mgenzel

You should really also add another axis of "Are you happy with this split?" :)

Who am I to question the Dropbox CEO, but... Even if the solution is new, if you're solving a real problem that people have (and if you're not, what's wrong?), can't you use the search terms around that? E.g., "how to recover lost files", or "increase disk space", or "share files", or whatnot... Just get people at the point at which they're experiencing the pain you're addressing... No?

I'll strike a somewhat contrarian view: having children doesn't really have to change who you are. You can still enjoy most of the things you enjoy, except you get to bring your children into it, and enjoy it on a new, cool level. We enjoy art & opera, so we take our kids to museums and concerts (we started taking our oldest at 3, our youngest is not ready for opera yet, but can do small concerts). We love linguistics, history, science, so we love sharing these things with our children (etymology is a particular hit with our 5-yr-old). Bonus point: if you're interested in cognitive psychology, you'll get the greatest kick out of observing your children's attempts at modeling the world & language. You like travel? Take your kids with you. Love to read? Share your favorites with kids. I remember how my father always used to re-tell us his favorite books (sci-fi stuff, jules verne, etc). We watch Daily Show each night with our kids (when we go to vote with them, they know stuff, it's wicked cool :) I still spend all my free time doing startups (yes, yes, there's lots less of it, but still). The first year+ was a bit hard (early years fall disproportionately hard on the women as milk-producing & comfort-giving machines, hah), and I must take lots of forced vacations (daycare closed, school closed, child is sick), but... What I'm trying to say, take it easy, and don't worry too much about it. For one, you can't really predict what'll happen anyway, you've got to live through it. As an old Arabic saying goes, "What can the horse tell you about the road he hasn't traveled?" :)

Ok, I'll add my anecdote too. Hacking != Having a personal computer. I started programming on my 3rd grade (required-to-have) programmable calculator (that had 10 steps & comparison to 0 only). Then, my father showed me Pascal on his computer at work (and programmers in the 1980s Soviet Union did not upper middle class make; plumbers made more), and I started programming on paper, and bringing in my paper programs to my father's work to "check". Then, the school I went to was a special math school (merit, not privilege) and they got computers (the only school computers in our city then) in my 4th grade. When we came to the United States, we were on welfare, so, no personal computer till I was in college. And yet, the schools had computers, you know. Granted, old macs, but computers.

The reason the "anecdote" is relevant is that the article doesn't state any probabilities or historical context here, it's just "If A, then B". There were plenty of periods in America when that couldn't have been true even for most people. E.g., in 1970s, if you were hacking, it didn't mean privilege, just luck in having access somehow. If you're learning to hack _now_ as a child... Come on, pretty much anyone can get access to some type of device now, even if it's just in the library.

As a busy-busy-busy parent, I find Facebook to be pretty easy & fast way to share photos with family. I had my own script a while back, but Facebook just completely took over that: it's easy to do, almost everyone who may want to see the photos is there (and it's easy to add an email of the few who aren't on FB), you can add captions or you can skip it, it looks reasonably well... And mind you, free.

Ditto on dpcan's comment: it's the sorting & tagging that are much higher portion of the hassle. Especially since with kids, you take tooooooooooons of photos, even of the same moment, in which case you really-really need to sort if you want anyone to ever look at the photos.

I can't see on the site how you've solved those problems, it certainly doesn't look that way.

But are there really all that many undergrad programs that prepare people to go straight into the associated careers? Why hold CS to a different standard? Maybe we just should have a programming school a la medical school :)

Also see a sci-fi story by Robert F. Young called "Thirty Days Has September".

Because highly successful people are not necessarily those who can teach (and also, are 'human teachers' anyway). Teaching is inspiration, empathy, enthusiasm, wit, patience. You could be a Nobel Prize laureate and have none of these, and you'd make a perfect snooze-worthy drone (witness some highly decorated profs at some top universities). I'm going to assume you don't have any children because I think otherwise you would see how much a difference person's personality has on the child's ability to learn.

Granted, many teachers suck. In the U.S. we don't have a system that rewards good teaching.

Also granted, the ability of the current technology to bring amazing (human!) teachers to the masses is great and growing. But, teaching is a two-way street, and you can't have much of that with 1 to 1 million ratio.

Also don't dismiss significant used books market. I hardly ever buy books over $5. Right now, digital books are priced like brand new books, and you can't resell them. There's some price discrimination in terms of how much time elapsed since release and popularity, but, given that I can buy a brand new book on eBay a few hours after it was published (or earlier), destruction of such market would be quite painful for many people. And so far I haven't seen even an inkling of a solution to this issue in any of digital goods categories.

Many people have said similar things before and nothing happened, neither to the web nor to their reputation. I think it's because it's one of those things that seems to be a good idea in a certain light, or at least based on good intentions.

A few points:

a) by asking people to sign an NDA before beta testing, you're slamming a door in the face of the overwhelming majority of potential testers. If you want to ensure a purely CYA legal policy, just stick in TOS as they sign in to test (that won't turn off most since most don't read TOS)

b) while it's true that you are unlikely to find someone who'll look, test out everything, and summarize in constructive bullet points, it's missing the point a bit. Your ultimate goal should be to find large number of warm bodies (ideally, from target audience) to throw at your app and then have infrastructure & discipline in place to observe them and make inferences. Also I think we need to differentiate between alpha and beta testing, they require different approaches (and I suspect that the author is talking about what I would call alpha: pre-functional still secretive app).

