yewweitan

Lots of great points, and I love the fact that there is a full transcript. Personally, reading the transcript, noting the important parts, then listening for other contextual cues in which the point was made adds another dimension to these podcasts.

Just as an example from this podcast, the points about Recurring Payment pricing strategies were extremely helpful. It immediately struck with me because:

(a) Recurring Payments are awesome! (profit wise) (b) They are Hell to setup for anyone outside the US

US companies have awesome companies like Stripe, Braintree, etc... as a Singapore Pte Ltd, the only 2 choices were Paypal or WorldPay. We chose the latter, and while their Customer Service was good, the technical details absolutely sucked.

Anyway, the point is that Patrick being in Japan and facing the same issues (he uses Recurly + Paypal), was a good personal reminder for the issues facing a small startup.

Maybe a profit opportunity? Well, at least it would make a good blog post.

First, I have to say I agree with essentially every single piece of the article. This is clear thinking from someone who obviously has seen all sides of the picture.

But first, I want to talk about a personal example that centres around the role of technology, and spins back around to some ideas.

I discovered this comment via our trusty patio11 in this tweet - https://twitter.com/#!/patio11/status/192482034403393536, which probably emphasises the need for surendipitous discovery mechanisms.

One of the distribution parties I really like (and which got mention in the article) is Bandcamp. As Lowery stated, they only take 15% of the revenue made from bands (it drops to 10% once the artist has >$5000 in rev - http://bandcamp.com/pricing) and provides some really great features, the most significant one I feel being a publicly facing band website which really focuses in one the content (more on their FAQ - http://bandcamp.com/faq).

I was searching for music to code to, and the instant-play feature of bandcamp sites made it so convenient to find stuff I wanted.

The most recent purchase list: - Glorie - http://glorierock.com/album/glorie - Maybeshewill - http://maybeshewill.net/discography/ and http://robotneedshome.bandcamp.com/album/to-the-skies-from-a... - *shels - http://shelsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/plains-of-the-purple-bu... - Ever Forthright - http://everforthright.bandcamp.com/album/ever-forthright - Sioum - http://sioum.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-mortal-but-was-fiend - When Day Descends - http://whendaydescends.bandcamp.com/album/when-day-descends

It all started with the "Recommendations" page of Cloudkicker - http://bandcamp.com/recommended/cloudkicker, which led to the discovery of "When Day Descends" and "Sioum", which in turn led to the rest of the above.

By clicking through the links above, and previewing the tracks, it's obvious that I'm a fan of instrumental rock / metal / post-rock / jazz-metal, etc... and I literally found.

The artists named their prices, bandcamp got a share, and I discovered some insane music that I was more than happy to pay for (all the above only cost me about US$50).

Ok, that's a personal example from this one particular music enthusiast. Some assumptions that made this possible:

- I like discovering stuff. I started by previewing the Song 'CAFO' by animals as leaders on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmfzWpp0hMc&ob=av3e), getting my mind blown, searching for other similar artists, finding Cloudkicker, and then spiraling to the rest of the similar artists

- I've got niche interests. I've been playing the electric guitar seriously for a couple of years (about 4,000+ hours of practice by my best guess), and since all sufficiently complex Melody converges to Metal and all sufficiently complex Harmony converges to Jazz, I end up developing a liking for those "obscure" genres, and don't ever mind the extra work needed to find, learn about, and pay for good music, even if it were just to make myself a better musician. This drives the above discovery process.

- I got a paypal account the moment I turned 18, and wired my (Australian) bank account to feed funds directly into it, and always have enough cash on hand. Not everybody has a convenient source of money to spend, especially not a large chunk of the demographic that finds pirating attractive (teenagers and young adults in particular, especially those in "less developed" areas, though I don't know exactly how much piracy stems from this group)

Hopefully we'll have more technology like bandcamp which make it easier for the creators of music.

But I have a more general gripe. In short, I hate it when consumer-facing, disruptive technology gets adopted too fast. There just isn't enough resource (brain power) to get things right.

What I mean is that the entities who end up winning use "technological solutions" that optimise for market-share instead of creator productivity.

