When you grow old you won't regret the things you did, but the things you didn't.

In my time I have done illegal raves, had sex with a porn model, started a bar in Ibiza, done drugs, started a crash-and-burn dot-com, and all sorts of other crazy stuff. But when I talk to my friends now (im in my mid-thirties) they wish they had not held back, and just gone with their ideas.

So get going, you have nothing to lose... If it fails at least you tried, your friends will envy you for having the guts to try, and in 10 years you will have a great story to tell.

I have talked to a couple of friends in a similar dillema. My take on the whole thing is that there are two kinds of people:

1. Those trying to find a reason to do a startup.

2. Those trying to find a reason to not do a starup.

"the choice has already been made, it must merely be understood" ...(from the Matrix)

It's easy to piss on things after the fact. It is pretty common behavior in our field to try and make yourself look good by criticizing others' work. It's usually pretty easy to find things to pick on with the benefit of hindsight, but much harder to create something new.

I'm 34 and finishing my degree in CS after being married for 10 years and having worked as a nurse for the last 15 years. Why was I a nurse? Because my parents didn't think that there was anything to the whole "computer craze", and they thought that nursing was a good, solid profession. I almost dropped out of nursing school to major in CS. And, I spent most of my free time in the computer lab, hanging out with the geeks. Go figure.

I know that parents get awfully nervous about this sort of stuff. But... sometimes they just don't understand. Especially when it comes to technology stuff and the tech biz.

If you have the money, and can give a startup a shot.. go for it. What's the worst case scenario? The worst thing that can happen is that you'll have learned a lot about starting your own business, and you will have learned a lot about new technologies, and your savings will be gone. That's it. That's the worst.

This is mostly bullshit. The guy is trying to do things in Rails the wrong way and complaining about it failing. He does have a few legitimate points, but I guess I'll go at it point by point, because it is fucking long:

-AR find works fine for me, in most cases, in those cases you can always fall back directly to SQL (has happened a total of two times for me). The guy very incorrectly states that the :group stuff will choke in Postgres. It does not. There is a separate driver for each database that will make the queries compliant with the specific DB.

-When using joins, you're supposed to use :include, or has_and_belongs_to_many. These are NOT read only, and work very very well. He's complaining that something he is doing the wrong way does not work. That is because he is doing it wrong, and it isn't SUPPOSED to work.

-I agree with his point about understanding Rails and the options hashes. At this point, I really wish that Ruby had named arguments, as the options workaround gets really annoying.

-I don't understand what he means by quality assurance. Rails has an incredibly large automated testing suite. I've been using Rails for two years and I've found one bug. I really just have no idea what he's trying to get at.

-On the last point, about the "big-picture", he is provably false. If you've written a Rails app and there is even ONE XSS injection opportunity, you've done it wrong. Spend two seconds in the API docs and you will find this function called "sanitize":: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/Saniti...

It helps if you read the fucking documentation before you criticize something.

Why talking about women needs to bring along dating? No wonder women hide away.

This came up recently. The answer is that you shouldn't worry about it, because you can't time the market. If you were really sure the economy was going to tank at a given time, you could just short a bunch of big stocks and make money that way. But no one really knows when or whether there will be a recession or how big it will be. So the best plan is just to ignore the economy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88410

I believe the answer lies somewhere in our DNA. Please direct your complaints to Mr. Darwin.

There was a study done some time ago that showed that people who negatively review something appear to be more intelligent than those who positively review the same thing.

This is probably the case here even though I don't know who Maciej is or what Rails app he's actually written. I think you should use a tool you're reviewing for a project before making up your mind about it.

I think it has some relevance, because it shows that being in IT does not imply unattractiveness. Talk about unattractiveness of male geeks is quite common, too.

Also, I think it would be nonsense to deny our human attributes. Men are interested in women's looks, and vice versa. Actually, isn't it another complaint of successful women that to be successful, they had to become like men (a ka Margaret Thatcher)? So if a successful women is still attractive, it might be a good role model after all.

Hi there. I use the site pretty religiously. I hope that my comments are insightful.

I know a few girl hackers. They do mention a lot of what might be called 'social friction'. In some cases, they stay around through undergrad because computers are a really magical, flexible medium.

The good news is that we like a lot of hackers and scientists and technical people. They're interesting. Other fields have their human debris, too. Lawyers have frat-boys. Lit-majors have bullshitters. But rarely do other fields have people getting together to make things, and that's just a lot of fun. :-)

I work at Yahoo!, and I really hope this rumor is true. There is a lot of dead wood, and even more VP level employees that really don't contribute to the bottom line. I know this, others know this, and Jerry knows this. Its just a matter of seeing if he has the intestinal fortitude to do the needful.

+1 for sex with a porn model

Well, imagine this rant where "RoR" would be replaced by "java", wouldn't you imagine being the author of the pamphlet ?

I'm frightened by such an uniform behavior in the YC community. By dismissing any dissenting point of view you kill diversity. I remind you that the next fad you (and I) will be trying to catch will be created by a guy bothered by the current state of things. Bothered enough to act (and reunite the "Tipping point" conditions).

This guy attack RoR, he's attacked personally as trying to sound smart. Have you ever criticized anything ?

(my karma will follow the Dow Jones today I think ....)

"My mama always tells me the only reason why I don't appreciate my job is because I haven't yet experienced an economic downturn."

That's a good reason, but not the only one.

Maybe you don't appreciate your job because you have a startup inside of you just bustin' to get out. Not even the greatest job or economy could help with that.

I wouldn't want to accuse Feld of having knowingly said anything as false as (1) and (3) unless I was sure he actually did, but they are in fact way off.

We're very closely connected to follow-on investors. As anyone who's been funded by YC can tell you, I'm thinking from the beginning about how to pitch them to later stage investors. Often this starts in the interview. There is a stream of investors coming through here. We just don't advertise it, because we don't need to.

As for (3), he picked a really bad example. I hesitate to drag Joe Kraus into this by name, because the help he gives the startups is something he does voluntarily. But the fact is that he is extremely generous with his time. He is meeting with 2 YC startups this week. This is the rule with the speakers, not the exception.

This isn't the first time I've noticed TS trying to portray YC as just us, while TS is some magical stone soup of mentors. It's complete crap, as anyone who has been funded by YC can attest.

They should stick to (2). In the being-in-Boulder department they do actually have us beat.