bstrong

I generally try to be encouraging of people putting themselves out there to create something new, but I'm worried that you're creating a pretty serious moral hazard for the founders you're trying to help.

It's the kind of situation that can lead well-intentioned people to make bad decisions.

In my experience, it's mostly the situations where people give their emails in person that are a problem: Receipts from in-store purchases (and in-store credit card signups), hotel reservations and rewards programs, EMR signups, lawyers offices, banks, realtors, etc.

Websites are pretty good at verifying email addresses these days. The real world, not so much. The super funny part is when you try to ask the bank/doctor/etc. to stop sending someone else's personal info to your email address, and they tell you they can't make that change since you aren't the account owner.

For a beginner, I think it's hard to beat "C++ Primer" by Stanley Lippman.

Oh, memories. I took CS107 in 1996, which was apparently the date this handout was written. Nick was my academic advisor, and his CS108 (which was C++ at the time) was one of my favorite courses of all time. Bunny World...

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old programmer, but I feel like kids these days are missing out on something important by learning to program in a language that doesn't require them to truly grok memory management.

P. Terry's serves "all-natural" beef, but it is not grass-fed. If you want a grass-fed burger in Austin, try Wholly Cow (which is quite a bit more expensive than McDonald's, as you would expect).

I highly recommend Honey Stinger Gold. I had trouble with every other gel I've tried, but I can digest the honey just fine, even without water.

I have a Garmin Fenix 3, and the vibration wakes me up easily. It also goes well over a week between charges, even using the GPS heavily. Long battery life is important for a watch you are going to use as an alarm, since you lose the convenience of charging overnight.

I find it interesting that people are complaining both about the lack of a web app and about Google keeping message history on their servers. I'm assuming they will eventually build a web app, but you can't build a useful one unless you have the message history on the server, encrypted in such a way that the web server can decrypt it and serve it to the browser.

Unfortunately, you really do have to choose between privacy and having a web app. I'm not sure which I value more, TBH.

Wow, that was harsh. If startups were assigned to the Deadpool based solely on whether their 1.0 products were ready to immediately disrupt billion dollar industries, there wouldn't be _any_ successful startups out there.

Personally, when I see a team of people who are passionate about what they are doing create something new and interesting, I like to cheer them on.

I think the technology is interesting and cool. Even if it isn't marketable in current form (what 1.0 product is), I wish them the best in iterating on it until it is.

> If an employee generated no additional income to it's employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place.

The thing to remember here is that hiring managers aren't spending their own money. And most managers I know (though notably not the best ones) have always wanted to manage bigger teams, both for simple ego reasons and because it tends to lead to promotions and higher compensation (in one company where I worked briefly, title and compensation were directly linked to number of employees managed).

This motivation leads to all sorts of decisions that are suboptimal from an economic perspective, including lots of "bullshit acquisitions".