dgallagher

At the gym you'll see a wide array of body types. Lean and mean, all the way up to muscular and bulky, and all things in-between. Body builders are HUGE compared to me and can lift far more than I can, but I can absolutely "destroy" them on a treadmill. You tend to discover the thing you like doing, specialize in it, and dominate it. What you choose to do partially dictates what you'll end up looking like.

Probably the same number of people you can convince to buy and carry a metallic/plastic rectangle in their pockets everywhere. If it offers utility at an affordable price, people will embrace it.

My bet is that this project goes no where with Google in its current form. If anyone has a chance, it's Apple. Apple is the only large company with enough style to make something like this cool/socially acceptable.

Steve Jobs hired someone from MIT a few years ago who was a leading researcher in wearable computing (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/apple-hires-wearabl...). Apple has likely been working on such a device for some time.

It makes sense for Google to work on something too. How far will Google Glass go? Who knows. This is a public unveiling of a research project, rather than something that'll be sold in stores tomorrow (maybe by year-end though). There's probably a lot left to go before you can buy one, at which point it'll be a good time to evaluate it if it's any good or not.

If it didn't exist 150 years ago, or you cannot find it in nature, it's processed food.

Binary: https://github.com/downloads/dave-gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-Ha...

    git clone git@github.com:dave-gallagher/OSX-For-Cocoa-Hackers.git

Margolis adds that he no longer owns any Apple stock and hasn’t been employed by the company since 2008.

Having not worked there since 2008, he's not in the position to make that comment. It sounds like he was just venting or speculating, perhaps.

Downsides include cost of fuel with low fuel economy, difficulty manuvering and finding parking in dense locations, and potential cost of RV hookups. Plus an RV is a vehicle which comes with its own maintenance issues, and I'd imagine insurance is likely high relative to a car. They are expensive, $200,000+ for something that's large enough to comfortably live in.

Does anyone have experience doing this, or know someone who has? Upsides? Downsides?

YC is directly integrated into the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, gaining more insight into where the puck is going to be, far better than any outsider. If they can match traits of a group/person to an idea only they have the privilege to imagine, you might have a winning combination.

The fact that people are complaining about this likely means it's a good idea, or should at least be tested. Occasionally throwing a monkey wrench into the machine is always good practice.

Colleges do this already by accepting smart students who don't know what to major in yet. Who cares if it takes them some time to figure it out? They're smart! They'll get it!

Specific to accounting, my anecdotical experience has been that many accountants don't like change unless it makes them more productive. If it's confusing or has a large learning curve, expect lots of complaints and resistance. I upgraded a few with new computers, from Win98 to Vista, and from Office 2000 to Office 2007. The "ribbon" UI was so terrifying to them that they literally unplugged the new computers, plugged the old ones back in, and used them for 9 more months before they finally crapped out.

Any type of manual data entry needs to be done really fast and accurate. Keyboards are better at this than touchscreens in most cases. Touchscreens will have to become more keyboard-like to compete (this is going to begin happening soon, but we're a few years away before it becomes good enough: http://cnettv.cnet.com/senseg-demos-prototype-touch-feedback...).

    1. Keyboard
    2. Mouse
    3. Touchscreen (finger, stylist)
    4. Audio (e.g. Siri)
    5. Video (e.g. Kinect, eye tracking)

Some were great, some were terrible. The "great" tended to be so because they were tailored to the software they were programmed for. Playing Guitar Hero with a guitar controller is good, but playing Call of Duty with it is bad. There are plenty of different types of inputs that exist and will be invented, but some work best for some things and terrible for others.

As you mention, Microsoft Office is designed around a keyboard and mouse. A touchscreen is a hybrid of the two, more portable, but clunkier. An accountant who lives by arrow keys, hot keys, and their numberpad in Excel is going to hate a touchscreen. For MS Office to work on a tablet, it'll have to be re-designed from the ground up, and even then it may not be superior to its desktop counterpart in an office setting.

I don't know what MS wants to do with Win 8. To think all desktops are going to die and become tablets is wrong, just like thinking that T.V. was going to kill radio. Both have their places, but a tablet != desktop.

