njl

njl@njl.us

http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/05/news/newsmakers/buffett_fort...

"Being very detached from the Hollywood scene, Murray does not have an agent or manager and reportedly only fields offers for scripts and roles using a personal telephone number with a voice mailbox that he checks infrequently. This practice has the downside of sometimes preventing him from taking parts that he had auditioned for and was interested in, such as that of Sulley in Monsters, Inc, Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, Frank Ginsburg in Little Miss Sunshine and Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also regretted losing the chance to play Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he heard that he was considered for the role, which he says he would have definitely accepted."

I don't think turning down major opportunities through outright neglect is ever a good habit, even for those with a surfeit.

So this is more a desperate legal maneuver by a company that was stuck with some dreadful license terms, and less a potential serious shellacking of MPEG LA. That disappoints me.

For the next project, I'm going back to daemontools, for a multitude of reasons. Between the /service directory and the svc command, automating stuff is ridiculously easy. I can get the active health check stuff by writing a ten-line script that does a much better check on a server than the generic checks monit provides. I can get emails when bad stuff happens with logcheck.

Daemontools is just so goddamn unixy.

The NYSE has guys (mostly guys) who stand around on the floor and act as market makers for various stocks. They call 'em specialist. They stand around and run the auctions for shares, match up bids and so on. Basically, they make sure that if you want to sell a stock, there is somebody buying, and vice-versa. This is their business, and they can't just throw up their hands and wander away, ruining the market in some given stock.

The high-frequency traders provide a similar function in electronic exchanges. However, they all threw up their hands and walked away, exacerbating an already bad situation as the liquidity left the market.

The "how it works" boxes on the first page need to give me more. I kept clicking on them.

I liked the plans list. I want the entire box to be a click target, and give me a mouse-over subtle color change. I also want pictures there.

The checkout page is very weak. A little javascript to count down how many vegetables I have left and gray things out when I don't have any options would be nice. The current plan upgrade link was sloppy-feeling. I also don't like "Oops! We need a little more info. Could you fix the following things?" ..it made me feel like I screwed up, when I think I followed the obvious path through the application. I'd be tempted to split out the joy of choosing what plants I'm going to get from actually paying for things. Also consider making the username the same as the email address, less to remember.

Come to think of it, after I choose a plan, a page where I romped through (conceptually) a bunch of awesome-looking fruits and veggies, dreaming about my awesome garden, with a form down at the bottom that says "where do you want us to send your tasty, tasty carrots, beets, and celery?". Then the address capture is about where my goodies are going, not paying...

This website is a great idea. I wish I had space to plant things, I'd give you a shot.

Some business ideas are just really fancy arbitrage. Execution matters, but the value is self-evident; the more people that know about the opportunity, the faster the market is going to get flooded. I'd keep these a little closer to the vest.

I suspect the start-ups that we talk about and focus upon here on hacker news fall more in the first category and less in the second.

This won't end well.

This whole thing has struck me as beyond creepy. I'm embarrassed both as a technologist and as a former educator. That this was allowed to happen is just horrifying.

Instead of a social networking app that tells me, "These are your friends, we'll help you keep in touch", I want an app that says, "These are people that might be your friends". The current social networking applications do a good job of telling me all about my current friends, and allowing me to keep in touch in a passive way. The issue is, most people have a hard time meeting new people after college.

Thank you for going to all the trouble to curate this, by the way.

On the other hand, I have no idea how the hell to actually make money off of that. I was thinking it could be built on top of LinkedIn or Facebook, but that reduces the chances of ever making any money off of it even more.

Back to my "boring" ideas that involve people paying me money for providing actual value ;)

I'll use this as an excuse to shamelessly plug the cofounder-finder I wrote in response to that spreadsheet, http://amb.itio.us.

I think, as software people, we tend to generalize the ridiculousness of software patents, and we decide that all patents are ridiculous. There are industries where innovation is the result of serious risk and serious investment, and it is in everyone's best interest to encourage that. The rub is figuring out which industries and which classes of innovation should be protected, and which should not be protected.

If I had one thing I could get across to anyone, it's that happiness is a state of mind and a habit, not the result of outside factors. You choose to be happy or unhappy. It's all in your head, although it's a good idea to adjust your environment to ensure happiness. Exercise, happy entertainment, and happy friends all help.

I refuse to accept that adulthood is about acknowledging limits and settling into a static and subtlety unsatisfying existence. I believe I only have one life to live, and I refuse to waste it. I want to add value to the world, and I am frothing at the mouth to do so. That's what I believe being an adult is -- accepting responsibility for my own life, acknowledging the values of other's lives, and then doing my best to add as much value to the world as possible.

As for your fear of making real decisions about where to live, your uncertainty about what will make you happy... Risk is an essential element of being alive. Very few choices are reversible; you don't have kids. Make some bold choices, make some stupid choices, but be alive. Move somewhere and take a weird job. Try a start up. Take a chance at something, anything. That's what being alive is.

Realize that everything ends up working out in the end, give yourself a kick in the ass, and go have a life that fucking matters.

Good luck.

The de jure successor of Perl 5 might be Perl 6, but the de facto successor is Ruby. That is where the momentum and mindshare has gone; my impression is that Perl is easing back into it's old home as AWK's big brother. In all honesty, how often do you hear about somebody writing a web application in Perl these days? While my personal experience isn't really admissible as evidence, all the people I know who used to write web apps in Perl are now writing web apps in Ruby. A bunch of the ones who used to do system administration with Perl are now working at Opscode doing systems administration in Ruby.

The obvious example is Walt and Roy Disney. Walt would have been next to nothing if it wasn't for his brother. Roy was brilliant at figuring out how to pay for his brother's ideas. There are a few examples in the world of fashion, genius designers who are paired with a merchandising expert. With Penny Arcade, Jerry and Mike accidentally sold off the rights to their work for short money, and were generally stumbling along. Robert Khoo was just graduating from an MBA program. As I understand it, he walked in and said, "I love you guys. Now I'll handle the money." It's worked out amazingly, to everyone's enormous benefit.

In my head, there's some sort of way to scale all this. I wrote a semi-coherent post back in January on my blog, trying to explain it to myself. http://www.njl.us/2010/01/new-old-business-model.html

Basically, I think there is room for a media conglomerate that's about playing the Robert Khoo/Roy Disney roll for all sorts of talented creatives. Scale up a support system that lets folks develop their own little independent brand on the Internet, but then provides them with pipelines for merchandising, advertising sales, and all the administrative crap involved in actually running a real business.

You're selling something you believe in. That makes it easy.

A specific book I'd recommend is "SPIN Selling" by Neil Rackham. He did actual research into successful solution sales cycles. He outlines the best way to go about making somebody realize that your product is exactly what they want. It's from 1988, but most tactical solutions-selling books since have felt to me like a branded rehash of SPIN Selling.