As a historical sidenote: large chunks of medical progress were made by rural and war doctors ie precisely those with few resources at their disposal (hence innovation).

Is that in fact how that happens though? Complete and flawless the first time around? I'm not that familiar with embedded sort of software, but my assumption was that they try to do a good job, but then use simulators to get the software ship-shape. At least that's what I would do, given my presumption of errors in any human endeavor. I'm much more in favor in building processes that accept failure gracefully, rather than presuming error-free production.

For the people who have downvoted my comment, it would be helpful to me to know why you did that. It wasn't an ad hominem attack, and my question wasn't all that rhetorical. I thought downvotes were only for being nasty.

I'm sorry, what? The guy lost me at the supposedly lost art of gathering and packaging software requirements. When was this golden age of the not almost-instantly-outdated packaged requirements? Maybe only when the success of software was judged by the speed of shipping out versions as opposed to whether users need/like/use it. Of course, if you ignore the latter, you can have perfect requirements and code alignment, but... Really?

Batle of neandertals vs modern humans shows how at the times of great upheavals even small advantages can spell difference between survival and success.

Sorry. Common problem in these kinds of forums, not entirely sure how to solve redundancy of content. I search before posting, but obviously it's harder to catch when it's similar but not identical. Thoughts?

Must say that many companies outsource email campaigns and it may not be the company's fault (directly). Just sayin' :)

I also didn't really enjoy Calculus in high school, only learning to love it in hindsight, when I took Real Analysis in college. Then again, I was always interested in theoretical mathematics (poetry, abstraction, & all that) rather than practical (yucky numbers & approximations :); so maybe pragmatists enjoy Calculus as taught?

Was my favorite subject as well, precisely for those reasons. Not sure how to teach the beauty of mathematics to those who are uninitiated though. I think it really should come in at the elementary school level, when you can show really cool things about numbers like Fibonacci sequence or binary system or simple cryptography, and make mathematics seem magical and cool (and not wait until high school with these concepts, when it's too late to convince most non-predisposed folks of the poetic beauty of mathematics; you can absolutely teach these concepts earlier).

I think I speak for everyone when I say: "hindsight is 20/20"

The article has little to do with Asimov's laws. Asimov's laws address "three fundamental Rules of Robotics, the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain", i.e., an engineering construct. The article mostly addresses a legal issue: "Accordingly, robo-ethicists want to develop a set of guidelines that could outline how to punish a robot, decide who regulates them and even create a 'legal machine language' that could help police the next generation of intelligent automated devices."

I also love how the article ends with "Morality is impossible to write in formal terms", and yet, it expects to see complex enough robots to warrant the article in the first place.

It seems a good fit, but I always do worry when great grassroots-type great-culture great-customer-service company gets acquired by a much larger company (even if it's Amazon, which is much better than others - I worked there, I know). It's very hard to avoid the intermixing, and the bad things flow much better than the good.

I think the point of asking such questions is to see whether they have even thought of the difficult issues. It's not the answer, it's the thought process (just like the questions they'll ask you, theoretically).

Must say, for a parent & entrepreneur, there are many tasks on the plate that fit the focus, are in fact things that I like to do, and oh yeah, by the way, are things that I either absolutely must or really-really should do. And the time required to do such tasks still greatly outnumbers the time available, even after throwing away tasks that don't "really matter". This article really doesn't help, probably because no one can help you make the hard choices required every day in the adult life.

Obviously, any pithy observation is by necessity overly simplified :) However, there's a lot more truth to it than otherwise. E.g, your first point, the painful status quo. My previous company addressed the job search market, in which most people are very unhappy with the status quo solutions; and our particular solution, I feel, was about 40-70% better than existing ones (and also a new paradigm), nonetheless, people weren't really readily jumping ship. With search engines (including a vertical one, like ours) evaluating comparative quality is actually pretty hard, which washes away a bit the easy switching cost (I don't mean expert comparisons; I mean average user looking at average queries).

I haven't thought of it that way, but you're right, it's probably a good investment. My fear is that acquisition often kills the very thing that makes the company what it is (including its long-term positive prospects), even with the best intentions.

Yikes. You've undermined my faith in the Google quick answers. I should be more skeptical, should've looked at the source.

Still, the point stands even more firmly :) I suppose I don't think it would be worth that much to Amazon, proportion-wise.

I'm half-joking. Obviously, there are benefits to domain names; however, I'm not sure how we can return to the egalitarian nature of web addresses, what with most normal domain names taken. We'll go through a few more years of Socialisrs, Ooookies, StupidCombos, and ReallyReallyLongDomainNames, but then what? Domain names that cost tens of thousands of dollars on average? I'm not looking forward to that future.

It's an object lesson that in order to create a winning new product, it has to be 100-200% better than the existing ones, not just 10-50% better.