Just a guy living in China who loves... well, right now I just love studying Chinese. And I also love @Melissa. Here's my website, twitter and facebook.
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John Erik Metcalf
“ software skills are the most portable high-end skills on the planet. Spotting and temporarily attracting talent doesn’t mean you get to keep it. Stock option-slavery and golden handcuffs for talent from acquired companies aside, there’s not much you can do to combat social and economic mobility. Not only can software developers switch industries easily, they can even survive on their own much more easily. A nuclear engineer really cannot do much without nuclear reactors or bombs to work with. ”
The Rise of Developeronomics - Forbes
Mobility is awesome.
Groupon IPO Shares Pop 40% On First Trade, Debuts At $28 With A $17.8B Market Cap
Wait wait wait!!! But but but!! Ponzi scheme! Should have sold to Google!
Yeah.
Groupon just went public with a market cap now 3x what Google was offering them. We’ll see if the good times last — now that they’re public, they’re going to have to show real growth in the numbers — but it’s pretty clear that either way, Groupon did the right thing in not taking that deal.
Good for them.
“ … Friedman laughed ruefully as he described leaving Hong Kong International Airport and arriving at LAX: “It was like flying from ‘The Jetsons’ to ‘The Flintstones.’ ”
My friend Amit has Acute Leukemia and needs to find a bone marrow match in the next month. Please get registered today, especially if you’re South Asian. I just took 3 minutes to do it myself.
“ Path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice. ”
“People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can’t help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject’s life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
”
Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer In Terms Of People “Killed Per Kilowatt Hour”
“ Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. ”
