Singularity trail

Electric Cars and Solar Panels

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:48:00 -0400

“Elon and Martin both recognize the synergy between solar panels and electric cars. As Martin pointed out to Gov. Schwarzenegger, a million solar rooftops in California will not reduce California’s oil dependency by one drop unless we have electric cars also.”

Via Tesla Blog

Elon Musk versus Rest of World

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:43:07 -0400

Elon Musk versus Rest of World

Lost Cringely interview

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:37:47 -0400

Lost Cringely interview

Bill Gates on Charlie Rose-Slip between vision and execution

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:36:17 -0400

Bill Gates on Charlie Rose-Slip between vision and execution

Tell him Im an asshole

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:26:00 -0400

Myopia

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:22:00 -0400

We are in the middle of a peculiar crisis.

Strangely some of us have figured out pretty neat ways of communicating with machines,and creating wonderful genies that actually make life good for a lot of us.But the Problem is that the majority of people who face most of these problems are unaware of these tools/arent wired enough to adopt these tools.

Case in Point

Gah!… more startups and venture capital! Don’t I already have enough communities for this? Where are the biker moms, the aliens, the normals? Apparently there are 21 members in the Kohort Ambassarors group so either they haven’t really started yet or have tunnel vision.

There are two ways to fix this.

Thought Diversity- Technology companies need diversity.Technology companies should be willing to invest in smart people willing to hack who have like really diverse backgrounds.People who have been problem solvers.(Controversy I believe everyone should learn coding,but I guess Clear Problem solving skills are as valuable as coding skills. )
Seeding Diversity-Maybe the definition of ‘hacker’ needs to be broadened. There are lots of people who dont write code,but are exceptional early adopters. I believe Quora has done a good job with that.(Would make an interesting case study)

6 things I do to be consistently happy

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 13:52:00 -0400

Brilliant article by Joel Gascoigne. This impressed me the most.

5. Learn new skills

“Being in the moment, focusing completely on a single task, and finding a sense of calm and happiness in your work. Flow is exactly that.” - Leo Babauta

One thing I’ve found during my time working on Buffer, is that a key reason I’ve been happy for most of that time is that I’ve consistently had new challenges to take on. It may seem odd that new challenges can equate to happiness, but it is the times when I’ve slipped into a few weeks of working on something I already know well, that have led me to feel less happy than I want to be.

I think a key part of why learning new skills can bring happiness, is that you need to concentrate in order to make progress. The “flow” state has beenfound to trigger happiness. In addition, when learning something new you are able to learn a lot in a short space of time due to a steep learning curve. For example, in the last two weeks I’ve started learning Android development from scratch and I’ve personally found incredible the amount I know now compared to nothing two weeks ago.

Gratitude

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 12:53:54 -0400

I read somewhere, that one of the ways of being happy is to be grateful to something once in a day.This got me thinking and I realized that I had not been grateful for quite sometime.Obviously everybody is greatful to their parents,relatives,friends,teachers and well wishers but there are a few things that happen in your lives that change you forever.

So I am going to put a list of a few things which have had a deep impact in my life.A lot of which is around history and connectivity.

A Brief History of Time- Cracked open my mind when I was 10 .The red pill moment.Understood that a matrix exists.Found most things boring and felt perpetually dissatisfied.I was sure,something was fundamentally flawed with physics.
Google-My kindergarten.
Pirates of Silicon Valley- I came to know about an incredible story, I was 25 by then. I came to know about Steve Jobs. And the Homebrew computer club.This changed my life forever.
Youtube- My History Channel. Got over the grouse of having born 20 years late(sort of :))
iPhone Launch- Taught me that magic is still possible
Twitter-My Location did not matter any more.
daringfireball-Clear structured thinking.Keeping it Simple.
Facebook-I came to know about Mark Zuckerberg
Quora-University Education-One day I will work at Quora

I feel ighter as I hit the publish button.

The Future

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 13:44:00 -0400

The Future is here.

You can already peep into the future here

What worries me is their future.

John Gruber has an extremely insightful piece on the iPad nano or air(whichever way you call...

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:09:48 -0400

John Gruber has an extremely insightful piece on the iPad nano or air(whichever way you call it)

Check a couple of these mock ups

What I am thinking is whether Apple would completely do away with the Bezel and come up with an edge to edge display.
The AuthenTec acquisition also makes an interesting case for blocking out fingerprint noise.

Pursoot of happyness

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 11:53:44 -0400

Ben Horowitz writes

When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong—other than needing a job, which isn’t so applicable in the current macro environment—is that she likes her job.

The question is how do you know if you like your job?
Someone very wise once said that customers don’t know what they want unless you show them that something.

