episode of Ancient Aliens could be so much better spent.

About a decade ago, I left a humanities Ph.D. program at Stanford after finishing the coursework, but before starting the dissertation. In my experience, my classmates thought very hard about what they wanted to do with their lives, and were very aware of the career risk involved - if not when they entered the Ph.D. program, certainly by a couple years in. (Hanging out in the graduate lounge with the eighth-year Ph.D. students will do that to you.)

However, most of my classmates were so intensely interested in researching their specialities that they decided the risk was worth taking. After all, it's not like they're particularly suffering during grad school. Grad school in the humanities gives you blissful amounts of time to really geek out in the speciality of your choice, and at top-flight universities, the first few years are free (except for the opportunity cost.) If you get in, your basic expenses and tuition are covered.

Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn. Odd, no? What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure. If their community was as understanding of their own failures as ours is of our own, perhaps there wouldn't be such drama about their low rate of success.

The United States has a federal government for a reason. The government is constructed in such a way that the majority doesn't get whatever it wants, if that majority isn't broadly representative of America as a whole.

In particular, the Electoral College ensures presidential candidates must appeal to a wide variety of people, from across multiple regions of America - instead of just focusing on running up the totals in large cities, which is what would happen if the Electoral College didn't exist. In the last election both political parties had to pay attention to the entirety of the electorate, from every county, in states as diverse as Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Nevada.

You could do America a favor by calling your state representatives and telling them what a goofy idea this is.

The Arab world is already awash in antisemitic propaganda. This Twitter account isn't going to move the needle there.

No, this account is aimed at Americans. It shares short, simple, true messages: Hamas is a terrorist organization, Hamas launches hundreds of rockets into Israel, Israel is defending itself, and Israel is rather good at defending itself. The messages are designed to be shared with friends, in order to combat anti-Israeli attitudes. If you look at the IDF's blog (http://www.idfblog.com/), they've even added some game mechanics to the mix with their 'IDF Ranks'.

Personally, I think it's brilliant.

I'll agree that the current federal government is a bit of an aberration compared to past Liberal and Conservative governments, but playing up differences from the Americans to justify political policies (good or bad - I suppose that depends on your personal politics) has been a big part of Canadian political life since Trudeau's first term in the late '60s.

Whether Canada is actually all that different from America or whether 'different from America' is just used as a cynical political tool is another question.

Yep, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.

A few decent regulations around underwriting mortgages, and most Canadians will conflate that into 'the banking industry shouldn't be touched' -- even though there's only six banks and they charge more in fees than American banks. (Which is saying a lot.)

And god forbid anyone say anything against the CMHC, which is a secretive time-bomb more leveraged than Fannie Mae ever was. Canada might have better underwriting rules for mortgages, but the mortgages themselves are 100% guaranteed by the Canadian taxpayer - for all we know, our housing crisis might still be ahead of us.

But hey, at least it's not America!

On a team of lions, the donkey is lunch.

There's nothing wrong with quitting a Ph.D. program. To me, it looks like you're bright and intellectually curious, but you've got enough sense to ignore sunk costs, which is a valuable skill to have in a startup.

Some places might ask for grad school grades - Google, I'm guessing, they're strange about that sort of thing - but in my experience this is pretty damn rare, especially when the grades are of questionable relevancy. Never happened to me. If it did, I'd just laugh. My grade in Old Church Slavonic simply isn't relevant.

I quit a Ph.D. in History and got my consolation MA when I left. In my experience, most people don't think 'oh, he dropped out of a Ph.D. program' (although I've never hid that), they think 'wow, he got a MA from Stanford!' Not taking the MA would've been silly - now, with some work experience, it doesn't matter, but when starting out it was really valuable.

People are always too afraid to air dirty laundry in public, because it might get them blackballed -- "you'll never raise money in this town again!", "you'll never get a job at a VC-backed firm", "we'll never do a deal with you again!", etc.

I can only think of one case off the top of my head where all the nasty details were revealed and all the names were named - the mid-2000s lawsuit by the epinions founders against Benchmark and August Capital, for similar 'let's wipe out the common' hijinks.

When the lawsuit became public, there was a ton of talk about how the lawsuit would ruin their careers, and they would never raise money again. But Naval Ravikant, one of the plaintiffs, seems to have done just fine. Mike Speiser, another one of the plaintiffs, also did pretty well for himself. Don't know what happened to the rest, but I'd be willing to bet they're still quite comfortably in startup land.

The consequences of naming names aren't as dire as you think they are. For the love of pete, if someone really shouldn't be funding entrepreneurs, tell us who it is.

'The Narrow Road', the Felix Dennis book that's quoted from, is a condensation of his earlier 'How To Get Rich' (not 'How To Make Money', that's identical to 'The Narrow Road'.) I found the longer version equally valuable and vastly more entertaining.

While Felix is worth reading - a 'get rich' book from some who actually built a business and got rich! - he comes from the publishing world and his advice is very different from the practice of most technology startups.

For example, he advises never giving away any equity in your company, ever, and includes the story of how, early on in his publishing career, he fired all of his senior staff because they asked him for a small cut of the equity pie.

The VC controls (and always controlled) the outcome for your company. I can't say I understand his behavior - blocking an acquisition but also refusing to participate in a future round makes both liquidity and fundraising impossible. Perhaps he plans to drive the company to the brink and then do a down round.

The only leverage you have over him is the damage his behavior, if public, could do to his reputation - since VCs live and die by their dealflow. If the deal was still on the table, I would've politely discussed his future exposure - 'if this behavior keeps up and the deal doesn't happen, you are not going to look good in the post-mortem I'll be posting to Hacker News'. Quality VCs know that their reputation depends on keeping entrepreneurs happy.

Now that the deal's dead, you might as well leave - but you'd be doing a disservice to the rest of us to not reveal who this guy is. If you can't do it in public (perhaps you're worried about raising money again from someone else - which, sadly, is probably valid), at a minimum you should be describing the whole story over at The Funded.