jdawg77

This can't be because the most advanced unit in the entire United States Military reminded the world that, last month, they already played the trump card can it?

http://www.army.mil/article/141734/Army_cyber_defenders_open...

Nah; that must be a coincidence. After all, why would somebody after the US Military try to convince people that their security was better? Do you honestly think Yahoo has better stuff than the Tony Stark of the armed forces?

Please. Let's see, Ycombinator's got some ex-Yahoo's as alumni, I'm sure they'll chime in and disagree with me any moment. Yep yep. Bring it.

Dshell was released on December 17th; last month. Press release from the US Army on Jan 28th (3 days ago...) would be a better, more official source than this blog.

http://www.army.mil/article/141734/Army_cyber_defenders_open...

The guy looks, imho, a bit like Tony Stark. That's pretty cool, the money quote is this one: "If soldiers eat it, wear it, touch it, fly it, ride it or ship it, we make it." Makers. Gotta love 'em. Funny timing, December 17th is 4 days after my patent pending in cryptography. Then, the press release was same day I offered a small amount for my company, publicly.

Media's taken a few days to catch up, or a few weeks, depending on your POV.

So, thanks for the downvote. I had a suspicion, given the venom, then reviewed your LinkedIn profile.

Before saying, "There is no criminal case," review some facts - and the legal aspects of state vs nation in the US of A. If a law passes in say, New York - it doesn't impact people in my home state of California. It can be used as precedent...but, seriously.

I've gone toe to toe with multiple governments about their own legal system and Neither of us is a lawyer...right? Right. So, as I mentioned, get somebody qualified, pursue both sets of charges. Financial fraud and racketeering, given the nature of the issue (VC funding) are Federal, not State, issues.

Wow. Please, please next time if it's legal, you're not a lawyer and have zero experience...let the adults talk who have been there. My 14 year old knows the American legal system better, who hasn't lived here two years, and holds multiple passports.

What's your excuse again?

Proving damages, with open source on the backs of funding, is relatively easy for an attorney with startup experienc, knows how much it costs to build a brand + reputation, etc. Then you can put together a financial model on, "Opportunity cost," re-coup it in a civil case, on top of and after the criminal case is finished. A good law firm will file both separately.

Nice, though, for crapping on his chances. I love the positive thinking.

If this isn't lies, and you live in a country with IP laws, it's easy:

Step 1. Validate your claim is legit; documentation and everything goes a long way. Archive.org is actionable in court (for fun, I put up an article on how I can invalidate several Microsoft patents, due to my prior art from 2000 - the patent was in 2008).

Step 2. Get in touch with your own lawyers, after getting some advice on RocketLawyer or similar. To whit, I could not get a lawyer to take my case last year, despite prior case rules in California, referral from a District Attorney AND a victory in California court through mediation, with more charges still pending against the startup.

Step 3. Assuming even like me, you have legal precedent, history and proof - you need funding. Apparently, as I have found, nobody gives a !@#$@$ in the United States of America about actual crime. I've got a ton of documentation, the only thing I have yet to do is literally CALL the police, and ask, point blank, "Why is that man not in jail?"

Step 4. Now that you how hard this uphill battle is guaranteed to be, if you have the proof, if you have the lawyer friends, finally - do you have the money? Can you get it? If that's true on both, review your stomach, because it'll be a long, hard battle. Family, friends and business associates have all "Disowned me," for various reasons, even though I was the victim. Unreal, but true. See Gamergate as well - the victim loses in the modern USA, at least. Other countries, like Maldives, Costa Rica - the victim also loses.

Step 5. Prepare to lose your professional reputation, even if you win in mediation. I'd love to say that if you win in court, like Michael Jackson before you, that somehow, people realize it wasn't you who did wrong. However, sadly, many people still believe he's a pedophile, many people don't believe I was robbed and fired while my boss was in Hawaii, my step-dad in hospital with 10% chance to live.

Sorry, bro. If you want a referral to awesome lawyers, I'm happy to help and do whatever it takes to help somebody. I care. I just wish other people would, too.

Take it from somebody who's shaken hands with the Indian High Commissioner of a country, chatted up many members of the State Bank of India and who's friends with a venture capitalist that takes investing in, and expanding, domestic infrastructure for cleaner air, water and electricity very seriously. He's setup many electric generations facilities, water generation facilities and more.

