That study was about VCs choosing investments, not startup founders working long, stressful hours side-by-side. I realize there are disadvantages to working with friends, but I’m pretty sure the advantages outweigh them. Paul Graham seems to agree, and he makes a living picking founders.
AngryParsley
Karma: 1,028
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it’s hard to do a startup with founders who don’t know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren’t enough to ensure that someone won’t flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.
A reading light. It’s battery-powered and can clamp onto things. I find it useful for reading in bed, especially when travelling.
I’d like to propose a new guideline for rationality quotes:
Please don’t post multiple quotes from the same source.
I enjoy the Alpha Centauri quotes, but I think posting 5 of them at once is going a bit overboard. It dominates the conversation. I’m fine with them all getting posted eventually. If they’re good quotes, they can wait a couple months.
I’m glad you’re focusing on improving your appearance, but be careful. If they think you’re going to be a one-time customer (Which is likely, since you don’t live here. Yes, people can tell.), the staff have a massive incentive to say you look good. Bring a friend if you want an honest evaluation.
I bought this, and I endorse it. It could be expanded in some places*, but it’s a great start.
*I should have taken notes while reading. I definitely remember thinking “this part seems too brief”, but I don’t remember where.
I agree with everything mentioned, but I’d like to add one thing:
If you use your computer a lot and you have money, don’t hesitate to buy something expensive. The cost per hour ends up being ridiculously low. I’ve said this for years, but many of my peers are still averse to spending “too much” on computer equipment.
I was in the same spot as you until I read this post by Sam Harris. It’s a pretty good intro to mindful meditation. It also links to some useful resources, such as guided audio tracks.
I’ve tried Eclipse’s search before, and it’s way too slow for my needs. Also, the Eclipse UI has a lot of annoyances since it’s not a native OS X application. It doesn’t obey my keyboard map, for example.
I haven’t seen grepcode before, but it looks like it builds an index. That’s a non-starter for me, since code often changes and I don’t want to wait for an index to get rebuilt before searching. If the tool silently rebuilds the index in the background, it’s even worse. Then I don’t know if the search results are correct or not.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been writing a utility to search through code quickly. I’m doing this because at work, some large dependencies got tossed in extern, making ack and grep pretty slow. At first I tried to make them faster (creating aliases to ignore certain files), but I soon gave up and started writing my own thing.
Grep is slow because it doesn’t ignore files by default. Ack is slow because it’s written in Perl. So I’m writing it in C, using libpcre for the regex matching. So far it’s about 3x faster than ack and 10x faster than grep. With some tweaking to ignore special files like generated code, I got it even faster than that. (0.5 seconds to search the codebase. For comparison, grep was 12 seconds and ack was 4.)
The Github repo is here. I don’t recommend anyone try it out yet. It’s not even close to done. Although I use it daily, I still need to iron out some formatting bugs, a couple of potential crashes, and then write docs. I bet it’ll take me a couple weeks to sort all that stuff out.
(Before anyone replies: Yes, I do know about ctags and git-grep. Ctags requires rebuilding an index after changing any files, and git-grep doesn’t work on non-git repositories. Also git-grep can’t ignore files committed in the repo, such as everything in extern.)
I think the one-sidedness of it made it funny to me. The turtle had absolutely no chance, and it was probably oblivious to any danger. It reminded me of The World’s Most One-Sided Fistfights Caught on Film.
Of course I also felt a twinge of pity for the turtle.
I never thought to write a post about it, but I use similar criteria when looking for an apartment. It’s easier to switch apartments than houses, but it’s harder to modify an apartment. This means that many of the criteria for apartments are more specific. Here are some criteria I use that Yvain didn’t mention:
East-facing windows. The sun rising in the morning is great at waking me up and forcing me to keep a normal sleep schedule. Without it I tend to go on a 26-28 hour day.
Noise level. If possible, try to talk to some tenants. Try to gauge their age and propensity to make noise. I love living in an apartment complex full of older people. It’s so quiet.
Top floor. I can’t stand people stomping above me. High-rises usually have better sound insulation, making this less of an issue.
At least a block or two away from major streets. Big streets have more horns honking and are popular routes for emergency vehicles.
Fast internet access. Often, only one ISP is available in an apartment complex.
This list has slowly grown as I’ve moved to different places and been plagued by different annoyances. My current place fulfills most of the criteria, although it’s a little too close to a major street. Firetruck sirens are louder than most emergency vehicles; enough that they break my concentration if I’m not wearing headphones. On the other hand, the Internet connection is particularly fast: symmetrical 100Mbit.
In the Golden Oecumene, modifying minds is commonplace, so people are usually as patient, humble, energetic, etc as they can be. The quote is about changing more basic values. Ironjoy was a sociopath until the Curia punished him.
“You could trifle with your mind, using activators and redactors from your own thought-shop, and put yourself back into the state of mind you were in before the Curia forced you to experience your victims’ lives.”
“Is this some sort of test or quiz? You know I shall not do that.”
“Why not?”
Ironjoy started to turn away, but then stopped, turned, and answered the question. “If I were now as I was then, I would gladly change my self to remain as I was then; but I am now as I am now. The me that I am now has no desire to be any other me. Isn’t that the fundamental nature of the self?”
-- The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
I run a decent amount and I used to be self-conscious about it. Eventually I realized: What does it matter what random strangers think? Their opinion of you has no effect on your life. They won’t even know your name or remember your face.
Now it doesn’t feel the least bit unusual when I ignore people. I’m breathing hard. In a few minutes I’ll be half a mile away from this person. Why spend the effort to make eye contact and nod?
Take the advice of GTmetrix with a big grain of salt. Many of their recommendations are conflicting (“Remove query strings from static resources” vs “Use a CDN”) or difficult/expensive to implement (CSS sprites).
It looks like easy wins would be to enable compression and put script tags after CSS includes. Everything else, meh.
That’s a caching issue. The + and—have been replaced with thumbs-up and thumbs-down.
You probably already know this, but if the CSS was generated, you could minify it and have cache-busting. It looks like this is already done for most of the site’s JavaScript. All the CSS includes have cache-busting query strings. Ditto for a good portion of images in the HTML. So currently, users get the updated CSS immediately, but their browser will display cached versions of the images included in url references in the CSS. Adding ”?blah=12345678″ to the url() references in main.css, lesswrong.css, etc would fix this. Then people wouldn’t have to worry about styling bugs due to browser caching.
I looked at both before I signed up, and chose Alcor. Both organizations have similar numbers of members and corpsicles, but I bet the average wealth of their members is quite different. Alcor’s higher dues are reflected in their staffing, research, and legal battles. CI is much more low-key.
The biggest difference between Alcor and CI is that Alcor does standby and transport. If you’re very ill, they’ll send a team to your deathbed so you can be cryopreserved as soon as possible. If you go with CI, you have to contract with Suspended Animation to get that treatment.
The results so far (only showing answers with > 1 responder):
To regenerate this, run
grep -v "#" poll.csv | awk -F , '{ print $3 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr.I’m not surprised by the number of votes for 2^31-1. It was the first number to pop into my head when I saw the poll.