I don't think online newspapers can get it right, because I don't think there's any such thing as an online newspaper done right.
Newspapers (as the name suggests) are an artifact of print. You don't need them online. If there's anything good in the New York Times today, I'll hear about it on Slashdot or Reddit or Digg. Why bother going to the Times's own front page, where all I get are Times articles?
Re:This should really be entitled "Hiding Spam"
on
Ending Spam
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· Score: 1
If you hide enough of it, you end it, because if users don't see it, it stops working. And if it stops working, spammers stop sending it.
Which raises the question: why do we still get spam? There have been good filters for years, but there is still spam. So it must be getting through somewhere. My guess is that it gets through to (a) people who get email service from their local ISP, and (b) users at medium-sized businesses, who are compelled to use wretched "enterprise" spam filters.
If everyone used Gmail or Yahoo Mail, that really would end spam, because those guys have good filters.
Sorry. I didn't expect this to be slashdotted and am a bit embarrassed that it has been. This isn't a proper essay, and I don't expect it to be interesting to the average reader. This is just a page I added to the part of my site for people working on the spam problem.
If investors only chose people with experience, they'd have missed Google and Yahoo (and Microsoft, if they'd needed venture funding). Those would be pretty lousy investors.
I don't, and I should know. It was a conscious decision to get the money problem out of the way quickly so I could work on other stuff. Or hang out in Caneel Bay...
If you spread three years of 112-hour weeks over a normal working life, it works out to 7.5 hours a week. Surely that is pretty efficient.
I don't think Branson has more fun than me. I think he just has a PR agency making sure everyone knows about it when he does.
No, a startup is not merely a young business. It is a very specific type of business: one designed to grow extremely rapidly. Most business are service businesses, like hair salons and gas stations. These are not startups.
Most small businesses are shrubs. A startup is a redwood seedling.
Hmm, that's interesting. Is this widely known as the "slashdot paradox" or did you just coin this term?
I've certainly been wondering about this. When something I've written gets slashdotted, a lot of the comments make me say, did this person even read the essay?
I think what happens on slashdot is that people respond to what they think an essay is about, rather than the essay itself. This is particularly bad for me, because I often deliberately pick topics that people usually write nonsense about (like taste, or advice to high school students), to see if it's possible to say something useful.
In this case, we can identify the people we know didn't read it, because I know the thing is so long that it takes an hour to read. It was slashdotted at 2:19, so any comment posted before 3:19 must be proportionately bogus.
Er, could you be more specific? I'd be happy to fix anything you think is mistaken. Could you give me an example of a sentence that's false? There are lots of sentences to choose from...
Altavista didn't suck at first, but if I remember correctly, it did by 1998, when they screwed it up in preparation for an ill-fated attempt to go public.
It was extremely convenient for Google that Altavista self-destructed though. I thought of adding a note about that, but people already complain about the number of footnotes.
We're all heading for the same asymptote. Not C++ perhaps, but Perl and Python and Ruby. So from the programmer's point of view it doesn't matter too much whether I finish a Lisp dialect with decent libraries before the others turn into one.
On that subject, I got mail recently saying that my prediction about the way Python would evolve in the appendix to "Revenge of the Nerds" had come true. Is that really so?
A US Supreme Court decision in 1972 (I believe) said that you couldn't make hiring decisions based on general intelligence, but only on the specific skills needed for the job. So Google can give applicants programming tests, but not IQ tests.
I included that as the one example in the essay of something you can't say. And needless to say, I've taken more heat for it than anything else I've ever written.
I stand by it, though. And I speak from experience. I was a philosophy major as an undergrad.
Yet they lost, net, in the technology race. And not just in development, but in production as well. And note that Germany's production problems began before Allied bombing raids started to shut the factories down. The root of the trouble was that production was under the control of an incompetent party loyalist (who later committed suicide).
Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple
Really? It seems to me that I go into great detail. For example, in the third paragraph of this latest essay I explain the connection between the two senses of "hack." That's a substantial point, and new too, as far as I know. At least, it was news to me when I realized it.
Other quite specific points: that hackers get in trouble because authorities don't understand one of their biggest motives (curiosity); that young hackers deliberately fake eccentricities; that copy protection mechanisms, because they're mechanisms, tend to attract rather than deter hackers; that new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it; that the kind of attitude that existed during the Manahttan Project is hard to imagine existing in Germany at that time; etc, etc.
