sidman

The name got me straight away, i wondered if it was someone from indonesia who was building it because i recognized the name as having the meaning of "value" in indonesian (as you mentioned) and what do you know ... its close :).

Good luck with it, hope it goes well. And salam to your dad from one who also has roots in bandung !

I think your right PG but there are some caveats. For one i think to be able to pass it off that ideas are better then speaking (which i do agree with) you need to have some clout behind you and prove your worth and you have surely done that with respect to startups and the tech world. Honestly if anyone else did the talk you did (new ideas) and delivered it the way you did (lots of um's) i'm sure the crowed would have passed it of as a lunatic with crazy ideas who cant even speak. I sometimes empathize and if it was me that was there I would classify myself as a raving lunatic who cant speak.

I think this is again part of the subset of ideas that looking good and looking smart is actually better then being smart cause perception is everything. I personally have always look at whats inside and what the actual words mean, even when im listening to a song i listen to the words and if they effect me rather then the sexiness of the singer (like i know most of my friends do)

I remember watching a movie called puncture with chris odonnel(sp?) where he was a lawyer promoting safe needles that could save front line health workers from getting accidentally stuck and the inventor of the needle didn't know how to present infront of the investors. As a result he got nothing even though he had a great product with great potential. (the movie was based on a true story)

So i do agree with you however i think for most of us without much clout still trying to prove ourselves in the world learning to speak well is just as important as learning to write and have ideas (i hate speaking publicly but im trying). If we cant present ourselves to investors or to customers well (or intelligently) we wont even get into the door :)

Legendary ! that is pretty awesome. I guess there are conditions on where you can do that and thinking about it now i cant think of anywhere near me where i could do that if i wanted/could do it.

Though if i went back to where my parents came from in south east asia i could think of alot of places where that would work.

I think you can get a certain distance by doing short term work and during that time flesh out the idea, write V1 of the code, even release it to users. But as the user base grows and the urge to iterate faster and faster starts to burn it becomes hard focusing on contracting or part-timing it (which i was doing)

You kinda get up in the morning SUPER bummed about going to the 9-5 shop and the motivation dies almost completely cause you just wanna make the side project (which i guess it is at the time) work.

If i was going to do some part time work i would probably look at tutoring highschool students or certain cs courses cause it pays ok for the day to day bills and i find that more fun anyway. Not at the super broke stage yet so dont need to go down that path at the moment :)

I had used wave pretty heavily too. For one thing it was a way to chat through the company firewall when i was still doing a 9-5 ;) (they hadn't block it) though more importantly it was a great way to jot down ideas back and forth during the day , comment on the add some images then tabulate them or add them into bug tracking/feature control system at the end of the week.

Sometimes the ideas would evolve on wave after a week and we would put the final result in our bug tracking/feature control system with a reference to the wave so we can remember our rational behind why we added or changed a feature.

hmmm makes me wanna try some, love my yogurt, im in OZ, wonder if they have any here or if i can get it from some specialty greek deli's ?!

I guess its more about official role and what you officially register yourself as when you join the company, its really the only thing that goes down in history so no one would actually know what you do other then your official role, not the general public anyway (press, media, shareholders etc etc).

After reading that whole article i find Kaphlan to be a very interesting guy. I feel i share alot of personality traits with him and from the outcome i can see where those traits has helped and worked against him in the startup world....

Might look into a few things further cause of this article :) Thanks ...

Its not an argument, its a state of mind in keeping your information that you value safe.

Im saying, as things get more secure you can start to move your information there (as i said with email, dropbox or your own servers). Use the online medium that matches your documents safety requirements.

If your a security guru then out of all those your own servers that you harden yourself would probably be the most secure. For non security guru's maybe email or dropbox do a better job.

No one ever said dont make it more secure, but as the sophistication of the security methods goes up over time so will the sophistication of the crackers/hackers. This means your judgement not matter how much better security gets will always play a apart.

Im stating that you shouldnt rely on others for security. Whether dropbox, or a clone. Stating that dropbox as a vendor cant be trusted isnt a valid as it will apply to all the clones. Bottom line you should take responsibility of your own files. Any new system that tries to be more secure will "most probably" still have security issues with it anyway.

I dont really know what the big deal is. If you have a file that is top secret dont have it on the internet whether it be your email, in dropbox or even on your own aws/hosted server.

