"Paying for the party" is amusing. "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" covers much the same material. The importance of drinking didn't happen by accident. The alcohol industry promoted it heavily.[1] Two out of five students in the colleges studied are now binge drinkers.
I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it.
I mean things like HPV vaccination. I'm not going to get my son vaccinated. This is an example of Merck and the other drug manufacturers manufacturing a vaccine to treat a low-risk disease. Pushing it on boys, as well, is simply expanding the market to get more money. When my daughter is old enough, she can get the vaccine, once we have figured out if there are long-term effects from this vaccine of if it's just scare mongering.
Yes, HPV causes cervical cancer in some cases. But they want to innoculating every single child for a disease that kills 3000 women a year in the US. That is less 10% of the number of people killed in driving accidents per year. That sounds like a money grab by the drug manufacturers by making up a boogyman in HPV, and collecting the money from our government and us through our taxes. It's genius, in some senses.
It's the equivalent of banning all peanut products from every school in the US to protect those few that are deathly allergic, and then paying a company for the enforcement of the ban.
> Because private blockchains are a solution to a network problem
Would someone mind explaining more specifically how private blockchains do anything that a traditional shared database or network doesn't already do? Without the incentives, distributed computing power, and public participation in a blockchain like Bitcoin, what does a private blockchain actually do?
If it's "private", does that imply that, like Ethereum, the blockchain could be forked at any time by those who claim ownership of it? Doesn't that essentially undermine the validity of many of the selling points associated with blockchain technology?
I've heard cases made about things like smart contracts, cryptographic authentication, and other "exciting applications", but I don't understand how these are any more effective in the context of a private blockchain than they would be directly relying on certain cryptographic primitives and traditional networks - especially in the absence of a public, globally distributed network with incentives that are aligned with improving the strength of the blockchain itself.
Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant."
That's more robust than I usually phrase things on HN, but you did ask. In slightly more detail:
Databases are wonderful things. We have a number which are actually employed in production, at a variety of institutions. They run the world. Meaningful applications run on top of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, etc etc.
No meaningful applications run on top of "blockchain", because it is a marketing term. You cannot install blockchain just like you cannot install database. (Database sounds much cooler without the definitive article, too.) If you pick a particular instantiation of a blockchain-style database, it is a horrible, horrible database.
Can I pick on Bitcoin? Let me pick on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is claimed to be a global financial network and ready for production right now. Bitcoin cannot sustain 5 transactions per second, worldwide.
You might be sensibly interested in Bitcoin governance if, for some reason, you wanted to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a software artifact; it matters to users who makes changes to it and by what process. (Bitcoin is a software artifact, not a protocol, even though the Bitcoin community will tell you differently. There is a single C++ codebase which matters. It is essentially impossible to interoperate with Bitcoin without bugs-and-all replicating that codebase.) Bitcoin governance is captured by approximately ~5 people. This is a robust claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
Ordinary evidence would be pointing you, in a handwavy fashion, about the depth of acrimony with regards to raising the block size, which would let Bitcoin scale to the commanding heights of 10 or, nay, 100 transactions per second worldwide.
Extraordinary evidence might be pointing you to the time where the entire Bitcoin network was de-facto shut down based on the consensus of N people in an IRC channel. c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9320989 This was back in 2013. Long story short: a software update went awry so they rolled back global state by a few hours by getting the right two people to agree to it on a Skype call.
But let's get back to discussing that sole technical artifact. Bitcoin has a higher cost-to-value ratio than almost any technology conceivable; the cost to date is the market capitalization of Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin enters through a seigniorage mechanism, every Bitcoin existing was minted as compensation for "security the integrity of the blockchain" (by doing computationally expensive makework).
This cost is high. Today, routine maintenance of the Bitcoin network will cost the network approximately $1.5 million. That's on the order of $3 per write on a maximum committed capacity basis. It will cost another $1.5 million tomorrow, exchange rate depending.
(Bitcoin has successfully shifted much of the cost of operating its database to speculators rather than people who actually use Bitcoin for transaction processing. That game of musical chairs has gone on for a while.)
