Pretty unfortunate series of events for the xkcd writer. My favorite quote:

One of them looks, shakes her head, and says my system is like that guy in Star Trek after the transporter accident.

Part of the reason I haven’t been posting is I plan to move my blog. If you look through my archives, you’ll see lots of ‘plans’ I’ve had, so we’ll see if this comes to fruition.

Most people won’t appreciate the following link. It’s testimony by Dr. T.J. Rodgers to congress, on March 25, 1993. It comes out against President Clinton’s plan that would involve additional government investment in Silicon Valley.

A lot of it sounds familiar to investment in alternative energy now. I got it from a Paul Krugman essay. Here is the testimony.

Paul Graham has a post up about how to jump start a rival to San Francisco. I almost went to Google Austin, before deciding to come to SF and Facebook instead.

Part of me, however, prefers Texas to California. Maybe it’s just rooting for the underdog. Or maybe it’s Whataburger over In N Out. Anyway, in the long run, I hope that there exists more than one startup haven in the US. Graham says it might take as little as $30 million to get it going. As he says, that’s not much compared to stadiums. Politically unfeasible, but he points out one interested rich person could pull it off.

It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco. Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as “hip” and “tolerant,” or as reflecting “traditional values?” Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home?

My answers to the question:

• Austin has pretty nice weather. If you’re a fan of warmth, it’s even better than SF most of the year.
• I think people live downtown. Can someone who lives there respond?
• “Keep Austin weird.”
• As the child of two Aggies, it’s hard for me to admit, but UT is a good school.
• I guess it’s not that walkable
• I think nerds would feel at home

So yeah, when’re you going to start, Mr. Dell?

Coming to terms with reality, I significantly cut back my blogs. I really came to the conclusion when I was reading The Last Lecture. The video is, of course, exceptional.

The book acts as a good supplement to the video. Some points are better developed because it’s not so cramped for time. Other things that were too emotional to delve into in the video get explored. One of my thoughts coming away from it was that I can’t wait to have children.

Onto the point of this post. I’ve known for a while there’s too much content. Too many books, blogs, movies, tv shows, and artists that I want to consume. In The Last Lecture, Pausch talked about how much he emphasizes time management to his students. That got me thinking.

I really enjoyed following the politics of economic policy, as well as some personal finance blogs. But, they aren’t that relevant to my life right now, and there are more important things to do with precious time. So, here is my funeral for my reading of these blogs.

• Megan McArdle: Good economic reasoning seasoned with personality.
• Marginal Revolution: Great pair of GMU Econ Profs. Tyler Cowen is a renaissance man.
• EconLog: Kling has had some of the best financial crisis coverage that you’ve never heard.
• Greg Mankiw: Classic
• Radley Balko: The world would be a better place if people knew about the abuses of the drug war.
• Jacob Grier: Libertarian Commentator, Bartender, and Barista
• Clive Crook: Foreign perspective on domestic politics.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates: Intelligent racial commentary from the other side, with personality.
• gapingvoid: Interesting cartoons and thoughts on living with the new web.
• Get Rich Slowly: Good thoughts about personal finance.
• One Frugal Girl: One person’s journey through finance.
• I Will Teach You to be Rich: I’d say more of a self improvement site. Interesting.

Maybe in a little bit, I’ll detail the high volume blogs that I do still choose to read.

Two related things came across my radar recently. The first is a post from Bob Sutton, Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction. Failure is a necessary and crucial part of eventual success. What I regret the most is all the ideas I haven’t tried to implement.

The second thing is a video of Conan O’Brian speaking to the Harvard graduating class of 2000. It’s quite entertaining. He eventually goes on to details all of the failures he had, and how they shaped his life for the better. “Success is like a white tuxedo, it’s great when you get it, but then you are afraid to get it dirty.”

Here is a great article about how dissent in Egypt is using facebook to organize. The most interesting thing to me is that facebook is working better than the internet by itself was. It too easy for the government to go to the site and shut it down. They can’t shut down or block facebook, because too many people use it for the mundane. That allows it to be used for other things like free speech. I’m quite excited to be working here. Pray that we can help make the world a better place.