Keep it on a flash drive and have it stapled to your arm if you want to transport it. For images that you want to share, or files that you kinda dont give a rats about if they were to get compromised or disappear, place them in places on the internet that match their confidentiality requirements (email - for secure, dropbox - for kinda secure or your own private server - for very secure)

I think arguing whether a new solution is required because dropbox can't do the job or whether dropbox can keep your files safe is a moot point. If your files are on the internet they are never 100% safe. Just keep your most private files on an external hard disk and have that disk detached from your computer and the only risk you run is if someone robs your house.

I personally think dropbox is great for what i use it for, i put images that i want to share, i transfer files to friends overseas and we all happily share our stuff easily and seamlessly and if i wanna access it i login through the browser or install a new client. WIN. No other service at the moment does it this easily for me. If any of my files where compromised, well whatever, a few holiday pictures or some itineraries.

The legal responsibility is put on Dropbox to keep your stuff safe, but I think the "common sense" responsibility is put on the user to decide whether s/he thinks dropbox is the place for a specific file.

I think the blogs comments regarding javascript are less true then that regarding shell as javascript is becoming a core language no longer only active in the web "glue language" domain.

In the web context within HTML it maybe but in terms of mobile development using tools such as titanium/appcelerator or developing things in node.js, this requires javascript not as just a glue language but as the core.

In terms of shell, yeh, I think it still applies cause to this day i havn't seen anyone write a fully blown program completely in shell (thought that could just be me).

What i noticed in all the places i have worked at, when the shell script/program starts to get to large its usually slowly migrated to perl or <insert persons fav scripting language here>.

that's great, thank you, this will suffice for now :)

Hi jcarden, i wouldnt mind a copy, where can i message you to.

Thanks !

Wow, this is a great idea. I have seen this tech before (well similar) in japanese restaurants around my area but the problem is the functionality was very limited and the user interface blowed. This however looks very nice to use. I think the main thing the restaurant owners who adopt this technology need to get a grasp of his how to properly integrate this with their customer service staff.

I would presume there would be some retraining also such as how to handle technical failures during an order (what to say and how to still keep it streamlined through old manual methods) but if all that stuff is sorted this looks great !

I mean playing games when your waiting and nutritional information is great. I do that tim ferris diet and knowing if something has sugar or the forbidden ingredients in them would be good to know. Also it would provide important info to people with allergies to nuts and other similar kinds of foods.

I remember during uni I got the results closer to what i wanted them to be from google. It didn't have the instant or any of those fancy things but it just gave me what i wanted. It still does now but i just gotta troll through a few more links (which is ok by me)

I feel that the main difference now is because of the immense size of googles data from some 7-8 years ago when i first started uni. However to be able to structure the size of the data they have and still provide relevancy is still an awesome job i think.

I just wonder though, if duckduckgo ever did become a contender (from a data size perspective) and started to approach the size of googles dataset whether they would have the same kinds of problem.

This happens all the time. Some people at the top just want to hear good news even though its false news. If there is one individual saying dont ship and they ship it, if it roots up after its been released the 2 get fired cause

1 - the marketing guy didnt listen to advice 2 - the developer introduced the problem

If the person giving the advice isnt there to say "Hey i already told them that ! but they didnt listen" they can declare it as a mistake or an unknown bug. Usually people dont get fired for an unknown bug and dont look "as bad" as if they where told and chose to ignore it.

Happened at my work a few times, engineer didn't get to the point of being sacked but when the severity 1 solution was ignored in preference of another more "stupid" solution proposed by business types the engineer that suggested the proper solution was never invited to meetings anymore. Then when the initial solution didnt work and used the said engineers solution they didnt even tell him they implemented it until weeks later when he found out indirectly.

[edit] hmm, after reading it again, its either what i wrote above or someone lied and said QA didnt find any problems so we shipped it based on their recommendation(which in my opinion is worse then a way to keep his mouth shut)

I think the essay is great but i think it applies more when you are already in a happy place where your happiness is confirmed by your own view of yourself.

Its a way to stay happy once your happy. For example, lets say your a poor entrepreneur, you tell yourself, if i can flip for 5m+ ill be happy cause i will never have to work again, i can help my parents i can do so and so. Your dream comes true and your startup gets acquired and you have that 5m+ in your bank account.