Bitcoin has some properties which one does not associate with many databases. One is that write acknowledgments average 5 minutes. Another is that they can stop, non-deterministically, for more than an hour at a time, worldwide, for all users simultaneously. This behavior is by design.
I can go on, and probably will some other day. This is a bit of a hobby for me.
When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted.
Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.
If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.
People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.
Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
They were not.
Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.
This study is looking at one specific mechanism by which exercise may be helpful in improving some aspect of your health. It's not especially useful to look at just this study though, as it doesn't actually link to any outcomes (the telomere protective expression may or may not actually reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease).
It's more useful to look at studies that have looked at actual outcomes (e.g. reducing the incidence of heart attack or stroke, etc). In those cases, the bulk of the evidence points to 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week of moderate exercise (e.g. a brisk walk or jog) being the best 'bang for your buck'. There are certainly gains to be made by going beyond that, but the curve falls off pretty sharply, and you can get almost all the (proven) benefits of exercise at that level.
EDIT: I would suggest this YouTube video from Healthcare Triage on the benefits of exercise that are supported by good research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFBBjynBpSw
* Fixed-price is acceptable risk only if: (1) The project is small (e.g. <= one month), (2) The client has a precise spec (and he is hopefully technical), (3) The project is not R&D -- there is little chance of it failing or taking a lot longer than expected, and (4) Your gut says the client will be easy to work with, will pay you, won't try to add on extra features, etc. Also, I recommend the client be a business where no one is personally invested in the money they are paying you.
* If the contract is hourly, generally the contract is simpler and is much less risky to you than a fixed-price one -- I would recommend hourly for a first freelance project. (Respectfully disagreeing with agibsonccc.) With fixed-price, clients can eat you alive with revisions if you aren't extremely careful with the initial spec and being on the same page as the client. You can also easily go over your profitable window if you have not estimated software before. (A lot of it is not based on your skill, but on how particular the client ends up being.) Also, you run a good risk of not being paid at the end, unless you take precautions.
Keep in mind that with fixed-price bids, you are fundamentally at odds with your client -- you must finish quickly to make a profit, whereas they want a quality product. With hourly rates, you both are trying to do the project as "value-based" as possible, and you make decisions together based on cost.
If you do a fixed-price contract, then ask for half up front. (A retainer isn't a bad idea for hourly either.) If you make a fixed-price bid, I recommend estimating the absolutely worst-case scenario hours required then multiplying by even more. I tell my clients it would end up being cheaper if they go weekly, since my fixed-price contract by necessity must be a worst-case scenario estimate.
Also, in general don't transfer copyright (and hopefully the source code too) until all work is paid for. Your contract should state that it must be renegotiated if additional work is added beyond the original spec ... again, you don't need to worry about this as much with an hourly contract with no guaranteed finish date.
* A better pricing model than hourly/fixed is usually weekly or monthly, where you agree to work full-time for that period and you agree to goals to be accomplished. This way, you do not have to pedantically record every hour and expose your time management skills (for better or worse :)
* For padding, it depends on your experience with your own work. I recommend never to guarantee finish dates in a contract, unless you have a huge multiplier. Estimating the finish date would be fine though.
Personally, I set my prices based on how much I want a job. If I am not excited about the project, then I am one of the highest bids (and sometimes my bid is accepted). I do recommend that if you don't like selling, you should take the rate you were going to ask for and ask for something higher. Much of the time, the client just says okay -- worst case, he'll just negotiate something lower.
* I am not a big fan of your upper limit idea. I would quote the high-end price with an hour cap. For instance, $X guaranteed for up to Z hours, then $Y/hr after that -- and you estimate it will be done by Z hours, but it's not guaranteed. If they don't like that, you could say it isn't worth your time unless they buy a Z hour block for $X, then you'll put the extra time toward improvements or whatever else they want if you finish early.
