Great business idea. But did you find a zealot to run it?
—
Jack Welch
One of the interesting things about running an IAC company is that once a quarter you sit in a room with Jack Welch all day and talk about business. It turns out to be an incredibly healthy exercise to have to answer questions from a tough outsider every once in a while. The above question of his stuck with me from our meeting earlier this week.
(via rickyv)This, to me, is one of the great mind-blowing SQL queries. It means something like “find the dealer for which there exists no dealer selling the same product at a lesser price”. It is the “double negative” restatement of “most expensive”. In other words, “not the lesser expensive”. It’s this kind of radical restatement of problems that I hope to accomplish with my work. Of course this actually has nothing to do with Arel, although it’s expressible trivially in Arel. But it provides some insight into my thinking about why I write software and why I am concerned so much about how software is written.
In science, being completely and utterly stuck can be a good thing; it often means a revolution is coming.
— 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense (via david)
Spoon - Got Nuffin
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
— The Economist (via mudd up, peterwknox) (via marco)
tlvx:
A conversation about Sketchpad, and doing new, great things:
Alan Kay: “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year? There was nothing like this before.”
Ivan Sutherland: “Well, I didn’t know it was hard.”
Also, the year was 1963. (!!)
via John Gruber.
I don’t think about records. I don’t put myself under pressure. I know what to do and I go and execute.
The interpreter was written by someone who shouldn’t have stayed up so late, Edwin Brady, and the language was designed by two people who shouldn’t have had so much to drink, Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. No doubt Andrew Stribblehill isn’t entirely blameless either.
OBAMA BRING BACK ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (via granitepics)
Piracy is essentially the consumer’s wish to have everything on demand. It’s not like people want to necessarily have it for free
—
Daniel Ek - founder of Spotify
Slipstream - Streaming Services May Soothe the Music Industry - NYTimes.com
(via fred-wilson)
(via tylerhwillis) So true.Sometimes I go whole days
listening bored, half sleep
I won’t say anything
that’s worth a thing to me
One day, suddenly, time
took a turn that once felt so brief
I blinked to see polite ghosts fading quickly
What begins as an unguarded
train of thoughts slowly can become
an addiction to the slumber
of disconnection and the resonance
of memory that no longer has a shape
but keeps you numb through
the hours tills gone is another day
Be aware, my darling
these things I say I mean
are just traces of something
I long to feel again
I see our time expand
in the air almost forcibly,
spreading thinner till it dissolves completely
If we want to write parallel programs that work reliably, we must pay particular attention to beauty. Sadly, parallel program are often less beautiful than their sequential cousins; in particular they are, as we shall see, less modular.
![Pacman Joins Twitter [Cartoon]
via superamit](http://25.media.tumblr.com/48Ai3N7srpa3oagxKRshGtBvo1_500.png)
