From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you.
The real vs. stated purpose of PowerPoint Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don’t always realize at first that the door’s open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.
Why did it take so long for blogging to take off? Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon. Fairchild Semiconductor is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded in 1959, less than fifty years ago.
Fairchild Semiconductor, 1st VC-backed startup Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “Made in USA” (November 2004):
Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We’re good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we’re good at for the same reason we’re bad at what we’re bad at. We’re impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don’t worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you’re getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it. …
For centuries the Japanese have made finer things than we have in the West. When you look at swords they made in 1200, you just can’t believe the date on the label is right. Presumably their cars fit together more precisely than ours for the same reason their joinery always has. They’re obsessed with making things well.
Not us. When we make something in America, our aim is just to get the job done. Once we reach that point, we take one of two routes. We can stop there, and have something crude but serviceable, like a Vise-grip. Or we can improve it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. When we want to make a car “better,” we stick tail fins on it, or make it longer, or make the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion. …
Letting focus groups design your cars for you only wins in the short term. In the long term, it pays to bet on good design. The focus group may say they want the meretricious feature du jour, but what they want even more is to imitate sophisticated buyers, and they, though a small minority, really do care about good design. Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do the same.
Why is American design so often terrible compared to Japanese design? Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “What the Bubble Got Right” (September 2004):
In fact most of the money to be made from big trends is made indirectly. It was not the railroads themselves that made the most money during the railroad boom, but the companies on either side, like Carnegie’s steelworks, which made the rails, and Standard Oil, which used railroads to get oil to the East Coast, where it could be shipped to Europe.
Who made money during the era of railroads Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “How to Start a Startup” (March 2005):
People who don’t want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it.
Protective incompetence Read More »
From Paul Graham’s “How to Start a Startup” (March 2005):
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed. …
I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck. …
What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.
What successful startups need Read More »
From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Key to Spinoza’s heresy was his monism, his belief that everything that exists is essentially a single thing, “nature” (that is, the infinite universe), and that this is identical with God. (As a girl, Goldstein was taught that Spinoza wickedly equated God with nature, when Jews and Christians agreed that God is supernatural, outside of nature, and a person.) Everything we experience — people, events, objects — is simply a “mode” of that single “Substance” or essence. Because God/Nature is infinite and we are finite, we perceive these things to be separate when they are not; all separate identities, including our own individuality, are merely an illusion or misperception. We perceive good and evil when neither really exists, from the perspective of God. The only way we can come to understand the true unity of the world is through the understanding of pure reason, which is integral to Substance in the same way that roundness is integral to a circle.
We can’t fully grasp this — our minds aren’t adequate to the task — but with a dash of intuition, we can glimpse it and experience Spinoza’s notion of true happiness. We can then attain what Goldstein calls a “radical objectivity,” a perspective that’s outside of our own limited identity. This objectivity will enable us to see the insignificance of our own pains, pleasures and losses except insofar as they help or hinder our ability to reason. We will realize that a life of restraint and peaceful coexistence with our fellow man is exactly what will sustain us in this cause; self-interest and virtue will be revealed as identical. Finally, we will be able to regard with tranquility the fact that we are mortal, that our minds, like our bodies, are simply a mode of the great infinity of Substance, and will someday end.
Spinoza’s conception of God Read More »
From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Goldstein’s description [of Spinoza’s conception of God] reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Quicksilver, in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza’s: “[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”
Neal Stephenson on being Isaac Newton Read More »
From Tim Bray’s “On the Goodness of Unicode” (6 April 2003):
Another problem is that in these parts of the world [China, Japan, Korea], it is not unheard-of to invent new characters. The Japanese word for such charaacters is gaiji; historically they were invented for personal or company names.
Asian languages invent new characters Read More »
From Tim Bray’s “On the Goodness of Unicode” (6 April 2003):
Unicode proper is a consortium of technology vendors that, many years ago in a flash of intelligence and public-spiritedness, decided to unify their work with that going on at the ISO. Thus, while there are officially two standards you should care about, Unicode and ISO 10646, through some political/organizational magic they are exactly the same, and if you’re using one you’re also using the other. …
The basics of Unicode are actually pretty simple. It defines a large (and steadily growing) number of characters – just under 100,000 last time I checked. Each character gets a name and a number, for example LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A is 65 and TIBETAN SYLLABLE OM is 3840. Unicode includes a table of useful character properties such as “this is lower case” or “this is a number” or “this is a punctuation mark”.
The politics & basics of Unicode Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
Instead of resisting the Vast Machine, many of us have given into cynicism and distraction. Our contemporary culture has become a brilliantly colored surface without a deeper spiritual meaning. We care more about celebrities than our own neighbors. Are Nick and Jessica getting divorced? Is that famous actor secretly gay? Staged media events allow us to think that everything is false. Our sense of powerlessness — the belief that an ordinary person does not matter — has twisted our lips into a sneer.
Media & culture’s emptiness encourages cynicism Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
In his insightful book “The Culture of Fear,” Barry Glassner shows how many of our specific fears are created and sustained by media manipulation. There can be an enormous discrepancy between what we fear and the reality of what could happen to us. Glassner analyzes several “threats” such as airplane disasters, youth homicide, and road rage, and proves that the chance of any of these dangers harming an individual is virtually nonexistent.
