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Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Tags: no_tag on 2008-07-01 and saved by138 people -All Annotations (29) -About
more fromwww.theatlantic.com
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the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”
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In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
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When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration
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About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
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More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher.
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“For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
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Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
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And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”
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“filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
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He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would
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expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
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Coding Horror: Don't Go Dark
Tags: no_tag on 2008-06-18 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.codinghorror.com
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Dropping code-bombs on communities is rarely good for the project: the team is either forced to reject it outright, or accept it and deal with a giant opaque blob that is hard to understand, change, or maintain. It moves the project decidedly in one direction without much discussion or consensus.
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programmers do not want to write code out in the open
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I don't think it's hubris so much as fear of embarrassment. Rather than think of programming as an inherently social activity, most coders seem to treat it as an arena for personal heroics, and will do anything to protect that myth. They're fine with sharing code, as long as they present themselves as infallible, it seems. Maybe it's just human nature.
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When somebody surfaces and the deliverable isn't done, we know right away. We know that this week we slipped one day. That's worth knowing, much better than getting to the end of the project and observing, "Oh, we slipped six months!" At that point it's too late to even bother counting up how much you've slipped.
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This is easier to deal with in the workplace, because you typically have some kind of (theoretically) rational project management in place, and everyone works under the same umbrella. It's effectively impossible to go dark if you're practicing any form of agile software development.
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Tasks are always sliced up so they fit into a single iteration, and you never let them spill over into multiple iterations. You'll always have something to show at the end of each iteration. You can't go dark without quitting the project or, perhaps, your job.
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'Dead man' wakes up as doctors prepare to remove his organs - 11 Jun 2008 - NZ Herald: World / International News
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The case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1½ hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants
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It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain - and finally, his heart started beating again.
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the man can walk and talk.
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"During the meeting, other reanimators ... spoke of situations in which a person whom everyone was sure had died in fact survived after reanimation efforts that went on much longer than usual," the minutes of the committee meeting say.
"Participants conceded that these were completely exceptional cases, but ones that were nevertheless seen in the course of a career."
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Orlando's Frank L. Amodeo: Secret life of a tycoon wannabe -- OrlandoSentinel.com
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Amodeo not only dreamed of taking over several former Soviet Republics, such as Tajikistan, and poor African nations, including Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), but he also wanted to control their economies and telecommunications through Mirabilis. And in the process, he would force governments to dissolve, the doctor said.
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Orlando venture capitalist Frank L. Amodeo was planning to take over the world. But on Tuesday afternoon, he lost control of his own world and soon will be heading to a psychiatric center.
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"In this case, Mr. Amodeo was expressing the ability to tell the future, the ability to transmute molecules, rule the Earth and establish the Terran empire. . . . In my opinion, it's reached psychotic proportions."
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The Internal Revenue Service seized $13.3 million in real estate
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Amodeo was disbarred as a Georgia bankruptcy lawyer in 1994 and later went to federal prison for defrauding a client.
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Orlando's Frank L. Amodeo: Secret life of a tycoon wannabe
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Paradigm Shift - plok
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The databases we use today were designed 20, 30 years ago.
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Relational databases were designed in that world. They require huge amounts of work up-front (schema design, data normalization, query design, performance tuning) to allow single queries to run at maximum speed. And this made sense. At the time.
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The computing world and the usage patterns today are fundamentally different.
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Thousands of users update their status on Twitter and Facebook this minute, in parallel.
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Doing a simple concurrency benchmark reveals that I can serve around 1000 concurrent read requests from CouchDB from my Mac Mini
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This not a fair comparison though, the requests do not do the same calculations so they can’t be compared. But they are not fair either the other way around: CouchDB and the tests are not optimized at all while the other setup is a few years in the making.
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The Panacea for Putting Things Off | ThinkSimpleNow.com
Tags: no_tag on 2008-06-03 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromthinksimplenow.com
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The more we make excuses, the more we buy into them, the easier it is to make additional excuses to support our mind-created beliefs. These beliefs become our story, and our excuses become our reality.
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Delaying is addictive.
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What we repeat in our mind actually exaggerates the scale of the task involved. It snowballs larger and larger, until the task becomes so big that you will never get it done.
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You’ll actually save time and attention energy by just doing it.
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You really start to be productive when you can change your attitude.
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Stop thinking. Just do it.