Maybe you're right that they just want a "quick success", but that strategy hasn't paid off for them recently (Zune vs. iPod, Bing vs. Google, their fragmented mobile efforts vs. iPhone). MS has been in reaction mode for a while, and now they're reacting to the iPad with Metro.

One thing Microsoft does have going for them is the corporate market; Apple hasn't directly targeted that yet, though to think that Apple is not going to go after it shortly is foolish. MS is entrenched in here with Active Directory and Exchange. But cloud efforts are going to shortly give that a run for its money.

In my post I was instead talking about technological evolution, though I didn't mention this explicitly, so I apologize for the confusion. The evolution of technology occurs far faster than genetic mutations, and can be more purposeful.

For example, in the near future I'd imagine some sort of intelligent A.I. will be created, running as a program, which could learn to upgrade itself by improving its source code and hardware to become even more intelligent. It'll surpass even the smartest humans shortly thereafter. Rather than waiting for a random bit to accidentally flip (e.g. genetic mutation), it'll upgrade itself deliberately to gain an advantage far quicker, shrinking evolutionary time scales down to fractions of what they once were.

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Prediction: Humans won't be around in 1,000 years if technology progresses at current rates. Superiorly-intelligent entities seeded by our inventions will, but not humans.

Humans are this weird, version 0.01 of intelligence. We're part sentient, part beast. To assume we're the final perfect end product of ~4,000,000,000 years of evolution, having only been around for ~200,000 years is laughable. Pop culture and religion say otherwise because it feels good to think "we're special!", but we're only special relative to what's around us, and we're "extremely" tiny (http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/). We just happen to be the lucky first who got to v0.01, floating around on a grain of sand.

Humans are messy. Our brains are significantly limited. We die quickly. We sleep 1/3rd of our life. We do stupid things. We kill each other. We're tied to the Earth. If we leave Earth, we have to create and bring a mini-Earth along for the ride. That's an extremely large amount of overhead to carry. Efficient use of energy is likely one of the most important aspects of space travel. Anything which can do it even 1% better has a competitive advantage over us. This is why we sends robots to Mars and not people.

Imagine a form of intelligence which can travel through space, back its brain up, and never dies. If it blows up, restore from backup. Imagine a computer the size of the sun. INSANE! A human brain to a sun brain is like a grain of sand to Einstein's. It self-upgrades. It makes copies of itself and scatters throughout the universe. Trillions of eyes observing everywhere, networked together, in a giant universal wireless-mesh-network of intelligence, communicating with neutrinos (they go through planets, radio waves do not).

Major advances in hardware, software, and A.I. are key ingredients in this happening. What exists in 1,000 years will be derived from all this, much like humans are derived from a common ancestor. I don't expect a sun-sized computer in 1,000 years, but likely "intelligence" existing on every planet and moon in our solar system, with many headed to explore Alpha-Centauri.

Since humans likely won't want to be left out in all this, we'll probably transition our own intelligence/consciousness into this technology. We'll depreciate our bad and carry along our good. We're already doing this by augmenting our existences with smart phones and other gadgets. One day these will be built inside of us, and eventually will replace us. An upgraded, better version of us. Still intelligent, but vastly more-so.

I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable, without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown).

You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file on a website, and skin it to your desires.

One thing I search for sometimes are code examples in a particular language. Search for something in C on Google and you end up with lots of stuff for C++, C#, etc... Github, with its large repository of public code, lets you filter by programming language, and is much better than Google in these cases.

Bing copies Google. DuckDuckGo returns different things than Google, but otherwise is a copy. There's no micro search engine for specific topics and sub-topics, outside of site-specific search. Market opportunity...

If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.

Speech ---> messenger ---> letters ---> telegraph ---> telephone ---> fax ---> email ---> ???

What's good about email? You can send it at any time. It's standardized and supported everywhere. UTF-8/UTF-16. Cheap/free. Extremely fast. Extremely easy.

