Hitchhiker

" Universal retention of provenance without commensurate universal commercial rights would lead to a police/ surveillance state. Universal commercial provenance can instead lead to a balanced future, where a middle class can thrive with proportional political clout, and where individuals can invent their own lives without being unduly manipulated by unseen operators of Siren Servers. " [1]

[1] - Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future?. Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Moving and prophetic.. even today and probably tomorrow.

This is freaking awesome..

Yabba-Doo.. Yippity-Yabbity-Doo [1]

HECK YEAH, WE're 5 !

[1] - Scoobypedia

to clarify Zan's comment its

511 ( startups ) 11(.)5 (B)

for it to be one " startups " , decimal and B have to be parsed out ;-)

Paradox is once you pull an Edison , financiers wish to have interactions with you.

This goes from the very top end of town to oblivion. Because, at the root of it is that gotcha.. money for nothing.. many know how the rest of that song goes.

http://cdixon.org/2012/11/23/some-problems-are-so-hard-they-... seems to to have the graphic as well ;-)

Just a side-note, making a name via accomplishing nothing is common, various sub-types such as that you hint at above are perhaps further taxonomy ?

Rebels eventually wish to be kings. Some actually get there. Then the cycle repeats.

My worry here is that individuals are paying more attention to specific actors who as powerful as they appear to be are not as formidable as systems they represent.

Its almost rare to see such wounded attitudes from an equally matched adversary.

The other direction is full scale martyr which was also displayed recently .. I'd rather not take the name to avoid pain for those close to the kid.

In deed, you remind me of Solon's warning. Perhaps the better way to put it is he's attacking one heck of a problem - and with the right detachment to both industry and academia - so the minimum is based more on the quality of problems than the individual ( as unique as that is in this particular case ).

But yes, being an entrepreneur is an added layer, as you've to learn to arrange people to attain a larger goal than just research.

And he shows signs of that even on the jobs page while avoiding the broken method of interviewing that is oft practiced, he's almost defining a boundary for relatively high signal from the applicants.

His fluid approach is reminiscent of the caper that the Google guys pulled at Stanford.. and as it turns out, I think he also got funded by Larry.

David's start is at 14 and not post 20 as most grad students. At minimum, he will end up making something like Mathematica like Wolfram and at max, he will change the world.

The Big and Little Oh of this story are both extreme events.

I do not think funding is David's problem :-).

Watch Elon explain why http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIsYT1rqW5w

This has been out for a while. Would be interesting to see the next steps.

The nuance is if one thinks deeply .. auditory interference is part of the human experience .. we even do not mind it since artifical and natural sources are always meshing in and out. This is why the Walkman took off since people were already listening to music from the time of live performances onward to the Edison era and then portables.

Glass if one thinks about it deeply is something unnatural.. microscopes, telescopes, vision impairment correction or shade from harmful sun.. or immersive , time disruptive experiences like a movie.

So the key barrier that glass concept is going to face is user rejection beyond the initial bubble crowd. Average people already have a certain context in which they find artificial inputs acceptable ( TV etc ).

Our distinction between natural and artificial sources of audio is different to visual.

I may be entirely wrong and Google may change the habits of a lot of young kids .. that is actually a rather strange and terrifying thought.

Anything that is not a fancy dress for attending a Borg themed party.. but rather is actually pointed toward Borg.. is a no go for me personally. This is one tech where I'd request someone wearing them to take it off while near me.

" That is a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. " - Charlie Munger ( http://ycombinator.com/munger.html )

The best learning curve there is. And additional irony, eventually someone on this curve eats all the white-boarding interviewing for lunch as well.

" Whether you are trying to protect corporate intellectual property or just the privacy of your personal life, the key idea is that you shouldn't underestimate the importance of your disclosures, particularly over time. " [1]

[1] - Conti, Greg (2008-10-10). Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?

" Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. "

" There is, unfortunately, only one product that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. " - Lanier, Jaron (2010-01-18). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Penguin. Kindle Edition.

" The building circular – A cage, glazed – a glass lantern about the Size of Ranelagh – The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference – The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the inspectors concealed - from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence – The whole circuit reviewable with little, or if necessary without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell. " [1]

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

It is perhaps sublime comedy .. their name[1]..

" Fox " " con " nnnnnnn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Controversies

" Star systems in a society come about because of a paucity of influential sorting processes. " - Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future? (Kindle Location 598). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

-- my thoughts --

I am sure it was.. but the main point is.. people attribute more rationality and objectivity to a process that frankly even by pg's own comments ( check out his essay on " two kinds of judgment ) is not so.

Investors ( even incubators ) should be a secondary thought to an entrepreneur's path.. I'd go so far as to point that its best to have a defensive approach and look for paths do not require them ( even pg has hinted many times via his essays.. including the cockroach bit ).

What happens when the first example arrives that clearly just bypassed the whole lot of the present ecosystem till a very late stage and hits the range of a Google or Microsoft ?

Well what is really weird is that yC's top hits as per an annotation on Harj's recent mock letter on Rapgenius got looked over:

" We missed Dropbox, Heroku and Airbnb. " [1]

If the 3 supposed hits that presently created most of yC's entire known value got passed over by the VCs at first go.. one has to be a bit skeptical about the whole idol contest.

[1] - http://rapgenius.com/Harj-taggar-well-be-circling-back-lyric...

Its actually a rather interesting / cunning behavior in contrast to the given ecosystem. Abstractly, this coupled with a suitable robots.txt could unravel the Google economy. Perhaps even establish a linear relationship between " yahoo, everything is free " people.

I hate to do this.. but..

" The Morlocks could have descended from today’s social network or hedge fund owners, while the ancestors of the Eloi undoubtedly felt lucky initially, as free tools helped them crash on each other’s couches more efficiently. What is intriguing about Wells’s vision is that members of both species become undignified, lesser creatures. (Morlocks eat Eloi, which is about as far as one can go in rejecting empathy and dignity.)

source : Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future? . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Just out of curiosity, how do you differentiate with http://rapgenius.com ?

Live free or die hard ;-).

An interesting thought experiment to do.. get really smart friends to read this piece after stripping Harvard , Bezos, Jobs and almost all the names .. replace them with variables X_1,X_2 etc.. perhaps a good thing to do for almost all such pieces.

I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune.

" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "

" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "

" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "

" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "

source : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb