Hey this one is fun too :)

Paul, If the parts of a program define its succinctness then my hypothesis is that succinctness is efficacy not power. Imagine a useful machine with just one part to understand my chain of thought.

PS: IMO there is a difference in power and efficacy.

From my experience - likelihood of succeeding because you tell people and all the other variations of this are just hoopla.

You will succeed if

1. You have a market

2. You service that market better than most or better

3. You can do what you are doing for years at a length. And then keep doing it some more without even thinking about it.

Sure, the idea has to be semi-solid. I was referring to the part of "Get this thing done, now. Get it out there and in front of people. Then we'll see if they bite."

I agree with the last 3 things you said but I think there is value to publicly announcing your intentions. It shows commitment to the idea and the willingness to sacrifice your reputation for the idea (there is a cost to people knowing about your possible failure, and the cost of people you care about and respect of dismissing your idea).

I don't understand the relevance of your link???

I have a friend in india that needs a visa. So I browsed around and found out about L-1. Basically, its a visa available to people working for multinationals. Legally, a multinational just has a corporation status in 2 countries (US and India in our case ). So I need to know if its possible to start a "paper" corp over there

Sure, you can - its takes a little while but it is fairly easy.

whats the cost ? I know tata consultancy (basically an engineer importer) is exploiting this L1 (sshh, don't let the general populace know that people smarter than them are taking their jobs) loophole to great success!

Good book, it should be in everyone's library but it won't help you learn about hacking.

I would argue that it does. The talks about holism vs reductionism, the introduction to programming with in it, extending to writing programs that write themselves and other strange loops are all very relevant.

Perhaps most relevant of all is learning how such varied fields relate. It's all very well being a hacker, but working out how hacking is a general thing not specific to computers is quite edifying. Learning how the tenents of the hacker are seen in religion, philosophy and art as well as science is quite profound.

You can stretch this line of thought to any though provoking book.

I seem to have only a few questions...

How does a 6th grader know that she wants to be a startup-founder?

Are you attempting to replace an admittedly broken schooling system with another one?

Are you attempting to increase creative space? If so, can creativity be decoupled from freedom? Are you going to force them to be creative?

Finally, at a risk of sounding a tad off. What good will this do anyone? What pain are you fixing? Is there a pain big enough? Why hasn't it fixed itself yet?

Hiya :)

Any given 6th grader doesn't, but it seems like if enough children get a chance, some will succeed. The nice thing about this system is there's no penalty for failure. Students can work for other startups or go to college.

This sort of system could be an alternative for people actively seeking one. Maybe parents who realize the current model might not be the best for their child, or a student not satisfied with the rate of teaching.

The school would be an increase in creativity.. It's focus would be on creation. Of course the school wouldn't force anyone to do anything. It's simply an alternate path, one that would probably be fun for everyone involved.

I was actually trying to fix my own pain, and this seemed a reasonable way to do it. You see, I'm nineteen. At seventeen I dropped out of public high school to work for a videogame company because I couldn't stand it one second longer. I felt caged, mentally beaten up, and I felt extraordinarily hopeless. Running off to pursue a creative endeavor like writing video games at a game company solved all that. It was simply the best choice for me.

But wait a minute, if I was so miserable, there must be other children who are, too. Creative ones who can accomplish great things if only society deems that they could follow their dreams. And why couldn't they actually work on their dreams in the best place for it, in an environment with creative people? Yeah, they need a certain level of maturity, but that can be supplemented by having mature people around to go to for advice.

So, in short, it would be great to offer the hopeless some hope, something other than "Just wait 'til you get to college, everything will be wonderful then".

Hi Palish, Thanks for your response. Some more thoughts...

The challenge is that the current system is generic, it allows you to choose any field of work or study and that choice can be postponed. In your school, that choice is made early and that brings with it a risk.

I think your pain was that 'you' felt mentally caged in the current educational system and that 'you' fixed your pain by making a change. What you seem to be doing now is applying a 'mass fix ' by generalizing/abstracting your problem, and while that works in most cases it may need additional fleshing out. Perhaps the fix for each individual might be more effective, perhaps everyone who feels caged needs to apply an individual patch just like you did rather than fix something which isn't broken when they are in 6th grade. Are we fixing before there is a pain?

Hope these thoughts help you develop your idea. Best of luck.

Ah! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P

Paul, Regarding your first point:

This title could use editing if any title needs editing - "Fuck Facebook Conversion: Be platform agnostic and use your own APIs. " I appreciate that the title of the blog entry is such, but then the site doesn't look clean with this title. I must also say, I think this aspect of the new changes might be a tad over zealous perhaps even anti-septic.

Regarding your second point - Titles are made to tempt people to click and most times the original blogger or author might use such a ploy.We might use the original authors title and he may be doing the spinning. How far down the line can you edit? Again the "Fuck Facebook" title is a case in point.

I urge you to reconsider the editing. Thoughts?

I don't think he meant what you think he meant by "clean".

The point of Pareto's rule is not so much that the numbers must be 80 and 20. The essence of what Pareto proved is that the few(causes) are responsible for the many(effects). So Pareto's principle is very much at work in Flickr.

I agree with this point, and it what I intended. The key to the Pareto rule is that it should drive personal effort. For sites like Facebook, I think that you would just attract the content drivers (the 20%), and then the other 80% follow.

Think about it in terms of the Tipping Point. Go to the mavens/connectors first. They have all the knowledge know everyone. They'll do the buzz marketing for you and persuade others to join. Another term would be early adopter. I know that I have personal done this for Meebo.

The "Pareto Rule" specifically refers to an 80/20 ratio.

Pareto didn't prove anything, he just made an observation about the italian economy. Other people noticed the ratio elsewhere, and named the rule after him.

The currency markets work 24 hours. Yahoo plots the intra day voltality but the graph that yahoo shows in that link does not chart all 24 hours and that is why you see a break which causes it to look like steps. The steps are going down because the currency seems to be on a downward trend.

I think he was really asking about the 5-day chart, which has a large stairstep upwards at 4:00 AM GMT on each day. The date range parameter apparently doesn't hotlink very well on Y!Finance.

Exactly.