I actually had this idea when I had dropped out of web design and became a taxi driver for a few years in 2001. It's a natural. However:
"Taxi dispatchers make money on tips..."
is an incorrect statement. Taxi dispatchers make money on BRIBES. Drivers do not tip out dispatchers. Nor do drivers' tips go to the company. What dispatchers euphemistically refer to as "tips" are actually bribes paid to them by some cab drivers to refer the best fares to those drivers - usually at the expense of the passenger, who has to wait outside longer for their cab because a closer driver was not dispatched.
The exact reason why UberCab or similar services ARE such a good idea is that they can improve the customer experience by cutting out dispatcher corruption.
Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.
How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bonuses raining from the sky?
Right time, right place. Right age group. Right skill set. 25% of the above are things you can plan for.
I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coincidence.
Nor does he have a hard time explaining what he did. He has spoken several times at Startup School about his approach to solving problems. I've learned a lot from him.
I'm with you on this one. After the initial 'serendipity' of google, PB's reputation was sealed and he could pick his title and company.
While it's interesting to speculate if PB had chosen a pets.com instead of google what would have happened to his career, it's not particularly constructive.
The idea that our success is largely beyond our control is sufficiently pernicious that we're all better off just pretending it is not the case and keeping our heads down and trying our damnedest.
Survivor bias is the phrase that comes to mind. The other one is "notoriety bias:" Only the stories with a spectacular ending get made into movies, so you read about the big successes and the big failures, but nothing in between.
Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, there's now an industry built on telling children their dreams really can come true if they accrue enough ycombinator karma. Way to harness that aptitude, baby.
edit: yeah, rate me down for telling you what you didn't want to hear. I'm not the one who throws $18k at a time down a well just to get a high school kid to suck up to me and think I'm a god.
I thought the point of the article was not to have dreams, but rather to be awake to the world around you, because much of the goodness in it will pass you by if you're fixated on something else.
Well all the 'young fliberdygibbits' who started with pets.com might not be successful by "your" definition, but majority of them might be very happy in their lives by their own standards.
There could very well be a cafe owner down the road who might exactly say the same thing about serendipity as PB did in this blog post. He could be happy with the choices he made in his lifetime and the chances he took that got him all that is good in his life (by his definition).
It all comes down to whether a person has a positive outlook or not. One can keep regretting the things that didn't work out, or choose to see the good things in his/her life.
Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.
Tucker Max: People create all these narratives explaining away why they haven’t had the courage to take their personal path, or explaining away my success, or anyone else. Anyone who succeeds in anything, there’s always going to be people who don’t have the courage to do that. They get upset about it, either explain it away, or dismiss it away.
JS: It sounds like you almost found out by accident. In Assholes Finish First you say that when you and your friends graduated from law school, “We were slowly realizing that the ‘real life’ we’d chosen really fucking sucked. A lot.” Sounds like you’re trying to tell people how not to do that.
TM: As much as I’d like to sit here and be like, “Yeah, I had the courage to do all this stuff, and I had the vision to see where I was gonna go and I knew I would get there.” That’s fuckin’ bullshit. That’s not true. That’s the narrative I might tell when I’m 70, and I can’t remember all this stuff.
JS: Trying to inspire your grandkids?
TM: Right. The true, true story is it’s a combination of some determination and some talent on my part. Some talent, a lot of determination, a lot of luck, and a lot of serendipity. And a lot of failure. I was fired—
JS: There’s a section about failure in the book.
TM: I was fired from the legal profession, basically. I wasn’t just fired from Fenwick and West—you read the first book, the story’s in there. I got fired in such a public way that there was almost no way I was going to get back into law. I would have to go back and be a public defender or something if I wanted to be a lawyer. Seriously.
Been doing the same thing - Argentina, then later Thailand and Vietnam - while working on my startup and turning flash projects to pay the bills. Telecommuting from the third world is where it's at.
Made the arguable mistake of spending 9 months in Australia on my way to S.E. Asia and it ripped my pocketbook to shreds. That was when the AUD was almost 1:1 with the USD.
