Eureka Man » Meta-Ideas

Paul Graham’s new compiler

Eureka Man — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:39:07 +0000

At Startup School, Paul Graham told us of Y Combinator’s new policy for funding teams:

Photo by ybboey

If you don’t have a good idea, no problem, he’ll give you one – as long as you’re awesome. Oh to be Paul Graham. To have teams of shit hot coders fighting to be accepted by you so that they can work on your idea all summer, for minimum wage. He has created the world’s first ultra-high-level compiler. I’m being disingenuous of course. This compiler has (at least two) minds of it’s own, and Paul doesn’t really mind if it doesn’t do what he asks just as long as there’s a fair chance it will make him some money.

Here’s his full pres:

A quick reminder about meta-ideas

Eureka Man — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:22:27 +0000

Doc Searls echos the meta-idea that I started this blog with.

Brain Crack

Eureka Man — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 02:46:07 +0000

I just came across this month-old zefrank episode which includes some characteristically insightful advice from Ze:

I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I’ve used up the last idea that’ll ever come to me. If you don’t wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do ‘em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you’ll get to later.

Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the, but the, but the, but the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause. When I get an idea, even a bad one, I try to get it out into the world as fast as possible, ’cause I certainly don’t want to be addicted to brain crack.

Then, as so often happens on the show, he breaks into song. This time it’s the catchy number “Where the fuck do ideas come from?”, a great illustration of getting a bad idea out into the world. � I much prefer “Hindsight is 20-20“.

The Web 2.0 Evolution

Eureka Man — Wed, 03 May 2006 14:36:25 +0000

So I turned up for the Web 2.0 Ireland day at DCU. Witnessing the Marc Canter show was entertaining and there was a bit of tech discussion sprinkled on top. But the overwhelming topic for the day was…

Money

Yes, that’s an actual slide, taken out of context, from one of the company’s presentations. It was web 2.0 very much from a business person’s perspective (not surprising given that it was an EI event). “What exactly is this web 2.0 thing?” “What features and technologies do we need to adopt to get some of this web 2.0 money?” or “How can I tell that a company is web 2.0 so I can decide whether to invest?” Web 2.0 used as a noun or an adjective.

Here’s my take. From a developer’s perspective web 2.0 should be a verb, if anything. Ask “How can I web 2.0 my business?” Say “Our product is web 2.0ing”. It means you’re pushing things forward, doing things right this time, right by the web, right for the people. And you’re not quite sure what the final desination of your web 2.0ing will be (Hint: there is no final destination). You’re just trying to be valuable to somebody. Web 2.0 is not any one group of technologies or features. It is whatever makes sense and makes value for the people you affect. Web 2.0 is a vague, yet meaningful term that describes a movement, a journey. The reason there is no clear definition is that we’re not sure where we’re headed yet.

The most interesting things will happen without knowing exactly how they’re going to make money. Web 2.0ing should convey a sense of relinquishing control. Relinquishing control of people’s data, sure. Relinquishing control of taxonomy maybe. But most importantly, relinquishing control of your business plan. Admit that it’s difficult to predict who will use your software and how they will use it. Release it and be ready to adapt.

What is my problem? I don’t really have one. I’m not bashing Enterprise Ireland or the companies who presented at the event. They put on an interesting and valuable show. I have masses to learn about the business side of things and I’ll take every opportunity i can get. In one sense Web 2.0 is about the money. It’s a resurgence of venture capital interest in web companies. It’s not a case of they’re wrong, I’m right, or even that we disagree. I’m not trying to own the term, only give a different perspective (one that may be equally, if not more bullshitty, sorry). However slight a distinction it is though, it makes a difference to the audience at your conference and the ensuing discussion. Thursday’s event did contrast to the unconferences I’ve been at where the feeling really was “let’s push things forward”. I’d like to recreate that here in Ireland.

So we’ve had the Web 2.0 conference. How about a Web 2.0ing conference? I caught a whiff of it during Adam Green’s roundtable. There are hackers out there interested in pushing things forward. I want a regular get-together focusing on them (us). If you’re in teh Valley this summer look me up. And if another TechCamp happens in September I won’t miss it this time.

Leaving Cert. Students… meet Paul Graham

Eureka Man — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:24:02 +0000

Here’s this week’s inspiring read from the man himself, just in time for anybody who’ll be filling in their CAO this weekend. Read it yourself, but in short: Realise that work and fun are not exclusive. Aim to do what you love and you’ll be great at it, easily. If you don’t know what you love yet then take as many opportunities as possible to try different things.

That’s the way I’ve been playing it for most of my college and work life. And I have very few regrets. (Though you might get a slightly different viewpoint from certain girlfriends/parents )

Now, if only I could combine my work with that more tormenting duty: exercise. Has anybody ever taken the building metaphor of software development literally and come up with a physical programming language? A hot, chiselled bod by coding – now that would be the ultimate panacea!

Tags: cao, leavingcert

Hack the Planet!

Eureka Man — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:33:42 +0000

Other people, it seems, have felt similar disappointments to mine with the gush of web 2.0 cash-ins. People with web 2.0 visions, I’d like to direct your attention to something you may have been overlooking: Planet Earth. I have a feeling that we (as web-app developers) are missing something right under our noses. Something big. We may have more power than we realize. The power to change something. Short of an actual idea, I present to you a niggle: the glaring absence of an idea where there surely should be one.