You now have a label, people expect certain things from you. Your happy but because of your new found label and because of peoples expectations of what that label means "in this cause a successful startup founder acquired by XXXX" it forces you to try and comply with that label which could possibly making you unhappy again. (maybe you dont like doing talks, maybe you dont like giving advice, maybe you dont like being criticised ... whatever it may be)

However if you dont care and dont classify yourself as "successful startup founder acquired by XXXX" then there is no reason to comply with what that means and because you achieved your personal goal of getting acquired for 5m+ ... you stay happy.

I think for people that are not there yet, its still kinda hard to apply "I am Nothing" to things you are still striving for or care about.

Well this is my interpretation of the essay .. :)

I think there is a fine line you need to tread. I agree with what paul has to say but sometimes what we care about is what drives us.

For the longest time i worked as a consultant but i never cared. When someone said to me so what do you do, i just said i work with computers, my rank didnt matter to me, my role , my status nothing. I wouldn't come to work in a suite or tie or even a shirt (i came in just a t-shirt and jeans) and it was very weird to many who were watching. I guess cause they cared and wondered why i didnt ...

They would say , "your a consultant, for a big4 how can you wear those clothes, cause i personally cant".

I would respond by saying, well i dont care , just wanna make sure customer is happy regardless of what my official role is, that way i could do my work , not have to redo things and then go home. Also one of the important things i think is i detached myself from being a consultant, i was nothing, not a manager, a consultant, a senior consultant , who has certain things attached to them so i felt free and just wore what i wanted with the one rule that the customer needs to be happy.

When i found out that i could get away with that i experimented with a few other things too, like if i was tired during lunch i would sleep on the park bench if it was a nice sunny day. I stopped thinking hey im a professional and cant be seen sleeping on a park bench cause thats what bums do and once i got over it and i thought , hey who cares, it was easy and i would come back to the office invigorated cause of a 20-30 minute quick nap :)

However the caveat is when you CARE enough about say programming . If you start to tell yourself you dont care anymore you loose a certain desire which if you care about it, isnt very good. if you keep telling yourself hey i am a programmer then that comes with certain things such as , writing code, being half decent at math, being logical etc etc and being good at those things isnt a bad thing.

So i think i get what paul is saying when he says "i am nothing" but i think you cant apply that to things you care about cause it will cause you to not care. But applying that way of thinking to things what you might care about but deep down know its just for perception or is kinda silly or even not really important has some surprisingly good results :)

Yeh, I kind of got the jist of that from reading recent posts, it seems that alot of upvoted are cynical kinds of comments. Assuming it was all true (which i am taking it as) I thought it was a great customer service story and empathising with what the OP must have felt when he saw the server in the tux standing there makes you feel kinda good.

Whether he is privileged or not the story was about the steakhouse and im sure many other businesses wouldn't do that regardless of who the customer was. I guess it shows, they know who their customers are, what their customers are saying, and improve on an already good service. I think lots to learn from that :) Excellant JOB by Mortons i say ....

Ah thats the opposite :) I love beans and thats why its easy for me to apply. I like green beans, kidney beans, lentils so its the perfect diet. I really like exercise but i kept wondering why i would get defined all around the body but the stomach took so much effort (hundreds of situps just didnt do it) until i realised from reading his book that my whole diet was screwed. And yeh eating right just makes you feel so much better.

I read four hour work week as well. Some of the stuff in that book is quite difficult to apply as is because of work constraints but i think for IT people , we are in the best position to apply it cause for example, working from home isnt such a far stretch for guys supporting a unix environment, or doing some dev work, where else for people doing sales or face to face work its much harder.

I tried applying some of his techniques to lessen my "in office" work time and i managed to get 4 days a week (with just a tad less salary then if i was in the office 5 days) and 1 of those 4 days a week working from home. That was the best i could do, i couldnt get 4 days work from home or anything like that and even so it wasnt easy to apply them, the build up to ask for that kind of schedule from your boss takes time and planning. You have to somewhat let him know thats what you want and then prove that you can really work individually and are on hand to address issues anytime thats needed so gaining that trust takes some time...

But reading his book did kinda of highlight the idea that hey it is possible and if you dont ask you will not get so i tried and it worked (not 4 hrs but close enough :))

I have read his second book and actually applied his techniques for eating and it works very well and also isn't to difficult to achieve.

