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Back in Bergen for the summer. After looking at the long-term weather forecast, this poster pretty much summarizes what I’d rather do…
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Popular passwords
cnet:
The top 25 most common passwords:
- password
- 123456
- 12345678
- 1234
- qwerty
- 12345
- dragon
- pussy
- baseball
- football
- letmein
- monkey
- 696969
- abc123
- mustang
- michael
- shadow
- master
- jennifer
- 111111
- 2000
- jordan
- superman
- harley
- 1234567
Why do you think 1234567 is so much less popular than 123456 and 12345678?
The human race is 1. stupid 2. perverted 3. into sports 4. weird.
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Saturday Tunes!
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Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 13 Notes Essay
All of these posts are awesome, not only #13. If you haven’t already checked them out, I definitely recommend doing so!
Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 10 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine.
Class 12 Notes Essay— You Are Not A Lottery Ticket
I. The Question of Luck
A. Nature of the Problem
The biggest philosophical question underlying startups is how much luck is involved when they succeed. As important as the luck vs. skill question is, however, it’s very hard to get a good handle on. Statistical tools are meaningless if you have a sample size of one. It would be great if you could run experiments. Start Facebook 1,000 times under identical conditions. If it works 1,000 out of 1,000 times, you’d conclude it was skill. If it worked just 1 time, you’d conclude it was just luck. But obviously these experiments are impossible.
The first cut at the luck vs. skill question is thus almost just this bias that one can have. Some people gravitate toward explaining things as lucky. Others are inclined to find a greater degree of skill. It depends on which narrative you buy. The internal narrative is that talented people got together, worked hard, and made things work. The external narrative chalks things up to right place, right time. You can change your mind about all this, but it’s tough to have a really principled, well-reasoned view on way or the other.
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“I am sure your victory will be great… Insanely great.”
“I am sure your victory will be great… Insanely great.”
Currently halfway through listening to Steve Jobs biography. If you haven’t read it, I recommend doing it. Afterwards, watch the videos here!
Amazing.
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Social media to be handled by the government?
Me and two friends had to use Google+ yesterday, as we wanted to have a conversation with 3-way video without having to pay for it (Skype). The website is awesome, and the re-design is brilliant. I even tried the mobile app, which looks and works far better than the one FB currently offers. My photo’s are automatically backed up on G+, but I still don’t see myself using the website in the near future – as it is a ghost town.
The problem is that every day I use Facebook, the odds of me changing to another social network is reduced – as I save more of my online life on Facebook. It annoys me that I’m not able to transfer all my pictures, messages and friends over to another social network if I prefer their functionality or design. I believe this will change in the future.
The same way the postal system started as a private initiative, social media has started as a private initiative. But today, every citizen (at least in Norway) are bound to have a mail address. You can still choose private carriers for mail transportation, but there is also a public alternative.
I don’t think there’ll be many years before everybody is bound to have an e-mail/SM-account where the authorities can contact you. I would like to have a “SM-platform” where I don’t rely on privately owned companies. A free platform paid for through taxes, where I can save my contact, messages and pictures. This way, I won’t loose my online memories if for instance Facebook goes bankrupt in 15 years.
I still believe Facebook, Google+ and other new competitors should exist, but I don’t want to completely rely on them. I want to be able to upload my “SM-platform” to the websites I wish to use, and just as easily remove the platform if I wish to change website.
It’s not fully thought through at the moment, and if you have any thoughts on the subject, please tweet me – as I would love to hear them.
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Online language
Earlier today, I helped a non-tech savvy friend create and publish a Facebook-page, as he was running for board membership on his school in Norway. As I’m currently in Denmark, the instructions had to be given over the phone while sitting in front of our respective computers.
The problem that occurred was that his Facebook language was set to Norwegian. One could say that this is the natural choice, and most non-native English speakers probably runs their OS, Facebook, e-mail client etc. in their own language if available.
When I tried to explain to my friend where he should navigate, it took us at least 5 minutes extra because everything had to be to be translated from English to Norwegian. Today’s incident wasn’t a particular big one, but I’m writing this on general basis. The advantages of having an OS, software and websites all running in English are numerous:
- You improve your skills in a foreign language (That’s part of the reason why I’m writing in English as well)
- It’s easier to troubleshoot computer problems. (Imagine if W7 gives you an error message. If you Google the original (in this case Norwegian) error message, you have at most 5 million peers posting about the same error. Post an original English error message, and the amount of peers that might have had the same problem multiplies by a factor of at least 62. (That’s only native speakers)
- Problems like mine today can be avoided.
And this list goes on. I can’t utilize many foursquare-tips if I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language (I’m aware of the possibilities with Google translate, but I prefer human translations any day – even really bad ones). I’m a big advocate of one mutual internet language, as it makes it easier for everyone to connect online.
I don’t think any of my Norwegian friends really needs their computer language set to Norwegian, I believe it’s carelessness. If you read this (and agree), please help spread the word – the English word.
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Do The Right Thing
To briefly come present my opinion with an awful analogy:
Fax machines, Nokia 3310s and also tech patents are becoming increasingly obsolete, and I believe the latter should die out one way or the other. Amazon’s “one-click-buy”-patent is a perfect example. Patents were supposed to incentivize innovation when it was expensive to build something new (like a car). The “one-click-buy”-patent was not expensive. The patent wars going on these days are just a distraction that removes focus from what’s really important: to build great products for the consumers! #GreatMoveTwitter
Twitter’s decision to implement the Innovator’s Patent Agreement could not have been an easy one. While it’s refreshingly straightforward and an obvious crowd-pleaser, it potentially puts the company in a bit of a vulnerable position. What if no one else adopts the policy? They’ll stand alone with their pants partially down.While I haven’t yet talked to anyone at the company about the decision, my sense is that they made the call using a simple principle: do the right thing.
While obvious, it seems that companies are rarely guided by simply doing the right thing. Legal departments get in the way. Or investors get in the way. Someone gets in the way. What’s right isn’t often what’s “smart”. And that’s a problem on multiple fronts.
When I tweeted about the upsides of this decision earlier, many people were quick to point out some of the practical problems. What struck me is how all the problems mentioned were derivatives of fear. Fear of others. Fear of change. Fear of dying.