What Lustig doesn't mention is that sugar is what your brain runs on. Eating too much sugar is not good for actual marathons but it works great for coding marathons.
Do you have a source for this? As far as I am aware your brain mostly burns glucose like the rest of your body. Admittedly glucose is also a sugar, but in the context of this talk sugar refers to sucrose (i.e. the white stuff you put in tea) which is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. Which would imply that sugar is still inefficient "brain fuel" compared to other carbohydrates like pure glucose. If you have any sources/references showing me wrong about the brain metabolizing fructose I'd be very interested and grateful if you could point me to it.
Sorry, I deleted my stories as I felt they were revealing too much personal information. My last job I was using Ruby and Java doing back-office data munging stuff for a financial firm.
If you want to share those experiences, I'd appreciate the information. Maybe I can learn something vital. Hit me up at messel at gmail dot com anytime you feel like it.
If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.
NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.
Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.
The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid.
There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.
(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)
I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.
I actually found it significantly easier to meet women outside of college. I was a Computer Science major and all I did was go to my classroom with all males and work on my hw/projects with all males. Further, as you get older, you have more and more women you can date.
I agree that one of the cool things about HN is the level of discourse, but the idea that geeks must be social luddites should die. There is nothing crass about wanting to meet women in college, nor is it anti-intellectual.
Nothing wrong with it; but saying 4 years of your youth + $100k + all the opportunity to learn and grow is somehow worth wasting just for the sake of meeting "girls" is stupid.
There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the highlight of the university experience.
>>> There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the highlight of the university experience. <<<
Thank you. It's just shocking to me that no one called him out. The very idea that the central purpose of college is sex, sex and more sex is just disgusting. I'm not a prude by any means, but seriously what is this guy advocating?
I know that this comment really doesn't add much to the conversation, but I just can't help it. This conversation is the last thing I expected on HN, and I haven't been around for that long!
Maybe its my background (non-American by heritage) but most people that I know met their life-long partners in college. It was not a time for serial sex.
Let's face it, companionship is important in life and college has a high concentration of people who are of similar age to you, relatively unattached, and of similar backgrounds or at least passions.
Now, turning to a cynical note---many if not most people think that college is useful as a certification that one can learn, and is intelligent enough to work. A university education is required for a good job. If you already have a job, or money then to this group of people the only reason to attend college is love of learning or socialization.
I love learning, but lets not pretend that socialization is college is non-existent or even an insignificant part of the college experience.
Fair enough. I agree with you that "the main reason to stay in college" should not be to meet women, but I do think it's a valuable benefit of the college experience. Especially in such a male-dominated industry, having females in my social circle is an important consideration.
Jared and Steve (founders of GroupMe) are some of the best entrepreneurs I've ever met. Your characterization is ill informed and just plain wrong. The fact that they were able to take a simple idea and implement it so successfully speaks to their ability as operators.
I also don't think quality entrepreneurs base decisions about where to start a company on where it's easiest to get laid. Most quality entrepreneurs that I know have no problem meeting women wherever they are because they are passionate, outgoing, interesting people.
Also, GroupMe's major investor is Khosla Ventures, which is a west coast firm. So I am not sure how that speaks to NYC as a "dumb money" scene.
I call bullshit on you as I know everyone involved. They are great, but can you deny the part about jam bands and a history of drunk tweets by their engineers? There's a whole website about "things X says when he's drunk" where X is the engineer I'm talking about.
If you don't think it's important to get laid, good on you, you've transcended to the next level of hacker zen. If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com.
As a New Yorker I am allowed to call bullshit, too.
Firstly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with drinking about debauchery in general. I live in SF, work at a Palo Alto startup and attended college in Berkeley and found that entrepreneurship and debauchery went very well together. The startup I work for exited to a Fortune 50 company for a great deal of money, and has a fridge stocked with beer. I drink a lot—and yet still get great work done.
Meeting girls has not really been a problem either. Palo Alto has Stanford, tho its girls tend to be way too smart for me. SF is the world's most promiscuous city (SF State girls are great!), and Berkeley is a huge college town.
As a former New Yorker transplanted to Palo Alto, I can attest that there are less girls here, but I have not had trouble meeting them.
Why is drinking and listening to jam bands reflective of their ability as a company? I can cite many examples of famous entrepreneurs who have well documented episodes of drinking or using drugs. Steve Jobs would be the most obvious.
After thinking about it for a moment, I guess I'm totally wrong. Guys who built an awesome app in 24 hours, then improved it and raised $10M during brief moments of sobriety in between jam band benders... Those guys are superhuman.