Given my background with the Indian government (nope, not Indian here) you're out of luck. The only way to "Save, earn, etc," with your situation is the exact same as I went through as a poor American, owing (today, 15 years after graduation) more than $35,000 dollars for my college degree. That's more money than I earned in the last eight months - and, I have two children, the IRS also claims I owe them about a ton of money, but thanks to finally catching up on filings, it's a smaller number - or soon will be.

Friend, it is hard for people who know billionaires, who know people, shook their hand and made them millions via Ycombinator and others (I got turned down, but, applied late).

The facts are the following: * Nobody owes you a living, period. If they do, we're all standing in line and it's not moving. * Save money. If it's a Penny, a Pound or a Franc, it matters. * Create works - code, write, etc - so when and if you CAN publish, you're ready. Even if you develop skills that you can't use, nobody can EVER steal what's in your head. :)

Finally on a very, very serious note. Everybody has a sob story. My mom's currently a cancer survivor; my step dad has been on dialysis for a decade and thank goodness they are poor enough the US government pays for their medical treatment - or they'd already be dead. Life can be hard, it generally can suck, but, you own what you know. Knowledge is power. Stop whining in public, produce, learn and grow. Most of us, here on a "dot com," address are global, or rather, "Not Indian," so won't be able to give you the best advice.

However, if the goal was, "Learn how to compete with the best & brightest," this is a fantastic place. Sympathy is hard to find, but positive, productive suggestions - hard work, acquire knowledge - are the real keys to growth.

Near as I can tell, you sound a bit like my javascript skills - that's not where I choose to focus though. My CTO, co-founder (we got rejected by Ycombinator, but, also applied super late) is a self taught programmer who, if you read what he writes, doesn't know a whole lot.

However, he's a genius. I'm 100% certain you have skills you aren't aware of, at your age, non "Tech," town, well, it's always possible you're better than us in the valley.

Write down what you want to do. Step, by step. Start a business or be an employee? Caution: too much self employment makes people not want to hire you as an employee. Ever. I was self employed for five years, took six months to find a job; this time, took that long so I'm staying self employed because groveling and begging isn't what I'm about.

I might be starving, but, I have dignity.

Next, after you have those goals identified, it's time to review the financial options, talk it through with your fiancee ideally so you're both on the same page (my ex-wife of 13 years was also the co-founder of my first 10 businesses, trust me, it sucks to lose a wife, or a business partner - sucks worse when you lose both).

Consider doing contracting, don't worry about it being on your resume, or not, while you explore and make enough money to slowly pad the bank account.

Since you did mention angular, and even though we're broke, we have a very powerful, open source social media & SEO tool that we're giving away. The project is gaining a lot of traction and if you contribute even a bit, we can definitely help promote you and your skills.

Plus, if some nice VC decides that my team and I are going to take over the world, we hire remote and don't have a central office. 3 team members now, hiring an intern next week who's a PhD candidate with experience in natural language processing.

Contact info in profile, and whatever you do, make sure it's your dreams you are following. Only those will lead to any kind of meaningful happiness.

Eff.org did similar a while back; also, browsing habits for years have been clearly a "Fingerprint," same as the keystrokes, depth, etc, were found recently on a monitor.

Even better, creepier, was the government study 15 years ago that could identify people by how they walk, only, via video camera / surveillance.

Or, remember the AOL study? That was only IP addresses, and many people were "Unmasked," this was meta data / search logs, only and identified individuals. That was a decade back. Seemingly, this article only uses citations that are 0-4 years old, it's been a well trod issue for a while, even in journalistic circles.

Bingo, Wired, and bravo for writing this!

Let's see: I tell everybody I'm broke. I caught up on ten years of back due tax paperwork. I'm clean, sober and have been for months...just launched free, open source no strings software to end $5 billion in annual American wasted spend on Facebook, Twitter and SEO tools that are mostly junk.

Yep, zero people care. They didn't get a push notification from Google Now, telling them to put down the phone and give to hookupJS. They didn't see Jeff Weiner tweet, "Jeremy, you haven't sent me an SEO weekly report since Yahoo, 2005 - what are the latest numbers?"

Automattic, makers of the best content management software in the world, have a similar philosophy as we do - give it away, free and open source, then chase the value that the open ecosystem creates. Alongside WordPress, hookupJS is designed to be a secure, open source marketing Saas - self hosted, no data leaks and 100% private for business data.

