phony_identity

I used to attend meetings of a Lisp / FP users' group. Man, what a lineup of the brilliant unaccomplished. There were maybe one or two guys who were using Common Lisp at their jobs (one was at Amazon) and getting amazing stuff done with it. You could spot these guys immediately by their energy and social comfort. But the rest were always working on something cool and never finishing it. They were so far gone nodding in their opium parlor of thought there seemed little hope. I couldn't interest them in any practical project. They were only interested in the next high.

I used to think 'publish or perish' was a bad thing for academia. Now I don't. Everyone needs external social pressure.

It's some indication of the greatness of James Watson that he shows up even in a talk about OO programming.

E pur si muove

20% time is really great. But my God, look at what some of the programmers are doing with it:

"Consider the collection of engineers who wanted to promote 'agile programming' inside the company. "

How could your soul be so dead that you want to spend your precious 20% hacking time to evangelize a Methodology? Can you imagine such a person?

And our author is one of them: "In my 20 percent time, I started the Testing grouplet." Yep, he means software testing.

I guess it's good news for us startup founders that Google has an infestation of Agilists, burrowing into the company with their sharp little teeth. Still makes me sad, though.

Viaweb's PR firm is discussed in the fourth paragraph here: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

>> Always.

No, rarely. The Second World War was party about resources, in that Hitler wanted lebensraum, and the proximal cause for the USA getting into the war was Imperial Japan's desire for the oil and territory of the Dutch East Indies. But Japan only wanted to take that because its wars of conquest got it embargoed. Had it stayed peaceful it could have just bought the oil, a much cheaper prospect. So, it's more like the oil was an issue because of the war, not the need for oil causing the war. However, Vietnam, Korea, WWI, the American civil war, and the war for independence... what resouces are you talking about?

Lose.

"Paul Graham... argues that... web startups themselves are commodifying."

Uh, no. He says they are hugely increasing in number. In fact, I think if anything that will increase the gap between the best and the worst of them. They are becoming even less of a commodity than previously, which was not at all.

Some nitpicking:

"Data security is just hard to provide, and thanks to hackers, even harder to protect." Wait, the 'hackers' are the reason it's hard to provide, right? So why the "even harder to protect" part?

Later there's the typical focus on stock price instead of market cap. This is the "ooh, shiny!" school of business writing.

"This curbs the riskiest kind of hacking" Please reduce hacking risk; wear a helmet.

You know what this reminds me of? A local newspaper article. This writer isn't smart enough to be on the web; Om should fire him.

I'm sorry, everyone. Just had to get this off my chest.

Why aren't the nodes labeled?

A meme of two posts?

Which meme?

Plato is crap: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57000

It's Robert. Trevor doesn't work on news.yc, I don't think.

It is you who does not understand statistics. If the 'top people' is a population with a higher than average IQ, then that is probably a useful thing to measure when trying to predict if someone is going to be a top person, even if not all high IQ people are top people and not all top people have high IQ. See Bayes.

Also, if you were coming to this situation with no prior knowledge that IQ means intelligence (that is, imagine that you didn't know what the term IQ means) then you could suspect that its correlation with 'top people' might not be causative. The trouble is, you live and work in the real world, and so have seen smart and not-so-smart people at work. So you have strong reason to suspect that the arrow of causality points from IQ, not towards it.

Intelligence is not the only thing, but it's important and it can be measured.

You couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs.

It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.

You couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs.

It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.

let's hope

Why stop at Ohio? It's a lot cheaper in South Dakota. But why choose S.D. when Poland is such a good deal? And Poland is outragously expensive compared to Jakarta. Although those Jakarta snobs really can get on your nerves... Tunisia is the answer.

I just don't think you're trying hard enough.

Evil?

"...YC seemed almost like the Medici of Florence... bringing all the great minds together from many fields created an unstoppable momentum of achievement."

Wow. That's really a great comparison. Given Paul's experience with Florence and knowledge of history, that might have crossed his mind too.

These guys are doomed.

To repeat what I've said elsewhere: we need a succinct term for non-technical people who think they should be doing startups and just have to find some programmers to realize their visions. You can't call them suits or MBAs because most of them didn't go to B-school and don't wear suits. What to call them?

Idiot.

People, we need a succinct term for non-technical people who think they have a lot to contribute to startups. You can't call them suits or MBAs because most of them didn't go to B-school and don't wear suits. Any thoughts?

lame

Because it's much easier to just dump your data to disk as you already have it, rather than translate it to SQL idea of what data is: SQL types, one-to-many relationships, etc.

This is not just a Scheme thing. If you use Java you have serialization. Python calls it 'pickle'. I'm sure whatever else you are using probably has something equally simple.

PLT Scheme + PLT Scheme web server + flat files (actually serialized s-expressions on disk. Which aren't very flat.)

No. (It's not really a demo, just a fun, unrelated little thing. But it has an URL which hasn't been hit yet from Mountain View or Cambridge.)