DavidChouinard

I would also add Don't Make Me Think (by Steve Krug) to that list.

Please do. There seems to be valuable lessons learnt there.

If one is working on very low level problems — as you are — then an academic education is tremendously useful. What you refer as badass is the work of a true computer scientist. There are indeed incredibly brilliant academics in most computer science departments.

However, most of us here — including the OP, it seems — are interested in higher level problems. Not those of writing compilers or optimizing some arcane algorithm, but those involving successfully running a startup. Academia is far behind on the later, and as a student myself, I share the sentiment of the OP.

Why so?

The video on the page mentions an average of ~10 hours per week.

Related: Derek Sivers' 3 minute TED Talk on leadership (it's perfectly spot-on.): http://on.ted.com/9O9d

I was skeptic at first too. Read the first few dozen pages of The Singularity Is Near and you'll be impressed the quality of the data. By almost all accounts, technological progress datapoints match very closely an exponential curve.

Here's a good mashup from a number of third party sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events....

This is hardly a wishy washy thesis by a history major. The data are pretty robust.

I sympathize with your position. Kurzweil seems to regularly makes strong remarks that shock me in their assertive naivety.

However, our species is incredibly poor at intuitively understanding exponential trends. Kurzweil's essential point is that our gut-feeling predictions of the future will be off substantially. Specifically, our intuitive sense of future progress significantly underestimates actual progress and the gap systematically widens as time progresses.

Neither you or I could have intuitively predicted twenty years ago the level of today's technological advancement. And we'd be even more wrong in the predicting the next twenty.

It's far too easy to dismiss Kurzweil's work as that of a superficial nutjob who wants to "sell more books and speaking engagements." Kuzweil's crunched the numbers. While he might not be right on everything, his predictions are based on data, but yours are based on human intuition that has historically been wrong.

I would be very careful of the knee-jerk reaction you display to Kurzweil's work. Keep in mind we are cognitively disabled at intuitively predicting exponential progress.

Which they then removed and replaced with "Ouch."

Read the document attached to the bottom or the original post. Trust me, it'll all be much clearer.

+1 for Don't Make Me Think. Old, but highly recommended.

Here's the way I look at it: computing is becoming exponentially cheaper, but good developers are incredibly expensive. Anything that makes the later more productive is overwhelmingly likely to be worth an increase in hardware cost (to cover up lost performance).

The problem is that performance is an academically interesting problem to us geeks. We love to optimize, make quicker and oh-so clever.

Interesting. I'm a Montrealer currently busy for the summer, but very curious in this opportunity for afterwards. Definitely saving this link.

It's much easier to sell mediocrity in B2B. There's no need to have truly great products, a truly great salesforce is good enough.

So yes, that whole thing about consumers is ill-advised. Especially when there's someone out there that's already figured out how to build truly great products.

I'd agree that they're still possibility of pulling it out.

The question is not can they, but will they.

The lack of results is an important result in of itself.

Sure they should.

A developer casually reading a few books/blogs could learn pretty much all those domains. The same can't be said of business guys doing the opposite.

Related: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you... (one of Derek Sivers' TED talks)

> if your UX designer is doing their job, you will never even think about them.

UX is not something you can stitch on afterwards. Good UX is deeply ingrained in engineering and an omnipresent, pervasive focus of the team. I think that's what parent is referring to in regards to what Google is lacking.

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have." —Steve Jobs

+1 for Rails for Zombies. Great way to get started.

This is a great article. I especially like this:

Here’s a seemingly paradoxical piece of advice for you: Listen to your customers, but don’t let them tell you what to do. Let me explain. Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.

RIM has 2 people sharing the position of CEO and 3 sharing that of COO. Always thought it was great recipe for a soulless organization with no direction or vision.

No compromise.

> As you may or may not know, this is my 8th grade year.

Interestingly, the sentence that completely blew me away had nothing to do with the argument being made.

> Figuring out a way around the standardized admissions process is the admissions process.

So true.

No, TEDx event (and anyone for that matter) can't charge for admission to event who's purpose is to watch a livestream of a TED (non-x) event.

To clarify: TEDx events can charge up to 100$ for their regular conference. TEDx can't charge admission to a livestream of TED/TEDGlobal/TEDIndia.

The problem (in academia or otherwise) is that the default is not to post online. Excited to see what happens when the pendulum swings the other side.

Sure it is. And that's a good thing.

Anything that's worth participating to is elitist. It brings together interesting, fascinating and smart people. Most admirably, TED succeeded at keeping the audience eclectic. Nobody learns from homogeneity and confirming their thoughts with people who think the same.

As a TED attendee and TEDx organizer, I can definitely confirm on this. Whether for my event or for TED, I see the talks as just an excuse to get amazing people together. Everything — from the high cost to the application process — is about ensuring that every person in the audience genuinely wants to participate and contributes to the experience.

Case in point: the talks are posted for free online to weed out those who attend for the information in the talks. The Internet trivializes pure knowledge and makes human interaction so much more valuable.

When you bank your event on people (which is pretty much the only thing you can bank on in the age of the Internet), you have no choice but to make it elitist. In a good way.

"Dropping out of MIT is like graduating from Yale."