In VA, I lived in a nice townhouse with three other people. I was happy to save money by living in the smallest room. It was 9′ x 9′. When I moved out to SF, I decided to go to the other end of the spectrum. Thus, I have an enormous one bedroom loft in Mission Bay (SOMA). I hope friends come to visit . Facebook is going well. There are an extraordinary number of interesting problems. Considering we have ~1 million active users/developer, I suppose that’s to be expected. This is definitely a place where one’s work is highly leveraged. (We are always looking for more engineers, so if I know you and you might be interested, drop me a line.)

Facebook is setup so that during your first 6 (for me 8 due to vacation) weeks, you are given diverse, but somewhat trivial, bugs in what they call bootcamp. The advantages are several fold. As a new developer (hereafter called n00b), it always takes time to get up to speed with a code base. Thus something that would take a more experienced employee 2 hours to fix, might take a n00b 8 or even 16. But, by working on a diverse set of problems, the n00b gets familiar with a broad spectrum of the code base. As the n00b solves the bugs, he or she gets to know various people around the company. Also, full time employees just don’t have time for all these minor tasks. Finally, since the problems to solve are usually minor, they typically don’t overwhelm the n00b.

The teams I am interested in are, in order, Internal Tools, Infrastructure, and Site Integrity. When I was at my last company, I started reading about bug tracking software as well as version control. For some reason, I”m just really interested in how software companies manage their process. I guess it takes my interest in software and combines it with my interest in people. When the bootcamp manager heard that I was actually interested in an email thread we were having about our bug tracking, he instantly thought Internal Tools would be a good fit, and I agree. Hopefully, I’ll talk about the interesting problems the other two teams face at a later time.

For a while, I didn’t have furniture, just a nice apartment. However, I lucked into some free, gently used couches and decided to get a nice bed and mattress from ikea. I own one cooking utensil, but facebook provides all my meals during the week. The food there is quite good, significantly more flavorful and healthy than what I would prepare for myself. I’m very close to the train so my commute in the evening is often an hour, but I spend almost all of it with access to the internet, so I can’t complain.

Or course I like it when Reason interviews security expert Schneier. Most of it is just good summaries of what’s on his blog, but I liked this answer to the last question:

Security is designed to protect us from the dishonest minority. It’s important to remember that. I remember being told as a child: “Never talk to strangers.” That’s actually stupid advice. If a child is lost or scared or alone, the smartest thing he can do is find a kindly looking stranger to talk to. The real advice is: “Don’t answer strangers who talk to you first.” The difference is important. In the first case, the child selects the stranger—and the odds of him selecting a bad person are pretty negligible. In the second case, the stranger selects the child; that’s more dangerous. I don’t think that’s either optimism to rightly point out that most people are honest, or pessimism to figure out how to best secure ourselves from the dishonest minority; it’s analytical realism.

Ironically, then, a bird’s-eye view of parenting research suggests that it would be good for the world if parents stopped trying so hard. Parents would be better off, because they would be doing less of something that — through excessive familiarity — has lost its charm. Children wouldn’t be worse off, because parental “investment” has little payoff anyway. In fact, if we take children at their word, they’d be better off. Kids know better than anyone that if mom and dad aren’t happy, nobody’s happy.

That’s Joshua Gans quoting Bryan Caplan. I look forward to reading both Parentonomics and Selfish Reasons to Have Kids

Stack overflow linked to an interesting post by Nicholas Carr about two camps of Wikipedia contributors.

Inclusionists believe that there should be no constraints on the breadth of the encyclopedia – that Wikipedia should include any entry that any contributor wants to submit. An article on a small-town elementary school is no less worthy for inclusion than an article on Stanford University.

Deletionists believe in weeding out entries that they view as trivial or otherwise inappropriate for a serious encyclopedia.

He posed it as a chioce. We can discover what an unbounded wikipedia can turn into, or we can discover how high quality a volunteer encyclopedia can become. But we can’t do both. He says maybe it’ll fork, but I doubt it, because then you have to duplicate effort for the overlap. Hopefully danvk will slap us with some knowledge.