We then end up merely hoping that the market settles upon a solution that has the creator's interest in mind, which is essentially hit or miss. Once the market settles upon the winning model, it typically is there to stay until the next diruption cycle.

I like to raise the example of the iPhone, specifically, iOS.

I just recently developed a substantial app for iOS (substantial meaning > 40k lines of code, not including comments and .xib files), and I can't remember how many times I was swearing at my computer at how atrocious iOS is. non-comprehensive APIs, arbitrary restrictions, non-deterministic view behaviour, potential for retain cycles even with ARC, no backgrounding for sockets, pathetic tooling (had to get a third party openSSL), etc, etc, etc ...

I doubt it was malice on Apple's part, but rather, an optimisation for profit rather than creator productivity (iOS devs). A "slick" interface which is uniformly programmable is all they need, and they weigh the tradeoffs and decide to adopt the existing MacOS platform to build iOS instead of starting from scratch (which would have arguably allowed for much more "developer control"). Let's not even get into the app approval process yet ... that's a whole other mess.n

But I like that example because (a) it was an opportunity to gripe about Apple (sorry, the Lisper in me couldn't resist =P), and (b) there is a significant market opportunity (for music, and for apps), there are high production costs, and the creators of the final product will figure out a way to make their stuff anyway. Which makes it all the more harder to change the existing system without fundamental disruptive forces.

Where can technology help? I honestly don't know. One way is to hope that the disruptor is benign (like Linus and Linux), but more often than not it is profit-seeking, and won't respect the means of production (the artists). Maybe some cryptographers can make specific DRM channels to authenticated parties in a sufficiently general authentication scheme (inherent to the computing environment, and not having to jump through 5 different hoops)? Maybe ubiquitous P2P payment systems will enable musicians (and other artists) to take credit for their work?

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll just end on a positive note, saying that the solution space is sufficiently large, and the non-financial motivation to continue to produce music is enough to constantly drive people toward solutions. We need more technical people (like Lowery) writing articles like this and talking about better ways to approach the problem with a technological solution -- it's the only type of solution which we can rightfully say, "nothing can stop an idea whose time has come".

Shameless Plug for a piece that I wrote that talks about some of these issues and more importantly, their practical resolution.

'Should I get a Standing Desk?' - http://www.yewhealth.com/2011/04/03/should-i-get-a-standing-...

Thanks for the feedback. What you've said is true, and I should have included a clause asking what the answerer's background was.

Personally, I started out programming with Lisp, and hence got introduced to the functional style early on. So that was 2 years spent with Lambda's, and a year with laziness, type classes and purity (Haskell) before being introduced to Continuations.

I should probably take a second run through that classic now. =P

This is a good time to reflect again upon PG's essay 'Mind the Gap' - http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

So true. Which is a both a great thing and a bad thing as Doug Crockford pointed out here - http://www.infoq.com/interviews/doug-crockford-html5

Essentially, he's saying that innovation by browser vendors drives innovation in general to a great degree. However, it hampers the ability of standards to do the work in some areas which need standards (such as Security).

I'd expect it to be the same with app side of things, especially with so many vendors trying to get their slice of the pie.

eg: HP's WebOS is supposedly a sort of hybrid web-native combo, RIM now has QNX, Qualcomm has Alljoyn for P2P and is pushing some fancy LTE frameworks. And let's not even get into Near-Field Communications (pretty hardware dependent) and the future of mobile payments =p.

I agree with the author almost almost every point. There is one which raised a question in my mind.

The author states:

"The music industry is the problem—too many bad songs are the problem. It’s the reason the audience doesn’t roar when you talk about playing a new track or two that were added for a re-release of your greatest hits. If your greatest hits were from the last three years, imagine how much money you’d be making on album sales even beyond your touring."

When he says "greatest hits" here, what exactly is he referring to? Am I right to assume, that he means that bands, just like startups, need to be continuously iterating and innovating?

If so, then I'll sympathise a little with the frustration a musician must feel.

I think it's fair to say that musicians make their money of their long-time fans, which implies that they need to keep people happy with their music for a long period of time.