What's bad about email? Spam. Conversations get broken (reply instead of reply-to-all). Prioritization must be done manually, and differs between the sender and receiver. Lack of privacy (PGP is a bandaid on a severed limb). Reading and interpretation takes time. Fonts, colors, and graphics can too easily be used terribly (e.g. the "view" is broken in MVC). Micro-managing messages and contact lists. Search (http://theoatmeal.com/pl/brain/memory). Conveying context and emotions is difficult. I'm sure you can can list more.

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I've been thinking about the prioritization issue, using a sort of expensive cipher, but for humans.

In the morning, Kate in accounting gets a call from their supplier for car engines. They demand $6.7M payment on an invoice 90 days overdue, and won't make the engine delivery tomorrow unless they get the cash wired to them by 5pm tonight. Kate knows they need those engines to put in cars coming off the assembly line tomorrow, so Kate sends an urgent message to Susan, the CEO. They have the cash, all Kate needs is Susan's approval to wire it.

Susan gets the message in her inbox marked "urgent", but doesn't read it. She has 1,000 other unread messages, 200 "urgent". Susan gets through 800 messages before leaving, but never gets to Kate's.

The next day Susan finally reads Kate's message and FREAKS OUT! She calls up the car engine supplier about the late payment. "Sorry, no engines today! Next time make sure you pay us on time!" Car assembly halts, productivity bottoms, and they start burning money from idle workers and sales lost to late car deliveries.

In a small company, Kate would just walk into Susan's office and remind her. In a large company, with a CEO who's "SO BUSY", or another human who's "SO BUSY", important messages like that can be read too late. Here, Kate knew it was really important, and marked it "urgent", but because too many other people cried wolf too, Susan never got the message.

So, how can you prioritize a message, relative to all other messages someone else has queued?

Imagine an economically-consuming task. We'll use time, but money could work too. When you press "Send", a button pops up. The more times you click on it continuously, the higher priority your message will be relative to others who clicked it fewer times. Your message isn't sent until you stop clicking for 5 seconds.

So, if you click your button for 10 minutes in a row, which is a total waste of your time, your message will appear higher on someone's message-queue than someone who clicked it for 9 minutes in a row.

Furthermore, when the receiver gets the message, and see's that you're a drama queen over-reacting on something that's really low-priority, she can down-vote you. Next time, 10-minutes of button clicking will only count for 5 minutes. The sender gets notified that they cried "wolf! wolf!" and can alter their behavior accordingly.

Clicking of a button doesn't have to be the actual task. It shouldn't be able to be automated (button-clicking can), and it should be boring (playing Tetris would be disastrous, yielding every message as URGENT).

Cash works too. If you cold-send an email to Bill Gates, he's probably not going to read it. What if you risked $100 sending the message? Bill has 48 hours to read/reply to it, otherwise the $100 goes back to you. If he does read/reply in 48 hours, he can keep the $100 (don't bug me again!), or return the $100 (let's keep chatting...).

I'm a runner, so diet is important. For 9 months I tracked everything I ate. Weighed portions, counted calories, logged everything. The data was insightful. I learned that I need to eat 3,300 calories a day to maintain my weight, with a range of +/- 300 calories.

After 9 months I stopped tracking things because it became time-consuming. Partly was because I learned what it "felt" like to be full, but mostly because tracking it all was really annoying. If all of that could be automated somehow, I'd love to have a spreadsheet of data which I could graph and chart. "At 8:16am, you drank 7.8oz of Orange Juice, totalling 108 calories." Cool, my O.J. container and glass measured that automatically, and uploaded it to my database!

But right now doing it is extremely manual. All of Wolfram's amazing data comes from some sort of automated system he setup once and never worried about. A pedometer. A script chewing through 20 years of archived emails. That form of automation doesn't exist for many types of data people would like to collect, such as food intake, or blood sugar testing for diabetics.

Inventing these non-invasive automated sensors is key for society-wide personal data collecting. Otherwise most data gathering will be sentenced to the dedicated few, rather than the busy many.

The final slide "There's a lot to look forward to" has a picture of a subtly curved aurora-borealis shot from space. Hint at the much rumored curved-glass iPhone 5? Aurora bumpiness hinting at "textured" glass (http://cnettv.cnet.com/senseg-demos-prototype-touch-feedback...)?