* If you are worried about a contract, do not hesitate to have a lawyer review it. If it is fairly standard, you can probably negotiate a fixed rate of around $200. This Nolo book has a good fill-in-the-blanks template on the CD specifically for freelance software consultants: http://www.nolo.com/products/consultant-and-independent-cont.... The book has separate ones biased toward the employer and biased toward the contractor, so you can see the differences and what they might try to put in that would be against you. It is a pretty comprehensive contract and pretty biased toward you ... but it's always in your favor to supply the contract rather than to accept theirs.
There seems to be a lot of confusion around open source projects vs companies.
There are plenty of for profit companies around open source software that are venture backed:
Mesos(mesosphere)
Spark(Databricks)
Flink (Data Artisans)
Zeppelin (NFLabs)
Scala (typesafe)
Linux (Red hat)
Hadoop (Horton, Cloudera, MapR)
Elasticsearch (Elastic)
PredictionIO (PredictionIO Inc)
Meteor (Meteor Inc)
Deeplearning4j (My company skymind)
RethinkDB(RethinkDB inc)
Redis (Redis Labs)
Wordpress(Automattic)
Drupal(Acquia)
Docker (docker inc)
Coreos (coreos inc)
NGINX(nginx inc)
and the list goes on!
Acquired companies also include springsource (VMWare) , jboss (redhat), and ansible (redhat)
Lastly, there's open source from companies such as facebook where the goal is likely hiring. By open sourcing internal tools, it's easier to onboard new devs for recruiting. If you like their tools why not work there?
The key distinction people are missing is that these companies don't monetize open source directly. Instead open source is used as a means of building a user base that will indirectly generate revenue in other ways such as support, licensing solutions around or on top of the software (open core), or through some form of consulting.
FOSS such as the GNU software is a different beast where the goal isn't profit.
I think the confusion is: we can all use the software provided by these companies for free (depending on the context/license) without paying them and contribute back in other ways such as bug reports and the like.
The other thing here is individual devs monetizing their singular github repos. There's no reason you can't charge for support or consulting.
Radim @ gensim does exactly that and he does fine.
Just because you can git clone a repo doesn't mean you can use it effectively. You typically seek support via community or commercial. There's no reason both can't exist and they both do.
Disque is definitely exciting, and looks like it can replace RabbitMQ, which has serious flaws in its clustering design. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
However, if some constructive criticism is permitted, I have to say that, having written distributed applications for many years, I have come to dislike the "classical" push/pop queue data model:
* Acking is a bad idea. It requires the broker to manage a lot of state, including locking and timeouts.
* Re-queuing invalidates total ordering.
* On the performance side, parallel distributed queue consumption (which also breaks total ordering) is directly at odds with this model.
* Queues as opaque objects — you can only inspect by popping the top message, and you cannot access older, dequeued messages. Fortunately, Disque allows you to read the entire queue without mutating it, but it doesn't look like you can read old messages.
* Complicated queue topologies (fanouts, dead letter queues, etc.) become a logical necessity of the strict FIFO structure. (These topologies need to be declared every time the client starts up, and introduces the possibility of schema conflicts.)
* Logical de-duping is probably not possible.
Apache Kafka gets the data model right. It wisely acknowledges that queues are linear and should stay that way: In Kafka, queues are strictly append-only logs where every consumer has a cursor to the last position it read. In this model, many of the classical concerns melt away: Acks/nacks are unnecessary (consumers simply "commit" their position); total ordering is always preserved (since the queue cannot be reordered) and parallelism is made explicit (through named partitions); de-duping is trivial, and complicated topologies are largely eliminated (AMQP-type "exchanges" that fan out to separate queues are unnecessary because multiple readers can all consume the same queue without changing it, as their position is independent of the queue); and you get to choose either at-most-once or at-least-once delivery consistency by how carefully you manage your offset.
Since logs are strictly linear, you are also given the choice of how much history to keep — all of it, if you want — which opens up some interesting use cases that are not possible with classical brokers.
Kafka isn't perfect. It's a huge pain if you're not in Java land. There are no modern, mature "high-level" client implementations for Go, Ruby or Node.js. Its reliance on the JVM and on ZooKeeper makes it fairly heavyweight, both on the server and on the consumer side (the new API for broker-stored offsets simplifies things, but non-Java clients are far behind). I would really love to have a lighter-weight, language-agnostic Kafka-like implementation without the Java baggage.
