
Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon - brianr
http://brianrue.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/pycon-2012-notes-paul-graham-keynote/
======
bambax
> _inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it_

I see these categories of email

1\. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which
therefore lead to "conversations"

2\. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have
acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back

3\. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow need to store
but that you will never respond to (they often come from aptly-named "no
reply" addresses; but mailing lists are part of it too)

4\. Random stuff (close to spam, but not really): things you have to read
because they may be important, but usually aren't

Gmail is optimized for #1 and does a good job at it. Lately it started to
address #4 by trying to automatically detect "important" email; in my opinion
this doesn't work well, but it could eventually work.

AFAIK nobody is seriously trying to solve #2 and #3, and in my experience #3
and #4 cause most of the clutter. Which makes #3 the most urgent problem with
the highest ROI.

What if you could use a special email address for "read-only email" that would
receive #3 mail and deal with it:

\- organize it automatically by sender (or "topic") and period (not by subject
/ conversation / date: all my utility bills of one year are ONE object and not
a dozen different conversations, for example)

\- save all attachments (that deserve it) as PDFs

\- notify you only when necessary (not easy)

\- etc.

I've been toying with mailgun today, and it seems building a first version of
this isn't out of reach; I'd be very interested to exchange ideas on this
subject.

~~~
dgallagher
A replacement for email probably won't look very much like email. It'll
inherit the good and drop the bad.

Speech ---> messenger ---> letters ---> telegraph ---> telephone ---> fax --->
email ---> ???

What's good about email? You can send it at any time. It's standardized and
supported everywhere. UTF-8/UTF-16. Cheap/free. Extremely fast. Extremely
easy.

What's bad about email? Spam. Conversations get broken (reply instead of
reply-to-all). Prioritization must be done manually, and differs between the
sender and receiver. Lack of privacy (PGP is a bandaid on a severed limb).
Reading and interpretation takes time. Fonts, colors, and graphics can too
easily be used terribly (e.g. the "view" is broken in MVC). Micro-managing
messages and contact lists. Search (<http://theoatmeal.com/pl/brain/memory>).
Conveying context and emotions is difficult. I'm sure you can can list more.

\--------------------

I've been thinking about the prioritization issue, using a sort of expensive
cipher, but for humans.

In the morning, Kate in accounting gets a call from their supplier for car
engines. They demand $6.7M payment on an invoice 90 days overdue, and won't
make the engine delivery tomorrow unless they get the cash wired to them by
5pm tonight. Kate knows they need those engines to put in cars coming off the
assembly line tomorrow, so Kate sends an urgent message to Susan, the CEO.
They have the cash, all Kate needs is Susan's approval to wire it.

Susan gets the message in her inbox marked "urgent", but doesn't read it. She
has 1,000 other unread messages, 200 "urgent". Susan gets through 800 messages
before leaving, but never gets to Kate's.

The next day Susan finally reads Kate's message and FREAKS OUT! She calls up
the car engine supplier about the late payment. "Sorry, no engines today! Next
time make sure you pay us on time!" Car assembly halts, productivity bottoms,
and they start burning money from idle workers and sales lost to late car
deliveries.

In a small company, Kate would just walk into Susan's office and remind her.
In a large company, with a CEO who's "SO BUSY", or another human who's "SO
BUSY", important messages like that can be read too late. Here, Kate knew it
was really important, and marked it "urgent", but because too many other
people cried wolf too, Susan never got the message.

So, how can you prioritize a message, relative to all other messages someone
else has queued?

Imagine an economically-consuming task. We'll use time, but money could work
too. When you press "Send", a button pops up. The more times you click on it
continuously, the higher priority your message will be relative to others who
clicked it fewer times. Your message isn't sent until you stop clicking for 5
seconds.

So, if you click your button for 10 minutes in a row, which is a total waste
of your time, your message will appear higher on someone's message-queue than
someone who clicked it for 9 minutes in a row.

Furthermore, when the receiver gets the message, and see's that you're a drama
queen over-reacting on something that's really low-priority, she can down-vote
you. Next time, 10-minutes of button clicking will only count for 5 minutes.
The sender gets notified that they cried "wolf! wolf!" and can alter their
behavior accordingly.

Clicking of a button doesn't have to be the actual task. It shouldn't be able
to be automated (button-clicking can), and it should be boring (playing Tetris
would be disastrous, yielding every message as URGENT).

Cash works too. If you cold-send an email to Bill Gates, he's probably not
going to read it. What if you risked $100 sending the message? Bill has 48
hours to read/reply to it, otherwise the $100 goes back to you. If he does
read/reply in 48 hours, he can keep the $100 (don't bug me again!), or return
the $100 (let's keep chatting...).

