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Why?

I'm not sure that what you're asking is possible. An "explanation" is just a description of a deeper concept that implies what you're trying to explain. Physics is pretty much as deep as you can go. Put another way, physical theories are descriptions of the universe that agree with observation. You can explain other things in terms of physics, but it's hard to explain the nature of the universe in terms of something deeper without religion.

You might want to explain to your son how science works instead; how theories are formed, accepted, invalidated, and replaced. Looking up Feynman interviews on YouTube would be a good start.

The appeal to businesses is clear.

The appeal to users could be social ("What brands do I associate myself with?") or promotion-related ("Become our 1,000,000th fan and get this free thing!", "Facebook-exclusive discount!"). Also I don't think Facebook lets you put in bio information (favorite movies, etc.) anymore without it linking to a page.

I don't think this is really centralization. Just another avenue for advertising. For example, even if (less mainstream) bands generally use a Myspace URL as their web presence, Myspace doesn't necessarily control the music industry.

I find the Facebook-controlled universal login much more unsettling, personally.

Story:

I started out playing around with a TI-84 in middle school. Saved myself a lot of annoyance by making it do my homework, saved myself from insanity by programming games in class instead of paying attention. I never got into the ASM stuff, since I didn't have a computer then, but I was at least pushing the limits of what was possible without it. (Wrote a 3D engine in TI-BASIC at one point - intolerably slow but it worked :P)

Then in high school I got a summer internship at a startup with a chemical research lab. I didn't know this going in, but my job ended up essentially being to sit at a desk the entire day and manually type column after column of data into Excel. That pissed me off, so I started messing around with .bat files, trying to automate as much of it as I could (still didn't know how to program anything but a calculator at this point). My boss—apparently an ex kernel hacker—saw this, decided I was wasting my time, gave me a Ruby book, and instead set me loose on a project to revamp their data infrastructure. That was my first exposure to "real" programming, and so far I still consider it the best time of my life.

To summarize, what got me into programming was: (1) trying to automate mundane, repetitive tasks; and (2) just playing around to see how much you can do with a piece of technology.

I would recommend this: look around and imagine what you would want to do if you knew how to program, then try to do it, using books as a reference. From there, follow your natural curiosity.

Send him an email instead of calling him out in public like this.

Bill Thurston describes math as the theory of formal patterns.

He has a nice article here: http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/9404236

I'm sorry but without concrete definitions this entire discussion is stupid. (Retroactively defining words to make your position tautological is not valuable either.)

The entire article consists of a remark that life is a self-replicating chemical reaction.

A more interesting question to debate might be whether this replicating property is an acceptable definition for life, (i.e. can there exist systems that aren't replicating but can be considered life, and how might these arise independently of replicating life?), or what happens when you apply various definitions of life to other systems than the physical universe.

I love the url interface. I just used it to post a comment on HN. Very convenient.

Exactly! Maybe he and Salman Khan should get together and do something.

This could be a great candidate for a multimedia textbook... 10-minute videos + notes + interactive proofs?

Virtually nobody knows what "math" actually is before college. Even in college I suspect the number is still low. If nothing else his project has the potential to fix that.

It's a cool math textbook, yes.

What I love about it—his main point—is his conjecture that it's not a far step from the "challenge everything" mentality of the original punk movement to "challenge everything" mentality that the brightest kids engage math with. Just apply some rigorous thinking.

It's a different way to approach math, directed to an audience that typically doesn't do a whole lot of it.

Why do companies produce these toolbars? I can think of two reasons:

1. as an enticement to install something they want on the client (e.g. spyware)

2. as a way to place their services closer to the user to make them more likely to be used (e.g. search)

So, to respond to your ideas:

- Useful, thoughtful plugins serve a completely different purpose

- Unnecessarily restrictive

- The problem isn't users going out and installing stupid toolbars, it's companies bundling them with other products.

I would propose this instead: since toolbar-pushers are relying on the toolbar being trivial to install and annoying to remove, the browser should just make it trivial to remove as well (a mandatory "x" on the right side that uninstalls the toolbar).

That depends; are you supposing Microsoft/HP/Sony had the iPhone and App Store too?

Part of the reason for the quick uptake was what already existed that made it immediately useful.

Can someone give a quick backstory to this?

I'm a musician and I can tell you from experience that I sound a lot better on a Steinway concert grand than on a cheap Casio keyboard. So, more money? I guess the keyboard is cheaper, but when the musician is happy the music is better.

I got all excited and then it interpreted my volume integral (∰) as a left angle bracket. :(

It's not just startups - look at IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple. Same idea, a bit more dense because of the amount of information.

So I guess the lesson is "keep your perspective". A good philosophy.

Thanks for the honest answer. Best of luck to you.

If you don't mind me asking, what would you have done instead?

"Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger!"

Sounds rough.

As I explained further down, my hope is to learn more about the risks of entrepreneurship to inform my decision about what to do with my life. I don't want to go into this naively.

That is awesome, could you maybe just give a hint about what kind of area it was in? I took topology last year and it was fun but I could never imagine it applied to CS.

You could make use of that new YC startup that makes you record video answers to online app questions (I forget the name). Better than a text application, less boring, fixed time to process.

edit: ah here it is: http://hirehive.com/

You missed the point. I'll just clarify the intent the question here for everyone else who does:

I'm just starting my second year of college, and trying to figure out where I want my life to go. I think I was born to do startups but need to know what I can fall back to. There's a very low success rate but because of statistical bias we hear mostly from those who succeed. I want to hear the other side of the story to find out what it's really like.

Is entrepreneur life sustainable? That's something I'm trying to figure out right now.

Precisely. My dad is a typical executive at a big company and the consensus still seems to be that startups are not as "legitimate" as, say, working at Morgan Stanley. We argue about it a lot.

I meant it as a more tactful way of saying "you didn't work hard enough/ideas weren't good enough/didn't develop fast enough/weren't emotionally strong enough" or something just happened and you had to reintegrate with normal society :)

what do you mean by being in your own way?

People who use Craigslist and eBay are usually looking for cheap deals, and a site that's too slick and colorful probably wouldn't give the same "bargain hunting" feel.

Don't blame a tool for being misused.

This isn't actually that bad anyway... the animations suit the business. I've seen far worse HTML.