Like others have said quitting without a plan is a bad idea. Start working on finding a job that's more in line with your personality.

You don't know if your ideas have a market. Get users if you think your ideas are worth pursuing. Sell first, build later. In the mean time build up cash to extend your runway. 2-3 months is too short.

Congrats Patrick (she said yes)! You have been an inspiration to tons of folks on HN that are starting out on their own. Wish you the best for 2012 and beyond.

It might help to list where you are located.

Their developers are in San Francisco according to his ad at 37signals

Any details on the speakers?

MIT thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617168 Last year MIT thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=860701

West coast 4 life ;)

I assume he meant for Startup Bootcamp

Yeah, I misread. Apologies. I too am interested in the speakers for Startup Bootcamp

I'll post them next week. We've got a great lineup this year.

Felix Dennis

If you still have any left [username] @ gmail.com Thanks!

Here is the roll call: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml

Maybe they registered those for themselves...

considering one was aweso.me, maybe

Here is a good list: http://www.bogleheads.org/readbooks.htm

General Investing

# The Four Pillars of Investing - by William ("Bill") Bernstein.

# Wise Investing Made Simple or The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need - by Larry Swedroe

# The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing - by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf

# All About Asset Allocation - by Rick Ferri

# The Informed Investor - by Frank Armstrong

# The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - by John "Jack" Bogle

# The Coffeehouse Investor - by Bill Schultheis.

Investor Behavior

# Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them - by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich

# Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich - by Jason Zweig

# Rational Investing in Irrational Times: How to Avoid the Costly Mistakes Even Smart People Make Today - by Larry Swedroe

Financial History

# Against the Gods and Capital Ideas - by Peter L. Bernstein

# Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation - by Edward Chancellor

# A Random Walk Down Wall Street - by Burton Malkiel

Like others here have mentioned, http://www.bogleheads.org/ is a great forum for Vanguard investors.

+1 for Bill Bernstein. An excellent book.

There are very few people who have done better than the market over a long period of time. So unless you are as skilled as Buffett, you are better off with low cost index funds.

On average, shouldn't roughly half of investors do better than the market and roughly half do worse?

In practice, it's more like 25% do better than the market and 75% do worse. This is because those who do better tend to do much better, while those who do worse tend to do only slightly worse. (Remember, if you don't short your losses are capped at 100%, while your gains are potentially infinite.) Mean/median confusion strikes again.

In addition, if you are an investor and you do poorly, you may just drop out of the market. On the other hand, if you are a winner, you'll stay in the market.

In this way, you can have a lot of investors losing their money with a fewer # of people gaining.

I'm not suffering mean/median confusion (note I said "roughly"), I'm just not convinced the distribution is quite as asymmetric as you think(despite, as you say, being capped at zero). But we don't have any numbers either way, so shrug.

Could've sworn the roughly 75% figure did come from data (thought it was a Berkshire Hathaway annual report, and it may've been 70% or 80% or something in between), but I can't seem to dig it up, so I guess we'll have to leave it as idle speculation.