I love these articles, but what I'd really like to see is a much more detailed account of the founders' entire lives up until they got in to YC. How did they meet. When did they hear about YC for the first time. When did they become interested in technology. What did they eat for breakfast the day of their interview. The real nitty gritty. And ideally this would be a special on Vice of course. :)
some instructions on how to build the extension and install it, rather than use the chrome store, would be awesome!
EDIT: wow, it works out of the box. just go to chrome://extensions, "Load unpacked extension..." (enable developer mode i think), and then point to the folder where you've downloaded the github repo, and you're good to go!
One of the creators wrote a great comment on the origins, which really cleared things up. My first comment meant to read "Seems likely to only be found by the creators". I just thought it was a rare and hard to observe occurrence.
I think that in an ideal world, it is more effective to refrain from multi-tasking and instead to focus on an influx of information provided by a skilled teacher. Unfortunately, many classrooms do not represent the ideal world. Teachers may be unengaging, uninformed, or just plain not good. Students may be unprepared, overqualified, or uninterested. Sometimes there is simply a mismatch in expectations and understanding. If the professor and students are driven to overcome these inefficiencies, and work incredibly hard to avoid them, then and only then do I think that this "rule" should be put forth. Although, one could argue that students and professors should strive to achieve this goal in every setting.
I think atomic commits can either bump or decrease your commit frequency.
If you had a giant piece of logic that wouldn't be atomic in multiple commits, but you have multiple commits on your machine for the sake of saving your butt in case you roll down a weird rabbit hole, then you'd probably squash before merging into master and end up decreasing your total quantity of commits.
If you had a lot of small changes that all were safe seperately, you might break up what could have been a single commit into several commits so that you have a more descriptive history, and increasing your quantity of commits.
This is SO SO important. I've had to convert JSON to XML and vice versa so many times in order to transfer data to and from legacy code components. No, I don't think an ideal world involves any sort of communication where one side speaks JSON and the other speaks XML, but the current world very much needs a standardization like this.
Many customers sell their iPhone around the time the new one comes out (using services like iCracked and Gazelle). Basic economics dictates that as supply increases, prices will go down. This is a guess as to what could cause the prices to go decrease so rapidly.
I see what you mean, and this would probably be good for society (you are supposedly replacing something with a better version). Granted if you could identify a different undeveloped business, you may have more to gain individually. Imagine there is company A pursuing market A', if company B decides to pursue A', then A and B have to split the value of A'. Rather, B can pursue B', and if |A'| ~ |B'|, then there could be more to gain by not being competitive. If B(A') < |B'| then this still holds true (where B of A' is a function of how much value of A' that B can realize). In the finite world that we live in, there can only be so many A', B' or X', so this strategy may eventually much more in favor of competition. What I believe Thiel has identified is that we haven't reached that stage yet, or even that it's improbable that we will ever reach that stage.
I think an implicit point that Thiel is trying to make is that there are enough untapped opportunities out there that there is no point to compete. The startup world is not a zero-sum game. We can all win.
I found this to be overly critical of Buzzfeed's content, and I believe that Buzzfeed's potential and current success comes from the content structure. I personally have faith that people are interested in consuming useful and intelligent information in order to improve their knowledge, so that they may perform better in the future for tasks like voting. With this assumption, it's amazing how much traffic BF generates with the allegedly weak quality of content that it possesses, which essentially is proof that something else must be working. Now that we have a proven structure for content, we simply need to fill in content. Isolated to one region, like the US, the content to be filled in we are all familiar with. But imagine that we expand to all regions. It must be at least an order of magnitude easier to start a news site using BF's strategy in any place, like Africa, which I would guess is at least part of the reason that a16z chose to invest.
Shouldn't we be more concerned with the frequency of poor people becoming not poor? Frankly, I'm not convinced that going to college, potentially accumulating debt, and not having a guarantee of a job is really the best strategy for someone near or below the poverty line. Perhaps there are other avenues available that promise or at least offer positive outcomes that don't require a college education.
Some people like git pull, but I prefer git fetch. This gets all's the history from the remote repo without applying any changes. Then you can run something like 'git rebase -i origin/master' which is where I think git can really shine.
There is an excellent link out there that explains git in layman's terms. I think it's called git for hackers or something of the sort. It's much easier than the docs in my opinion.
It's amazing how empowering reading is. Benjamin Franklin used to stay up reading the books dropped off at his brother's printing press, and Warren Buffet supposedly reads 5 hours a day as part of his standard work schedule. Forget 10,000 hours, I'd like to know how many words the most successful people have read in their lifetime.
Great idea. The next progression would be cross browser benchmarks, and perhaps something suitable for browser extensions (unless this already works for that use case).
I'm excited to know which diets, exercises and lifestyle define a healthy human, which I'm hoping this information will give me (assuming the information will be released).
First company I thought of when reading this was Famo.us. They are creating open source Javascript frameworks, but then want to sell hosting solutions that handle their stack (something along those lines).
Professor Alex Halderman from Michigan has performed a few studies on Electronic Voting and Electronic Voting Machines, and essentially has proven that it is insecure. At one point, he hacked an American EVM to play the Michigan Fight song on every submission. You can read a few of his papers here: [1][2]
The challenge of creating anonymous and secure voting systems is still an area of constant research, and I do not believe that the Australian gov't has solved these problems yet.
Should we view the source? If we know it's insecure because it's basically unbelievable to think that otherwise, what good will seeing the code do? The fact that it is not being shown basically confirms the insecurity (if it was truly secure, we'd be able to see it without having a negative effect on the system). It seems the right thing to do is to fight this method of voting until EVMs are more secure, but maybe we should hedge our bets. Maybe we're going to be stuck with these EVMs in the interim, and we should avoid leaking the source to prevent people who have difficulty viewing the source.
You have excellent suggestions. I will try to follow up.
A strategy that I am taking is the promotion of Computer Science education and the use of open source technology. Computer Science needs to be cheaper, easier and more attractive to learn. We need more teachers, better communication between the school and the office, and more girls studying CS.