aneesh

I don't think the article misses the point. He never says Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg should never have dropped out. He's just saying that dropping out should be rare. For the vast majority of people, it's not the right thing to do, financially. The "right people" will ignore all the discouragement and drop out anyway. People like Sergey Brin & Larry Page will drop out, with or without Thiel's investment.

"It's better to discourage than to encourage dropping out, so that it's done only for compelling reasons."

1) they are hiding. You (theoretically) can't reverse the function by any method other than brute-force.

2) they are *binding. You (theoretically) can't find any other input that hashes to the same output by any method other than brute-force.

Any tool that "decrypts" md5 hashes most likely does so by generating what is called a rainbow table -- a giant list of many possible inputs, and the hashes they generate. If you look at the spreadsheet and find a hash from your rainbow table, voila, you know what it came from. To make it harder to use rainbow tables, any security-conscious site will "salt" the passwords before hashing them, by adding a random string prefix. The point is for the random "salt" to be different for each password you are hashing, so a standard (unsalted) rainbow table won't work, and further, the same rainbow table won't work for every password.

(md5 itself has been shown to be vulnerable to collision attacks, which is why I said "theoretically")

"Plans are useless but planning is indispensable." --Dwight Eisenhower

The one place where it's really difficult to stop using Google is AdWords. If you want to buy search ads, Google has a near monopoly, and others can't compete right now. That's where the real "can you even stop using it?" is.

"You get the Zoom.it short URL, an embeddable viewer, as well as the underlying DZI and surrounding metadata."

It works well for small teams, but breaks down pretty quickly as team size grows.

See the few seconds starting at 1:13 in the video.

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=san+francisco

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation

If you truly want regex support, just grab a lot of tweets with the API, and filter client-side.

"I wish I got a chance to write more code. I do mess around. They don't let my code go in shipping products. They haven't done that for about eight years now."

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/1997/...

Unfortunately, neither of us is working on it anymore, and the site is no longer very active. But the code for the site is open-source, so feel free to launch your own clusterify and build a community around it!

Here's the link: http://y.ahoo.it/mVPMVA8X

But I think you can improve lifestyle in two ways -- increase income like you mentioned, or decrease costs. It's possible for technology to bring costs down. And when costs come down, a $100 income can buy the lifestyle that $300 used to. So even if you depress wages, you can still win by depressing costs even further through technology.

If events A & B are mutually exclusive, it means that if A happens, then B cannot happen, and vice-versa