The decentralized, anonymized web definitely helped get those videos out...but I don't know whether the social networks really had much effect. Even if they had, you're assuming that the Iranian gov't cares what a mass movement of its citizens thinks, which by all indications it doesn't. Things like Wikileaks, Cryptome and YouTube, which are not social networks in the sense that "social" is understood by the Valley, have far more potential to influence events on a government-to-government level -- or between other parties with power parity. The social nets are just a bunch of squawking parakeets that governments like North Korea and Iran are free to ignore at will.
The point isn't that the governments in Iran or North Korea care about tweets - they don't - but that the people there and here can find common ground, rendering the governments less relevant. Not "superfluous" - but less able to influence things for the worse.
I know that's the positive view of the situation... but if it makes governments less relevant and makes Facebook more relevant, all it's doing is shifting the power locus somewhere else, not actually enabling people. Spreading the word is worthless without power parity and trust. I.E. social networks don't threaten governments any more than a mob of people in the street would; empirical evidence in Iran does suggest that the rest is hype. After all, it's not like the US population started pressuring their government to invade and save the Iranian resistance -- or the Darfurian resistance, or anybody else for that matter.
And empowering Facebook isn't such a hot idea, is it? Facebook isn't a democracy, either; it seems to care as much about the will of its constituents as does the Iranian gov't.
I don't so much see the transfer of power as being from governments to social networking services themselves as much as it being from governments to the users of social networking services.
Exactly the sentiment I was going to express. Thank you. There is a story I'm trying to remember that goes something like this: There were two abusive rulers looking out over their people, and one suggests to the other that maybe all the slaves should wear white armbands so they could be identified easier. The other replies "No way! Then they might realize how many of them there are."
I don't know. Facebook users didn't even have the power to roll back the outrageous TOS changes, they all know exactly how many of themselves there are. You're telling me they have the power to overthrow the Ayatollah? If so, where's the proof that they've made any positive social changes in the last few years that they've been around? Sure, they helped elect Obama, but that can also be read to mean that social network groups can be just as easily manipulated as any other mass of people.
Yes, Facebook users did have that power. Whether or not they took advantage of it is another story, but if all Facebook's users decided to leave without a TOS change I bet they would have got the changes because there is no FB without users -- same with governments. And there is a mountain of difference between having motivation to try to effect TOS changes, versus a human condition prevalent with graphic images of your neighbors being beaten and shot in the streets.
So, yes, I do believe the people have the power to overthrow the Ayatollah (or any other govt. for that matter) if they are organized enough. Unfortunately, I don't see that large undertaking helping even if it were to happen because the Iranian people largely want a theocratic government, which to me will be inherently dictatorial. It comes down to this: the Internet is inherently about connections -- connecting computers, which by extension connect people. It's not social networks themselves that provide the magic, they're just vehicles riding on top of that fundamental connection potency; that's where their success has come from. When you want to give people power you let them connect, communicate and organize. When you want to weaken them, you isolate them. It's that simple.
Okay, but networking a thousand jihadists makes a stronger jihad, while doing nothing to make them better or less violent people. Networking a million cancer survivors makes people feel better but doesn't do much to cure cancer. Where is the proof that networking millions of apathetic people is going to make them one iota less apathetic, as opposed to just reinforcing their preexisting condition?
I'm not sure what answer you're looking for me to say. Networking is simply a tool, and like any tool it only provides the potential to be of benefit. But having the tool available is certainly advantageous.
As for apathetic people I'm not sure where you get that. I was able to find a clip that shook me a bit as a freedom loving American. It was during the protests in Iran where a woman openly cries out for help against her oppressive government's actions. Watch it and tell me you consider her and those like her apathetic.
As emotional as that is, I feel powerless and sad that there is nothing I could do, or expect my government to do. The issue in Iran is political, and it's something that has to be worked out by the Iranian people themselves, possibly like Americans worked it out with the oppressive British government during the Revolutionary War. However, as I've explained above, I don't see that as improving the condition unless the result of any revolt is a constitution being drawn up, as ours was, which is designed to protect citizens' rights and freedoms.
I don't know about you, but I think the existence of HNN is kind of a refutation of your argument. I know I never had the chance, here in rural Indiana, to engage with this many thoughtful people.
