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Lower corporate taxes increase the rewards for successful businesses. The higher the potential rewards, the bigger risks investors will take with startups. Therefore, there will be more 'fit' companies.

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Instead of big government bureaucracy, trying to force a Google competitor from the top down, the EU should be seeding promising European startups. The next Google is probably not going to look anything like Google, and you aren't going to find it with this style of funding.

See also:

• How to be Silicon Valley
• Why startups condense in America

Instead of big government bureaucracy, trying to force a Google competitor from the top down, the EU should be seeding promising European startups. The next Google is probably not going to look anything like Google, and you aren't going to find it with this style of funding.

See also:

• How to be Silicon Valley
• Why startups condense in America

"It's not because the market can not handle the supply, rather, it is usually because of a fatal business decision made early on. And the #1 culprit is: over spending."

Uh, no. It's number 11.

It's because he apparently thinks that to be of concern to the press "in the modern world", somebody has to pay a lot for this. I'm no fan of Paul Graham, but he has written an interesting article about the business of press releases, which is a kind of a thing George Michael might be talking about: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Bloggers claim they want to be taken seriously as legitimate news media. Yet they go and do things like slip paid for advertising in with the rest of their content.

The "legitimate news media" do this too. Paul Graham wrote an interesting article on this a while back. Yeah, I agree that its unethical (I really hate those radio ads too, by the way), but it is so pervasive in the media business that you have to take anything you read anywhere with a grain of salt.

The ideal of an impartial, unbiased news media that reports only the cold hard facts does not really exist in the real world, and never has. Everyone has a point of view that will bias their reports. Much of that bias is fairly benign and unintentional, while some is egregiously self-serving or greedy, but it is always there. We should read everything with a critical eye, including the original story, Paul Graham's article that I linked to, and especially my own post :)

But Microsoft already is dead :P

Paul Graham made an interesting point about the crappy K-12 in the US. Here's the thing he wrote: http://paulgraham.com/america.html.

It's under the 10th reason, America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers.

The calculation is not as simple as you imply. If you get a million spams per day (like this guy), then you're probably better off with the spam filter, since without it your chances of catching the one purchase order hiding in 1000000 spams is pretty slim.

Spam filtering becomes worth it when the error rate of the filter is lower than the error rate of a human sorting through the same mail. That level of performance is pretty easy to achieve.

Exactly!

As an example of this kind of marketing manipulation consult "The Submarine" by Paul Graham.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

April 2005

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

The source of this FUD is, no doubt, Microsoft's PR firm.

Microsoft is dead too: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Boy, this year is getting really interesting. Maybe OS X or BSD is next to die?

The "Graham" is Paul Graham. From his website bio:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998...

He has a really interesting essay-blog at his website which is worth checking out.

You might be interested to read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth and explains why you shouldn't take such rejection too personally.

Look at cultures around the world, especially pre-industrialized ones. Each has it's rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. Even the US used to have them. We had master-Apprentice training, we had guilds. What few realize is that these provide a transition from childhood to adulthood. They do so by establishing a sense of accomplishment in the youth as they increase in skills and maturity. The relationships formed by youths provide a solid grounding for dealing with the biological (hormonal) changes that adolescence brings on.

Instead today we have high schools which continue to treat you as if you are five years old. Seriously. Look at what the difference in experience is between 1st and 12th grade. It's the same thing with more topics. There is no bridge between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Graduation is supposedly some major event, our "replacement" for a rite of passage. But it fails miserably on that account, as we can see.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

and I agree with both you and him. School is today to some degree a deposit place for kids while the parents are working and this is bad.

For example: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

We're talking about children here. Most adults would brush off what is called cyber bullying. But a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't yet have the maturity to deal with these things. As an adult, I don't really care if people say mean things about me, and by and large people don't. But high school is a place where you are forced to go with a lot of people who often don't like each other and who spend their time inventing new and cruel ways to torture each other. Often it works because most teenagers care deeply about what the community thinks of them.