This niggle stemmed partly from reading Pay it Forward. It’s about a real world-hack that feeds off the same power as email chain letters. Someone does a very good deed for you and instead of paying them back you promise to pay it forward to 3 others. Kindness proliferates exponentially. Of course it works in the novel, but I think the internet has lowered the bar for making things like this happen in real life. Things happen faster on the net. It’s easy to experiment. And there is a steady supply of bored surfers to experiment with. If only we’re open to the possibilities maybe we can come up with something to shake things up. I recommend Pay it Forward as web 2.0 reading material. Plus it’ll make you feel all warm and bubbly inside.

While you’re at it, and to bring you back down to Earth so to speak, read the Gumption Memo. You could hardly find a more easily digestible yet outlook-altering 50 pages. It’s a specs document for solving world problems by Brian Skinner, an open source coder who I hope to be collaborating with over the next while. One of Brian’s positions is that national governments, driven by tribalism, are squandering their enormous power to cure some of the world’s ills. Here too I think we have something on our side. The Internet melts country boundaries. Online, you are primarily a citizen of the net and only secondarily of the country that hosts your physical self. When you act in the interest of your netbrethren it is for a vast, yet connected nation, the likes of which the world has never managed to host before. The rest of the world will be joining our virtual nation shortly. It would be great to have something cool ready for them when they get here, apart from somewhere they can upload photos or find hot chicks.

I think one lead is the power of social software to create and distribute value at a micro-level. I’m talking firstly about value in information. Flickr (or any social tagging site) invites its users to spend a small amount of their time adding metadata to their (and other’s) stuff using a simple textbox. Crucially, this effort is mostly directly for the benefit of the user themselves. They create a valuable information scaffold around their data to help find things in future. But the software skims some of this value off and, by the power of aggregation, reuses it for the good of the community. A global information scaffold emerges to benefit anyone who needs it. Everybody wins, to some extent. The game of information exchange is not zero-sum

Now information is one thing. Of course, there are other currencies, like money for instance, that do tend to be involved in zero-sum games. But money and information do not live in unconnected realms. People readily exchange money for information every day. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is getting towards what I’m talking about. It pays people just for having the abilities of a normal human (and having access to the net). It connects. A bundle of capillaries channeling droplets of value around the net. Yes, from a developer point of view, when you start handling money as well as information things get a bit more complicated. That’s something else that needs to be worked on.

Like me, you don’t have to have one altruistic synapse in your cranium to tackle something like this. Do it for the for the fame and adoration. Do it because you might make the world a nicer place for yourself to inhabit. Do it to learn Ruby on Rails. Do it because it’s better than making another social bookmarking site, right? Channel some of that web 2.0 energy and direct it towards World 2.0. Think global, and then act global too. There’s even the possibility of investors out there for budding world-hackers.

So idea-people, that’s the niggle. I’m suggesting to you that these days changing the world, far from being a lifetime’s work, may simply constitute a weekend of inspired coding. Pass it on. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.

Update: Forgot to mention the Recovery 2.0 project.

Paul Graham on the value of ideas

Eureka Man — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:40:28 +0000

Paul Graham says: “[S]tartup ideas are worthless”. The value of a successful startup lies in the people and in the process of exploring an idea.

And there should be more than one person: “Y Combinator has a rule against investing in startups with only one founder.” I’m inclined to believe him. Unfortunately my main project at the moment is a solo one. It would be great to meet up with more dev geeks now that I’m back in Ireland. I’d love to get some Dev House style meetups going. Any interest out there? Mail me.

Advice to self

Eureka Man — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 04:49:15 +0000

When you have ideas, the first instinct is to keep them secret, a possession, in the hope that they increase your net worth. But ideas are very risky assets. Ideas are data. They transfer easily from person to person. They can be copied and recopied and never lose their value (and never gain any either). They can instantly be rendered worthless to you by popping up in a similar form in someone else’s mind. Your real worth is something that noone on earth has the technology to steal yet. It is hardware. It is moulded by all your years of experiences. It is information, yes. But it is encoded in the inner wirings of the enormous, continuously changing machine that is your brain. The real worth lies in the hardware that generates great ideas.

So, my advice to myself (and anyone else you this applies to) is to publish, talk to people, blog and generally vent hot air. If you are so confident in your talent for generating ideas and you want somebody to employ you on the strength of this talent then you can’t expect them to take your word for it. Put your ideas out there. They are worth more to you as advertisements or previews of what you can do than they promise hope of single-handed exploitation. You want a patron who recognises your brain’s capacity to generate new ideas as a more valuable commodity than any individual idea. It’s hard to get someone to pay you to start having ideas from nothing, but someone may pay you to stop telling everybody else your ideas.

With that sentiment in mind, roll on BarCamp!

Tags: ideas, barcamp

Release Early…

Eureka Man — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 07:11:26 +0000

About two months ago, I was visiting a friend in New York and I remember getting very excited about a cool way I had of attaching javascript events to DOM elements with the help of a little library I’d written. Not being a web developer, she found it hard to share my enthusiasm and may not even remember the occasion now. This was the most public exposure I gave my technique, though I dreamed of someday getting cited on ALA.

Well just the other day Ben Nolan, from New Zealand, released pretty much the same thing and it triggered so much interest that it got to level 3 of Hot Links. I was struck by his last two blog posts:

Using css selectors for JS behaviours – Thursday 5PM

Had a flash of insight today and invented a really cool way to do unobtrusive
javascript. I’m going to write up some docs and throw it online for some
deli.cio.us action later this arvo.

Rewrote some of our apps using the new module (behaviour.js) and it’s very very
cool. Combine this with prototype / mir.acu.lous and you’ve got some super hot
hotness (in a retrogradable fashion).

Made a page about behaviours – Friday 5PM

http://ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/

It’s on deli.cio.us already which is cool.

I like that: have an idea on Thursday, release an implementation to whoever’s interested on Friday. By Sunday he was back to building rockets.