I don't think she's unattractive or has aged badly. I find Michelle Obama to be more attractive and an overall more compelling First Lady, but that's largely a matter of personal taste.
What I never understood was the attraction to The Wicked Witch of the Northwest, aka Sarah Palin. She did nothing for me. Moreover, her husband was a secessionist.
> Because I'm not a minority, not living in a slum, and working my butt off
All of which will contribute to your better being able to find a job when you graduate.
When you show up to the interview right after a black or hispanic kid from the ghetto, and you have the same education, who do you think they're going to choose? This world does not treat people fairly, as you are finding out now. The problem is that when you are given the advantage, you are generally unaware of it, when you are given the disadvantage, you are acutely aware of it.
Please at least wait until you get into the real world before you start getting angry at society because you're white and middle class and like to work hard and don't live in a slum, okay? Seriously, just wait a couple of years before you get upset about these terrible socioeconomic circumstances you've been dealt.
Actually, if you lived in California, that might not seem like such a sarcastic joke, when you show up at Berkeley and 50% of the student population is Asian, almost none of whom are on financial aid. Maybe you do have a point, LOL.
Yea I agree its a little soon and I am doing well for myself. The problem is that they are rewarding the lazy punishing the ambitious. I don't care that they help with minorities or poor people thats all well and fine. But who says that I'm not poor? Next month I will be making more per hour then my mother and she has 20 years of experience, I'd argue she is nowhere near the middle class.
Have you ever seen a "lazy" person get a grant to go to college and then graduate, or are you just assuming someone who isn't white is lazy, and is getting a handout?
I may not be directly participating in this conversation, but I don't appreciate your invocation of a false dilemma. The situation is more complex than you are implying, and the whole "Do you approve of affirmative action or are you a racist?" line has no place here on HN.
And yes, it is what you are saying. I'm not fooled.
I don't approve of affirmative action if I am just as poor and started out in just as bad conditions but get treated like cause I'm white my life was automatically easier and college will be automatically easier.
> Do you approve of affirmative action or are you a racist?
I don't believe in affirmative action, and my advice of "get used to an unfair world" is consistent with that view. Thanks for putting words into my mouth though.
> I'm not fooled.
Fuck off, chuckleface. Furthermore, don't tell me what has "place" anywhere.
If you're having trouble following enough directions to fill out a single form, you might want to reconsider going to college. There's lots of directions and forms involved.
The credited response to that is that there are many ever so smart young people who are ready for college but have no access to the details of their parents' financial situation.
Yeah, it's also used by journalists and bloggers who want to sound more clever than they really are when talking about subjects in which they have no formal training or practical experience.
I guess I'm an idiot, because I don't believe you at all, at least not in the terms you've stated.
If you had a diagnosed autoimmune disorder like Crohn's I would have no trouble believing you but "I'm allergic to raw produce" just sounds like 100% bullshit to me.
Your behavior is typical of attention-whore types who were either neglected/ignored as a child or were lied to extensively by their parents for some reason. Notice how you dwell on other peoples' ("idiotic") reactions to your mind-blowingly hard to believe claim.
I apologize for implying that you are an idiot. I was being facetious after taking the news of "denatured proteins" in a happy, light-hearted manner.
As for the allergies, shall I come to your home for a demonstration? You can watch my lips and tongue swell up while I scratch my chin and neck something fierce and spend a couple hours wheezing. It's pretty frightening to watch, and it gets worse over the years. I'm glad I've needed to be hauled to an emergency room only once. I do keep an Epipens on me.
Someday when you are prescribed Epipens by bona fide allergist MDs, you will be handed several brochures. Some of them will comfort you with the statement that many people out there, commonly your most immediate family members, won't believe you and think you're (consciously or subconsciously) making this all up. And some of them are designed for other people to read so that they will take you seriously.
To be honest, living with dangerous allergies--especially a large number of bizarre, dangerous allergies--is mind-blowingly tough, physically, nutritionally, logistically, emotionally, socially, and professionally.
Enough with the heavy stuff. I shall end on what I hope is a more pleasant note. I find it amusing that when I make an occasional trip to a health food store and people ask me about my grocery needs, about 3/4 of them recommend some naturopath or other for some loony muscle test, and the rest are firmly convinced there's no such thing as allergy at all to anything "natural."
It's nice that you question his personal experience because if it's something you haven't heard of, then it obviously must be both bullshit and a consequence of poor parenting.
A little digging on the internet (curiosity over blithe ignorance, oh no!) would return this:
And guess what? Cooking produce probably does help him because it denatures the proteins present in the food. Your post is nothing besides internet tough guy posturing, which I do find entertaining, if a bit annoying.
Hooray! Thanks for spotting "denaturation" in the Wikipedia article (an authoritative source, I know). I hadn't bothered to look for anything about allergies there in years.
