It's this kind of rah-rah self-congratulatory unquestioning cheer-leading that is bringing me back to Hacker News less and less often.
Read more and you learn the truth: this guy practiced his ass off for a long time, and that's how he got good. "Speed learning" is bullshit. There are enough studies showing a direct correlation between the time spent practicing an activity and your skill level that I don't need to mention them here. But this correlation of practice time holds not only for music but for chess, flying an airplane, basketball, virtually any activity of skill. And yes, programming.
It takes around 3,000 hours of study to be competent in something, and about 10,000 hours to be an expert. There are no shortcuts. You can be Bobby Fischer and in your first chess tournament you're still going to get your ass kicked just like he did. But if you do all chess, only chess, all the time, for years, you can compete.
One of the most important thing I teach my kids is, there is no magic. People are always trying to force magic upon you, usually when selling something, or to puff themselves up. But the reality is there is no magic. It's all hard work just to get to ground zero. Then you need luck.
Some may see this as pessimistic, or self-destructive, but I see it as just the opposite. It's only when you've been liberated from spoonfed bullshit that you can start to live and experience life in full.
1. Tin Men (1987) - how to sell
2. Boiler Room (2000) - ever worked for a microcap? I have.
3. Suckers (2001) - how sales really happens
4. Something Ventured (2011) - raising capital
5. Achilles and the Tortoise (アキレスと亀 Akiresu to Kame) (2008) - the terrible personal price to pay for following your passion
6. Death of a Salesman (1985) - how following your dream can destroy your family
7. Mean Streets (1973) - investments often go bad
8. Up in the Air (2009) - ever been laid off? ever laid someone off? I've done both and it ain't pretty
9. Office Space (1999) - best movie yet about office life
10. Falling Down (1993) - business change doesn't just transform industries; it also destroys lives
Left in 2008 as well, last time I went back I was first denied entry because my American passport (issued a few months previous in Frankfurt) was "invalid". After some haggling I convinced them that indeed, it was a valid passport, and they should check their computer that in fact I was who I said I was. Eventually, after about ten minutes questioning, I was allowed in. Being of nth-generation pilgrim descent apparently didn't matter.
Fast forward to landing in Germany, where I was not only not a citizen, I wasn't even a permanent resident. After looking at my passport for all of about two seconds, I was whisked through the border.
It sucks to be treated like a criminal in your own country, but it's what the US has come to for everyone now. Sure has been that way for, at various times, native americans, blacks, the irish, hispanics, chinese, whatever. But now instead of treating everyone like a free citizen, the decision has been made to treat us all like potential criminals.
Not sure how well his self-publish approach would work for first timers. As he said himself, he already had 5 books published by traditional publishers, was a writer on major media outlets, and has a significant blog following. Later books tend to be better as authors improve over time.
Most titles just languish, undiscovered.
One of the more disappointing parts to the article is that the books - self published or not - never made much money. Instead his money came from trading and selling companies talking about trading. A sad indictment of the state of fiscal capitalism.
The software business isn't about reading books. It's about producing software. I know too many great programmers and software executives that haven't read most, or even any of these books, and seldom read books at all, or science fiction at best. Writers read and write books. Programmers code. Execs raise money from customers and investors so we don't have to get a real job. ;-)
Really amazing stuff. Given a huge drop in price I could see entire cars, buildings, bridges being made this way. Add in some photoelectrics so you could "close the blinds at night". Imagine embedding colored electronic ink in it as well, instant mural for your house, augmented reality out your window, turn a cloudy London day (like today) into a sunny one. Have your Google Tech Talk follow you around the house on the adjacent walls as you get up to get a sandwich. Embedded microcameras for virtual presence in your room, the other walls becomes another place, another time.
Soon we are going to see the app store model hop off the straightjacket of our phones and into everything we can see, touch, feel. Everything around us will be programmable, customizable, downloadable. An appified world.
This thread got me thinking: how many levels deep do we need to go in HN comment thread replies until we break the layout?
Next time some arrogant prick name drops his Alma Mater, just tell him you don't think people are qualified to work in technology unless they dropped out of Reed College.
Nice idea, unique solution to the problem. I'm working on a site right now that allows comments, when I release it I have the same concerns about comment quality. Time delays may be a great answer, perhaps also varying by the upvoted rating of the commentor: higher-karma users have the comment window appear after less time.
None of us want to see hacker news grow into reddit imgurl land, but I see that becoming more and more the case lately.
Hearing people talk about "where to spend your time" and "what makes your startup work" is like listening to children talk about what shapes they see in the clouds. You're reading oracles from turtle shells.
History is non-repeatable, startups are non-repeatable, and the success distribution suggests something less akin to a dragon race and more akin to a state lottery.
I've been here four years and still don't have anything like a "permanent" residency, only temporary visa. Just getting past the "we'll deport you in a month" took about two years of going back to the visa office (Auslanderamt) once a month. And I'm a high-wage IT professional with experience. The visa I eventually received (the temporary one) is given to about 250 people a year, that's for a population of 80 million, their version of a high-tech visa.
Some places like Austria are even tougher. For EU citizens there isn't a barrier generally, but outside the EU, it's very difficult.
The world is a prison planet by and large and you're stuck where you are. My experienced, published Italian IT colleague was on a trip to the US as part of his US-based startup and was deported at the border when his plane landed, because he was slightly under the required 183-days-every-year-three-months-at-a-time visa waiver rule. If you think the US is attracting the best and brightest with its visa policies because you've seen some Indians at Cisco, you're grossly deluded.
What the article only touches on, but is even more interesting, is the fact that it's really just a specific case of the general Poisson distribution, a general mathematical result of exponential arrival times of events, of which mortality is but one example:
The number of soldiers killed by horse-kicks each year in each corps in the Prussian cavalry. This example was made famous by a book of Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz (1868–1931).
The number of yeast cells used when brewing Guinness beer. This example was made famous by William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937).[7]
The number of phone calls arriving at a call centre per minute.
The number of goals in sports involving two competing teams.
The number of deaths per year in a given age group.
The number of jumps in a stock price in a given time interval.
Under an assumption of homogeneity, the number of times a web server is accessed per minute.
The number of mutations in a given stretch of DNA after a certain amount of radiation.
The proportion of cells that will be infected at a given multiplicity of infection.
The truth is that most of a founder's "preserving equity" comes from stealing it from someone else, be in a co-founder, employees, or early investors. Anyone actually involved in startup financing (as opposed to counting IPO shares and generating percentages) can attest to the veracity of this.