Who wants to work with me on my next startup, which sets up an innocuous-looking Facebook profile for privacy-conscious individuals, including friendships with other perfectly normal people and records of totally commonplace, unobjectionable activities? We can make sure that you'll never be rejected by a landlord, AirBnB host, or insurance company because of your online presence.
I used to work as a nurse, and certain bay area hospitals would want access to our facebook profile log ins and passwords as part of the hiring background check and our 1-year review.
How everybody got around this was to set up an innocuous, benign facebook dummy account with our real name, no posts excite liking the SF giants and talking about the Warriors games. Then we would all make our "real" facebooks with the wild stuff using our middle names instead of the last name. HR was none the wiser.
> I know a guy, a sales guy, who "worked from home" for a large multinational while earning six figures. He spent most of his time doing home improvement projects. He replaced his roof (himself), he built and installed new kitchen cabinets, he remodeled the entire house and painted it all.
You seem surprisingly judgmental about this given how upset you were about others not recognizing the effort you put into the business in your garage.
What happens if you have a very small false positive rate for fraud, and end up stiffing the customer? You could easily land in deep trouble with consumer protection laws after falsely satisfying their order.
Honestly, it's the growing realization that despite all of my efforts, I haven't done anything worth feeling proud of. To me that feels like I've lived a waste of a life.
As you can tell, this is an ineffective strategy for motivation.
I didn't mean in that sense. And, though I sense your question is somewhat sarcastic, I'll pose this to you. In the same way that a person joins the military to do a job, protect our interests both domestically and abroad, to the best of their ability, without the luxury of being able to question the mission; does anyone in the hacker news community feel the same way?
For example, do any data scientists feel like they could make a meaningful contribution toward increasing the performance of PRISM's algorithms, thereby reducing the number of false positives and helping keep the country safer.
The hacker ethos is one of distrust of big corp / government and a greater responsibility to the people and their rights. But, despite what we might like to think, people will die and maybe, just maybe, some of us might be able to help.
Granted, our values are only meaningful if we adhere to them during trying times. And, poorly paraphrased, those who seek to tradeoff their freedoms for security, get neither.
And thus, hopefully, you can see why I asked this question.
If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, and can't find it, is it because I'm not paying enough?
The fact that many SV companies want mythical beings to solve their engineering problems is an entirely different issue, but this does not invalidate their claims of a "shortage." It just means that they have failed to come up with a business that is capable of being worked on by the existing talent pool.
> If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, and can't find it, is it because I'm not paying enough?
To be fair with the analogy, that should rather read...
> If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, one out of the 100 that are in existence, and I can't find someone to sell it, is it because I'm not paying enough?
The answer then becomes - Yes.
Top engineers in the US are not mythical creatures, they do exists. Hence why the original analogy is disingenuous.
If you want a unicorn at any price and your business simply cannot deal with the fact that unicorns don't exist, then you suck and you deserve to fail.
I don't mean you in specific, but this is the simple fact about unicorn hunting.
EDIT to note: this does not apply in the mythical "Lake Wobegone"-like areas people are sure to point out to me, where I've heard that a full third of the population are unicorns ;-).
> When will the Peoples Republic grant self-determination to Tibet? That would be the action of a self-assured and mature state.
Probably around the same time a certain self-assured and mature state grants self-determination to the indigenous people of Alaska, Hawaii, and large parts of the Southwest. The rest of the country is a lost cause; ethnic cleansing and violent displacement has assured that going back is impossible.
Is this supposed to be Tron or Snake? I distinctly remember Tron being a multiplayer game, with the mechanics such that moving along a wall or trail increases your speed, putting you in position to cut off the other players and make them crash.
In the classic Snake game, the tail of the snake moves and the snake grows longer when you eat snakefood. In Tron, the light trail stays there and you try close in your opponents. So this game is definitely Tron, not Snake.
Tron is usually a multiplayer game and the speedup next to light trail you mentioned is missing.
Btw. back in the BBS days there was a Finnish freeware Tron-with-weapons game called "DeLuxe Moposota" (rough translation: moped wars). I have very nice memories of it. It works nicely DosBOX. Here's a youtube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gozt-1BgVrU
