saikat

Yeah that's a good point, I can see how this is fairly confusing. This happens because the box is added on top of the button - you can, however, hit the "Back" button on the toolbar (after selecting the box) to move the box back.

Hah! Nice catch, that is not in fact accurate.

Interesting, I haven't been able to replicate that problem. What browser/OS are you using?

Yeah, we just launched this today and are in very early stages of beta. We realize speed is an issue right now (we've mostly been testing on Windows and OS X, on which it runs better), and it's definitely something we're working to improve.

One of the big problems I have with PG's essays is that, though I like the content, I have a very hard time believing everything he says without evidence. When you are in an emotional low, it's very difficult to think, "I should just persist because PG says it usually works." So it was great to see his points actually backed up by other founders' experiences.

As a side note, does anyone have a transcript of Jason Fried's talk? His was another favorite of mine from yesterday.

Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.

Most sites that have Gears support don't force the user to install Gears to use the site. There is no pop-up telling the users that they should get Gears to run the site - Google docs just has a nice little link at the top that says "Offline". There is no impetus to click it, and I bet many users don't even realize this feature exists. When the plug-in becomes required to use a site, and the user is presented with a pop-up telling him so, I think that changes things quite a bit.

Though I agree with you and think it's unnecessary to forego opportunities like this for the sake of your startup, I just wanted to mention that that in a Q&A session with Steve Jobs that I attended, one kid asked him what advice he had for young entrepreneurs. He said a few things, but I remember vividly that he said (paraphrased), "Make your startup your sole passion and goal in your life - you won't have time for a side job or a girlfriend or anything else - you can't love anything more." It seems like he thought having nothing else take up any of his attention was, in fact, part of the reason for his success. I wonder how true it actually is.

The whole point of karma is to have meaning and to discourage users from posting a certain type of comment or question. Googling just "PoC" or "software PoC" pretty immediately answers his question - my guess is this is why the downvotes happened last time. I probably wouldn't downvote a question like this, but I can see why others would discourage it.

Your logic does not take into account the entire ecosystem in which these companies exist. If you take it as law that companies exist only to make profit and they cannot help it, then you should also take it as law that when companies do things people don't like, people will get upset, and this will, hopefully, reduce the company's profits. This is how people can try to make companies do what they want, and this is how markets work. So, using your logic, there is nothing wrong with people getting angry and blaming the company - it is part of the system to make the market produce what people want.

The author doesn't give numbers, but on the point of people just testing out their new phones, the author does qualify her correlation:

"No doubt some of that 400 percent is due to users merely testing out the features on their new iPhones"

404 on attempt to create account =(.

Sleep. If you are at work and your boss doesn't realize sleeping will make you more productive, go sleep in the toilet until you can quit your job and get one where you can sleep how and when you want.

Or just read Hacker News.

Reading http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10255403-235.html , it does seem like the people who got a chance to play around a bit with it are at least impressed. I have some hope.

I read technical/science articles in the NYTimes mostly out of curiosity about what the larger public thinks about these things and how all the complex research and work in technical and scientific fields gets distilled down and summarized for the mass public. I find it interesting to know what people outside of our bubble think. But, yeah, if you are reading this article seeking new information about AI, then this is a waste of time.

Mercurial with bitbucket is great. Bitbucket offers one private repository (I think this is a new thing, but I'm not sure) for free, so it seems fine for use with closed-source code, if you need that.

We also used mercurial for a while in conjunction with dropbox (just set up our central repository in dropbox). Mercurial is a lot less overbearing than SVN (very easy to setup repositories), so I recommend it highly for a small team. Git is also a great option, but I haven't used it myself (and it doesn't seem like github offers free repositories yet unless you are an open source project).

A related thread from a while back - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57538 . I've actually been doing PG's rice and beans recipe (with some changes and some other variation), and it's not so bad.

Regardless of the fact that the general idea of a social network was nothing new, the article hinges heavily on the fact that there was something called "the facebook" at Exeter. But I'm pretty sure the reason he called it the facebook was because the same thing at Harvard (a directory of students with photos that eventually went online) is called the undergraduate facebook, and he wanted students to immediately realize that his facebook was this, but more.

I have had a chronic pain in my upper back right above my right shoulder blade, below my neck, and a little to the right of my spinal cord (the area is about two square inches in size). I got this injury from (surprise surprise) a marathon coding session (40 hours straight) sitting in an uncomfortable chair without taking enough breaks, and it has been plaguing me for about six years now. It used to be a very sharp shooting pain, but now the area is somewhat numb and mostly gives me sharp pains if I do certain awkward motions (like turning my head too rapidly), lifting heavy objects using that particular part of my back, or coding for long stretches of time.

I have tried just about everything from traditional back exercises to acupuncture to cure this, and up until recently, nothing really worked. I finally went to some doctor in India who gave me a different type of exercise that made a lot of sense. Normally, chiropractors will tell you to do things like rotate your head or stretch your neck by looking up and down for 10 seconds at a time - basically minor motions that put minimal stress on your back in the hopes that it will strengthen the back. The doctor in India said my problem was not that my upper back muscles had grown weak from RSI, but that my particular injury had caused some muscles to start pressing down on a nerve there, which is why I have such a local pain and why that area has started going numb. So, exercises putting more strain on that area were in fact worse for me.