~~~
mnutt
Also somewhat related is Zed Shaw's Utu. It's a chat room where all messages
are encrypted, and if you start annoying people they begin increasing the
amount of work your computer has to do to encrypt the messages sent to them.

<http://www.savingtheinternetwithhate.com/>

------
larsberg
Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple
decades. not fun for students or professors.

Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had
lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it
compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also
seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done the
startup sold for lots of money, big smash-hit video games, part of the i*
device releases from day 1, etc.

All of the faculty I know really love it as well. Certainly, I hear bad things
from the assistant (untenured) faculty, but all of the folks I meet who've
made it over the hurdle seem to really love their work and have a lot of fun.

Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Or is my circle of friends and
programming languages researchers just a bunch of weirdos?

~~~
bluekeybox
> Are non top-tier universities really that bad?

Yes.

~~~
kenrikm
I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and
I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university
where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of
your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the
personality of the person.

~~~
philwelch
A lot of that is in spite of the university and not because of it. But even a
mediocre university will provide more resources than you might find without
it.

------
mahmoudimus
Thanks for this! Lots of wisdom here. This one particularly rings very true:

"Only way to get a product visionary as the CEO of a company is to start it
and not get fired."

From the same part in the article,

"None of the existing players will – not run by product visionaries."

Later elaborated on as: "just have to be better than samsung, hp, motorola –
not so hard"

Doesn't this in itself bring an interesting question? Why is that those
companies cannot innovate or have visionaries? Surely, they must. Maybe that's
another opportunity though. How to find the visionaries in your company and
reward them for doing so?

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
Size makes it impossible. If you've ever worked at a sizable company then you
understand this, if not explicitly. The work of an employee becomes more and
more to integrate with the machine, and less and less to think independently
and innovatively. Follow the procedures. Know what forms are needed. Know
who's buyoff is needed for what. Go to the break room when there's donuts
celebrating the release of R145.8.

The best a large company can hope for is a skunkworks.

------
lr
6\. bring back the old moore’s law

I'll have to dig up my BeOS Bible this weekend, but I though the BeOS solved
this problem over 15 years ago. I have been floored for years that chip makers
keep telling developers to write code to work with multiple CPUs. If those
developers are OS developers, then fine. But application developers? No way.
This is the job of the OS!

~~~
rbanffy
I'm curious. How did BeOS solve this problem?

~~~
sounds
BeOS did several things, I'll throw out the obvious one:

Separate the UI thread from main() (the thread doing the core app logic).

Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is
single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads.

To the original poster, I'd like to point out that BeOS didn't (and Haiku
doesn't) use a different compiler. What pg was saying was that we need a
better compiler + language. Right now the programmer must manage every detail
of the threads. A few abstractions are available - OpenMP, Apple's Grand
Central Dispatch, etc. They don't really make highly parallel implementations
though. The field is ripe for disruption.

Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.

~~~
rbanffy
> Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is
> single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads.

It's an interesting idea. It would be trivial to write boilerplate like this
so that when you create a new .c file, it will start with a basic multi-
threaded application.

I remember seeing some parallel FORTRAN code in the late 80's with things like
loops explicitly marked for parallel execution and other tricks. The downside
is that debugging mutable state across multiple threads is a bitch. It's not
something I would wish to my worst enemy.

> Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.

I have been playing with the idea of using Verilog or VHDL to express computer
programs... Did nothing, but it would be an interesting thing to test.

------
spdy
<http://streamti.me/> Livestream from PyCon 2012 It gets better every year :)

------
YooLi
Is this available in video format? I can't help but think reading this is
taking something out of context or missing information. Quick glance:

 _1\. dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top
10,000)._ \- Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well.

 _2\. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it._ \-
What? I use email to converse with people, not to list what I need to do.
Occasionally I will send myself a reminder mail with a list of TODOs, but my
email inbox is definitely not a todo list.

 _5\. his friend from apple: there will be no new good stuff post-steve jobs._
\- Is his friend Tim Cook? Isn't Apple famous for secrecy even inside Apple or
do all 9000+ employees in Cupertino know what's in the pipeline?