However, the crowd funding yeilded only spam, private comments so far. The LinkedIn messages have been well meaning, but, zero text lines read. The single, solitary fork we got on our repo (software is live, functional and free - on github) practically made me cry.

I don't get it. For some reason, I agree, the feeling in my gut says, "Nobody cares." When I was drinking, I checked into a mental hospital for a few days because I was going nuts, getting stolen from by my former employer and worse.

It is an excellent article. Ignore me, just go read it. Then take a walk, smell the fresh air, and for once in the week, try to figure out if you are inside the Matrix, or if the mesh layer is already controlling you. Put down the hololens, the nerd helmets and the Occulus. Take a look at real life, in 3d. It's awesome.

Fantastic article and in the past seven months, we've been a basecamp user, then former basecamp user, as we switched to Trello. Ironically that was for cost, like switching from 3rd party to (finally) a home grown php tool to replace the Saas $200 fee.

Essentially, what we're seeing from my team's perspective are the culmination of a few trends that started being bigger back in 2003, when I first worked from home full time for about six months, prior to joining Yahoo at giving up the lifestyle for a few years. With nearly ~6.5 years in WFH experience; I've done it nearly half my professional career.

Those who can make it work, do it the way in the article, there's no option, only pain, to that process. It broke up a 12 year business partnership I had, in the end, written goals were broken, therefore, I ejected. Simple, straightforward and asynchronous. There's a movement, tempo to when a team is producing. My CTO and I are incredible partners this way, and we spend less than twenty minutes per session "Talking," because he's even more introvert than me, it seems.

At the end of the day, team's ship something. Marketers should be shipping business models, spreadsheets, powerpoints, Adwords copy, Blog Posts, Social Posts, Images, Videos and more. Engineers ship code, so, they rock and should have it a bit more straightforward.

Designers ship design. If the "Business monkey," isn't playing secretary, documenting things and helping others ship, OR shipping something with their fingerprints all over it, something is broken. For a production oriented individual, remote, WFH work is the most empowering kind.

Freedom. Run at your own pace, if the team gets slow, develop new skills, a new hobby and explore. The digital world is a vast place; for example, I'm building free, open source SaaS, running two blogs, a team, built two visual novels this month, learned Daz3d, Carrara, Gimp for animation & more.

I ship what and how I want, when I want & where. The team does the same, as a group, we have aligned objectives. So the business moves at one pace, and as an individual, I carve my own lane. Run ahead, scout, explore, learn and grow. Then perhaps, those skills in animation & 3d become useful to the business. Or not. Time will tell.

Great article, and thanks for posting your experiences. I love learning.

I have a free, open source software on github. Is this the kind of thing that would be featured in the tips for designers & developers? It's a bit hard to figure out what kind of tips, without a sample / preview of the content you're going to send...

Actually, your email isn't (that I could see) in your profile. Odds are good, "Low karma." Geniuses built hacker news so that spammers like I used to be couldn't alter the system, have too much influence and more.

So no, I can't see your email, I can't mentally parse it from your username, etc. My contact info is in my profile - eg, if you know I'm Jeremy Goodrich, I'm not too hard to find. All too easy, in fact. I'm the only one of the sixty to one hundred folks with the same name who's been in digital marketing & search / information retrieval since finished college at University of Oregon. Feel free to write, I like chatting with people. Thanks for reading, listening and here's to a fun conversation.

Renyi entropy, and why this discovery is huge, are the whole cipher / counter cipher structure of modern "Crypto." If we (for a moment) hypothesis that math, itself, is an artiface of culture...then, we see that Lofti Zadeh (thank him for the 'net) and Bart Kosko's math model of the hypercube are still the best proofs.

Eg, to a large degree, Yitang Zhang validated both gentleman's work immensely, as Bart, in particular, first proved that the whole 100% of "Probability," is in fact a subset of continuum theory, aka, Fuzzy Logic. It's the "Probability and the hypercube," model, put forth in Kosk's 90's book. Fascinating reading.

Of course, it could be that, the model is too simple, to elegant to "fly," as we Americans like complex stuff that is far, far out of reach of lay people. It's an academic bias that I, with no degree holding family, simply do not share or partake in. Truly breakthrough discovery can, and does, happen in a lot of places.

One simply needs to know where to look.

