theoj

In the context of what NYC is trying to do, it might be interesting to read PG's thoughts on how to create a Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

The two main ingredients he identifies in his essay are rich people and nerds. I guess NYC has plenty of rich people and Wall Street capital. What's lacking is the youthful nerds and the universities that would attract them to come to NYC.

An unexplored issue is how geographic constraints will affect the Silicon Valley-ization of NYC. Everyone wants to be in Manhattan but that's an island with limited space. When the other major industries in NYC (like finance) bid up the resources (such as land and labor), can startups become equal or even dominant in NYC?

Even if it turns out that the new parsing algorithm doesn't shine in all situations, I think it is nevertheless a welcome development. Compiler and interpreter makers can use this algorithm for those grammars and languages where it actually outperforms Yacc.

This reminded me of this summer's blockbuster movie Inception. Much like this article, it examined how ideas are planted in our minds and what effects those ideas have once they take over the mind and become impossible to eradicate.

I wanted to say the same thing as soon as I saw the article. You can look at religions as memes or viruses that propagate from person to person.

I think the article could have benefited from having Ben's observations grafted onto more structured models of individual preference such as Myers Briggs Typology and the Merrill-Reid Four Quadrant Model, rather than having him create his own limited and incomplete model.

I could compare this to someone trying to write for the first time without ever having been taught to write. So the person creates his/her own alphabet and starts writing. This alphabet seems great, so much more so because the person does not know anything about the other alphabets out there. But if we were to compare his alphabet with those that have benefited from hundreds of years of improvement by many different individuals, then we would see that his alphabet is quite incomplete, unexpressive and limiting.

I think in much the same way the Ones / Twos "alphabet" is less expressive and much more limiting compared to existing preference models such as MBTI and the four quadrant models. Over many years, a lot of people have done a lot of work in order to create models that describe personal preferences -- so I think it would make sense to re-use rather than build from scratch. That is so much more true given that the other models look at more dimensions and have more categories and are thus able to categorize variability much more accurately.