What you're forgetting is 99.9999% of all discussion ever has been banal. The only difference is that Google now indexes some of it. The other 0.0001% is what changes the world.
You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion.
I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.
How can targeted advertising be a service? It would only be a service if you wanted to buy something but you didn't know what until you saw an ad for it.
I think it's bizarre that anybody who grew up after the '50s would buy anything based on an ad... and yet... I make a living in advertising because it's true.
Also, they should get off your lawn? "The kids" have never been able to write a complete sentence. Until they get to the point where some of them need to - at which point, they do fine.
Also remember that many browsers will autofill this field, including the password, if someone just types the first 2 characters of the username. And malicious websites can take advantage of that fact to scrape U/P pairs with half the work.
Wow. I really dig this idea of sharded / modular network problem solvers. It would be interesting to take it a step further and let the solvers themselves negotiate their own distribution over time, CPU use, etc. - e.g. replicate all the active solvers on all the clients but allocate chunks of variable size to each depending on which evolves to be the "dominant" solver on any given CPU. You'd need an algorithm to stop Montecarlos from becoming the dominant process everywhere, probably. Montecarlo is notorious for chewing up a processor, but in various applications it often does not need to be run constantly, so the free cycles could be used for something else.
I especially like the idea that this could be applied to anything, not just Go. I did something in this direction a few years ago with an a-life data processing platform that used SOAP to shard problems to groups of machines.
At that point there are two issues, firstly the protocol becomes a bottleneck if you're dealing in large datasets, and secondly if you're dividing something up spatially you still have to aggregate your results. It would be the same if you divided it problematically for Go moves, unless each algorithm could give a "confidence" indicator that could be used reliably so that the master engine would not have to montecarlo each result set. That could be done if the montecarlo was moved to the sub-servers to test their own moves before sending the moves back complete with percentage wins for direct comparison in the master engine. It would chew up a lot more cycles and mean more machines, but it would remove the post-processing bottleneck.
A list of 10 moves from 30 different machines, even using a heavy-weight protocol like SOAP, would be nearly instantaneous. I would favour a light-weight format such as JSON, though. For other applications, I agree, network bandwidth would be a possible bottleneck.
My initial idea was to have each engine return ten moves, in sequence, with the first move being most important. The moves need not be delivered simultaneously. The Master selects the lowest scoring move that was picked by multiple engines. Other ideas include weighting (the fuseki engine's input is not very important in chuban or yose), and imperative moves (death engine forces a play to save a 30 point group).
The Master would send requests for moves by submitting a board position and whose turn to play.
What I really like about the idea, though, is that anyone could develop an engine (in any language) that adheres to the protocol, and add it to the AI network. At any time.
Cool stuff. Do you already have an API for people to write their own solvers -- something that passes a board state and an interface to return ranked choices?
How do you stop people on the network from overranking their own AI's choices (assuming this were an open project)?
Agreed. A small screen and the right IDE is perfect for focusing. At first I thought I'd miss the extra real estate but after about a week I adjusted and never even think about it now. Especially with Spaces and gesturing between apps.
And the startup time you mentioned, with the SSD - true. It's phenomenal. My Air starts up (and shuts down) about 5x faster than a Pro. It's almost instant-on.
This says more about OS X than it does about SSDs. I have two Debian boxes. One has an SSD. The other has a regular disk. They both boot up almost immediately.
The reality is that reading about 323k into memory is fast from both SSDs and rotational disks:
To be fair it doesn't start or shut down faster than a Pro w/ an SSD in it.
That said I don't need an optical drive and would love to shed 2.5 to 3 pounds. I'm sort of attached to my 1680x1050 display and 8gb of RAM though. A bit unsure if I'll trade my Pro in for an Air just yet.
1680x1050 is 1.75MP while 1440x900 is 1.3MP and 1366x768 is 1.05MP. Being frustrated with my old MacBook's resolution of 1280x800 1.02MP I'd probably have to get the 13" Air.