To get to the point, the "exercise" works as follows: 1) Stand up straight and straighten up your neck. 2) Gently press on your forehead with your two hands such that the force is pointing behind you. While doing so, press forward with your head against your two hands so that your neck stays straight (very important that the neck stays straight the entire time). 3) Do this for 30 seconds (I started off with 10 seconds). 4) Repeat steps 1-3, but instead of pressing on your forehead, I press on the right side of your head, the left side of your head, and then the back of your head. 5) Repeat steps 1-4 three times, and then do the whole thing 3-5 times a day.

This has helped tremendously in getting feeling back and reducing pain. Apparently, this part of your back is usually under some minor stress from holding up your head (and this strain is increased when you hunch). So, after my muscles started squeezing down on my nerve in whatever awkward way, this minor stress that is otherwise normal was pressing down on my nerve all the time, causing it to hurt. This exercise will, five times a day, take the pressure off my back and into my hands and let the nerve have some time to slowly get back into place.

Also, I have started using a standing desk for at least some time a day and it has done wonders to keep me from hunching while working (which in turn has also made my back feel much better).

Fair point - I changed the name in the article (though can't edit it here). I wasn't really sure what to call the post, but I'd say it's a bit more than a list =).

You are right that that is a big difference, but I wasn't trying to compare these technologies based on their runtimes - I was attempting to compare them based on the type of application they attempt to produce. I wanted to make this a very simplistic list without going down the slippery slope of explaining too much about each technology (as there is a LOT about each technology to explain). The way I see it, these are two different approaches to creating a desktop-like RIA, but the end goal is the same.

Thanks for the suggestion - I didn't know about ECB, and it seems useful. I want to try not using a Textmate like interface for now (and see if that makes me more or less efficient once I get used to it), but if I decide that I don't like it, I will definitely check out ECB.

Another page with sorting algorithms animated (with some other algorithms): http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html

"The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo."

Reminds me of the metaphor Clay Shirky uses in his "Love, Internet Style" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs) speech. He talks about the Ise Shinto shrine, which the Japanese claim to be 1300 years old even though the building itself is rebuilt periodically. The Japanese think it is 1300 years old because the function of the shrine has existed for 1300 years, just like the function of this man has been around since 1861, even if he, the mere physical manifestation of this function, has not. Interesting way to think and define oneself.

Additionally, I've found that the smartest people who go to prestigious schools care more about prestige and interesting work than about salary. The best CS and math students at Harvard wanted to be professors or do research. It was the average Harvard students, for the most part, that went to finance or consulting to make the big bucks.

PG made a point (I think in one of his essays that I can't remember - correct me if I am wrong) that I've found to be fairly true (though of course not always) - that often, jobs for a given level of qualification have a set wealth they will pay, and this payout can come in the form of a more interesting job or more money. This generalization does have a subtlety though - when you are a higher valued candidate for work, you are not only offered more wealth but a greater diversity of choices of work that offer different proportions of interest vs. money. Essentially what I mean here is that it is much easier, coming out of Harvard, to get a high paying job than it is to get a really interesting job. When you are in the middle rungs of math at Harvard, it is not that hard to get a job as an I-banker (lots of money, but two years of very boring work), but you can't just trade off some of that money for a more interesting job. It is only when you are smarter that you get the option of having either the high paying I-banking job or a lower paying job that is more interesting (i.e. cutting edge grad school work at MIT's AI lab). A lot of the smartest people want this more interesting job not only because they are driven more by their interests than money, but also because these jobs are more prestigious since only the smartest people can have them.

On top of this, I knew a lot more people from Harvard who were willing to forgo making much money in their earlier life by taking travel grants or just going off to some country to make some documentary or doing a startup (something that I think has a much lower total expected outcome of income than a finance job). A lot of the smarter people were willing to sacrifice money for freedom because they were sure they would probably eventually make enough money to survive (and the degree helped this), and freedom was just more important to them.

Given all this, measuring money in these studies doesn't even seem good enough to me to be a heuristic for success. People at the most prestigious universities seem to often have the freedom and luxury to have different priorities and to simply not care as much about money. It seems like even a study asking people about their job satisfaction some number of years later would be better.

Bill Clementson has a nice write up on his setup that has more to do with how not to get hurt using Emacs that I have found very helpful. Not necessarily specific to OS X, but he has a few suggestions that seem helpful for OS X (like making the right apple key your meta key):

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041024.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041029.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060116.html

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060131.html

Apparently Lessig is less than happy about their reporting too - http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall...

Thanks for the suggestion. I use Evernote similarly but that mostly works for things that are okay for me to read later. I am wondering more for something to keep track of things that I need to read or do now - if I am exploring something new and want to learn as much as in necessary to get up and running. With my Weblocks example - I am just diving in and there is a lot that might be in the tutorial that I don't understand but need to understand to keep going. This is fine when the depth of the stack of things I am doing to learn is shallow (for example, the one that comes up most when doing a tutorial - reading the tutorial , opening up Emacs to code it yourself, then going back to the tutorial). But when doing something where I know very little and am trying to learn a lot, the stack gets fairly big at times and that is when a program would be useful to keep track of it.

I think of tracking this stack as my memory's RAM and I feel like I am doing a lot of disk writes (to some notebook or text document). I feel like my computer has a lot more RAM, so maybe it can help me =).