Last point: The fact that Disque calls its messages "jobs" makes me a little disappointed that it is, in fact, not a job management system. I'd love a solid, distributed job manager.
75% of Turkers are Americans. And I didn't see it in the OP but I would guess that similarly 75% of companies issuing HITs are American.
Now I don't know the exact wording of minimum wage law, but I'm pretty sure if you hire an independent contractor through a 3rd party staffing company, let's say to clean houses. And then you set a fixed price on the service, say you will pay $20 for each house cleaned, knowing it takes 4 hours on average to clean a house. And then you let anyone who wants it take the job. This would be illegal.
So, I honestly don't know how mTurk is allowed to operate the way they do. American companies should not be able to hire American workers to perform labor at below minimum wage, just because they use an API to do it.
I'm willing to bet if someone was willing to spell it all out in front of the right AG or the right class action legal team that there would be significant settlements to be had.
Let me add my favorite book of war stories in finding product-market fit, reaching/educating users for whom the product is a sufficiently new thing they need that, in pursuing a business model that worked (do the numbers!), etc. This one is about a specific company, so it's a concrete and very real history vs. perhaps some of these recommended books more focusing on the theory, principles and applications, it could help reify those sorts of books. Disclaimer, I really like history and think you can learn from it ^_^:
Shift Payments (YC S14), based in San Francisco's Financial District
We are building a Visa card that can be attached to any store of value, including Bitcoin wallets, gold holdings, fiat, and soon, loyalty points, airline miles, and more. Our mission is to improve access to financial tools.
We're hiring a strong generalist/fullstack engineer. Experience with Ruby, Java, Sinatra, and AngularJS is a plus, but definitely not a requirement. Experience shipping and operating a live product is a strong plus.
If this sounds interesting to you, we'd love to chat! Please shoot me an email with links to some stuff you've built: eugene@shiftpayments.com
I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ever since he was named President of YC in 2014. Now I know. It's less to do with him; more to do with this narrative of Sam Altman as some visionary, world-saving, future-builder. The story just doesn't fit the character. There's no comparison between him and true visionaries like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc.
Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.
But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.
To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges.
Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.
One question - does it support TCP sockets? I've evaluated a dozen or so Node.js hosting solutions and none (0, null, nil) supported TCP sockets. HTTP/S and WebSockets only. It's ridiculous - a TCP server is a major use case for Node.js and yet if you want to host it, you must configure and administrate your own server (on EC2 or whatever).
The consulting work he is referring to is rapidly disappearing. Mostly because the big global consulting firms are execution-focused, and they're essentially willing to give away the recommendation work for free as part of a bid for the execution work. Buyers caught on, and realized that instead of hiring McKinsey, all they really needed to do was issue an RFP for the implementation and they would get what they needed. McKinsey/Bain/BCG have had to branch out to other types of work as a result.
Don't you think that many companies (with big budgets) will nurture the deep learning/data science projects inside the company instead of outsourcing them? How do you compete with those internal initiatives?
I am not only talking about Skymind since this issue arises in many other specialties.
Whatever the article mentions is more or less accurate. Also it's the same anywhere else in the Middle East. I've a friend (Indian origin) who grew up in the Middle East. He has lived in Dubai and Muscat (Oman). His father worked as a finance manager for an American cola company (hint: it's not Coca-Cola).
Roughly this is how the society is organized:
1) Arabs - first-class citizens - dumb, don't like to work, but often hold 'mudira'/'manager' positions in companies. They don't have college degrees but they hold senior-level positions in companies and are uber-slackers :)
2) Western expats - they get paid huge expat salaries and in general live in a world of their own (read: huge gated communities where typical restrictions in a Muslim country don't apply - alcohol, women, etc). There's very minimal interaction between them and the Arabs, or the Indians, or the Filipinos.
3) Educated immigrants from poorer countries (mostly from Indian sub-continent) - They do most of the work which their Arab bosses are not interested in doing or incapable of doing.