Yes, my three allergists have all called it "oral allergy syndrome." One of them speculated my problem might have to do with "volatile oils," considering I'm also allergic to the smell of the raw produce. 19th and 20th century chemistry is amazing. Did you know that "flavors" for factory foods are food perfumes, top secret stuff concocted by perfume chemists? I learned that around ten years ago in a book called Mauve, about the history of fabric dying, of all things. (Some years earlier, I concluded the scent that remains long after slapping on some Polo is blueberry from old Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mix.)
So the thought of being allergic to volatile oils made pretty good sense to me. But as soon as I say "volatile oils" to people in combination with "cooking," they get all confused. Maybe they think I want to solve my problems by blowing up my kitchen or setting the building on fire or starting a heated argument. I'm happy to think that "denatured proteins" will sound a lot less volatile.
BTW, I'm a she, not a he. I also happen to be blondish and thin with a weak voice. I find that many people in real life, whom I shall not bother to classify here by occupation or sex, don't take me seriously. If you like, you can picture Julianne Moore in "Safe," a film which I find both uncomfortable and terribly funny.
1. He says you can build companies with "almost no money": $100k - $1M, if I recall correctly.
2. He says you can delay profi^H^H^H^H^H revenue almost indefinitely by looking out on the horizon.
So given these two facts, when exactly do the founders/managers/employees (all of which are young kids by his own admission) start getting paid real money, like the amount required to buy a house in the Santa Clara valley?
Is payoff 100% contingent on a liquidity event and/or perpetual venture capitalization, thereby diluting founders' capital stock further and further? Are his venture founders supposed to continue living in apartments indefinitely while he looks on from his mansion in Atherton and architects the final vision to be realized a decade or more from assignment of preferred stock?
His whole management vision starts to look more and more like serfdom the longer you think about it. The immediate analog that springs to mind is the A&R practices of the music industry in which they sign young, naive bands to contracts that essentially bind them into a period of servitude under the guise of a promise of fame and fortune (to be realized in spades at a later date TBD, just trust us guys, you're gonna be rich and famous!!!) while paying for their operating costs with a future claim on earnings.
This comparison only gets stronger than it already is when you realize that most financially successful musicians make their money from touring and merchandising - realizing their own revenue in small, and sometimes incremental ways until they get a successful fan/customer base.
I mean the whole analogy seems rather obvious to me, and I believe we as (young entrepreneurs of) an industry should learn the lessons of the music/entertainment industry - am I totally wrong here?
I see no difference between Marc Andreesen and David Geffen. Except one lives in SF and one lives in LA.
First of all, there's a supply/demand issue here. There are a gazillion kids looking to A) break into the music business and B) spin up their own consumer software startup. Guess what? As a result, you don't get to live really well unless you make it.
Making it obviously includes a liquidity even, but it can also include great success pre-revenue and/or pre-profit. How do you think senior management at Ning is doing, salary-wise? Howabout Twitter? Digg?
The serfdom remark is just wrong. It's not serfdom-- it's sharing risk. He's risking a pile of (admittedly someone else's) money. You're risking... absolutely nothing if you're getting paid close to market rates. The closer you get to a sure thing that everyone is going to get rich (or at least get all of their cash back), the more entitled you are a market rate salary.
No one is forcing you to accept his terms. You lose nothing by punting your own startup a few years into it and getting a job at any time-- except whatever you haven't vested.
Yeah, that's kind of my point, which is to find a way to do it on your own terms instead of accepting "almost no money" for what is most certainly going to be a significant equity concession in your company.
A VC contract does not "bind you into a period of servitude." You can always walk away and start a different company. The fact that Andreessen will support businesses that can't make money in the first 10 years is a good thing, not a bad thing. I'm sure he will also support business that make the founders rich immediately.
Here's an actual example, instead of all this pontificating. It's not that impressive but it illustrates the point.
I had to write an external "chat history" module (i.e., always send the last N lines of a conversation to a client as soon as client joins) for an IRC server, in python. (it's a long story)
Your standard RDBMS solution would probably involve the ircd logging directly or indirectly to a database, with a python script handling requests and doing selects out of that db. On a network with thousands of users, this will load a db machine down with IO operations. This also has to happen quickly, so that new text is added to the history log in near real-time. Batching is probably out of the question.
My solution was to have the ircd pass off its strings to another program (in this case, I used python) via a named pipe (this could also have been done via a socket, to aggregate multiple servers or do other neat tricks), and then have the logger app load these into memory - in this case, a giant python dictionary keyed on channel name which pointed to a constantly-updated ring buffer class for each channel. This ring buffer held the last N lines of conversation.
Writes were simple - h[c].write('text')
Lookups were simple - h[c].get()
Fast writes, fast reads, and disk i/o was batched for efficient logging to disk, at which point you deal with the data in batches and maybe store it into a db if you want to do something more advanced like with SQL.
Of course this could all be done with C within the ircd itself as well, using a hash table and ring buffers as well.
It was actually much faster (and logically simpler) than writing a DB solution, and I'm certainly no master hacker.
Wait I think I just did.