How to Disagree March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. DH0. This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. u r a fag!!!!!!!!!! But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. The author is a self-important dilettante. is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag." DH1. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. Of course he would say that. This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. DH2. DH3. This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in: DH4. DH5. DH6.
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. 1. Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? What's wrong with having one founder? But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. The last one might be the most important. 2. Startups prosper in some places and not others. Why is the falloff so sharp? 3. 4.
1 Feasibility Study Revised August 2009 Mary Holz-Clause Co-director, AgMRC Iowa State University Extensionmclause@iastate.edu Don Hofstrand Co-director, AgMRC Iowa State University Extensiondhof@iastate.edu As the name implies, a feasibility study is an analysis of the viability of an idea. Feasibility studies can be used in many ways but primarily focus on proposed business ventures. A feasible business venture is one where the business will generate adequate cash-flow and profits, withstand the risks it will encounter, remain viable in the long-term and meet the goals of the founders. A feasibility study is only one step in the business idea assessment and business development process. Evaluate Alternatives A feasibility study is usually conducted after producers have discussed a series of business ideas or scenarios. During the feasibility process you may investigate a variety of ways of organizing the business and positioning your product in the marketplace. Pre-Feasibility Study Market Assessment
The List of N Things September 2009 I bet you the current issue of Cosmopolitan has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we'd have called its "outline." As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them. Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things is random access. There are times when this format is what a writer wants. There are other less legitimate reasons for using this format. The list of n things is easier for writers as well as readers. Writing a list of n things is so relaxing. It seems a fine plan to start students off with the list of n things.
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn April 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.) The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating. So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. 1. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions. By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. One of the things that will surprise you if you build something popular is that you won't know your users. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Permaculture principles - PermaWiki Permaculture isn't about having to get your head around untold facts, figures, Latin names and complicated techniques, rather it is about recognising universal patterns and principles, and learning to apply these ‘ecological truisms’ to our own gardens and life situations. We can identify the underlying forms that recur throughout the natural world and learn to understand and utilise them in designed ecologies... Permaculture design principles include: 'Mollisonisms' Edit These are sometimes described as the 'attitudinal' principles of permaculture, and include; Holmgren's 12 design principles Edit These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability [1]; Also see permacultureprinciples.com [2]; Observe and interact - By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation. See also Appropriate technology
-= On Lisp -> Clojure (chapter 2) =- Startups in 13 Sentences February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be? When I made the list there turned out to be 13: 1. Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. 2. The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. 3. This is the second half of launching fast. 4. You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. 5. Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. 6.
BUILDING YOUR SHIPPING CONTAINER HOME. | Residential Shipping Container Primer (RSCP™) Action It. Building a house is no small feet. Even a small one. I. Finish construction documents for your shipping container home and submit to building authority for permitting. Submit construction documents to factory for pricing and engineering of container modules. Clarifications to building authority and factory as required . Get required permits from building authority. Submittal of construction documents to general and sub contractors. Execute purchase order of container modules from factory. II. Site Work Begin grading work including any required excavation for foundation, utilities, storm water management, and septic.Bring required utilities to site.Install septic system and any storm water management system if required. Foundation The foundation shown below is a typical slab on grade application for a 1000sf (three 40' containers) shipping container home design. Container Modifications Shipping containers have monocoque bodies. Set and Secure Containers to Foundation and Each Other III.
The Anatomy of Determination September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent. I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, but the relative importance of determination and talent probably do vary somewhat. I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work that depend more on talent are always more admirable. If determination is so important, can we isolate its components? Being strong-willed is not enough, however. Notes
Paul Graham Paul Graham may refer to: See Randomness April 2006, rev August 2009 Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living." Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality—and I don't mean this in an insulting way—of the kind of conversations freshmen have late at night in common rooms: What is our purpose? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. Now we'd give a different answer. The history of ideas is a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all about us. The idea that we're the center of things is difficult to discard. (Few people can experience now what Darwin's contemporaries did when The Origin of Species was first published, because everyone now is raised either to take evolution for granted, or to regard it as a heresy. This principle isn't only for big ideas. I say pick b. See randomness.
The Trouble with the Segway July 2009 The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork. My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell. Why do Segways provoke this reaction? Someone riding a motorcycle isn't working any harder. Try this thought experiment and it becomes clear: imagine something that worked like the Segway, but that you rode with one foot in front of the other, like a skateboard. So there may be a way to capture more of the market Segway hoped to reach: make a version that doesn't look so easy for the rider. Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway.
Lisp in Web-Based Applications Paul Graham (This is an excerpt of a talk given at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA, in April 2001.) Any Language You Want One of the reasons to use Lisp in writing Web-based applications is that you *can* use Lisp. When you're writing software that is only going to run on your own servers, you can use whatever language you want. For a long time programmers didn't have a lot of choice about what language to use for writing application programs.