I think this is slightly harder for a musician, since unlike a startup, they don't explicitly have a "problem" to solve. For myself, I used to be a great Linkin Park fan, and I still think that 'Hybrid Theory' and 'Meteora' are 2 of the best albums around. They lost me after that unfortunately, and being 14 at the time when Meteora was released means that I never gave the band any cash.

On the other hand, there are other bands that I've been following for a long time whom I still gladly pay for their music. E.S Posthumous released their album 'Makara' last year, and even though its on YouTube, I still paid for the thing --- Thanks to iTunes =) [by the way check them out - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kH781DV0U] The same goes for bands like 'Mr Big' and their album 'What if','Nightwish' with their album 'Dark Passions Play', and Steve Vai with his recent 'Live in Minneapolis' album.

I use those bands as an example because they've been around for awhile (10 years or more) and still can provide innovative, new music that retains the same appeal as their previous work, but yet provides a distinct WOW factor to it. ie: same but different.

I personally think that very few bands can do that, and the industry that supports long-term creativity like this will inevitably be small.

So that's a long way of saying that I agree with the author's premise, and that the music industry of the past is bound to see a major change (relatively shrinkage) thanks to the inherent nature of the craft along with the new-found efficiency of distribution.

That sounds great! It seems like the Israeli military system brings with it an integrated approach to pathways in life.

That's far better than the picture that has been painted in front of my eyes (South-East Asian context) with places like Singapore and Vietnam. With the former, it's 2 years of physical grunt work. With the latter, one of my friend's cousins had to serve in the Army for 2 years as a Private after having graduated with an Engineering degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia. =(

From the article, on going to college: "The way it works in Israel, you have to go to the army first"

I wonder how much this impacts the entrepreneurial mindset in male youth. I grew up mostly in Singapore, and they too have conscription upon reaching the age of 18 (with some exceptions, eg: for medicine and for national scholarship holders). From what I see from my friends' facebook channels, it's definitely a draining experience indeed, one that takes months to recover from once its done.

But Kudos to this guy! Greplin is pretty awesome and I've already put it to use.

If Nokia were to do this, then they had better find a way to make developer migration/adoption as frictionless as possible.

We're talking about smartphones here, which are going to be driven by developers to some extent. A whole scale migration from Symbian/MeeGo to something else is going to be a messy one for sure, one that's definitely going to anger the current crop of developers.

With frameworks like Qt in place, which makes it easy for developers to build for all Nokia platforms, I tend to think that Nokia would not to go down the path of an OS overhaul.

Then again, anything is possible when you've got billions of dollars in revenue. It could be anything from an OS switch, to a new version of Qt which natively compiles Python, Ruby, JS, etc

EDIT: this - http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/09/nokia-cancels-meego-phone/

seems to make one wonder even more about Nokia is up to

Always a great one from Marijn!

As a side note, would it be possible to add a simple 'X' (close) button to the interpreter/console. Clicking on the reading area didn't seem all too intuitive, especially if your screen isn't that big, and the console ends up taking up much of the view =).

As commentors have mentioned, you can't simply roll-your-own-Java without being at risk of a legal battle.

Zooming out. What are the biggest technologies being affected by this, and what are the alternatives available to the creators and developers of those technologies?

Would we end up in a situation where someone like Google would have to revamp their entire Android runtime?

'The Master Switch' by Tim Wu, because it gave me an added perspective on how History shapes present Information Empires

In fact, Hugh was the one who got me inspired to start drawing and pushing these random scribbles online. Needless to say, some of his sentiment probably bled through =p

That's a good point, I should do something on that line of thought some day. Something which speaks of the values of acquaintance over companionship (with reasonable context of course)

Well, maybe 'very different' was an overstatement =).

One way to look at it is that we should use single-use functions as far as possible to keep code straightforward.

And as jpr said, LET* can potentially promote bad style, giving one the inclination to mix functional and imperative styles in a potentially troublesome fashion.

I think it was in 'On Lisp' that PG said that use of LET* should be minimised for the reasons above.

But if not, you're right. Use LET* just as you mentioned, but don't use LET* for all cases.

Some discussion available @ Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/554949/let-versus-let-in-...

I'd say Common Lisp is the superior choice.

