Parse.ly has an official “take your birthday off” policy, so I made sure to set a good example.

I remember when I was younger, I used to look forward to birthdays very eagerly. Birthdays were when I got a new videogame or programming book. Birthdays were about stuff, and taking the day to play with new toys.

Now, over a decade later, my birthday is much less about stuff. I don’t play videogames anymore, and I already know how to program. I am fortunate to live comfortably and don’t long for stuff any longer. My Nintendo Wii gathers dust (like everyone else’s, it seems). My computer is no longer used to amuse me, but to allow me to work on my passions — building software, building a company, staying informed, informing others. I have a seemingly endless queue of books I’d like to read, movies I’d like to watch, things I’d like to write, software I’d like to build. I’ve come to realize that birthdays, at my age, are more about time.

In my ruthlessly efficient worldview — where I regularly talk of cost-benefit analysis, backlog prioritization, and productivity — my birthday has become about taking a moment to flip my prioritized world on its head. Let’s not pick an item from the top of the prioritized backlog. Instead, let me take something from the backburner, for once. Let me behave — if only for a day — as if I had all the time in the world.

I don’t need stuff. I just need time. Of course, that’s the bittersweet part of one’s birthday. That even as you come to realize the importance of time, the day acts as a reminder of how our time on this earth is limited. 1 day passes, and only n-1 left to make a difference.

DreamIt Ventures had just cut us a check for $20K to get our startup off the ground. But my cofounder Sachin and I were worried. $20K seems like a lot of money, but it’s actually not that much. Not when you’re using it for both living expenses and to hire other people to get your company off the ground. So we started planning our spend and rationing the money immediately.

We knew we’d use some of the money for our living expenses. We had just arrived in Philadelphia, and we were living in a startup house with Matt and Burak, the founders of Tidal Labs, and Jack, one of the founders of SeatGeek. It turns out that rent wasn’t that expensive in Philly, especially in this arrangement. Instead, our number one cost, we determined, was going to be food.

The Next Meal

One of the founders of modern management, Peter F. Drucker, once wrote, “In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.” How true. But every startup entrepreneur I talked to obsessed with one thing and one thing only: “runway”. In other words, where the next meal would come from once the small amount of funding we got ran out.

With some good take-out and food truck options in University City (where DreamIt’s offices were), we were already spending as little as $10/person/day. But actually getting this food wasted valuable time, and it usually wasn’t very healthy. We heard reports of the “Startup 15″ — the 15 pounds many founders gain when beginning work on their companies. We also knew that when you eat like crap, it affects your productivity negatively. Finally, we knew healthier takeout options were prohibitively expensive. This presented a serious problem. Thinking like founders, we decided to hack this situation to our advantage.

Most companies at DreamIt figured it couldn’t get any better than the food trucks, and stuck to low-cost takeout most every day. We wondered — was there a way we could cut our food cost down, eat healthily, have positive productivity, save time, and hell, even lose weight in the process?

The Birth of a Good Idea

Thus was born The Startup Diet. What we needed was a diet with the following properties:

• Healthy, energy-filled food to enhance productivity
• Low daily calorie intake to prevent weight gain
• Idiot-proof and simple meal preparation
• Extremely cheap per-person cost
• Ability to purchase in bulk to reduce time wasted at supermarket

Sachin went online researching diet options and came across Tim Ferriss’s blog. Ferriss takes a scientific approach to living, and is best known for his popular book, The 4-Hour Work Week. The relevant article Sachin found was called How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise. This provided an excellent starting point.

The Four Rules

I encourage you to read his post, but for the impatient, here are his rules:

• Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates
• Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again
• Rule #3: Don’t drink calories
• Rule #4: Take one day off per week

The diet we came up with was basically a fork of Ferriss’s. We followed his four rules. The most important of these ended up being rules #2 and #4. By turning our meals into a routine, it became much easier to make them efficient and reduce the time spent buying, prepping, and cooking food. By taking one day off per week, we didn’t feel that we were “missing out” on important business opportunities as a result of our diet — e.g., lunch appointments with mentors or a night out at the bar to blow off steam with the team and other founders. Our “cheat day” also had an interesting other efficiency effect: we were just forced to schedule all of our breakfast/lunch/dinner meetings for a single day, and thus didn’t interrupt our work week with distractions.

The Core Insight: Beans as a Base

The goals of our diet were different than Ferriss’s. But like him, we used beans/legumes as a base. Beans are an excellent base food for a startup diet because they meet all of our core requirements above. But the best thing about beans is their startup economics. If you consider that our goal is to ingest the cheapest/healthiest possible calories, you can’t find a more flexible foodstuff than canned black beans. You can buy organic canned black beans for as little as $1.50/can. One can of beans is around 600 calories.