Etc.

~~~
anateus
Going to address only #2: My understanding is that what he means is that even
a social totally "conversational" message is a todo item of "read me". Less
"frivolous" emails tend to either contains direct action items or _imply_
action items that must be taken.

PG wishes that aspect be more explicit in order to gain more control over it.

------
AceJohnny2
A nitpick:

 _don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus.
“there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”._

I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he
thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west
as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans,
not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found the East Indies, i.e.
south-east asia!).

But alas, actual truth carries less rhetorical power than popular myths.

~~~
kennystone
You're missing it dude. Columbus' conclusion was wrong when he started, but he
had the right instincts to start sailing. This is what PG is saying - you
don't know the future, so start sailing in an interesting direction and maybe
you'll find something big.

~~~
AceJohnny2
I see your (and PG's) point, and I think he tied it to a terrible example.
Basically, Colombus won big despite being wrong on so many aspects. In truth
he was just very (incredibly) lucky. Thus I take the point as "do something
stupid, you might just get lucky on something unrelated!".

But I understand that PG's real point is "trust your instincts, don't listen
to the naysayers, but adapt to the circumstances".

~~~
saraid216
I don't think it should be necessary to be right about a lot of aspects. Going
out and discovering how thoroughly wrong you are is a huge achievement.

~~~
jarek
Even better when your friends can arrange for you to get paid a couple million
for that.

------
andrewparker
Anyone have a video link? Google came up empty for me

~~~
rbanffy
It will probably show up on blip.tv. It also offers a very good iPod
compatible RSS. There is already an excellent collection on
<http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011>

------
binarycrusader
I felt Paul's analogies about copying things and selling smells in talking
about copyright were a little awkward. They were a response to an audience
member that asked how he could justify disparaging the music industry selling
copies of music in view of software depending on that model.

In fairness, as he stated himself, he wanted to write a proper essay first
about it so was attempting to come up with something on the fly.

I felt the proper response should have been something more along the lines of:
Copyright only exists because society in general recognizes that right. So if
society in general no longer believes it is a right, then business models will
have to change to reflect that.

I personally don't know what the right long-term answer is, but clearly, since
you can copy bits for "zero" cost, it's going to be even harder to convince
people to pay in the future as they come to that realisation collectively.

------
why-el
I think another argument against universities would be the growing
expectations they impose on students. The sort of academic inflation we see
today, where people are expected to go from bachelors to masters to phds
regardless of whether that is relevant to them, or better yet, to the industry
they are targeting.

------
derwiki
Ongoing diagnosis seems simliar to one of the recent X-Prizes:

<http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/>

And the idea of the X-Prize seems to be mostly in-line with the spirit of Y
Combinator. I only last night saw all the current X-Prizes and am pretty
impressed.

------
endeavor
"find the tiny thing that turns into the gigantic idea"

I like this, or it at least validates some of my thinking. All of my startup
ideas are small and modest, something that will help me and maybe some people
like me. But I have no idea where the idea will take me...

~~~
mishmax
"tiny thing -> gigantic idea" + "maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big
ambitions initially", could suck us in however to one of PG's 'mistake
founders made': "Marginal Niche" (from
<http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>).

So I guess a question is how to distinguish between marginal niche, and
something small in a huge market. I guess it's market size and gut feel of
potential.

------
davidkobilnyk
I took the part about email being a todo list to mean that, it's inherently a
todo list in the sense that it's a list of messages you have to deal with. You
don't have to purposefully use it as a todo list for it to effectively be one.

------
joering2
> 2\. replace email. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting
> stuff on it

I think what he actually meant is that if you logon to your mailbox, you see
threads of stuff to do. Hence, your mailbox with names, subjects and content
is really a "todo" for the day/week/etc.

I think, in the near future, we humans will be a creating protocols on our
own. We will be creating our own protocols and "pushing" data, instead of
"pulling" it from the web, like it is right now.

In my spare time, I am actually working on a paper covering that. I call it
"hapi": Humans with Application Programming Interface. Will be glad to share
more when its done.

------
Ingaz
>6\. bring back the old moore’s law

I'm not an expert in this field by any means, but I think this idea is not so
"frightening".

There was rumors in 2006 that AMD tried to develop "Reverse Hyperthreading".
No official notes though.

Edit: Intel Anaphase: <http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1111>

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=A...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES416&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=ISCA)

------
AmericanOP
I keep hearing how difficult it is to build a standalone email client which
integrates with gmail. Does anybody have a link to any good discussions for
why it's so hard?