I like his books in general cause he tries to maximize efficiency with minimum input mixed with a significant amount of discipline. I think this is why it also appeals to many people. Who doesn't want to get maximum output whilst putting in little effort !

Hopefully thats not an issue, i plan to train myself more during this period of down time. Just cause im not going to the office doesn't mean im going to loose my skills. If anything im going to be learning a lot more things then i did at work.

If they care whether i am currently employed or not if i do need to join the work force again then i guess screw'em, they aren't looking for the right kinds of things.

Oh i totally understand that but i think if you read between the lines this article is more target to an audience like us. ie Hackers, who might hate their job but are still at it, moving pay-check to pay-check not happy with what we are doing with our time, able to do other things but just not stepping out to do it, not for people who have a family, a mortgage and need to put food on the table.

Plus its been 2 days because thats when i found this article, if i found it 3-4-5 weeks later then i would have put there 5 weeks since i have been unemployed. Regardless of the time its been since i left work the choice has been made to step away from a stable income job that felt completely draining to being unemployed but enjoying what things i can now do (which is the jist of this article)

>Try being unemployed against your own preferences (i.e. after being fired and unable to find new work) for half a year or a year - as in the current climate, long-term unemployment is becoming increasingly a problem - and we can talk again.

Wanna know something, i have a friend who i have offered my garage too for a couple of months cause at the moment he is at risk of loosing his house. He is forced to rent it out and cant afford another place to live. He wants to keep the house for his family and doesnt want the bank to take it away and turn all those years of hard work in interest payments to vanish into thin air just cause of a few months of missed payments due to being layed of.

Now he works 2 jobs 18 hours a day for 7 days to get what he used to be paid before he lost his job and needs to do that until he can get back on track so that his missed payments for the last few months have been made up. I know full well what unemployment means, not first hand but close enough ..... and its sad

HOWEVER ... i dont think this article is directed at people in this situation - hence my caveat :)

if anyone knows this i guess its me. I put my resignation in one month ago and have been unemployed for about 2 days so far and I am loving it.

My old job was in a large bank, paid well and i only had to work 4 days a week. The only issue is i wasn't following my passion and it made me feel well and truly down EVERY SINGLE DAY (was there for about 2 years).

For about 3 months prior to putting in my resignation i was also already working on a side project that started getting legs and had started to bring in ramen profitable google ads profit so that It allowed me to quit work and still be able to eat whilst not touching to much of savings along with also paying for some small amazon servers to keep the service running. I thought what the hey, lets give it a go so i quit. Shocked everyone, including parents but i just couldn't go on any longer. It hurt to much... and IT in banks just totally suck.

Also like the article says planned an exercise regime, my work hours for my currently little side project and hanging to start on Peter Norvig and Andrew Ng's classes when they start. Never felt this excited in a while.

I think the caveat though is that while being unemployed (currently like I am) is better then having a lousy job , not being able to put food on the table is lousier then a lousy job. I guess this article applies to people who aren't financially struggling cause i know some people who would take ANY job that came their way right now.

I took a look at the ones already online and downloaded them a while back. Also went through Khans stuff on the areas you mentioned after i realised i needed just a refresher on a few of the areas. After the refresher following the lectures was much easier.

I did a bachelors and a masters in comp-sci at usyd and unsw in aus, it was good but i remember not getting into the depth that the stanford lectures did so im quite excited to get back into it. Also decided to take some time of work to work on a few of my own things so got alot of time to have fun with the materials.

BTW thanks to standford for this material, its totally awesome :)

Its not that black and white. Just cause your startup isnt directly fixing the world problems it doesnt mean that one day it might not. Either directly or indirectly.

I hate to say it but i think in more cases then not the kind of startups that most of us imagine doing (ie web startups) have a hard time doing anything to solve the worlds problems directly (the worlds problems that you mentioned more specifically). Not saying there isnt (i seen a few that raise money and help schools execute projects for instance but there are only a handful) but for the most part they do not tackle for example educational problems DIRECTLY such as say OLPC does.

I really love sal khans khanacademy stuff, its truly awesome but it isnt getting to the kids that dont have a roof over their school let alone an internet connection and many of these schools could really use his material.

This material might one day with the help of a very rich successful individual who is willing to purchase computers for the less fortunate parts of the world to then be able to view khans stuff. I think this applies to ALL web startups that isnt directly raising money for the problem parts of the world.