4) Construction workers/other physical labour - mostly immigrant workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and other poor countries.
The western world seems to acknowledge this problem finally when their people are starting to suffer due to the economic crisis. This is how Middle East works and it has been like this for a long long time.
Middle-east is one place I won't move to even if Google offered me a job there.
I moved from DC to Chicago and I love it here. I don't know where Thiel is getting his data but there are a lot of talented ambitious people in Chicago doing amazing things. To me going to New York or Silicon Valley is akin to the goldrush. Their is a lot of competition, nowhere to live, and lots of sheisty people that want to rob you or make you work for free for them. Thanks but no thanks.
Chicago has contributed immensely to the tech world. For example, Ruby on Rails was built by engineers from Chicago based company. And I know for fact there are a lot of rails apps powering Silicon Valley and NY.
I guess my point is that there are smart engineers everywhere and its more up to your own individual drive how far you go. Good thing about Chicago is that's it cleaner and cheaper than San Fran or NY so I'll take my chances.
I'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent.
So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
It's worth noting that Tails doesn't make you impervious. Tails uses Tor, and Tor is vulnerable to NSA and GCHQ attacks. Specifically, they have the capability of deanonymizing individual targets. I hypothesize that this capability works by monitoring Tor traffic worldwide, then performing a timing correlation between an origin and an endpoint.
Here's an example: Let's say (for the sake of example please) that the NSA can passively monitor Google searches in realtime. Let's say you search for a phrase that sets off their monitor: something like "a Tor user has Googled for Snowden." They'd like to know who you are. How would they do that?
One way is to record the fact that from your home computer originated some Tor traffic at almost the same time the Google search took place.
It's unclear exactly how they deanonymize Tor users, but one piece of info that may corroborate my hypothesis is that in a Snowden screenshot, you can see the NSA has a tab called "Tor Events" in one of their tools.
The need for websites to load quickly is Tor's Achilles heel, because it enables timing correlation. The fact that few people use Tor exacerbates the problem.
The fundamental principle about doing science has changed. It has come from becoming a true scientist(born with natural curiosity towards natures, physics, understanding and exploring fundamentals principles of physics, life and matter) to bread butter scientist where you are pigeon holed into a cubicle writing grants all day and tinkering a very narrow part of a huge field to collect as much data possible so that you can put it in your next grant proposal. Oh by the way, do not forget to teach undergrad, grade their papers and sprinkle some tenure pressure, department politics into it and your life as a scientist is complete.
Ok this sounds really cool so I can't resist replying.
This is great time to be selling security software, especially at the data level.
I've never totally bought the "start with startups" approach for enterprise security software. I'd suggest finding a CSO at a large enterprise that loves what you're doing, and tell him/her that if you can get a signed LOI for a pilot, you're happy to build whatever they'd like. This will likely be enough to raise some seed money to build it. Then go make that customer as happy as you can.
There are a few common options available to most developers.
1. Create a course or ebook plus screencasts. Charge a lot (e.g., $199 for the highest tier that includes everything in a bundle). Typical income range: $2K - $100K.
2. Create an ebook. Charge a lot (e.g., $49). Typical income range: $2K - $50K.
3. Write a book for a high-royalty publisher (e.g., PragPub). Typical income range: $10K-100K.
4. Create a SaaS product that solves a consumer or business problem in a given niche. Typical income range: $0 - $1M per year (mostly the $0 end though).
5. Create a mobile game. Typical income range: $5 - $100K (the majority below $10K).
6. Create a blog and leverage affiliate commissions and ads. Typical income range: $5 - $1,000 per month.
7. Create a template or plugin for a popular platform (e.g., WordPress). Typical income range: $100 - $100K a year.
All require work. Some will be more passive than others after your initial outlay of work (3 being the most passive).
How good are you at marketing? Because for software we have Market > Marketing > Design > Code.
My suggestion is to go for 1, 2, 3, or 4. Four is the most challenging among these 4 options and the least likely to succeed. But if it does, there isn't much of a cap in terms of how much money it can make.
