by Steve Phillips / elimisteve
A good rule of thumb is that diversity of opinion is essential anytime you don’t know anything about something important. But if there’s a strong sense of what’s right already, don’t argue about it.His example of not arguing or complaining about using C++ to build the product is a good one.
Of course, the other half of the problem is that the bulk of today’s generation of VCs, by and large, lack the testicular fortitude and vision that the previous generation did. With the new mindset of “failing fast” and focus on “the art of the pivot”, the reality is that many would-be promising companies are being sacrificed and prematurely killed in order to chase the latest fad that could be flipped to the next sucker.
When it’s said and done, the web isn’t all that different from the rest of the business world, but I guess I expected more.
We can do better! Come on guys...
# ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 # ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcreposix.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcreposix.so.3 I'm running Aptosid and these worked perfectly. Original error: Setting up libglib2.0-0:amd64 (2.30.2-6) ... /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/glib-compile-schemas: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/gio-querymodules: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory dpkg: error processing libglib2.0-0:amd64 (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 127 ...
The implication of all of this is that this is real engineering. Anyone can stand up a web server and make a decent website. Building something large is completely different in kind. It takes real skills and an incredible attention to detail at every level. Every part of system must work reliably within bounded tolerances at all times. Not everyone can make this work.
Free As In "Free to Kick Ass"
Therein lies the beauty of Open Source -- it gives us the freedom to focus on kicking ass and doing amazing things without the constraints of satisfying commercial interests.
...people might say things like "Man, I used to sleep on the street, and it's terrible. But now I have this great base of support. I have my case manager, I talk to him on the phone, and I have a good relationship." The guy who did say it lived in transitional housing with three people who were going through similar experiences, so they would hang out and go shopping together. The project gave him skills he needed and the support he needed to function in life. We all need that. I have my family, my friends, my education, my job. All these things keep me off the streets at night. Few homeless people have them, but they need them to thrive—independently and interdependently—in society. These essentials also include source of income and life skills, such as the ability to show up at a job.
This idea of constant but meaningless change drives a machine of consumption, where advertisers pressure those with extra purchasing power into unnecessary upgrades through a fear of being left behind.
Too true. Instead, we must innovate!
Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”
"It can't be discrimination if it's based on actual data, right?" Wrong.
Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.
The men were held in custody or ordered to appear in court today. All of the women were released by police and are due in court Wednesday and Thursday...
I want equality, too!
Btw, yes, this is the article where the Boston mayor says, "civil disobedience will not be tolerated."
If you knew that your computer performed two or three hundred empty cycles waiting for some piece of data to be fetched from main memory on a cache miss, or that when you see the little spinny thing, you are actually waiting for your hard drive to track down dozens of fragments of a file scattered across the hard disk drive because it got too full that one time, or that your web browser locked up on you because some novice programmer wrote some portion of it in blocking network code that is waiting for the last byte to arrive from the web server, and that the web server is sending that byte over and over again because a router is temporarily overloaded and is dropping packets like crazy so your neighbor can download a youtube clip of a cat hitting a ball into its owner’s crotch, you might throw up in your mouth a little bit. Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you.
HA -- burn!!! These recent complaints (initiated by Ryan Dahl) have been directed at the crappy state of today's software, especially under the covers. Usually I'm more disappointed at what we've managed to accomplish given that there now exists a world-wide network of OVER A BILLION human beings with high-speed internet and/or smartphones. Our three crowning achievements seem to be FarmVille, iFart, and selling more ads ::slow clap for Facebook and Google::.
Is anyone else underwhelmed?
The third world is making better use of these technologies than we are, as evidenced by the Arab Spring (though Twitter's role in the recent uprisings has been overblown). What people are doing with sensors + Arduino, what some of us are doing with VoIP (at ConferenceMeIn), IBM's notion of a "smarter planet" at least scratches the surface, but only barely!
In other news, and in response to the end of the excerpt, last week I earned my second most productive day of all time -- 14.4 hours of ass-kicking, to be exact. Makin' it happen.
I believe that, if you think you are good, it is only because you are comparing yourself with the wrong developers.
COME ON, STEVE! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR???
Stop worrying about financial shit and just _build shit_. Decentra [the distributed computing platform I'm building in Go (see steveswebapps.com/decentra)] can be _amazing_ in just a few days if you just commit to it... and the Rails dev you need to work on... ::sigh::
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I am reminded of Nietzsche: "The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful then the truths of little men."
This was no institution continuing a long tradition of public service. This was a headlong rush to reshape the world in a generation.
Google's ambition is inspiring. I've got a related blog post welling up in me I'll finish sooner or later...
I've got two basic rules of thumb. First, try to dilute in the 10-20% band whenever you raise money. If you can keep it to 10%, that is great. You might have to do more, but try hard to keep your dilution below 20% each round. If you do two or three rounds at north of 20% each round, you'll end up with too little of the company.
Second, raise 12-18 months of cash each time you raise money. Less than a year is too little. You'll be raising money again before you know it. Longer than 18 months means you may well be sitting on cash that you raised when your company was worth a lot less.
These rules are most applicable in the early stages. When your company gets above 100 employees and valued at north of $50mm, things change.
Good to know. I suspect Jay and I will be looking for angel money relatively soon.
An expensive habit is like a trap; it's dangerous. Now most Americans have the exact opposite attitude: if they make this much money, they look for how to spend this much, [makes ample gesture] which is completely imprudent. So they start buying houses and cars and boats and planes and rare stamps and artwork and adventure travel and children, [laughter] all sorts of expensive luxuries that use up a lot of the world's resources, especially the children. And then, the next thing they know, they've got to desperately struggle all day long to get money to pay for these things, so they have no time even to enjoy them, which is especially sad when it's a matter of children. The other things, I guess, can get repossessed. So then they become puppets of money, unable to decide what they're going to do with their lives. If you don't want to be a puppet of money, then resist the expensive habits, so that the less you need to spend to live on, the more flexibility you've got and the less of your life you're forced to spend to make that money.
So I still live, basically, like a student, and I want it to be that way.
You and me both, brother! It really is great, and highly underrated. Consumerism is a plague.
We see now that the US State Department is trying to censor us. We can also look at it in the following way. The birds and the bees, and other things that can’t actually change human power relationships, are free. They’re left unmolested by human beings because they don’t matter. In places where speech is free, and where censorship does not exist or is not obvious, the society is so sewn up—so depoliticized, so fiscalized in its basic power relationships—that it doesn’t matter what you say. And it doesn’t matter what information is published. It’s not going to change who owns what or who controls what. And the power structure of a society is by definition its control structure. So in the United States, because of the extraordinary fiscalization of relationships in that country, it matters little who wins office.
In other words: there's little censorship in the US, not because we're free, but because we're not free. Hmmm...
This is why I say that all existing political theories are bankrupt, because you cannot build a meaningful theory without knowledge of the world that you’re building the theory about. Until we have an understanding of how the world actually works, no political theory can actually be complete enough to demand a course of action.
Brilliant. It's exciting to think that if we only had more and better information about the world in which we live, smart people wouldn't just argue Socialism v. Libertarianism v. Anarchism; eventually we'd reach a point at which we can rule out certain theories and create newer, much more robust replacements. Hopefully this time is coming!
Workaholic. Programmer. Linux Lover. Python Pusher. Budding Entrepreneur.
Co-founder of Santa Barbara Hackerspace.
Workaholic. Programmer. Linux Lover. Python Pusher. Budding Entrepreneur.