~~~
breckinloggins
\- There is no "gmail" API. It either looks like imap/smtp to your app, or
pop3/smtp.

\- POP3 is completely braindead, so moving on...

\- Imap doesn't natively expose many gmail features. imap doesn't know about
"Archiving" and "Labelling", so you have to map those to things like deleting
and folders. There's an impedance mismatch.

\- Exposing a search interface with all the functionality and responsiveness
of the web app is painful. Sparrow does it nicely, in my opinion.

\- You sometimes can't login and don't know why. Sparrow does this badly.
Once, Sparrow just started putting red dots on my account and all it said was
"authentication failure". I actually had to dig in to Sparrow's (thankfully
provided) JSON logs to see that the error message was that "non web clients
are locked out on your account". In turn, I had to just KNOW that this meant I
had to do Google's unlock captcha. But they don't make that easy to find, I
had to google it. Imagine my mom trying to troubleshoot that. I don't think
so.

\- Enabling 3rd party access to gmail via Imap is not a trivial exercise for
the non-technically inclined. Even more so if you have two-factor
authentication turned on. Imagine my mom trying to set that up. I don't think
so.

\- Imap and SMTP aren't the most trivial of protocols to implement correctly
and completely.

\- Stupid little things. Like, right now if I want to have my Google Voice
number ring to Google Chat, I have to have my GMail window open in the browser
(someone correct me if there's a better way). If I already have it up just so
I can receive phone calls, why do I ALSO want to have a standalone email
client open?

~~~
tdfx
Making/receiving calls in Gmail is the reason I stick with the web client. I
don't actually use the chat much, but I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of
Google Voice's integration with Gmail.

~~~
pbreit
I would kill for a Google Voice app! I can't stand missing pretty much every
call because I don't have Gmail open.

~~~
tdfx
I use GrowlVoice for Mac for almost all my SMS, and I jailbroke my iPhone 4S
and installed "Phone GV Extension" and "SMS GV Extension", which makes GV work
seamlessly with Apple's native phone/messages app. If GrowlVoice somehow found
a way to use the AV plugin that Gmail chat uses so I could make calls through
the app, I'd be one happy camper.

------
ikawe
> it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the
> developer like 1 cpu. most ambitious: do it automatically with a
> compiler.really hard, but is this really impossible?

>if so, prove it if not, the expected value of working on it might be really
high.

parallel complexity theory: <https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/pct.pdf>

------
pron
Everything here could be summarized under the headline "solve people's
annoying, day-to-day problems (in an original manner)". There are some great
perspectives here, but I have a (little) problem with the premise of "solve
people's annoying problems". I understand that this probably was a business
talk to people interested in entrepreneurship, and, certainly this is great
advice for people wanting to build a profitable business. But in the end, this
is all it is: "how to make lots of money from software? Answer: solve people's
annoying problems".

In a society where engineers are arguably playing an increasingly important
role, I think this outlook is too limited. This perspective is what I would
expect in a CPA convention. If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential,
is this what you want to inspire them to do? Have them make cooler gadgets,
easier "content consumption experience", better to-do lists to make people
more "productive" and, lastly, possibly provide better health so that they
would live longer to buy more gadgets and "consume" more "content"?

If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential, why not inspire them to
find ways to alleviate poverty and promote justice, education and equality?
Well, you say, this is not a job for engineers. Well, if engineers are
expected to think of new ways to book sleeping arrangements or sell clothes,
their insight can surely be turned to loftier goals. I don't want to be caught
saying anything positive about Facebook, but for better or worse, they have
changed the way people around the world communicate with each other, compete
with each other, and see themselves as part of society. So, yes, engineers are
certainly capable of achieving some great feats.

Many lawyers make lots of money. Lots. And probably many of them became
lawyers for that purpose. But It's hard for me to imagine - and maybe I'm
wrong about this - but it's hard for me to imagine a well known lawyer
delivering a keynote speech at a lawyers convention, where his main points are
tips for making lots of money. Lawyers may be hypocritical (and they are), but
at least many of them separate their business goals from their sources of
inspiration. So why should engineers be inspired only by business tips? Is
money the main source of inspiration for us? Doctors and lawyers make money,
too, but they aspire for - or, at least, are inspired by - more. Even writers,
directors and actors aspire for more than making money, or even "delivering
content" or providing entertainment. They dream that, perhaps, some of their
work might carry some Truth. Give people a new perspective about life, maybe
even change people's lives - but not by making them simply more "productive".
Peh, productivity - if there ever was a more overrated and servile word.

Anyway, we should aspire to do the same. Fellow engineers, do whatever makes
you feel good about yourselves. Do whatever you need to make lots and lots and
lots - piles - of money. By all means, solve people's annoying problems;
that's a great advice. But don't aspire to that. You should dream about
solving _humanity's serious problems_. You should dream of making this a truly
better world - in every respect.