Plus you get to hone your development and business skills further. Not to mention that you get to pick your own stack so you can experiment with new languages, frameworks, and technologies of your choosing if that floats your boat.
In general, I would recommend spending your spare time doing what excites you the most. Does the idea of a web side project excite you more than writing a book? If so, go for that.
My other suggestion is to create many micro-launches. Create small projects. Many of them. Stuff that you can launch in 1-3 months. See what sticks. Kill what doesn't. You'll end up with multiple revenue streams. $500/mo quasi-passive income here and there adds up quickly.
I have managed remote employees for years and while I still think it's a good tool in the box for providing a healthy and happy workplace, as well as recruiting/retaining talent in situations where you couldn't otherwise, I've grown increasingly jaded about the idea of functional, fully-remote organizations.
The trust issue referenced in this article is one element but there are many others:
- Many people don't handle the level of autonomy well, or don't stay motivated in isolation
- Harder to engage a remote employee in company culture and values
- There is a big difference between remote in the same time zone/country and remote on the other side of the world
- Management invariably has less control over a remote employee and less ability to command their immediate attention
I think comparing "remote work" with "not remote work" is a massive oversimplification of the issue that does everyone a disservice. There is the group of remote contractors you've never met, there's the team of fulltime employees that live within a few hours' flight of each other and meet several times a year, there's the guy who works in the office 3 days a week and at home from 2. So what are we really talking about? Generalities are not productive.
The dark spectres hovering over the head of remote work are that remote employees often end up being less productive and less available when you really need them.
For certain types of work and certain types of people these issues are more or less pronounced... this is not a black and white thing. But I am pretty sure we will never see a future where everyone is a fully remote worker.
We suffer from strong survivor bias. Each day CrunchBase sends me a list of companies, most that I've never heard of and many that I can't understand how they're being backed, and it reinforces the idea that you can go out and build a great product and VCs will rain money down on you on your path to success. However these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Some advice from someone in the trenches.
First, assume that you will never raise a dollar of outside Angel or VC money. Smart, great board, great product, it won't matter. An investor's null hypothesis is that you will fail and it is incredibly difficult to convince them otherwise. If you're the CEO and you don't have Brad Pitt like charisma and you're not a sociopath then it will be very very hard to raise capital.
Second, be prepared for the dreads. The worst part about it is that once these wounds are opened they will be there for life. You're going to wake up at 4:00 and won't be able to sleep because your mind is churning, trying to find some solution to your problem. This usually boils down to insipid growth rates and lack of capital to properly execute.
Third, there will always be 100 things to do and you get to pick 3. What you have will be imperfect. You won't have the metrics you need, and you'll be apologizing for everyhing. It also makes it that much harder to get others to see your vision.
Fourth, the longer it takes you to raise capital the more your team will doubt your competence.
Fifth, you will be rejected every day. VCs, customers, partners, potential employees. This takes a massive psychological toll even as you're get back up to put on that brave face. Unless you are a sociopath it is bound to chip away at your confidence and it may be that split second of doubt that hurts you in your next meeting.
anyone who thinks GHOST is a good idea, has not understood Bitcoin at all. the whole point of the blocks is that nodes can work on the global state in a chain. so the idea that nodes should work on greedy subtrees is about the worst possible idea. Bitcoin solves not only the Byzantine generals problem, but a latency variance problem, to achieve logical broadcast. anyway, the author of this paper also believes that "anyone with reasonably high intelligence could have invented Bitcoin by random luck" [1]. well, no. there are many hidden problems which Bitcoin solves. the literature on quorum systems, distributed applications, etc. is very deep.
I got critical thinking early because I was brought up by a lawyer. There were always briefs around the house, and I could read the briefs for both sides. Seeing both sides discussing the same facts and coming to different conclusions gives a sense of how to decide something. Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying. This is apparently unusual, although it didn't used to be. Left-wing radicals used to read the Wall Street Journal, to see what the other side was up to. This seems to have stopped; the problem with the Occupy movement is that while they were against Wall Street, they never developed an agenda that could be implemented to do something about it.
[1] http://www.soe.vt.edu/highered/files/Perspectives_PolicyNews...