Surely this is a lot more than just saying that hackers are great. (And where exactly do I say that, by the way?)
Re:He gives a great counterexample in his article
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 1
Germany university towns in the nineteenth century seem to have been far freer in spirit than most other places at the time. (And BTW, I was born in England.)
The brilliant minds are not necessarily *from* the US, but the US is the place where they can get most done.
I suspect a good fraction of Dutch hackers, when they visit the US, ask themselselves, could I live here? Whereas very few American hackers think that when visiting the Netherlands.
I never said hackers were at the forefront of any battle to defend anyone's rights. I just said hackers *worry* more about civil liberties than dentists or landscapers. And you have to admit they do. It seemed worth trying to figure out why.
He's over-romanticizing and overrating the nerd 'culture', which is essentially an over-focus on one tech competency to the exclusion of all else.
Actually it seems to me that nerds tend to have a broader range of interests than ordinary people. If you go to the average tech company, it is the developers and not the accountants or legal department or salesmen who are most likely to have travelled to Nepal or to know about Roman history.
A marketing expert can put together an army of coders in India or Russia for pennies.
This was already happening during the Bubble. One of the companies we worked closely with was started by MBA types, and outsourced all their development to India. It was a disaster.
Outsourcing development is for banks who need to get reams of routine database software written, not for startups. If someone is really just a "marketing expert," they won't have the vision to tell the armies in Russia and India what to build.
This is why there are so incredibly few successful companies lead by 20-somethings
I'm only saying this of tech companies, and several of the biggest of those were led by 20-somethings: Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Yahoo (yes, the founders are powerful), Google. Ellison was about 33 when he founded Oracle.
Re:Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy
on
What The Bubble Got Right
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.
It may not be a good plan to hope to do "something you really like" after many years of minimum effort, but it does work to do SYRL after a few years of maximum effort. At least, it worked for me.
I talked a little bit about this in Great Hackers, and much more extensively in "How to Create Wealth," which is probably the most subversive of the essays in Hackers & Painters.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think online newspapers can get it right, because I don't think there's any such thing as an online newspaper done right.
Newspapers (as the name suggests) are an artifact of print. You don't need them online. If there's anything good in the New York Times today, I'll hear about it on Slashdot or Reddit or Digg. Why bother going to the Times's own front page, where all I get are Times articles?
If you hide enough of it, you end it, because if users don't see it, it stops working. And if it stops working, spammers stop sending it.
Which raises the question: why do we still get spam? There have been good filters for years, but there is still spam. So it must be getting through somewhere. My guess is that it gets through to (a) people who get email service from their local ISP, and (b) users at medium-sized businesses, who are compelled to use wretched "enterprise" spam filters.
If everyone used Gmail or Yahoo Mail, that really would end spam, because those guys have good filters.
Sorry. I didn't expect this to be slashdotted and am a bit embarrassed that it has been. This isn't a proper essay, and I don't expect it to be interesting to the average reader. This is just a page I added to the part of my site for people working on the spam problem.
Since when does being slashdotted imply a lack of criticism?
If investors only chose people with experience, they'd have missed Google and Yahoo (and Microsoft, if they'd needed venture funding). Those would be pretty lousy investors.
I don't, and I should know. It was a conscious decision to get the money problem out of the way quickly so I could work on other stuff. Or hang out in Caneel Bay...
If you spread three years of 112-hour weeks over a normal working life, it works out to 7.5 hours a week. Surely that is pretty efficient.
I don't think Branson has more fun than me. I think he just has a PR agency making sure everyone knows about it when he does.
Good heavens. If they find out you're reading the articles, they'll take away your account.
Seriously, though: thanks.
No, a startup is not merely a young business. It is a very specific type of business: one designed to grow extremely rapidly. Most business are service businesses, like hair salons and gas stations. These are not startups.
Most small businesses are shrubs. A startup is a redwood seedling.
Hmm, that's interesting. Is this widely known as the "slashdot paradox" or did you just coin this term?
I've certainly been wondering about this. When something I've written gets slashdotted, a lot of the comments make me say, did this person even read the essay?
I think what happens on slashdot is that people respond to what they think an essay is about, rather than the essay itself. This is particularly bad for me, because I often deliberately pick topics that people usually write nonsense about (like taste, or advice to high school students), to see if it's possible to say something useful.