If you look at black beans from an efficiency standpoint, you get 4 calories per $0.01. Compare a slice of pizza which is 200 calories and will usually run you $2.50; that’s only about 0.8 calories per $0.01, making beans about 5X more efficient. But beans aren’t just more energy-efficient, they’re also loaded with protein and fiber (about 7g of each per serving). Most of the cost in a diet comes from eating expensive proteins like chicken and beef, and beans have the ability to provide both efficient calories and efficient proteins at the same time. Finally, you can buy canned beans in bulk and store them.

For other nutrition, we would lean on four more sources: eggs; salad (mixed greens, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers); prepackaged vegetarian protein sources like tofu, seitan, and wheat gluten which we would use sparingly; and canned soups.

The Trial Run

We went to the supermarket to run our first trial. We knew this would need some coordination. Our first trick was to make an up-front investment in lots of differently-sized Ziploc containers and canvas carrying bags, so that we could flexibly relocate food where we needed it (home, office).

We wanted to prep food for the week ahead of time and bring it into the office to ensure we didn’t cheat on the diet. The next trick was to come up with a meal plan using the four rules and our beans-as-a-base theory. Here is the meal plan we came up with:

• Breakfast: alternate between 2 eggs per person or vegetarian saussage links; add hot sauce and side of mixed greens.
• Lunch: alternate between mixed salad with one can of soup (we liked Split Pea and Lentil) or salad with black beans on top. We would prep the salad for the week in zip lock containers, and leave the rest of the things we needed (e.g. salad dressing or the canned beans) at the office.
• Dinner: a combination of black beans, vegetarian protein (usually “chicken” strips or “beef” rips), hot sauce, onions, and jalapeño peppers. We would eat this “core” food like a burrito stuffing, but instead of putting it in a tortilla, we would eat it with romaine lettuce wrappings. (Think “Lettuce Wraps” that you can get at fancy New American / Asian restaurants.) The great thing about this as our dinner food is that we could make the filling ahead of time for 2-3 days and then just reheat it. Fresh Romaine Lettuce has a great crunch and lets you eat the food with your bare hands, even minimizing dish cleanup time. We just had to keep a regular supply of Romaine Lettuce on-hand.

An Agile-Friendly Diet

I mentioned Matt from Tidal Labs. He was also our landlord. His Spruce Hill House was the perfect atmosphere for getting some serious summer hacking done. But one of the nicest — and eventually, most useful — things about the house was the huge kitchen and huge Sub Zero refrigerator. Matt later told me bought the refrigerator off eBay for a $1 (it wasn’t functional and the owner just wanted to get rid of it), and then Matt fixed it himself. He is scrappy and awesome that way.

Sachin and I treated this Sub Zero fridge as our diet command center. We would prep our meals before and after our long days at the office. One of us would prep breakfast for the day while the other prepped lunch/dinner materials for the next 2 days. We’d collaborate on prepping dinner. Every couple days, we’d swap.

We cherished this time for its management value to the company. In the morning, we’d have a founder standup: we’d figure out the things we wanted to accomplish for the day while prepping and eating breakfast. We’d evaluate the day over dinner, a kind of mini retrospective. The Startup Diet became a kind of management technique.

Making It Work

Perhaps by now you’re convinced that this diet has a lot of cost and efficiency benefits. You can’t beat living on $4/person/day for food. You can’t beat saving (by our estimate) 1-2 hours a day on prep and meal time.

But, the main question we get about this was, didn’t that taste horrible? Surprisingly, no. We used a lot of obvious flavor enhancers to keep things tasting pretty good. We invested in good olive oil, sea salt (in a grinder), black peppercorns (in a grinder), and threw in a liberal helping of spices, hot sauce, and herbs.

The second common question we get was, wasn’t it mind-numbingly boring to keep eating the same thing over and over again? Again, surprisingly, no. The first week you wonder how you’ll go a whole summer like this. The second week, it just becomes the routine.

Remember, startups are hard in the early stages. Every day requires your fullest attention. Therefore, turning meals into a routine actually made a lot of sense — it reduced the degree to which we were interrupted in getting the company off the ground. Our body got used to it, and we hardly even noticed that we were eating the same meals week by week. Rule #4, the cheat day, was the real savior in this aspect. We used to look forward to our cheat days, and we made them count. Cheat days also acted as a kind of reward for a week of focused work.