~~~
nostrademons
I think he addressed this - the way to solve big, world-changing problems is
to start by solving ordinary, day-to-day problems and then expand from that.
If you start by saying "I'm going to solve poverty", about a year in everyone
will say "Why haven't you solved it yet?" and you'll find it very hard to find
people to help you. You end up accomplishing far less than if you said "I'm
going to help a hundred underprivileged but talented high-school kids find
colleges that are appropriate for them and give them their best shot of
getting in."

I found that one of the worst and hardest mental habits to kick was the notion
that I had to do "big, important things". Because big, important things are
ill-defined, and your success metrics aren't clear. It's very easy to kid
yourself into thinking that you're promoting justice for all, right up until
you're 20 years in and the world is still not a just place. And then you have
a mid-life crisis, think you're a failure, and give up.

It's much better if you can point to specific and yet often underwhelming-
sounding instances of "I made this person's life better" or "I let this person
do something he otherwise would not have been able to". A journey of a
thousand miles starts with a single step, and all that.

~~~
pron
I agree with everything you said. Yet, I don't think that's where Mr. Graham
was taking this (though I haven't heard the actual speech, but, for the
purpose of this discussion, let's assume that the summary has, indeed,
captured its spirit). I think that his advice focused on how to build a
successful business - important, sound, advice for any professional, but
hardly a source of inspiration, which, I guess, was his intention.

Anyway, as I said, I don't really have a problem with anything he said in
particular. Some of the things actually made me think. My only issue is the
premise that engineers should be inspired by business. Case in point: "it
would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer
like 1 cpu... the expected value of working on it might be really high. why
high: web services. programmers like convenience." I would have said that with
a compiler like that, scientists would be able to design new drugs more
quickly, or that a manned mission to mars could be done more easily, or... I
don't know. But his example (at least as it appears in the notes) is web
services.

Again, he was talking about how to come up with ideas for a start-up, which is
a business, I guess, so the talk was very much to the point. But even if Mr.
Graham believes that start-ups are where smart engineers should spend their
best years and bright minds because start-ups are what makes the world better
- and he does indeed seem to believe that - I think he should have at least
discussed _why_ it is that bright young people should strive to build high-
risk fast-growing businesses, rather than, I don't know, go work for the
government or an NGO. It is as if many engineers just assume that the best
path for an accomplished engineers is in the fast-money business. Engineers
_should be_ agents of freedom, of equality, of innovation and even social
justice. I just don't like it that nowadays engineers in certain fields are
automatically associated first with money, as if they were stock brokers or
something. This is important because history has shown that smart as they are,
scientists and engineers were often very easily manipulated into serving some
terrible causes. They are easily manipulated because they are drawn to solving
problems rather than thinking about whether they should be solved in the first
place.

For example, an easier delivery of entertainment "content" is a problem for an
engineer. But is it a problem worth solving? From a business perspective -
certainly. From a human perspective - possibly. I don't know. But young
engineers eager to learn from an experienced colleague are already trained to
think about how to solve problems. They're even trained to find problems to
solve. But they should be inspired to think about why it is that a problem
requires solving, and to consider whether there are other, more worthy,
undertakings. Again - in the end they'll do whatever it is that they're doing
now. Only that shouldn't be their inspiration.

Also, big things don't have to be well defined. They should just hang up there
as a source of inspiration. Big things, not rich people.

~~~
elangoc
I can relate to where you're coming from. When it comes to the motivations
that drive some engineers (vs. the ideals that ought to drive them), you'll
probably like the recent talk by Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principle"
(vimeo.com/36579366).

You (correctly) point out the places where capitalism comes up empty, if
capitalism is our implicit system of determining the worth of goods and
services. Apart from the environment (which seems unaddressed by the major
economic models of the world) or the other causes you mentioned (unaddressed
by capitalism, at least), I suppose it's fine to rely on the adequacy of money
as some measure of the wealth we add to the world
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>).