I've been using a last-revision 2.13 Ghz Air (SSD) as my dev box and only computer for a year and a half. I love it. It's the best mac I've ever had (and my 10th since 1992). I do a fair amount of graphics work as well as code, and it's suitable for that - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You can't walk into a Costco or Sam's Club without seeing labels I designed on my Air. And for coding, it's a dream. The ONLY reason I'd be a bit averse to getting the new one is it's no faster than mine; with the SSD, "2Gb" of RAM is really never a limit since the drive is basically lightning fast anyway; and the new one doesn't have a backlit keyboard, which is bad because I don't stop coding when it gets dark.
I'm an expatriate and live on the road; I'm literally never anywhere without my laptop, not even for five minutes, so the weight and form factors are critical. And I don't use my computer for entertainment, and don't care about having a DVD drive, etc. I do all my development with Flex, Dreamweaver, Dashcode and a LAMP stack, so my needs may not match those of desktop app devs. But for me it's really been ideal.
To offer a countering point of view, my 4 year old MacBook started dying on me yesterday - if I hold it wrong it reboots, so I had to go looking for a replacement. I ended up going for a new MacBook Pro 13" for several reasons:
- I like being able to rip DVDs and watch them on my iPhone. It's one of the cheapest ways of watching TV series, if you don't mind not being up to date with the latest episodes...
- 4gb RAM. More RAM never hurt anybody in the speed stakes.
- Firewire - I work quite a lot with video, so being able to suck stuff in over Firewire 800 is a very nice feature to have.
- And then, last but not least, battery-life. The MacBook Pro is a beast for battery life, and that is very important for me.
Some of the advantages of the Air include the fact that the screen resolution is better than my MacBook (but as I'm used to the MacBook resolution, it's what I currenty have, I'm sure I won't miss it)
SSD drive, but I'm thinking that that is more about headroom on my MacBook Pro. In a couple of years time when it starts to feel a bit old and slow, I'll pop in an SSD (which should be cheaper by then), and my machine will get a new lease of life.
Just as an aside, my use case is mostly centered around programming in XCode and Textmate, but this is my principal machine at home, so lots of web surfing is also done.
I also like have a DVD, but I actually like several of the the external ones better. I never use it on the road so I tend to have a powered hub with some toys attacked.
You are so right on video, it really needs a bigger machine.
I think the biggest difference this time (I have used a MacBook Air in the past for dev until I switched to 17" MacBook Pro) is the added option of 4gb of memory. That will really help. Also, the lack of heat right under my left arm would be a nice touch.
// do not buy the official external drive - it doesn't work on other machines
True enough, but as a general rule, I never buy extra RAM from Apple if I can avoid it. The stuff that is baseline installed seems to have a reasonable price tag attached, but they really do price gouge when it comes to adding extra RAM as a BTO option. So that, plus the fact that I doubt that RAM is user-extensible in the new MacBook Air (they call it 'onboard RAM' on the Apple Store, which doesn't fill me with confidence.)
I do exactly the opposite: I never want to have to open up a piece of hardware (I've done that plenty in previous lives)--I want to treat my computers as appliances.
So if I want 4GB of RAM, Apple it is.
Isn't the fact the RAM isn't user-installable (true) in the MBA even more reason to buy the full boat?
Have you considered the sony vaio Z? You can get a 1080p screen, 2 SSDs in a raid 0 or 1 configuration, a DVD/Blu-Ray player (think you can put another HD here instead), core i7 processor, decent battery life (6/7 hours), standard amounts of RAM, 13" and 3 pounds. It will blow your air out of the water while being the same weight and size. It's about 0.5" thicker although.
I do iphone development, so I'm stuck with what apple has to offer, but if I didn't that would be my machine of choice.
I did consider it, actually. The thing is, I need to use the Adobe suite a lot, much of that for graphics work, and I loathe Windows. If all I did now was code, I'd consider a Vaio running linux...I would say that's a better value overall if you don't need to do any graphics. I toyed with the idea of getting one and hackintoshing it, but I wasn't really committed to the headache of potentially having a brand new machine play badly with software I need to use daily.
Also, to the poster who wrote about the MBP vis-a-vis video...Yeah. Firewire is what's missing from this machine. I don't do any video work at all anymore so it doesn't bug me. But it would.
Does your Air have 2gb of RAM or 4gb? Does it ever feel sluggish?? I'm also a Flex developer :) so for me it's usually Flash Builder, photoshop, a browser and terminal.
