Play many 9x9 games; play against the program Igowin: it can beat dan players. Keep playing 9x9 and 13x13 games until you are 8 to 10 kyu in strength.
Play on 19x19 games and study fuseki theory -- how to play the opening. Start to study joseki, but do not memorize them; understand the principles behind joseki.
Replay professional games. I am a fan of Shusaku (the book Invincible is a must read for any serious Western player). Don't simply click through games on the computer. Get a set of stones and a board. Play through the games. Get a feeling for the moves. Try to understand the strategies.
Once you get to 4 kyu, study tsume-go problems (http://senseis.xmp.net/?Tsumego). Start with problems around the 6 kyu level. Keep studying the same problems over-and-over until you can solve them in milliseconds. Then move up to 4 kyu problems. Repeat. Keep doing this until you become a dan player. If you study 1 hour of tsume-go every day like this, you might reach 5 dan in about four months.
As soon as you can, if you can afford it, take private lessons with professional players. KGS has many.
Thiel has argued that there is a "bubble" in higher education -- that is, on average, American's over value it. Not that higher education is meaningless or that going to a top school and getting good grades doesn't signal that you are: smart, ambitious, hard working and would fit in with the academic culture at a hedge fund.
As a Canadian I find the persistance of the "small vs. big" government narrative in American politics bemusing - there is no small government party in the states, only branding.
This is an article on dealbook - everyone reading knows the difference between market cap and price per share and the market cap is in the first paragraph. Headlines include the price per share of stocks all the time, it doesn't mean the readers or writers are stupid.
Also, price earnings would be a pretty foolish approach to valuing Facebook - I wouldn't be so sure that you are so much more sophisticated than the imaginary bozos you are criticizing.
I noticed you were using Shopify. You could probably add a lot to that $10,000 by selling a varient of your store's design on the Shopify theme store. It looks awesome.
It's a deceptively focused/small offering to start with but they have the key components required to become a credentialing system outside of the university/college system.
It's easy to look at YC startups and say they aren't pursuing massive visions but the truth is many of them are just starting with some tiny subset of a big problem.
When you click on a piece of work on /browse/ it takes you directly into the "gallery view" for that piece, rather than to the artist's profile page. This is a bit jarring. I would consider taking users to the artist's profile first and letting them enter the gallery view from there.
Thanks for the feedback. It actually used to work that way, but users were telling us that they wanted to go directly to the image that the clicked on. We'll work on a happy solution.
Two more comments:
I was about to email you about it when I noticed you actually have something about gift cards on your website. Make it more prominent! I think gifts would be really awesome here, but you make it so hard to find :)
Also, it'd be nice if you could somehow give an example of artists' price ranges. I don't know if I'll be paying $15, $50, $500, or $1000, and especially for someone new to art commissions, this could be a point of serious confusion.
Either way, awesome idea. I really hope this takes off. Consider me a hopeful future customer!
Planet Money also did a follow up on one of Bain's deals that went right. TL;DR Bain bought a company, levered it up, restructured it and successfully took it public.
The company executives all got bonuses, Bain made a ton of money and the workers got to keep their jobs. The company is still running today.