Good job on meeting girls in PA. The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina. That may not be your "type" but it's better to broaden your range than hold out for what you think is your best match. It's not like in NYC where there's a match (or 10) for everyone.
Sadly, I think sometimes my posts come off as mean-spirited. I consider myself sort of a forum comedian who tries to throw some wisdom in while being entertaining. I wasn't trying to disparage GroupMe. I actually like and use their service! On the other hand, I also don't think anything I said is factually inaccurate!
"After thinking about it for a moment, I guess I'm totally wrong."
And yet, your totally wrong and snarky comments above get up-voted. Go figure.
"The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina."
And you said you were here for 10 years? Based on the amount of real-estate you devoted to talking about getting girls, I'm guessing you're not too good at it. Yes, it's harder to get girls in SF than in NYC, but the people droning on about it are as hopeless in SF as they are anywhere else.
You sound like the epitome of a hormonal teenager. I know this was an ad hominem, but seriously is sex more important than doing great work? Really?
Moreover, what happened to love and quality relationships? What I'm getting across from your comment is basically mindless one nighters and the entire getting laid gig. Sure there are some places on earth where it's better to do that, but love, true love, can blossom anywhere you go.
Further, your comment is the most disgusting thing I've ever read on HN. It's crass in all of the wrong ways and it reads like some 14 year old on steroids wrote it. If your self worth is determined by how many women you take to bed then, trust me, you will be a lonely man indeed.
That said I really hope that I misread your comments.
" If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com" LOL. This is the best sentence I have read on hackers news by far.
This might be the funniest comment I've ever read here.
I can't disagree. I've lived in NY for the last few years and I have found it so much harder to find women in SF. Though, I'm sure some people will have contrasting stories.
I agree wholeheartedly with SF being pretty difficult to meet women. I was there for six months and had a hell of a time after leaving college. I've since relocated to Seattle to work - and it's been incredibly easy comparatively.
I can't really posit why that is, besides maybe the depressing rain making finding a mate the only relatively common thing to do here. Or, maybe, the women's standards are way lower. Either way, it's easier.
That's pretty interesting. Do you have a cite? Android (the company) was essentially designed as something to sell to Google. I wonder if the guys at Android bypassed Schmidt because they knew he'd be a tougher sell.
He said it during a press event in New York. There were ppl live blogging in the room but somehow nobody picked up that part of what he said, but I remember at least one person tweeting it.
He said it in passing, while talking about the Google mobile strategy (the summary of what he said was "we sort of fell into this business, nobody really understands it just yet (mobile ads) or how big the opportunity will be")
I agree Android was setting itself up for an acquisition, same as what happen with Danger. They were probably aiming for a carrier or large non-Apple manufacturer.
So there was press, lots of live-blogging witnesses, and what would be an incredibly interesting statement by Eric Schmidt, and you can't find any record of it?
I'm sorry, but the most likely theory in this case seems to me to be that you're misremembering things, than somehow a whole room of other people were simultaneously rendered incapable of recording or publishing a very interesting quote from Eric.
Yes they do. It had been a little slow due to the traffic they've received from the bubble ball app going #1, but it seems like they've taken care of whatever the issue was.
This is an odd request for Hacker News. Everyone here knows that the liberal arts are stupid. Focus. If you have time to take courses outside of the CS department you should be using that time to write unit tests for your homework assignments or think about how you can work in SEO optimization strategies into next semester.
That's terrible advice, I hope you're being sarcastic but I fear not. There's plenty of useful stuff outside of CS which isn't liberal arts.
Maths, stats, electronics, physics could all be useful in an entirely computing-based career.
Biology or chemistry could open up a career in bioinformatics, molecular modelling or simulations. Likewise linguistics for text mining, information retrieval, speech/language processing.
Economics if you're interested in being an entrepreneur.
The crunchier end of philosophy, where it overlaps with maths and linguistics and cognitive science, will give you a much deeper frame of reference for understanding many hard problems.
Not all computing jobs involve twee social web startups or mundane CRUD.
What a horrible advice. Don't do assumptions on our behalf!
You'll be spending a lot of time with computers once you graduate, so better off spending it off computers while in school.
Socialize, make connections, study art/literature/philosophy.
I disagree with your opinion of the liberal arts, but I will certainly agree that getting practice writing unit tests for your code on homework assignments will be a boon in the long run.
The key to avoiding this is to stop thinking like a programmer, and start thinking like a sysadmin.
A programmer will automate some tedious repetitive task, and then boast about the automation to his programmer peers and managers. The programmer will then be rewarded with more tedious tasks to deal with.