For example: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Laws against adult bullying are a lot more lax because adult bullies have a lot less opportunity to actually have an effect. Children are a lot more vulnerable to this sort of behaviour, both because of their age and the fact that they are pretty much stuck in school and not allowed out. If you hate your co-workers, you can always try to find a new job. In many societies you can't change schools that easily, if at all. Children are also more likely to engage in sociopathic behaviour towards their peers.

Yes. Having a thick skin is the price of living in a free society... but for adults, not for children.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Paul Graham's article "Microsoft is Dead" may be applicable here. For me, I'm no longer worried about buying another Windows machine (yes, I'm on XP right now) because I no longer use apps that are tied to Windows. In fact, as things go, I use fewer and fewer apps that aren't web based. I just don't need them any more. Beyond that, most of the apps I use have free alternatives and I use them.

The one proprietary application I still use is iTunes with my iPod. So a Mac machine might work for me next time around. I want one because they are so well designed, unlike this HP piece of junk whose battery doesn't make it an hour, and because friends and family have all had very good experiences.

Then again, I might just throw the whole lot out and buy something cheap and put Ubuntu on it.

Whatever the case, there's more to the equation than Bill Gates's relative worth.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Paul Graham's article "Microsoft is Dead" may be applicable here. For me, I'm no longer worried about buying another Windows machine (yes, I'm on XP right now) because I no longer use apps that are tied to Windows. In fact, as things go, I use fewer and fewer apps that aren't web based. I just don't need them any more. Beyond that, most of the apps I use have free alternatives and I use them.

The one proprietary application I still use is iTunes with my iPod. So a Mac machine might work for me next time around. I want one because they are so well designed, unlike this HP piece of junk whose battery doesn't make it an hour, and because friends and family have all had very good experiences.

Then again, I might just throw the whole lot out and buy something cheap and put Ubuntu on it.

Whatever the case, there's more to the equation than Bill Gates's relative worth.

Don't be silly. It isn't losing, Microsoft is dead, remember?

Ignore Microsoft, he says, because "Microsoft is Dead."
His take: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Mine: http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1356 1

In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet, which was still then a quasi-government entity. What he was doing is now called VoIP, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business.

Actually an essay of his that is more on-topic would be:

Are Software Patents Evil?

I submitted link to Paul Graham's new essay on startups, but probably it is not home page worthy story so I'll write it here again.

A bit off-topic but worth having look at it.
Why Not Not Start a Startup?
http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html
(March 2007)

He discusses about reasons why people don't start a startup and tries to explain that most of those reasons should be ignored.

To anyone who thinks that Silicon Valley is going to show up elsewhere in the world, I highly recommend reading the following essay by Paul Graham:

Why Startups Condense in America

Among his points, there is one in particular that (I think) gets overlooked the most. His seventh point, "America Is Not Too Fussy" is really a key issue. Like it or not, many Amercian startups bend the rules to find the most expedient solution to getting into business. 95% of the time, this bending of the rules is harmless, and actually benefits society. However, many countries would simply enforce their regulations to the point where that startup would never exist. I find his point to be amazingly enlightening.

Take a gander at his article, then come back to the matter of the Siberian Silicon Valley. Does Siberia have the infrastructure? The desire? The willingness to bend the rules? The lack of a police state? Free and open immigration? Cross pollination of employees between companies?

I think you'll find that many of these items exist there, but many do not. Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because it has all of those things in spades. Now if only it didn't cost a bloody fortune to live there. :-P

Its sad that 2% of the population control 99% of the wealth.

It is?

http://www.paulgraham.com/anybots.html

What puzzles me is how people acting out completely uninformed /. fantasies about Microsoft's demise, or the evils of software patents, or whatever, get rated "5, Insightful." Actually, I'm not puzzled at all; this is known as "preaching to the choir."

Incidentally, y'all might want to check out an article by Paul Graham whose premise is that "if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general."