The case for iPad mini

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 11:23:00 -0400

Source :Ryan Jones

If the new iPad mini is a Mobile device,will that Cannibalize or catalyze iPhone sales?

I have always believed that the iPad will kill the iPhone, and the iPad mini is possibly one step in that direction.

Evolution of a newbie

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:52:33 -0400

Talking about Roadmaps, Dharmesh Shah had a pretty Good one a while ago.

Talking about roadmaps

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:49:50 -0400

Jimmy Li talks about the roadmap we all wished we had when we started out!

The case for MBA's

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:02:00 -0400

It hurts when people try and bucket large sections of society as type A, type B. Yes it is true that large communities do show similar traits and behavior, however it is not entirely true.

In a country like India, an engineering graduate had 3 options post completion of his degree(Situation back in 2004, things have changed a lot now):

Apply for a US Masters degree
Apply for an Indian MBA program
Apply for a job with an Indian company

The reason why I listed 3 points is that some of the other options like starting up back in those days were not entirely cool things that somebody could do.

Long story short, a lot of MBA’s are engineers living in disguise silently holding back their innate tendencies to innovate and create products- However with very little avenues to do so.

Ben Horowitz, actually details a very interesting story about the rise of MBA’s.

It turns out that the success of the MBAs from the late 80s and early 90s created an insatiable demand from startup companies and their backers to hire MBAs from top schools. With only a small number of top schools, the newly minted MBAs became the belles of the of the startup ball. Every Stanford and Harvard MBA received multiple offers from top startups and, not surprisingly, many MBAs developed a strong sense of entitlement and overconfidence.

They began to stroll into startups with insane lists of demands. They wanted lofty titles, they wanted to manage hundreds of people even though they had no management experience, and they wanted salaries that matched people with 10 years more experience. And the MBAs got what they wanted, which ironically precipitated the MBA’s long and painful fall from the penthouse to the outhouse.

As Usual, Indian MBA’s were almost 10 years behind the curve and missed a crucual leg(involving technology start-ups) and directly crash landed in high paying Banking and Consulting jobs.

But Ben has another interesting take on the whole issue:

At Andreessen Horowitz, we believe that once everyone thinks that something is true, that might be a good time to do the opposite

And

In the public equities market, everyone knows to buy low and sell high. However, the momentum of the day usually overwhelms that obvious strategy. In practice, public market investors pile into stocks as they become overvalued and abandon high quality companies at the first sign of trouble. Similarly, when it comes to hiring MBAs, technology companies have historically bought high and sold low. The current price is low.

Finally some hope for all the MBA’s like me in search of the promised land :)

I’m tired of the opportunists and their hackathons

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:45:43 -0400

Ryan Carson,

It’s a joke and I’m tired of it. Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Remember Life is more of a marathon. Not the 100m dash types.

Even Steve Jobs slept 8 hours.(Or something like that). Its been around 3 years and I sleep around 4-5 hours everyday. Ofcourse I do take my powernaps when I am completely tired, while being stuck in Traffic, but not the religious ones that Dustin Curtis refers to in his hack the brain post.

Personally, I too am not in favour of these “hacker mansion” posts.Reeks of some sort of opportunism. Not required for an industry thats so pure and beautiful.

Pathway to heaven

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:03:58 -0400

If you often wondered, what to read, whom to follow, Marc Andreessen has compiled a nice list of Blogs he thinks are quite good to follow.

Here is the link

small dogs / big dogs: Avoiding Depression While Not Running a $1B Company

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:47:00 -0400

small dogs / big dogs: Avoiding Depression While Not Running a $1B Company:

Excellent Post. Very relevant in these times. Personally recommend.

smalldogsbigdogs:

Instagram sells for $1B. Evernote is now valued at $1B. Pinterest at $1.5B. 3 month old companies coming out of YCombinator are getting investments based on $10M+ valuations. And today will be the Facebook IPO which will likely put a market cap on the company north of $100B.

This is not a…

a blog by pud: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:03:00 -0400

a blog by pud: I have 404,772 users. Now what?:

Someone who gets it right more often than not.

pudjam666:

Three months ago I started a social network for musicians called Fandalism. My goal was to build a database of every musician on the planet and give them a place to show their work and meet other musicians.

I launched it without much fanfare by inviting a few friends and posting about it on…

Attila's den: iOS Tutorial: Creating a chat room using Parse.com

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:28:54 -0400

Attila's den: iOS Tutorial: Creating a chat room using Parse.com:

attila:

About Parse

Parse.com has been out of beta for a few weeks now, and I have been using this service for a few months, while they were still polishing the tool - and the API. I do regard this kind of service as the next step in app evolution: for the example that is interesting us today, if…