John Erik Metcalf

May 27

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” — Hanlon’s razor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

May 16

One For The Shoeshine Man - Charles Bukowski

settled:

The balance is preserved by the snails climbing the
Santa Monica cliffs;
the luck is in walking down Western Avenue
and having the girls in a massage
parlor holler at you, “Hello Sweetie!”
the miracle is having 5 women in love
with you at the age of 55,
and the goodness is that you are only able
to love one of them.
the gift is having a daughter more gentle
than you are, whose laughter is finer
than yours.
the peace comes from driving a
blue 1967 Volks through the streets like a
teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You
Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum
of the rebuilt motor
as you needle through traffic.
the grace is being able to like rock music,
symphony music, jazz …
anything that contains the original energy of
joy.

Read the poem

Apr 01

Dec 24

My Parents Were Home Schooling Anarchists - NYTimes.com -

(via Instapaper)

Dec 11

[video]

Dec 10

“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.

Nov 20

The End of the Future - Peter Thiel - National Review Online -

(via Instapaper)

Nov 09

Groupon IPO Shares Pop 40% On First Trade, Debuts At $28 With A $17.8B Market Cap -

parislemon:

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.

Nov 03

“… 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.’ ” — Jetsons vs. Flintstones, a visit with Thomas Friedman | Susan Freudenheim | Jewish Journal

willw:

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.

willw:

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.

(via superamit)

Aug 31

“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.” — Tools for Thinking - NYTimes.com

Jul 28

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.

” — http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html