Try to sit in the middle of the carriage. I don't get motion sickness on trains, but I find doing that makes a meaningful difference to how comfortable it is to type on a laptop on a commuter train.
Develop a sense of curiosity, get into the habit of asking yourself why things are they way they are, even if you don't need to know the answer. Read widely about technology and follow the threads to new topics. Try things just to see how/if they work. Go's a great start - it'll get you thinking about programming language design, concurrency, networking, etc., and all of those will lead to something else.
You'll also need to be comfortable thinking about things you don't understand. If everything you do is familiar to you you're not thinking broadly enough.
From the article: "To be clear, Malik isn’t talking about Kickstarter where funders make a donation that acts like a pre-order. He’s talking about the public buying stock in private companies, something that may soon be legal thanks to the JOBS Act..."
... one other thing though. With a bit of practice you can remove the need to develop on feature branches; break things down into really small chunks and get into the habit of making half-done features unobtrusive (e.g. hiding UI elements until they're ready). That way you can push to master often and have confidence it'll always be safe to deploy, which simplifies your tooling and reduces the scope for merge conflicts etc.
This doesn't seem that bad to me, what problems is it causing?
The only changes I'd make would be to wrap it up in a script so you have one-click deploys, and possibly implement the 'copy and symlink' strategy that Capistrano uses so you have minimal downtime during deploys and instant roll-backs if necessary.
That should never be necessary; if you invest in the appropriate automation you can get your regular deployment process down to a few minutes and then even emergency fixes can go through the normal channels. The benefit is of course mainly the ease of day to day deployment, but it does mean that in those emergency cases you don't need to worry about what you've forgotten to do, or how your changes might mess up the assumptions baked into the automated system.
YouTrack (http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/index.jsp) is my favourite out of everything I've ever seriously used. Physical cards stuck to the wall also works well for small, co-located teams.
The important things are that someone needs to put a decent amount of time into managing the bug list, and you need to be actually willing to devote appropriate resources to fixing them (or better still, eliminating the root causes). If those aren't present you'll just end up with an unmanageable dumping ground regardless of where it lives.
Okay, cool - so it seems like you do actually have quite a specific piece of technology missing, but it also seems to me that this is an architecture / technical design problem rather than just needing someone to code it up. It also seems that it's pretty core to what you're trying to do, which to me suggests that you really need a find a way for yourself or someone with a long terms stake in the project to own this piece.
If you were able to encapsulate that part of you product (the simulation and associated data store), would you feel comfortable architecting the rest of the system (whatever that is - web interface, associated company website, etc.) and bringing someone else on board as a contractor using fairly standard technology (e.g. Rails / Django)? If you could do that it'd free you up to focus on learning the bits which really matter.
Putting my two cents in technically, the way you're describing this makes me think that it's not necessarily a good fit for a traditional RDBMS - 'hundreds' of tables of fields strikes me as an unconventional way to use these technologies, but I don't know enough about the problem you're solving to suggest what might be more appropriate.
So what is your background? It seems like you have experience doing something technical, even if it isn't professional software engineering. Do you feel you could code up a workable implementation of your network simulation in Python which could be encapsulated as a component of a larger system using a mix of technologies? Separating things out into modules for which you can (in theory) implement using different stacks is generally a good idea in any case.
Can you say more about how your product is medium computational intensity? i.e. what makes it more complex than your average databased backed web app? Why do you feel that code quality is more important for you than for an average project?
The architecture of your application is more than a one-off decision about tech stacks made at the start, and I'd say that you really do need someone with a long term stake in the company who's able to own this on an ongoing basis. I don't know whether there might be ways to get an advisor on board to do this rather than making a full hire.
> 1 - what do you think about users paying in advance?
I guess it depends on your attitude to risk and the sort of service you think people will pay for. If you don't you presumably need more working capital, which has a cost, and you're taking on the risk that people won't pay but you're stuck with the goods. You're basically getting into traditional retail.
> 2 - what do you thin about the 5%?
I wouldn't pay it, but I don't have a problem paying for things online. You need to figure out what your target market will pay.
> 3 - do you think the buisness model is broken in anway?
It sounds like something which will need careful risk management, and may require a lot of capital. (Edit: Basically this isn't anything new - you're proposing becoming a retailer of 'stuff from ebay' as far as I can tell.)
Can you be more specific about how large 'large' is?
Edit: without knowing the specifics, you might like to look at Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/). That'll give you an HTTP/JSON API into your data, so you might be able to do all the UI work you need client side, e.g. with Backbone.js (http://backbonejs.org/) or similar.