A sysadmin automates a boring task, and tells nobody. The only way anyone can request work done is to file a ticket in the ticket tracker. The work gets done, but nobody besides the sysadmin knows how it was done. If the sysadmin is good at his job, he is rarely seen at his desk, and often seen playing foosball.
No wonder people's impressions of sysadmins are not overwhelmingly positive. (I'm envisioning Wally from Dilbert here.)
If you can replace someone's job with the proverbial small shell script (or apt-get install $OPENSOURCEPROJECT), sooner or later that is what will happen.
Interesting. Twitter seemed quite enthusiastic about their two "Pivots": When we began working with Pivotal last year, we knew they'd be a big help but we didn't expect how much they would contribute to a healthy and attractive work culture.
On the other hand, Pivotal's price is steep, and you have to hire their programmers in pairs: It’s about $15,000 a week for a pair. And so what we came up with was, “Look. You don’t have much money...” But we came up with this idea that if we do a six week run, and he gave me a very slight bit discount, so like a six week was going to be $84,000 we could get a minimum viable product up and launched.
Given the price of hiring Pivotal Labs, it sounds like Twitter and Laura Fitton were pretty enthusiastic. I wonder how to reconcile that with what you've been hearing—has Pivotal Labs gone through a growth spurt in the last year or two?
Hi, I'm actually a Pivotal engineer (in our Singapore office) and while I can't comment on either of the examples above I do want to clarify that clients don't have to hire Pivotal engineers in pairs. We do pair on all production code and our strong preference is for mixed teams of client engineers and Pivotal engineers. We strongly encourage even team sizes so that there is rarely an odd engineer out.
I know many people here charge $150/hour. 15k/week for two persons working 40 hour each is about $187/hour which doesn't look unrealistic to me. That's not to say they're cheap, they certainly aren't, but if you consider that a company has many expenses beside employees salaries then it's not that high.
Perhaps the biggest thing here is that you must hire a pair, so it actually comes to about $374/h, but if it's true that you get the job much more quickly with a pair then I don't see the issue.
Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?
But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...
It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.
I was curious about Pivotal's consulting work, because even very good software consulting companies go downhill quickly when they try to scale. Joel Spolsky described it perfectly: I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.
If Pivotal has a nucleus of really talented people, it makes sense for them to become a scalable product company. (Although I'm not really convinced by Pivotal's proposed pricing plans, at least for consultants with several smaller projects going on at once.)
I can't speak to your first-hand experience with them. But do you think they made this pivot because their contracts were not renewed? Or is it possible -- I'd speculate, probable -- that developing a business model around Tracker is a much more appealing prospect for them than software consultancy?
Software consultancy gets old quickly. You trade your steady paycheque being told what to do, for a not-so-steady paycheque being told what to do. Even at $15K per week, the revenue is not as scaleable as the potential revenue from charging for Tracker would be.
Again, I can't speak to your first-hand experience. But it struck me as sounding a bit mean spirited. I'm not sure if that was your intention. If they can churn out Tracker, which is pretty good, but are doing a mediocre job with some contracts, there's a correlation there. It doesn't mean they are necessarily the cause for the mediocrity. The cause might boil down to "fit" and this may be the reason why the contracts were not renewed.
EDIT: Actually, on further investigation (which I should have done before posting this), Pivotal Labs is a lot bigger of a consultancy than I thought. It's more than probable that only a small handful actually touch Tracker. I was always under the impression that their consultancy was a lot smaller, so they could ensure consistently high quality.
The speculation here is certainly understandable. The reality, though, is that Pivotal's consulting business is growing stronger than ever - we're over 100 great Rails developers now, with offices in SF, NYC, Boulder, and Singapore, and we are completely booked. All of our business comes from word of mouth - mostly existing and past clients. Check out some of them here: http://pivotallabs.com/clients.
Many clients do come back to us, but we actually try hard so that they don't ever "have" to - by leaving them with a maintainable, tested codebase, and effective engineering practices like TDD/BDD, pairing, aggressive refactoring, etc. We even help hire and train their own developers.
We kept Tracker free for almost three years, and over 180,000 people have signed up for it so far. We use it on all our projects, and the widespread adoption has been a great calling card for our consulting business. The decision to begin charging for it was not an easy one, but the reason is simple - we want to make Tracker better, faster, and establishing a revenue model for Tracker will allow us to devote more resources to it, including a larger dev team, support staff, and operational/hardware capacity.
Our goals are not to transition from a consulting company to a product one, but to do both equally well, and it's hard to do that when one side of the business has to fund/support the other.