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Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity: A New Hope: Polyglotism
Tags: no_tag on 2008-05-15 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromola-bini.blogspot.com
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In many cases the best solution is a hybrid one. There is a reason that Google allows more than one language (C++, Java, Python and JavaScript). This is because the languages are good at different things. They have different characteristics, and you can get a synergistic effect by combining them. A polyglot system can be greater than the sum of it's parts.
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Compare languages, understand your most important tools. Have several different tools for different tasks, and understand the failings of your current tools.
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Be good polyglot programmers. The world will not have a new big language again, and you need to rewire your head to work in this environment.
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Ajaxian » The seven rules of pragmatic progressive enhancement
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- Separate as much as possible
- Build on things that work
- Generate dependent markup
- Test for everything before you apply it
- Explore the environment
- Load on demand
- Modularize code
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Why Apple and Google are winning | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs
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Focus on adoption first. Focusing on adoption helps a company to fixate on how to make software (or hardware) enjoyable, and not necessarily what will make it sell better. The sales follow the adoption.
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Not Google. It focused on adoption first. It focused on making the search experience simple, fast, and useful.
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For those commercial open-source vendors out there, this means your first order of business should be to focus on adoption and the user experience, rather than proprietary extensions (if any).
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It has lost its way of late as it tries to complicate the user experience a bit by adding bells and whistles designed to drive upgrades, not customer satisfaction.
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As we focus on the unwashed masses rather than the elite, which begs a focus on adoption first, software will become easier to use and more pleasurable to use. Like Apple. Like Google.
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Computing at Scale » Blog Archive » Parallelism: The New New Thing!
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parallelism is set to be the “new new thing” for entrepreneurs and investors.
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One area within SaaS that is growing quickly is the opportunity to deliver a SaaS product as an appliance. Marc Benioff proved to the world that you can put your data into the cloud and still sleep at night
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Tons of opportunities there to develop new products that can offer 10x-100x performance improvements over the existing ones.
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Disk will become the new tape, and will be used in the same way, as a sequential storage medium
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The move from sequential to parallel computing that is now underway will be as profound a change for the IT industry as the move to the web in the 1990s or the move to personal computers and workstations in the 1980s.
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All new computers are now parallel, and the scale of parallelism is growing exponentially.
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This once-in-a-lifetime transition from sequential to parallel software promises a ten year bonanza for entrepreneurs and investors as new companies emerge and shake up the IT industry offering the tools, systems and applications for massively parallel computing.
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The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success : Bruce F. Webster
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Managing talent and skilled workers is a key success factor in the 21st century across all industries, not just technology-based industries. However, many of our organizational practices originated in the 1800s with railroading and the rise of the Industrial Age. Your average Gen Y programmer bears little resemblance to the unskilled and semiskilled laborers of the past.
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nstead, they focus on checkbox items, such as certifications and years of (claimed) experience with a given technology.
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They seek to match keywords against what they think their needs are.
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And they tend to believe, unconsciously or explicitly, in the mythical man-month, thinking that the larger their IT staff, the quicker they can complete projects
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They recognize that they have a limited number of slots on the team, and they may also be operating under financial constraints, either due to the team’s own resources or a league-imposed salary cap.
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A talented IT engineer can pick up new technologies rapidly
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At the same time, having talent is no excuse for being a prima donna.
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It is our observation that firms often have too many IT engineers rather than too few.
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a direct result of management policies and politics that equate headcount with internal clout — in short, kingdom building.
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All Pages engineers made recommendations as to which candidates to bring in for interviews, either from incoming résumés or from their own professional network. When a candidate was selected to come in for interviews, every Pages engineer would conduct his or her own one-on-one interview with that candidate,
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We only had a certain number of slots, and we were going to be working very long hours together for years, so we chose carefully. The result was a very stable and talented development team that had almost no turnover over a grueling four-year period.
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The quarterback is the most visible player on a football team and is responsible for leading the offensive team to get the ball into the end zone. The equivalent position on a software team is the chief architect.
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Fred Brooks first laid out the need for a chief architect at length, most particularly for conceptual unity [5].
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For example, one project we consulted on had 30 engineers developing network management software for a global telecommunications project — but no architect (or architecture) at all!