In this case, we can identify the people we know didn't read it, because I know the thing is so long that it takes an hour to read. It was slashdotted at 2:19, so any comment posted before 3:19 must be proportionately bogus.
Er, could you be more specific? I'd be happy to fix anything you think is mistaken. Could you give me an example of a sentence that's false? There are lots of sentences to choose from...
Altavista didn't suck at first, but if I remember correctly, it did by 1998, when they screwed it up in preparation for an ill-fated attempt to go public.
It was extremely convenient for Google that Altavista self-destructed though. I thought of adding a note about that, but people already complain about the number of footnotes.
We're all heading for the same asymptote. Not C++ perhaps, but Perl and Python and Ruby. So from the programmer's point of view it doesn't matter too much whether I finish a Lisp dialect with decent libraries before the others turn into one.
On that subject, I got mail recently saying that my prediction about the way Python would evolve in the appendix to "Revenge of the Nerds" had come true. Is that really so?
A US Supreme Court decision in 1972 (I believe) said that you couldn't make hiring decisions based on general intelligence, but only on the specific skills needed for the job. So Google can give applicants programming tests, but not IQ tests.
I included that as the one example in the essay of something you can't say. And needless to say, I've taken more heat for it than anything else I've ever written.
I stand by it, though. And I speak from experience. I was a philosophy major as an undergrad.
Glad you found the nerds essay useful, at least.
--pg
Yet they lost, net, in the technology race. And not just in development, but in production as well. And note that Germany's production problems began before Allied bombing raids started to shut the factories down. The root of the trouble was that production was under the control of an incompetent party loyalist (who later committed suicide).
Somewhen I think Graham said something like he and Stallman and so forth were great men because they weren't afraid to say they were great.
Good God. You must be thinking of someone else...
Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple
Really? It seems to me that I go into great detail. For example, in the third paragraph of this latest essay I explain the connection between the two senses of "hack." That's a substantial point, and new too, as far as I know. At least, it was news to me when I realized it.
Other quite specific points: that hackers get in trouble because authorities don't understand one of their biggest motives (curiosity); that young hackers deliberately fake eccentricities; that copy protection mechanisms, because they're mechanisms, tend to attract rather than deter hackers; that new technology often isn't developed by the people who are supposed to be developing it; that the kind of attitude that existed during the Manahttan Project is hard to imagine existing in Germany at that time; etc, etc.
Surely this is a lot more than just saying that hackers are great. (And where exactly do I say that, by the way?)
Germany university towns in the nineteenth century seem to have been far freer in spirit than most other places at the time. (And BTW, I was born in England.)
The brilliant minds are not necessarily *from* the US, but the US is the place where they can get most done.
I suspect a good fraction of Dutch hackers, when they visit the US, ask themselselves, could I live here? Whereas very few American hackers think that when visiting the Netherlands.
I never said hackers were at the forefront of any battle to defend anyone's rights. I just said hackers *worry* more about civil liberties than dentists or landscapers. And you have to admit they do. It seemed worth trying to figure out why.
Marketing is still much more important than substance.
If it were, we'd all be using Excite or Lycos (remember them?) instead of Google.
He's over-romanticizing and overrating the nerd 'culture', which is essentially an over-focus on one tech competency to the exclusion of all else.
Actually it seems to me that nerds tend to have a broader range of interests than ordinary people. If you go to the average tech company, it is the developers and not the accountants or legal department or salesmen who are most likely to have travelled to Nepal or to know about Roman history.
A marketing expert can put together an army of coders in India or Russia for pennies.
This was already happening during the Bubble. One of the companies we worked closely with was started by MBA types, and outsourced all their development to India. It was a disaster.
Outsourcing development is for banks who need to get reams of routine database software written, not for startups. If someone is really just a "marketing expert," they won't have the vision to tell the armies in Russia and India what to build.
This is why there are so incredibly few successful companies lead by 20-somethings
I'm only saying this of tech companies, and several of the biggest of those were led by 20-somethings: Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Yahoo (yes, the founders are powerful), Google. Ellison was about 33 when he founded Oracle.
Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.
It may not be a good plan to hope to do "something you really like" after many years of minimum effort, but it does work to do SYRL after a few years of maximum effort. At least, it worked for me.
I talked a little bit about this in Great Hackers, and much more extensively in "How to Create Wealth," which is probably the most subversive of the essays in Hackers & Painters.