Interesting to see this and given I filed my first patent pending last month, thought I'd share my thoughts. I'm $100k+ in debt; I grew up poor. My parents live on a fixed income, I send them money every month and last year, in 2014, I made the least annual income I have made since 2003.

As a divorced father of two, who was fired from his last full time job, and can't disclose due to NDA prior work, I've been self employed the majority of my adult life since 2006. Since September, I'm a former alcoholic, which is news to many - I had drank regularly since I was 18 and only recently realized I could correlate a bit of my drinking to early communication issues that resulted in the "low end," classes in my first years of education.

I digress, though, as the first one in my family in three generations to receive a bachelor's degree, life in college and out is hard. In my family, during my "prime," my business expenses were over 100K per year in 2009 and 2010. However, things came crashing down and changed. It's a long, long story. Drinking helps zero.

Now, my software is free, I filed a patent pending because I need credibility. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman said, and growing more so. Ten years ago I spent $50K on my own tools. If I had known then that I'd need them in 2013, and 2014 again, I would have done what I'm doing now.

Made them free. Open source. Given it away, hoping that with better tools, everybody benefits. That's the dream.

We got rejected by Ycombinator. I've worked with guys in the news way way more than I'll ever be, and I tell a lot of stories, incidentally, most are true.

Thanks for reading, I love this site and learn from it daily.

One thing, super fast - bingo. Just wanted to say that, in terms of "end game," it fails to excite me after having worked in accessibility roles at companies large - and small. Eg, when you find out your employer got sued and lost for accessibility it feels like you failed the evolutionary test of compassion; sure, they passed the corporate, "Cost / Benefit," litmus test, but, was the work they did, "Good?"

Thank you for the compliment - I passed your link to my engineering partner, because, I'm the clueless business monkey. ;)

You can do this with hookupJS for free - and then share the images on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and more.

Oh, and, wow. Underwhelming options. Our code is open source, free to use, no login, host on your own box & more.

Also, I fail to see a Terms of Service, only Privacy Policy, on your site. Odd. Makes me uncomfortable, honestly.

It's always a mystery to me how some stuff gets attention (like this) and other things get ignored; maybe because this, "Innovation," seems 100% aimed at making Twitter less accessible to visually impaired?

PS: we store the images we build as layers, so, we keep the text and can include it for later analysis, along with the background color used, font & more. In addition to tracking stats for you on the content you make, to see how well it performs on Facebook.

Sigh; would be cool if you'd add that to your roadmap. Or perhaps just relaunch with our code?

A quick mention of the first comment; true, we Americans can't expect to be able to break the law overseas and get away with it...but, as anybody who's spent time in a Muslim world, etc, or perhaps has a ton of family from that tradition - it's easier to see why Je Suis Charlie could give Facebook a headache.

I can't sue a journalist overseas for slander that occured about three years ago and still exists; for the most part, I only recall it as an example of how the "international justice," issue cuts both ways. We have the United Nations for a good reason and in both Costa Rica and another country, some of my best friends worked there.

If another country, not the USA, wishes to use an invention of my people (the internet) to crap on me, well, they should also either suffer the consequences of American justice...OR, even better, we should all realize that living in one place doesn't and should never subject one to another place's definition of right and wrong.

Losing my job last year made me re-evaluate a lot of aspects of my life, since April, I spent time off the internet; though to be fair, until September, a good chunk of my 'offline' time was burying my head in a bottle. (Just FYI, terrible idea - you torch a lot of long term memory that way from the drinking period).

Weekends, after starting to overwork again, have stopped being for the internet and more for phone calls, or outside, or cooking epic food. Anything analog. Digital will still be there if I grab my phone, but, I'm trying to remember and learn how to live life in 3d.

Why not feature something like our free marketing meme generator in your "growth hacks," column? For some reason, even though it's open source, functional replacement for say Bufferapp or Hootsuite, we're not getting any pickup yet. The SaaS free version is in process of getting approval for the app from Facebook to use the graph API.

Tell me: since my open source software is free, life and working - the meme generator doesn't even need a login! - does it represent the kind of thing you'd feature? OR can you give us other content examples, because the "hype," on the home page feels way too thick.

Nervous asking for feedback here; but, you can't learn if you don't ship and ask questions. So here goes, free, open source javascript & mongo DB, Angular, Node based system to score a Facebook page based on Insights data; schedule posts, see trends and create marketing, branded creative.

