Companies I would have loved to found:

• Apple (OMGOMGOMG)
• Etsy (how I would have loved to have founded this one)
• Google (organizing human knowledge is important)
• Wikipedia (ditto)
• Quora (ditto)
• Wikileaks (to be free is the most fundamental right of an individual)
• Facebook (the world is alive for the first time ever)
• YouTube (links of pure joy)
• Flickr (photography)
• Vimeo (classy video)
• Yelp (despite the crappy design, restaurants are beautiful places and local businesses are nice)

Companies that I wouldn’t really mind running and turning into something more meaningful:

• Dropbox (files will be dinosaurs soon)
• Twitter (ugly)
• Last.fm (not in its current state)
• Blogger (bad design)
• Tumblr (only problem: hipsters)

I would rather kill myself than start these companies:

• Every gaming company
• Virtually all dating sites
• Most YCombinator companies
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft
• Palantir
• Foursquare
• Gowalla (subject to change)
• Formspring

I hope the code is useful to someone who wants to setup a quick forum running on Google App Engine. There’s no error checking and if I recall correctly it was all written overnight. Looking at this project again makes me surprised that I was so much better at visual design last year than I am now.

In this app, you would hit a hot-key or click on the icon in the Mac statusbar, type in the number of minutes and seconds and you’re done. When the time’s up, it will emit a sound and/or flash a Growl notification. You can run as many timers simultaneously as you want.

This is an incredibly simple app that would make me (and a lot of others, I believe) so much more productive. Nothing like this exists for the Mac yet so this is a request to the world at large to bring such an app into existence. PLEASE MAKE THIS.

It’s easy to get disappointed with technology and to question what’s important and what’s not. Are people really happier than they were a hundred years ago or when they lived in villages? What’s with the stress and the constant striving for seemingly nothing in our modern lives? After all, an iPad is just an iPad regardless of how magical it might seem. From a technologist’s point of view, there are so many things in life that are easier, so many things that the comfort of a hundred thousand odd dollar job offers, so why bother starting new companies or embarking on risky endeavors?

Trivializing technology is easy enough.  For one thing, we are so immersed in it, that the simple lives of the past and in distant places seem appealing, perhaps just for how starkly different they are. Humans definitely live longer than they have ever done and that’s an disputable success of technology. But even that can’t be conclusively called an “improvement”. After all, the answer to the question of whether people live happier lives has to be argued on subjective grounds.

In this unsure state of mind, I stumbled across an interview of Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla). When asked about the importance of going to Mars, he explains that the biggest criteria for what he chooses to work on is how much it matters on the scale of evolution and the universe. Just as easy as trivializing technology is forgetting the magnitude of our technological achievements. In the 4 billion years since life begun, in the history of earth, at no moment in time has the possibility of landing on Mars even been within the realm of possibility. Ever! Until today. (Sit back and think about that for a minute)

An object from Earth landed on the moon for the first only 50 years ago even though the Earth and the moon have been around for billions of years before that. We communicated via video despite 6000 miles of distance for the first time ever only within the last ten years. These are incredible advances on the magnitude of billions of years. That 6 feet tall humans could achieve things like this, considering the vastness of space and time, using a minuscule brain is just remarkable.

A lot of pursuits, a multitude of possible careers and paths in life don’t make that huge of a difference on this scale. Being a technologist, doing research or being part of a company that’s sending people to space are few of the things that do. That’s why we should be proud of humanity’s progress. That’s why we do what we do.

I started working on Project Euler problems last night when I was bored. It’s fun. I’m going to be putting up solutions as I work through the problems on GitHub. The solutions will probably not be very elegant or the fastest possible ones because I like to do these problems as 15-minute work breaks.

So, I wrote a couple of functions that let you do exactly that. The code’s on Gist here. I hope this saves someone 10 hours of banging their head thanks to Facebook’s incompetency.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to think in very abstract terms. What this means in practice is that, if there’s some simple, general, elegant point to be made, tell it to me right away. Don’t start with some messy concrete example and attempt to “work upward”, in the hope that difficult-to-grasp abstract concepts will be made more palatable by relating them to “real life”. If you do that, I’m liable to get stuck in the trees and not see the forest. Chances are, I won’t have much trouble understanding the abstract concepts;

Another case where localtunnel has been very useful for me is when I’m developing Facebook Connect apps. The official FBConnect Javascript library has some issues with setting cookies when running locally. I looked through the code but I couldn’t find any reason why it wouldn’t create a cookie because it was running locally (more details on the bug here). And I spent hours trying to get it work on localhost but in vain. But simply using localtunnel and giving the Facebook Developer site the public URL makes it work.