But really, the trouble here is that there's a lot of uninformed bashing going on, by people who are not familiar with either patents or the software industry. Please talk to some lawyers or legal scholars or people who actually deal with large corporate patent portfolios. You will hear different -- not necessarily correct, mind you, but different -- words from the sort of reflexive geek ranting one gets here.

There most certainly are a lot of school books and web pages written about object oriented programming, including static inheritance. OOP is not a monolithic agreed-upon definition, but there are certainly some best practices to apply and notorious mistakes to avoid. There are a lot of different things that go into "OOP", and anyone designing an object system should understand them all, so they can understand the trade-offs they're making. Unfortunately the PHP designers were just trying to ape the surface features of Java, but they didn't understand OOP well enough themselves to know why it was designed the way it was, or get their own OOP design right.

Paul Graham quotes Jonathan Rees's la carte menu of features or properties that are related to object oriented programming:

Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.

1. Encapsulation - the ability to syntactically hide the implementation of a type. E.g. in C or Pascal you always know whether something is a struct or an array, but in CLU and Java you can hide the difference.

2. Protection - the inability of the client of a type to detect its implementation. This guarantees that a behavior-preserving change to an implementation will not break its clients, and also makes sure that things like passwords don't leak out.

3. Ad hoc polymorphism - functions and data structures with parameters that can take on values of many different types.

4. Parametric polymorphism - functions and data structures that parameterize over arbitrary values (e.g. list of anything). ML and Lisp both have this. Java doesn't quite because of its non-Object types.

5. Everything is an object - all values are objects. True in Smalltalk (?) but not in Java (because of int and friends).

6. All you can do is send a message (AYCDISAM) = Actors model - there is no direct manipulation of objects, only communication with (or invocation of) them. The presence of fields in Java violates this.

7. Specification inheritance = subtyping - there are distinct types known to the language with the property that a value of one type is as good as a value of another for the purposes of type correctness. (E.g. Java interface inheritance.)

8. Implementation inheritance/reuse - having written one pile of code, a similar pile (e.g. a superset) can be generated in a controlled manner, i.e. the code doesn't have to be copied and edited. A limited and peculiar kind of abstraction. (E.g. Java class inheritance.)

9. Sum-of-product-of-function pattern - objects are (in effect) restricted to be functions that take as first argument a distinguished method key argument that is drawn from a finite set of simple names.

So OO is not a well defined concept. Some people (eg. Abelson and Sussman?) say Lisp is OO, by which they mean {3,4,5,7} (with the proviso that all types are in the programmers' heads). Java is supposed to be OO because of {1,2,3,7,8,9}. E is supposed to be more OO than Java because it has {1,2,3,4,5,7,9} and almost has 6; 8 (subclassing) is seen as antagonistic to E's goals and not necessary for OO.

The conventional Simula 67-like pattern of class and instance will get you {1,3,7,9}, and I think many people take this as a definition of OO.

Because OO is a moving target, OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser.

Perhaps part of the confusion - and you say this in a different way in your little memo - is that the C/C++ folks see OO as a liberation from a world that has nothing resembling a first-class functions, while Lisp folks see OO as a prison since it limits their use of functions/objects to the style of (9.). In that case, the only way OO can be defended is in the same manner as any other game or disci

anyhow little long but a good read

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Paul Graham makes this interesting case:

http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Couldn't agree more. And the reason is I know I'm one of those untrained people. I'm also probably the only one among my peers that thinks we have no business calling ourselves software engineers.

Judging by a bunch of people I've met and worked with, schools fail to teach basic problem-solving skills, professionalism, or indeed, even the fundamental tools of software engineering. Instead they focus on teaching a specific language or tool, and the students never rise above that. Hence we get a lot of Blub programmers.

For quite some time I've been thinking that we do stuff ass backwards: we go to school, take a stab at learning something useful and then go to work where very little of the teachings are applicable. I wonder how things would be if students first got to work in real-life conditions and then got to decide what their learning focus should be.

And stay upwind.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

Maybe a math or applied math degree?