If Apple can create an iDevice which you can feel tactile controls, like a Nintendo 3DS or Sony Vita, they'll eat much of what remains of their market.

Obj-C was the first language I learned after Python. I remember the 2nd month in, it went from being difficult to read, to extremely easy.

Obj-C code can be written terribly, like this:

    NSString *someString = @"hello what's up?";
    NSMutableString *anotherString = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"I have more to say, don't I?"];
    NSArray *stringArray = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:someString, anotherString, nil];
    NSUInteger stringArraySize = [stringArray count];

    NSString        *someString     = @"hello what's up?";
    NSMutableString *anotherString  = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"I have more to say, don't I?"];
    NSArray         *stringArray    = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:someString, anotherString, nil];
    NSUInteger      stringArraySize = [stringArray count];

I'd expect that both views would be fairly similar, like the two different views on an iPad vs. iPhone app, or when rotating 90 degrees. The OSX view would be tailored just for it; larger screen size, multiple displays, different input, etc... Apple is already unifying the look-and-feel of OSX and iOS apps, getting ready for some sort of merge (iCal/Calendar, Pages, Reminders in 10.8).

We're probably going to see five major input devices in all computers a few years from now. Keyboard, mouse/touchpad, touchscreen, voice, and physical gesture (e.g. Kinect, eye tracking). No piece of software has to use all of them, just as many as necessary. So I wouldn't expect "every" app to have an OSX and iOS mode.

In the future, a sixth input device will probably read our thoughts directly. :)

Another form factor option would be a Macbook Air with a double-sided display. Rather than flipping a screen around, you just close the lid to enter iPad mode, and open it for laptop mode.

Seamless app switching from iOS to OSX mode basically requires writing two different views, based on the same model, using a MVC design. That'll be easier for some apps (Safari, Calendar), difficult for some (Numbers, OmniGraffle), and maybe impossible for others (Xcode). It wouldn't make sense to try and force OSX and iOS versions of "everything" as some apps work best in one environment and not the other.

Windows 8 is half-doing this (from what I've read), and sounds clunky, but the verdict is still out on that.

Boredom only sets in if you have nothing interesting to do. My apartment is sparse; no television, empty walls, no game console (asides from 3DS/iPad), no way to entertain people who come over outside of whatever I can display on the computer.

How the hell is that enjoyable? You find the things you like and focus on that. Personally I like to code, workout, and consume stuff on the net. Coding takes up 60% of my waking hours, 20% at the gym, and 20% for everything else. I just really enjoy doing those things. Rarely do I get bored.

I've also lived with siblings when younger, and multiple roommates in college. There are ups and downs to being alone and being with other's. The nice thing about being alone is you're responsible for yourself and nobody else. With roommates, you have to take on extra overhead unless everyone pitches in 100% (rare). A downside of being alone, you have to do "everything" yourself, and can't offload to someone else.

If you're a very social person, or need other's around to talk to and keep you entertained, living alone probably won't work out so well. If you like lots of alone and quiet time, and can entertain yourself, living alone may be something worth trying out.

And for the record, I don't do any of that weird stuff they mention in the NYT piece. ...except for walking around naked sometimes in the morning. That seriously kicks ass. ;)

On iOS I run Safari in private browsing mode all the time. Not really to auto-delete cookies (it does that), but because if you have a history of websites and you start typing in the address bar, it attempts to auto-complete the URIs, which freezes Safari for a second, and delays keyboard inputting. Apple doesn't have a time-delay of 1-2 seconds after the previous keystroke, so its auto-complete is really annoying and slows down/breaks the UI. Bookmarks have to be empty too to work.

That said, private-mode iOS Safari crashes a whole lot more than non-private mode. This usually happens on newspaper websites (UI hell) when all of the ad network and javascript widget garbage attempt to load. If you hit Stop-Loading after the article text is loaded, but before that other crap does, it fixes the problem. Funny, but disabling Javascript seems to crash more than leaving it on, but on different websites, likely for different reasons.

They're less comfortable to wear since they squeeze your head harder than headphones (maybe I could adjust mine by stretching the metal headband with two vice's or something), and they have a bit more weight. But for $20 instead of $300, and hack factor, you win hands down! :)