BUT what can be done is, the success (monetary or influential) we get from allowing people to find restaurants that are near them, or allows people to search for data easier <insert startup goal here> can be put to good use.

Maybe even purchase those computers for some unfortunate part of the world that will then allow them to view sal's, standfords or any similar educational content that will actually change the lives of those kids.

If im not mistaken i remember Michio Kaku saying that we will reach type three in about 1 million years from now where humans can build dyson spheres and harness the energy from galaxies, where we would be able to send robots to search other galaxies and then create gateways for the actual type 3 civilization to travel through to them. We are currently as he states it at 0.7 and our greatest challenge is to break past the type 1 where it is the most violent, like a child moving into their teenage years.

Looking at the state of the world today we are kind of doing so, where type 1 allows humans to harness and completly understand the power of the planet (solar, wind, kinetic) we are developing systems to help us harness it however we just need to ensure we dont obliterate ourselves before we get there.

Yep thats right. I actually really like ads from google because it isnt obstructive and they actually help look for what your after. I am well aware of how they get this information so they can target things to you and whether or not you agree with this is i guess a different issue which i have some thoughts on but in the regards to just the adverts discussion alone and their "intrusiveness or helpfulness" i like them and think they are useful. Interms of ad quality tho, i cant say the same for facebook ads.

Many years ago when google first started doing targeted ads on their search i didn't even know they were paid for ads. I thought it was just a new design and didn't think much more of it. Then i realised "sponsored ads" meant they where ads people paid for and thought it was a much better way of doing it then how some search engines where doing it (which at the time) was artificially putting paid ads higher in the results which obviously skewed your search result and turned any good search engine into total crap.

Also currently im in aus and just launching a product and the traction has been pretty good and we have done so by using direct marketing but trying to get to a more global audience we cant do it the same way as we are when we do it locally.

We cant hand out flyers, we can do newspaper ads, hell we cant even talk to the target people, the best we can do is use facebook twitter and tools like adwords and admob and if you use these tools right people take notice and it helps build your business. Im happy these things exist cause otherwise how the hell do we get the audience on the other side of the world if we dont have presence there.

I am a google apps paying customer and it took them 4 weeks to get my domain issue corrected ! In that time i wasnt able to get mail so i had to change my mail to use godaddy until they got back to me. When they finally did they said it was because my dns records were pointing to godaddy ! After 1 week of not getting mails i would say an alternative is required. I actually had a feeling that this would happen :)

I really love google as a company, their products, api's, their talks and all the events they hold are so great, i have learnt alot, BUT man, when i couldn't access my mail as a paying customer and got the runaround for support for 4 weeks even though they said it was high on the priority list ... GRRR thinking about it just makes me mad.

Anyway on a good note, after this issue everything is working fine and i guess aslong as you dont need support then everything is good :)

I think google is well aware of their roots. They entered a market where there was already market saturation and everyone thought they were going to be crushed "who needs another search engine". Everyone got complacent and as a result google managed to grow and make a better product. Eventually they move into other areas which then allowed them to dominate the web.

Coming from those roots you know full well that its better to crush/compete or acquire companies that can do to you what you did to others many years ago, its safer then thinking your to big for anyone to catchup and become complacent (and far cheaper if you nip it in the bud).

If i was the CEO at google i could name a few companies that would make it hard for me to sleep at night and facebook is high on that list. Look at the trend, buzz - (because they couldn't acquire twitter), originally orkut ( friendster fell through and to atleast have some form of social networking product), google offers (either cause groupon's model wasnt to their liking or groupon reject the offer. Irrespective of this groupon still perceived as a threat) along with countless other startups that made cool things that could have potentially competed with googles flagship products.

I think its simply cause google knows the web game well, they know that any of these startups (and other hot web properties) can bring them down if they are not careful and its better to acquire or if not keep building competing products so they still stay the dominate power.

Now trying to compete with a product such as google+ that could in time be comparable to the currently dominating player is I guess just good for future business :)

I use Sal's material quite abit, well mainly his finance and mathematics material, specially if i need to remind myself of things i did back at uni. I think Sal is most strongest in those areasgiven his background. However looking at the rest of what he produces if your a beginner in any of the topics his stuff is a GREAT place to start. My weapon of choice is actually python so it would be great to see how those tutorials look like :)

Just gotta say great job to Sal though, he spreads his knowledge and i'm sure many people around the world are greatful for it.