Although Glassner accurately describes the falseness of a variety of threats, he refrains from embracing any wide-reaching explanation. It can be argued that the constant message of impending destruction is simply a way for the media to keep us watching television – “Are cyber predators targeting your children?” is a tagline that is going to get the audience’s attention. What interests me is not the reality of these threats, but the effect they have on our view of the world. Fear encourages intolerance, racism and xenophobia. Fear creates the need for a constant series of symbolic actions manufactured by the authorities to show that – yes, they are protecting us from all possible dangers.
Media-induced fear & its effects Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
“And so what if they know all about me?” asks the honest citizen. “I’m good person. I’ve got nothing to hide.” This view assumes that the intimate personal information easily found in our computerized system is accurate, secure, and will only be used for your benefit. What if criminals access your information? What if corporations deny you insurance or employment because the wrong data has ended up in your file? What if you simply want to take control over who knows what about you?
Another answer to “I have nothing to hide” Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The Traveler describes for the first time in any book the secret computational immunology programs being developed in Britain. These programs behave like the leucocytes floating through our bloodstream. The programs wander through the Internet, searching, evaluating, and hiding in a person’s home PC, until they detect a “dangerous” statement or unusual information. After gathering our personal information, they return to the central computer. There is no reason why they can’t easily be programmed to destroy a target computer … such as the one on which you’re reading this essay.
Government-created viruses for surveillance Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
The passports contain a radio frequency identification chip (RFID) so that all our personal information can be instantly read by a machine at the airport. However, the State Department has refused to encrypt the information embedded in the chip, because it requires more complicated technology that is difficult to coordinate with other countries. This means that our personal information could be read by a machine called a “skimmer” that can be placed in a doorway or a bus stop, perhaps as far as 30 feet away.
The U.S. government isn’t concerned by this, but the contents of Paris Hilton’s cell phone, which uses the same kind of RFID chip, were skimmed and made public last year. It may not seem like a problem when a semi-celebrity’s phone numbers and emails are stolen, but it is quite possible that an American tourist walking down a street in a foreign country will be “skimmed” by a machine that reads the passport in his or her pocket. A terrorist group will be able to decide if the name on the passport indicates a possible target before the tourist reaches the end of the street.
The new RFID passports are a clear indication that protection is not as important to the authorities as the need to acquire easily accessible personal information.
What RFID passports really mean Read More »
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
And everywhere we go, there are surveillance cameras – thousands of them – to photograph and record our image. Some of them are “smart” cameras, linked to computer programs that watch our movements in case we act differently from the rest of the crowd: if we walk too slowly, if we linger outside certain buildings, if we stop to laugh or enjoy the view, our body is highlighted by a red line on a video monitor and a security guard has to decide whether he should call the police.
Surveillance cameras that notice aberrations Read More »
From James Wolcott’s “Debbie Does Barnes & Noble” (Vanity Fair: 22 August 2005):
In terms of production techniques, two years mark key inflection points in porn. The first was 1982, when X-rated producers abandoned celluloid for videotape. The other pivotal year was 1998, when Viagra was introduced. Performance anxiety, begone!
2 years that changed the pr0n industry Read More »
From Joel Spolsky’s “Biculturalism” (Joel on Software: 14 December 2003):
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary. …
Let’s look at a small example. The Unix programming culture holds in high esteem programs which can be called from the command line, which take arguments that control every aspect of their behavior, and the output of which can be captured as regularly-formatted, machine readable plain text. Such programs are valued because they can easily be incorporated into other programs or larger software systems by programmers. To take one miniscule example, there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls “Silence is Golden,” that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just typed a 300 character command line to create a file system, or built and installed a complicated piece of software, or sent a manned rocket to the moon. If it succeeds, the accepted thing to do is simply output nothing. The user will infer from the next command prompt that everything must be OK.
This is an important value in Unix culture because you’re programming for other programmers. As Raymond puts it, “Programs that babble don’t tend to play well with other programs.” By contrast, in the Windows culture, you’re programming for Aunt Marge, and Aunt Marge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly or a program that produced no output because it misinterpreted your request.
Similarly, the Unix culture appreciates programs that stay textual. They don’t like GUIs much, except as lipstick painted cleanly on top of textual programs, and they don’t like binary file formats. This is because a textual interface is easier to program against than, say, a GUI interface, which is almost impossible to program against unless some other provisions are made, like a built-in scripting language. Here again, we see that the Unix culture values creating code that is useful to other programmers, something which is rarely a goal in Windows programming.
Which is not to say that all Unix programs are designed solely for programmers. Far from it. But the culture values things that are useful to programmers, and this explains a thing or two about a thing or two. …
The Unix cultural value of visible source code makes it an easier environment to develop for. Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library. …
When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users. Computers were expensive, CPU time was expensive, and learning about computers meant learning how to program. It’s no wonder that the culture which emerged valued things which are useful to other programmers. By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit. …
For example, Unix has a value of separating policy from mechanism which, historically, came from the designers of X. This directly led to a schism in user interfaces; nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work, and they think this is OK, because their culture values this diversity, but for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another.
Cultural differences between Unix and Windows Read More »
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national “values”; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not “democracy.”
The US is becoming less democratic Read More »