What Happened in 2014?
avc.com
avc.com
This is amazing and I guess I'll need to meditate over this fact (as I still like those files on my computer, feels as if I own them).
For now I'd still recommend holding on to your important stuff and considering the nature of the relationship between you and your cloud provider.
Even on HN most people have only made a few changes. Only a tiny number of HN users have PGP / GPG keys available, for one example.
I suspect the abstraction of a local filesystem will become more and more quaint and give way to popular abstraction involving a remote, distributed filesystem of some sort.
If we had actually devised an alternative to hierarchical file systems and moved to something like a persistent object store (as with Newton OS, PalmOS and some other platforms), that would have been impressive, though in the long term might not turn out well due to relative novelty and lack of battle testing to the idea.
In fact, trying to pretend files don't exist in an environment dominated by them is foolish.
They are not mirroring your data, you are mirroring their data.
Maybe the things we want to pass on to our kids will be more tactile. Our first iPhone or 3d-printed wrench? Or maybe the same type of heirlooms that have been passed down families for generations - jewelry, watches, paintings. Sure we won't be giving handwritten letters to our progeny but frankly, that's our own fault. I haven't even written a single letter to my wife! And I don't want our banal "where u at" text messages to be memorialized for posterity. Our vacation photos or public blog entries shared online will do just fine.
Think about how it's different from other kinds of investing. Warren Buffett looks for industries that are stable and picks good companies that operate in those industries. To do this well you need to know what makes an industry stable and what makes a company good. Examine enough of them, avoid trying to get rich quickly, build a system, and you can do well at it.
VC by definition operates in unstable industries and has to pick winners based both on having a good read of people so as to pick good founders, and having a good read of society so as to have an idea of which kind of ventures might succeed.
To do well investing you need to have a good deal of money, to earn this money you generally have to be successful, the act of creating that success later plays a role in helping you to understand what makes a good investment.
So, you start out, conquer an industry and make a bunch of money, then use that success to make even more money investing in other people. If you can do both of these things, then you can not put your foot in your mouth every third word when trying to predict the future. Maybe you can cut it down to every third paragraph.
This is harder to so in some environments, but often, the more one goes up a ladder of influence, the easier it becomes (self efficiency, delegation, understanding of employer or sponsor).
I have no idea regarding VCs, but in large companies a common formula is: Managers: 10% of time for reflection Managers of managers: 20-30% of time Managers of managers of managers and further through the tree: 60% of time
This power of reflection increases clarity in decision, communication, and impact, whatever the field. Contrast this with the need to constantly fight fires with no time to think about the big picture.
Often, it doesn't work out this way. Lack of delegation, filling more than one role at the same time ('stretch goals' that really mean the organisation is under resourced), desire for immediate impact stop this from working.
The only thing you can say about the author is that he's knowledgeable about the industry. His speculations on what happened in 2014 is a reflection of his knowledge, not skill.
Coding is a skill. If you just read a book on C++ without writing a line of code you gain a big picture understanding of C++, yet you lack the necessary skill to actually code. Like big picture thinking, anybody can learn a skill, but It takes far more time and discipline to actually gain a true skill then it does to see the big picture.
I'll say one thing though, understanding the big picture is often all you need to bullshit other people into thinking you have a certain skill.
Faster to type, easy to run a bit of code to achieve.
converted is store for modified text
new paragraph is store for modified sentences
abbreviations is list of common abbreviations (eg,nb,dr...)
paragraph is split by newline '\n'
for each newline in paragraph
/* abbreviation check using '.' seps */
if fullstops in newline greater than one
check newline for abbreviations and replace
/* break down para into newlines by '.' */
split newline into sentences by '.'
for sentence in sentences
if sentence starts with word
replace first letter with upper
else
move to first word, replace with upper
/* build up paragraphs */
append sentence to new paragraph
/* modified text */
append new paragraph to converted
write converted to display
This seems so huge to me - maybe it's because I have kids and saw it happen firsthand over the course of this year.
A couple years ago we dropped cable TV because everyone was watching Netflix, now I'm thinking about dropping Netflix because the kids all watch Youtube (and I don't need to be wasting time on Netflix).