More useful, powerful words are seldom spoken.
...or else.
Or rather, the most commonly cited reasons for not starting a startup, and why most of them are bad reasons. The new article by Paul Graham. Some highlights:
- The median age of a founder is 27. Actually, that's how old the founders of Sun were when they started their little company.
- Knowing nothing about business is not a good reason to avoid starting a startup. Just worry about making something people like. When you've got lots of people looking at your site, you can always figure out how to monetize it. On the other hand, if your site is a piece of useless crap all the business knowhow in the world will not help you.
- Investors do not hold past failed startups against you. In fact, this is viewed as good experience.
Paul Graham is a fellow filled with good advice about startups, and occasionally drops these inexplicable, indecipherable, bizarre opinions on things (like Lisp, in which he says Lisp is the most awesome of the awesome, the badassingest of the programming languages, the tool that will give you the unfair business advantage. However he can't tell you why, because it's inexpressible in your "words", for some reason. Pah, I say.) However, you can't argue with the fact that he's a successful entrepreneur, with the investment organization Y Combinator that has a success rate of something like 25%. So, there you have it.
Took a little breather.
Also, here's what happens when you freak out a room full of Japanese ladies:
Rock on, citizens!
Well written, funny post over at The Escapist on what it's like to man the cash register during Chirstmas time at Electronics Boutique. Definitely check it out.
I just got back from the theater screening of the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica season 3 (i.e. episode 10 of season 3). Evidently they're screening them in a few cities across America. First of all, let me just say that I got there an hour before it started, and I was literally the 300th person in line. The writers for the show came out and were all freaked there were so many people there.
Anyhow, after the episode (best episode evar) the writing staff (minus Ron Moore and David Eick) came out and fielded a bunch of questions. Here are all the ones I could remember, paraphrased:
1. Are there any plans to do a feature-length movie? Answer: Funny you should ask that. Next question.
2. Do you know how the series will end? Answer. No. We know how season 3 ends. Ron Moore steers us in a general direction, though.
3. A general note. Ratings for the show are way down. Downloads, iTunes or otherwise are not being counted in this measure for some reason. They then asked people in the crowd (about 280 in my screening) to raise their hands if they downloaded the show, and nearly everyone did so.
4. Is it hard to kill off supporting characters? Answer: Yes. Between us all, every supporting character has hypothetically died at least four times. Every time someone proposes killing a character, someone else makes a spirited defense for that character. We're saving lives everyday!
They also talked about how the writing happens in interesting ways. For example, during season two, they knew they had the unresolved issue of what to do with the nuclear warhead that Baltar gave to Gina aboard cloud 9. So, to remind themselves, they just write "Remember the Nuke" (or a similar phrase) on their white board and just left it there.
It looks like the new OS X version will allow a mix and match with Python and Objective-C. There's now a full bridge connection Python and the Cocoa libraries: To open up the benefits of the Cocoa frameworks to a wider developer audience, Leopard embraces two other highly dynamic languages for use in building Cocoa applications: Ruby and Python. These two languages are an excellent fit for integrating with the Cocoa frameworks, and they both have high quality bridges to Objective-C. These bridges allow you to mix and match Objective-C, Ruby, and Python, allowing you to choose the best tool for the job at hand while using high level Cocoa features such as Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Key-Value Observing (KVO). so the developer can access the whole OS X gui framework from Python code. Check out the description here
Whoa, in game footage of Assassin's creed during an onscreen demonstration. Check it out here. I'm sure you'll notice especially the large crowds populating the city. Pretty amazing, although there's no word on how goal-directed the crowd NPCs are.
If you check out this presentation by Max Levchin delivered several weeks ago as part of UIUC's reflections/projections distinguished lecture series, you noticed that his theme was "start a startup now now NOW!". One of the main reasons for doing so that he mentioned was this phenomenon of the "overhang" regarding venture capital companies. Essentially, this is the phenomenon wherein VC's have more money than they know what to do with, and are actually looking for companies to invest in. He argues that we are in such a time right now, and so get out there and make a company. This New York times article (oh get over yourself and click the link) seems to confirm that we are indeed in such a state, although for a different reason than you might expect. Some companies (e.g. Meebo, Reddit) are even turning VC's down and deciding to finance their company on a shoestring (Meebo did it on credit cards for god's sake!).
Ah, crunch time over = very yes. Back to the front! Season finale of Pure Pwnage is out! Go get it!