Even if the world is being eaten by software
([http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html)),
the transition to using software happens fastest through startups, I'm coming
to believe. I used to work in a life-sci research lab, and there's just an
exponentially growing divide between data growth and the tech resources to
handle it. NGOs and government can be disorganized and unmotivated, so working
for them is not necessarily going to be the best use of your engineering
talents. But that might be aside your point, i.e., try to work towards noble
goals.

Lastly, and most importantly, I find the model of the Aravind Eye Hospital as
truly inspiring and business-model bending: a company set up to help the ones
who are the _most_ in need. The ones who can least afford it. And yet in the
process, generate income that goes back to serving and accelerating the
mission. _This_ is what "social enterprises" ought to be:
<http://infinitevisionaries.com>

~~~
pron
Thanks! Interesting stuff. My point is actually broader. I don't want
engineers to be inspired by nobler things - I just want them to be inspired by
_bigger_ things. They may want to enslave everyone on the planet - that is a
big goal indeed - and though I believe most will try to do good rather than
bad, first they have to learn to think about the _why_ before they start
thinking about the what and the how.

The what will be cooler gadgets and "increased productivity" or "streamlined
processes" only if the why is money. Money is perfectly OK as motivation; it's
just so... pedestrian.

------
agumonkey
+1 for a more continuous medical system.

I'd be curious to see the percentage of deaths caused by delayed diagnostic.

Genomics prices are heading down, let's make it easy, fast, and integrative.

------
hallnoates
> dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000).
> don’t worry about doing something constraining in the short term, because if
> you don’t succeed in the short term there won’t be a long term

Umm, search is just fine thank you. I could not survive without Google
currently. The only thing I don't like about them is the lack of good customer
support and the way they tend to develop unintuitive things with poor
documentation (appengine was hard as hell to develop to, Android is getting
better, but still they don't have a Rails-style "get up to speed" doc- they
have a long way to go) But search is not their problem or mine.

> 2\. replace email

> inbox is a todo list.

No, it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer.
If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong.

> powerful people are in pain because of email. that’s an opportunity.

B.S. Email has survived Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave (cough)...

> whatever you build, make it fast. gmail has become painfully slow.

Maybe on a Pentium III. It isn't slow for me though.

> 3\. replace universities

Good idea, but won't happen. The problem is any business/institution that gets
continuous revenue without having to be accountable. Universities suck because
they don't have to provide what they are needed for, they only have to compete
with each other. The service the universities should provide is the
preparation of its students for the betterment of the world. However, what
this means is debatable, and the hippies of the 60s that grew up in an
environment where they didn't have to work their asses off (like the teenagers
of the depression era) are the ones teaching our kids how to feel better about
themselves by building a hut in a 3rd world country.

> 4\. kill hollywood

The studios are the only ones that really know how to produce. Music, T.V. and
movies are all about production. The YouTube era won't last forever. It is
only a matter of time before they get a full handle on things again.

> 5\. a new apple

Apple is still on top of the consumer market. Solve problems that need solving
in the way you feel is best. Don't work hard to be something else. Apple
didn't.

> 6\. bring back the old moore’s law

>...it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the
developer like 1 cpu.

As an analogy, why don't we make Ruby look like 8086 programming? Parallel
computing is different- you can't solve problems with the same mentality.

~~~
coffeemug
> inbox is a todo list. _No it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous
> communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're
> doing it wrong._

That means most business users of e-mail are doing it wrong. Take a sample of
heavy e-mail users (managers, sales people, marketing, etc.) and ten out of
ten will tell you that they're inundated by e-mail, and that it is a defacto
todo list. E-mail _is_ a giant problem for everyone who needs to communicate
with a large number of people professionally, and "you're doing it wrong" is
not the answer. Using e-mail as a todo list is the path of least resistance,
so it's the only viable option for most people right now, and it sucks. It
needs to (and will) get fixed.

In general, it's easy to go through any list of ideas and dismiss them. All of
these ideas seem sensible to me. They're vague by design, many of them will
likely take a very different shape, but it's a good list of general directions
to explore.

TL;DR don't be a cynic, be a builder.

~~~
sgrove
> don't be a cynic, be a builder.

Beautifully put.

------
xxiao
waste of my time, frankly