All free and functional today. Now, pelt me with the rotten fruit. I'm curious and begging for feedback. The online account on our site does not work, as it's not approved by Facebook. The code is functional, and it's what we've been installing on 2 macbooks and a Linux box; mostly Ubuntu and hosted by Digital Ocean.

The only scenario you forgot to outline is when the CEO of the company that hires the small agency writes the content. Sometimes, this can be great - if that CEO is also an author, has years of copywriting experience and say, has sold tens of thousands of books.

Usually, that's not the case. Then the CEO hires the design agency, who wisely uses Lorem Ipsum or similar. Then, you might have an internal marketing manager who knows the CEO's copywriting skills suck. The agency also knows this, but, because it's a "Startup CEO," who's got some BS claim to fame, they write it anyway.

Screw the people who say the CEO's copy sucks, etc. Do you know how that scenario plays out? The board steps in, if they have any brains, and fire the CEO who can't copywrite but insists on wiping their arse with the whole thing. In this scenario, too, the agency simply takes the money and watches, waits for the internal marketing manager (usually, the guy who hired the agency) to get a new job or get fired. Then, the startup goes down in flames.

The best part? The agency still got paid. Sometimes, you can't save a client from driving themselves over a cliff. Take the money, smile, do the right thing and give them the best possible advice. But, don't sit still and do zero whilst the company drives themselves off a cliff. Especially when they pay you all the way down until they combust.

What's funny to me is even with, "Freedom of information act," in the USA some Americans act like everything is public record.

It's not. Sometimes, for international relations, things are classified, never released until much later. Having been party to a minor agreement, at least knowing about it, before the general media, gives you a ton of insight into how the USA operates.

To me at least, I came to the, "Business," operating model. In other words, the economic engine takes priority and the agreements I know of that were signed pushed that particular agenda.

Dollars, literally, make the world go round. The US dollar is the world, "Reserve," currency. There's a very good reason for that, and a very good reason the Secret Service is in charge of the US money supply.

Then again, perhaps I'm as much as insider as the author of the blog post. Eg, out of the loop.

The most advanced, at least in terms of haptic based cryptography, is owned by Bank of America in the US. When reading through the USPTO, I didn't see anything revolutionary owned by JPMorgan.

To me the awesome news here is that while the leak happened, it's accountable 100%. That's very swift closure compared to many, many other data breaches of the past.

Reality is 70% of Americans do not hold a passport. Then, of those who do, most have traveled abroad, not lived there.

Then, of those who travel abroad and have lived in a few states, let's say, 5 - which is only 10% of the overall number of states we have...do you see where I'm going with?

The, "Average," experience is now personalized. Algorithms on Google, Netflix and Facebook or Amazon are about as, "Personal," as some technical people I know get.

Then there's a big, huge disconnect between reality and what we do for a living, because of where we are...I had to lecture somebody in our industry where the VC money comes from recently.

Either it's their age (youngster, lol) or unwillingness to wake up and smell the hummus, I don't know. Two cops were murdered by a guy claiming, "Revenge," for all the black men who we've SEEN get slaughtered on youtube.

It's revolting and I'm hopeful that, one day, the concept of, "Freedom," and, "Justice," will give us all a shot at a better society. Besides, I read too many comic books growing up with the X-men in them to let, "Hydra," win.

-3, impressed.

Okay, I met the former ambassador to Sri Lanka and had tea with snacks when we hung out. Present was a Vice President of the country I lived in - great guy.

I can't confirm nor deny, because I don't know, the exact status and titles of the various members of the legislature I met while overseas because, frankly, it wasn't my intent to keep a log then post it publicly.

To whit, I've also been listed as a reference for a prosecutor who became a judge in California. However, none of this should be needed to, "Trot out," in a response about foreign politics, which I have ample experience in personally through multiple visits to many countries.

Thanks, though, for deflating my karma count - I need to remember, I'm sharing here because it's fun, not because I'm winning a game. ;)

When was the last time most, if not all, of the community here hung out with a guy or gal from the Foreign Service? Or better yet a member of the State Department of the USA?

Or the equivalent in their home country; that's just as well, given that the people I've met all over the world who work in their country's foreign service department are generally good people.

If you haven't seen, "A Beautiful Mind," it's a great film and the math literally helps explain why North Korea, despite evidence, might be a, "Sock puppet," used by...well, let's see.

What country is having a really, really crappy time with economic sanctions right now?