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Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis - The Daily WTF
Tags: no_tag on 2008-04-29 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromthedailywtf.com
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the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long
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The least talented folks
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entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near
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Employees – especially the most talented ones – are not “dating around” and moving from place to place in search of the Perfect Company at which they can grow old and retire at. They’ve already aced the first four rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy and are in search of self-actualization: the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their abilities and to strive to be the best they can.
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Indefinite retention is impossible; employees always quit.
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They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can’t afford to let them go.
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What was once “fresh new ideas that we can’t implement today” become “the same old boring suggestions that we’re never going to do”
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This leads towards a loss of self actualization which ends up chipping away at motivation.
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Nothing – not even a team of on-site masseuses – can assuage this loss.
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A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni. This is far more than a semantic distinction.
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An alumni relationship is positive; something that people can take pride in; and one that keeps the door open for further opportunities on both ends.
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But perhaps the most important benefit to a culture of quitting is that it effectively flushes out the residue of unskilled employees. When someone hasn’t moved up or out after a few cycles, it becomes painfully evident who the weakest link is. Everyone – even that certain someone – knows that they’ve long outstayed their welcome. If the sheer awkwardness of being “that guy” doesn’t cause him to leave on his own, and he still doesn’t get it after being asked to resign, then certainly no one will miss him when he’s inevitably let go.
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The higher-up the position, the longer the curve. Changes tend to occur much more slowly at the top. For example, a basic “refactoring” of a department’s teams could take well over a year to implement.
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The greater the skill, the shorter the curve. Ambition and skill go hand-in-hand, and ambitious individuals tend to want swift changes, and quickly lose motivation when these don’t happen.
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The larger the company, the shorter the curve. Large teams are generally not receptive to ideas from the new guy, leaving a large part of contribution (i.e. past experience) wasted. Furthermore, promotions are often based on tenure, not skill.
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The smaller the company, the longer the curve. Smaller companies, on the other hand, are more receptive to change, allowing one to contribute past experiences for a long while.
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That said, we still need to bring these changes to our industry. Obviously, we can’t all implement the Cravath System overnight. For many companies – especially those who really don’t need skilled developers –a full-fledged Cravath system will never be a good fit.
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jcole’s weblog: Jeremy Cole’s take on life. » Blog Archive » Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise
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That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code.Add Sticky Note
- Have they been taking notes from Zend?posted by tswicegood on 2008-04-15 23:59:59
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MySQL simply does not understand the market they’re in. Which is pretty pathetic actually, because the market is theirs to win or lose, and they seem determined to throw obstacles in their own way of winning it.
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Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: Google App Engine: How AppDrop Does and Does Not Affect Lock-in
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rankly, I think an Amazon portability story would be much more generally interesting to enterprise IT. But, that's just me.
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At *this* moment in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial.
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If you have a substantial amount of data, you can't just write code to dump it because they will only let any request run for a short period before they terminate it.
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This last point is really very serious. I've been warning for some time that the first phase of Web 2.0 is the acquisition of critical mass via network effects, but that once companies achieve that critical mass, they will be tempted to consolidate their position, leading ultimately to a replay of the personal computer industry's sad decline from an open, energetic marketplace to a controlled economy.
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Why There Aren't More Googles
Tags: no_tag on 2008-04-15 and saved by15 people -All Annotations (2) -About
more fromwww.paulgraham.com
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This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true.
Google's founders were willing to sell early on.
They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay. -
when a startup turns you down, consider raising
your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they
want will later seem a bargain. -
turning down reasonable offers is the
most reliable test you could invent for whether a startup will make
it big. -
money guys undervalue the most innovative startups.
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bold but unscrupulous
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more like bureaucrats
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Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.
If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's
throats. -
The exciting thing about market economies is that stupidity equalsAdd Sticky Note
opportunity.- The quote of the article right there... That's brilliant.posted by tswicegood on 2008-04-15 16:53:09
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VCs are money managers.
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But the startup world is evolving away from their current
model.
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Moving on from centralised-decentralised development, or: what's after github and gitorious?
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Everytime someone uses a centralised service to house their decentralised development Linus, not Lachie this time, kills a kitten.
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How to Disagree
Tags: no_tag on 2008-03-29 and saved by46 people -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromwww.paulgraham.com
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The author is a self-important dilettante.
is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag." -
because
good ideas often come from outsiders -
Sometimes they even agree with one another, but
are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it. -
The most convincing form of disagreement is refutation. It's also
the rarest, because it's the most work.