Stever's blog

Please ignore this post again. I’m experimenting with some more SEO stuff.

Vintage luggage is a good place to buy suitcase, travel bags and stuff. I changed a few things around, and re-worded the travel bag for laptops page. I also changed the page for rolling suitcases. Try using them for your luggage needs, blah blah.

Wonder if this will work. . .

Here’s a very poignant xkcd comic. It brings about a very good point that life never really dies, it just rearranges. I love xkcd.

My meditation retreat in Malibu was cancelled at the last minute. I decided to go to a neighboring university, Pepperdine, to do some reading and hacking on my computer. All I can say is “wow”:

I’m in the university center, which is a very wide open space with plenty of couches and chairs. I wish I had a camera right now. There’s a fireplace here and a beautiful view of the pacific ocean. The chairs here are very comfortable. Fuck Starbucks, I’m going to start hanging around here when I want to get serious about my computer science research.

Recently I posted the question “What is your best startup idea” on Hacker News. I combined most of the responses plus a few I found lying around the web and put them in an easy-to-read format. If anyone has any additional suggestions for startup ideas, please put them in the reply section of this blog, and I’ll add them manually.

Also, if anyone wants to put any of these ideas into fruition, there are two hacker-style events you can go to:
3 day startup – http://www.3daystartup.com/
Hacker codejam – http://www.meetup.com/hacker-codejam (this one is my personal meetup)

And if you can, please help spread word about this in the hacker community. IE: facebook/twitter/email/blogs/whatever . I’m trying to gain some grass-roots momentum for my meetup.

- IMDB, but for government
- StumbleUpon for iPhone Apps.
- GPS + Digital Photos
- Social network for chance encounters
- Wikipedia for genealogy
- Like imdb, but for government
- Online dating site, but from a different perspective
- Community problem solving
- Open source credit scores and history
- Reverse Ebay: Want to buy XYZ
- Facebook + Craigslist
- Who looks like ME?
- Website for sharing startup ideas
- Touch screen restaurant menu
- Location based gaming
- Top-Ten List
- Dynamic podcasts for reading material
- Website for selling websites
- Real estate aggregator

I get a lot of programmers ask me why I am so gung-ho over lisp. Hal Abelson, one of the authors of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, wrote this in the preface to Simply Scheme. I couldn’t have stated it better myself:

One of the best ways to stifle the growth of an idea is to enshrine it in an educational curriculum. The textbook publishers, certification panels, professional organizations, the folks who write the college entrance exams–once they’ve settled on an approach, they become frozen in a straitjacket of interlocking constraints that thwarts the ability to evolve. So it is common that students learn the “modern” geography of countries that no longer exist and practice using logarithm tables when calculators have made tables obsolete. And in computer science, beginning courses are trapped in an approach that was already ten years out of date by the time it was canonized in the mid 80s, when the College Entrance Examination Board adopted an advanced placement exam based on Pascal.

. . .

Harvey and Wright’s introduction to computing emerges from a different intellectual heritage, one rooted in research in artificial intelligence and the programming language Lisp. In approaching computing through this book, you’ll focus on two essential techniques.

First is the notion of symbolic programming. This means that you deal not only with numbers and letters, but with structured collections of data–a word is a list of characters, a sentence is a list of words, a paragraph is a list of sentences, a story is a list of paragraphs, and so on. You assemble things in terms of natural parts, rather than always viewing data in terms of its tiniest pieces. It’s the difference between saying “find the fifth character of the third word in the sentence” and “scan the sentence until you pass two spaces, then scan past four more characters, and return the next character.”

The second technique is to work with higher-order functions. That means that you don’t only write programs, but rather you write programs that write programs, so you can bootstrap your methods into more powerful methods.

These two techniques belong at center stage in any beginning programming course, which is exactly where Harvey and Wright put them. The underlying principle in both cases is that you work with general parts that you extend and combine in flexible ways, rather than tiny fragments that you fit together into rigid structures.

You should come to this introduction to computing ready to think about ideas rather than details of syntax, ready to design your own languages rather than to memorize the rules of languages other people have designed. This kind of activity changes your outlook not only on programming, but on any area where design plays an important role, because you learn to appreciate the relations among parts rather than always fixating on the individual pieces.

Programming C is kinda like making a machine with interlocking gears. If one of the gears is off, the whole thing doesn’t work. But as long as it is programmed correctly, it functions like clockwork.

Lisp, on the other hand, works kinda like a biological ecosystem. Groups of simple units (cells) can be grouped and organized a certain way can create insanely complex systems (humans) with relative ease. It’s hard to do this in C because the gearwork becomes too complex.

I’ve been attending a lot of technology meetups/barcamps lately and I figure I would create one my own. Here:

Here’s the link: Hacker Codejam

The basic idea is we get together in an open space for a few hours, mix for a bit, separate into groups and pair program together. My dad has some space next door to me that I can use, it’s about 2700 square feet. I might even set up some projectors/HD sets if they’re needed so it’s easier to display the code.

The whole idea is to get together and work on projects together in a collaborative environment. Quote-unquote “hard” problems suddenly become easy when they’re attacked at the group level. It’s also a good environment to hang out, have some (sometimes) free food, brainstorm ideas with other people, give/receive advice for a programming problem you happen to have, and perhaps even find startup founders.

Anyway, check out the meetup, and I encourage the readers of my blog to tell your friends and post this up on your blog/twitter/facebook or whatever. I’m trying to create some internet buzz.

One of the big misconceptions of Western thinking is that more data and more analysis leads to better decision making. This is just plain false. The above cartoon is a humorous example of this. We tend to interpret data only through the lens of our dominant idea. More evidence simply takes use further along the lines of our own hypothesis. In this case, the above detectives formed an unconscious bias and they are now likely to underemphasize clues that don’t support the hypothesis and overemphasize other clues that do. Most problems in thinking are due to errors in perception rather than errors in logic. IE more mistakes are made from people jumping to the wrong conclusion due to a wrong interpretation of the evidence than by making a strict logical error.

10/GUI is probably one of the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface I’ve seen in a long time. This concept proposes a multitouch interaction system that does not require a multitouch screen (and thus does not have to deal with all the problems such a screen causes), but instead uses a multitouch area near the keyboard. The proposed graphical user interface makes full use of this multitouch area. Watch the video, it’s definitely worth your time (of course, some people disagree ☺).

Click on following link to see (I couldn’t embed it in my blog, hhhhh):

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Look at this picture and tell me what you see first. . . do you see a young woman or an old woman?

Usually, you have to point out the other perspective before someone sees it. This is the problem with most people when they brainstorm. Once you’re adept at looking at a certain situation in a certain way, it’s hard to break free. Traditional brainstorming reiterates the same existing patterns and perceptions and only change them in a minor way. This does not lead to breakthroughs! Most people don’t know that they do this though. . . they’re trapped in a cognitive jail and don’t know it.

One of the ways to break free from the jail is to be purposely absurd. IE: find a random word and crossing it with your problem. The more outlandish, the better. Then run an experiment with that random word. It’s usually a waste of time, of course, but occasionally it leads to surprising results and unanticipated consequences. Once you look at it and say “hmmm, that’s funny. . .”, you run with it. This helps discover aspects about the problem that are not immediately obvious.

ha ha,

One of my postings actually made Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=857297