Maybe, just maybe, a bit of experience at interacting with the folks who (gasp) make these kinds of decisions would make the whole situation easier to explain. Or if most of us simply revisit kindergarten in the US, eg, the game of, "Tag." Remember how to claim a cookie that you're not supposed to eat?

Touch it. "If I touch it, I own it," because nobody wants to eat the cookie you touched after you liked your finger, right? So, Russia perhaps, "Licks their finger," tunnels through, and then when we discover the breach, "Look, it's the North Koreans!"

If not them, I'd say Luxembourg is behind it all. We know most American companies that have operations overseas use them to launder (I mean, mitigate) tax burdens in Europe, right?

Open Source, potentially useful, Javascript to compare attribution models or other algorithms impact on data visually.

On Codepen, my CTO has been sharing, well, everything.

It's awesome.

Suppose you want to compare various attribution models to your online marketing, like Google Analytics. It's a bit tricky to get the math right in Javascript to show how the various algorithms impact the distribution of the data.

The project has a link to the open source URL on github, but, I still haven't picked a license type, so, I'm not expecting people to download or contribute (yet). Also, if you do get curious about the code, any / all feedback welcome :) It's why I'm here...

and, if you are passionate about open source license types, as I am, and have wrestled with, "Which one do I pick?" Pointers hugely appreciated. I'm as anxious about helping build the software as I am about making sure that people are encouraged and happy to use what we produce.

(go easy; I bruise).

Sigh; whoever nuked my karma, a short story to help you understand. Though I'm after good teachers, perhaps you can follow up?

Research a "three dimensional model of taste," which doesn't exist (yet). Why? Think of a six sided dice, every facet, which combined with it's twin, adds up to seven, a prime.

Now, extrapolate from the flavors you've enjoyed the following: 1. Sweetness - strawberry perhaps? 2. Sourness - a lemon? 3. Saltiness - a saltine cracker maybe? Thirsty? 4. Bitterness - funny how the lips pucker from Grapefruit. 5. Umami / savory - we might not officially recognize this in some places, but we all know "savory," - potatoe soup's a favorite of mine. 6. Spicy - are you feeling the heat, yet?

Now, compare that to any given model of flavor...I'm waiting. Thanks :)

It doesn't match, does it? With taste & smell, alone, a human being can sense four dimensions...all three axes, X, Y and Z on the Cartesian plan. Oddly enough, most flavor models left out, "Spicy," and after I saw a German guy's head nearly explode from a Thai Chili Pepper, I knew, *spicy exists

What's the fourth, for the person who can't see, who can't hear, who can't talk?

Time. If you can taste, taste changes over time. If you can feel, you're Hellen Keller and can understand Braille.

Now, Helen Keller - please next time, throw me some of your clearly larger, more infinite, more awesomely epic knowledge, because I'm confused.

I'm also blind, can't hear, and can't see. When you sh!t on my, "Karma," and refuse to share your overwhelmingly superior knowledge...

...well, we all know :)

Quantum = metric or measure, after reading the abstract, I think it's cool, but I'm more info Fuzzy State Machine influenced designs, like a hybrid neural fuzzy system.

The extra, "Fuzzy," makes it better. With two data points, you get sets of attributes, ad infinitum. Rather than trying to simply point out what ones are common, or good, or match any given specific outcome, etc. I like infinitely awesome attributes.

Tastes like bacon.

Have you ever tasted the difference between fuzzy logic influenced design and the probabilistic stuff? Infinitely more delicious.

Case in point: sometimes, you simply want to know an expectation was met - or not; and that there was the initial "expectation." Once this becomes clear, the chain of trust is easily, "fuzzed," to get some interesting outcomes.

Large and small are fuzzy metrics. A subset of non binary thinking (see Kosko, the model of probability and the hypercube, etc). "Jeremy is short," well - to a 5'0 person, I'm freaking tall.

To Yao Ming, I'm short. Trouble is, we each of us technologists tend towards introversion (been struggling since...well, take my age and then subtract however many years my communication skills were less than stellar).

Ever try to raise money for an idea based on numbers? It's like trying to land a date based on the size of your...real estate. Sooner or later, another yutz shows up, plops his drink on the counter and announces that the yacht he just stepped off was twice the size of yours.

Ya, it's never a fun game because it necessitates that binary outcome. Suffice to say good tools in the wrong hands can still be used to chop off your own feet if you don't pay attention.