The point I was trying to make is that recent (eg in the last 20-50 years) changes to the schooling system have already disadvantaged boys, certainly here in Australia. One example off the top of my head; smarter boys are picked on by their peers, with no threat of discipline. By doing little to address this, the school yard environment passively encourages stupidity in males.

Well, they all *look* the same ;-) Yes, if you want to get into semantics, vocabulary and other language lawyer topics they are massive differences in each and every dialect of Lisp, but they all follow the same essence of lists and cons cells and the other axioms that make any lisp a LISP. See The Roots of Lisp by Paul Graham for a better writeup of what John McCarthy discovered when he 'found' (rather than discovered) Lisp.

Go fuck your self.

"She gave everything she had".
Fuck you, fuck her, and fuck Jesus.

The smelly woman, would probably be back next week with yet ONE more penny.

The rich dude?
He can go back each week and give $1000 more.
But WHAT THE FUCK WILL HE DO if he gives everything away?
He'd have nothing... he couldn't go to "make" more money.

So, next week, he comes in and gives a penny.
Shesshh... talk about killing the mother fucking golden goose.

Wake up and smell the roses stupid fucking asshole.
Here's a very nice essay that you should read, and re-read. It's called Mind the Gap. http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

I encourage you to read this essay by Paul Graham. Someone posted it elsewhere in this story, but it's applicable to your post.

Perhaps a link to Paul Graham's Mind the Gap essay would be worth reading as well.

There's at least four fundamental errors that are made or implied by the Inequality Matters argument:

1. Money is not zero-sum, just because some CEO gets a lot of money doesn't mean I get less.
2. If there were perfect equality then there would be no incentive for anybody to make any progress at all.
3. Correlations don't prove cause-effect relations.
4. The results are highly selective and not an indicator of good/bad on a whole. Even if more crime does result, many other good things may also result as well.

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

"...Most innovation in the software business happens in startups, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. At least, that's what we advise, and we bet money on that advice.

The only real role of patents, for most startups, is as an element of the mating dance with acquirers. There patents do help a little. And so they do encourage innovation indirectly, in that they give more power to startups, which is where, pound for pound, the most innovation happens. But even in the mating dance, patents are of secondary importance. It matters more to make something great and get a lot of users."

My resolution for 2006 was to stop procrastinating and simply DO IT (whatever 'IT' happened to be). The poster should read this essay - it sounds like his diversionary tactics result from a lack of focus/attention. The moment you realize you're procrastinating, it's easier to stop it and get that work done.

Otherwise, it's the usual: save more, strive for happiness, learn a new skill, etc.

Paul Graham has an excellent article on "The Submarine":
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

"...
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1] ..."

Guys have you read http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html by Paul Graham?

I don't see why you'd want JavaScript replaced by Python or Ruby. As a programming language, it is more powerful than both. By powerful I mean simplicity and power of the language itself, not comparing sets of features.

For proof, [re]read Revenge of the Nerds. Search for "Appendix: Power" on the page, look at the problem. Try doing that in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C of any kind.

I imagine it's rather hard to find anyone to report on somthing, who has some sort of knowledge on the subject, that isn't one of theese three.

Deja vu? Didn't this happen last year too? The Christmas shopping season press-push of an obviously flawed story claiming iTunes popularity was crashing? It seemed then a submarine by someone to depress iTunes sales. Thinking back, maybe it also looked, from some of the details of the story, like the music owners were behind it? Anyone remember?

And now this? Has anyone looked into the research funding? And into how the press caught it?

I think every form of advertising needs to express that it is an ad.

You fail. Java can be used on the server end, generating HTML in much the same way PHP generates HTML. The difference is that PHP is an absolutely pitiful language, and while Java has its own flaws, it's still overall much more useful and sane than PHP. I would still rather use software based on Python, because that reveals it was written by someone with enough sense to use a productive language rather than an "industry standard" (read: designed for idiots).

Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php#Criticism
Also read: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Inequality and Risk
Mind the Gap