In terms of the availability of support libraries and what not, you'll find it easier with Common Lisp. Quicklisp would be the most recent (and awesome) tool that comes to mind.

In terms of the language itself, it's just more complete to me.

LET and LET* have very different uses, and while ugly, LABELS has helped me quite a fair bit, especially in porting over some recursive Haskell code.

Oh, and don't forget the wonders of LOOP =)

Other than that, I can't speak for Racket, nor any of the other Lisps out there. So take by biased opinion as a CL user for what its worth.

Yeah, I'll second the quality of the searches. Especially those where you know what you're looking for (obscure programming docs and forum/group chat logs for one)

Great to see that level of success. I hope it's not due to the novelty of this, and I'm sure we're bound to see adoption slowly creep up with this slashtag business (and probably some similar stuff from Google as well)

Nice article. Adds another dimension to the Innovator's Dilemma

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/04/understanding-...

That's interesting. I like the reference to Google. In a way though, Google could rely more so on technical innovation to drive itself forward.

That's obviously not the case with Facebook, as seen from the controversy over their privacy settings. It's gonna be interesting watching technology drive culture at the crazy rate it is today. What a time to be alive!

Looks pretty sparse and as everyone has said, not the best out there. MDC probably still has the best 'official' documentation thus far.

Wealth is anything and everything that has potential future value.

Making wealth is tapping into that value.

Eliminating distractions was actually quite easy for myself. As long as I've got silence, I can focus well.

Procrastination is another issue, for exactly the reasons that the author states: lack of concrete goals.

With bigger projects, concrete goals are harder to make. Especially with software, I'm always a horrible estimator, and I'll write something like "Get X feature to start working". It may be a small feature, but it ends up moving in all the different directions that I'd never expect it to take.

I've tried becoming a better estimator, by recorded what I intended to get done, what I did get done, and then reflecting on that. It's a slow and simple process, but I think it's working. Or maybe its my bad estimation ability fooling me again =p.

The ability to be able to say this, and mock so many of his surrounding people and disciplines, probably highlights best the fact that he practices what he preaches.

A refreshing read indeed.

As an aside, is there any particular reason that the comment header (containing the commenter's username and other details) was designed to be grey and of the same text size as the actual comment body?

I think we can say that standard forums are much more 'scannable' compared to HN, and I often find myself looking out for posts from users whom I respect on that particular forums. In this case, Putting the username before the the points of the comment may lead people to view the comment for the commenter first and foremost, as opposed to the number of points the comment has.

I don't know whether or not that is a good thing. For one, it makes negativity very obvious, and it makes recognising a bad commenter pretty easy.

On the other hand, it may give a free-first pass to 'respected' commenters who might make mean comments every once in a while.

On the whole though, I think it may make it easier for your average user to recognise and avoid mean comments when they do see them.

Another possibility may be to shift the position and/or size of the upvote/downvote buttons to make upvoting a more conscious decision. I've got no suggestions about how to do this yet though =(.

FWIW, I personally got myself a basic ELFA set http://www.containerstore.com/shop/elfa/bestSellingSolutions... . Cost me $350 down here in australia with a simple two desk setup. Also had to go through the hassle of getting a handyman to set it up, and then a comfy bar stool for switching between sitting and standing.

Closer to $500, and not as much surface area as a regular desk, but great Swedish quality and definitely a relief for my back.

Total agree, giving a damn is probably the best filter ever. Of course, the converse can be applied effectively too; not giving a damn to things that you're not willing to invest wholehearted in, streamlining your productivity instead of trying to give a damn with everything.

Yup, I did read his Fooled by Randomness before I read this one. That one blew me away too. The Black Swan succeeded in in being even more impressive though, and I think it covered quite a bit of new ground.

The Black Swan is longer, and has a bit more technical coverage. I liked that, but I've heard from others that it gets in the way of the main point about how to deal with randomness.

Regardless, both books are insanely good. Worth the time and money for sure.

If I were to name one, it would be "The Black Swan", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

You hear all the time about how unlikely it is for someone to succeed as a startup. Or how the Democrats have a 65% chance of winning. Or even how statistically speaking, it's safer to fly than to drive.

After going through that book, my perception on randomness was changed forever.