Making It Your Own

I am not a doctor or a nutrition expert, and so all the regular caveats apply. But this was how we were able to keep our costs down while Parse.ly was being incubated at DreamIt Ventures.

Learn to love black beans and other legumes — they are a healthy, flexible and efficient food. Plan your approach. Turn eating into a routine, and prepare most of your meals ahead of time. Cut out the carbs, beer and soda — drink lots of water instead. Use meal prep time to manage your company. Use your cheat day to manage external relationships and reward yourself.

Stay focused on your startup. Lose weight. Gain productivity. Extend your runway.

The rest is up to you.

For those of us who start companies, we see the company as a vehicle to creating something valuable and lasting for society, while also advancing our personal goals. This isn’t usually hubris or ego, though sometimes it may be. Instead, it’s usually an attempt to make your time worthwhile: to yourself, to those close to you, and — if you’re lucky and persistent enough — to the entire world.

The problem with social mobility is that not every individual begins at the same starting line. In fact, the range is huge. Those who start with an influential family or significant capital resources have a much easier time getting to the top. For those who don’t have this head start, things are a lot harder.

Though America is not entirely merit-based, it can reward individuals for hard work. I’ve experienced the benefit both of an advantageous starting point and hard work in my 26 years on this earth. I also believe that with each step and milestone in my life, my potential to create enduring value for society has increased significantly.

Beginnings

The inspiration for this essay was a comment I read online about a successful young businessman who was the son of a successful businessman. “I’d [like to] read a story about a 25-yo [who] made good on the same scale[,] who went to a state college, had screwed up parents who were too busy fighting with each other or gettiing drunk to even have a clue what he was doing, isn’t childhood friends with a celebrity… Just happened to be smart and hardworking and optimistic even despite all those factors. That would actually be an interesting story.”

My parents weren’t screwed up, but they did fight a lot — my Mom and Dad separated when I was in elementary school and divorced shortly after that. I’ve not been childhood friends with a celebrity and I don’t have a trust fund.

I’m not saying I came from a disadvantaged upbringing — in fact, quite the opposite. I went to public high school in New York. To a New Yorker, that may not sound like a huge step up in the world, but I recognize that public school in New York represents one of the top educations you can get.

I grew up in a nice house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. I had good, encouraging teachers. My parents were liberal and a positive influence. I didn’t have a silver spoon in my mouth, but I also didn’t have any serious handicap in my upbringing. Probably my biggest step up in the world, given my current trajectory, was that when I was 10 or 11 years old, my Dad noticed an interest I had in computers. And so, he bought me a PC (running DOS / Windows 3.1) and set it up for me on Christmas Day. From that point forward, I was enchanted by the machine. And once I got a 28K modem and dial-up access to the web (on one of the first ISPs, The Pipeline), I became a citizen of the world before I had even hit puberty.

This I do know — though I had a head start, I also worked hard. I was a geek — as I got older, I built my own servers in my basement, taught myself to program, and discovered Linux and Free Software. But I also kept ahead in “the real world”. I did feel a little disconnected from my peers in my private pursuits; reflecting on my childhood, I realize I “grew up” a little more quickly than my peers.

My First “Startups”

At 15, I had built and launched somewhat popular websites for a couple of personal projects. Nothing you would remember — each one was related in some way to an interest I had in multiplayer online video games, an interest I aged out of a year later. Each website had between a few hundred and several thousand visitors a week.

But the sites looked nice. When I told my family friends and teachers in my local suburb that “I built websites”, they were all interested in having me work for them. Recognizing the opportunity, I turned this into a business.

By 2010 standards, the websites I built were boring and simple — static designs, gaudy flash “intros”, contact forms and quickly-outdated information portals. Yet in 1999, this was cutting-edge. So cutting-edge that people were willing to pay to be on the web. I printed up business cards and called my company a “digital online identity firm”. Might seem like an obvious thing now, but I felt proud to deliver that value to my early-adopter customers. This was my first “B2B startup”. During this period, my friends would ask me to hang out on the weekends, but I’d be working on HTML/CSS, JavaScript and Macromedia Flash, building up my online portfolio.

At 16, I was approached by the editors of a technology publishing company called Friends of ED to write a couple chapters for a book of theirs called Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio. They found me on the web — my first “digital introduction”, before the days of LinkedIn. On the weekends, I regularly answered people’s Actionscript programming questions in a listserv called flashpro. They liked that I had both a Flash and programming background, so they contacted me to contribute to their book — one of the first that discussed building backend systems and tying them to Flash frontends.

I corresponded with them entirely via e-mail. I wrote the chapters and edited about 80% of the book during my junior year of high school, while also prepping for SATs and acting as editor of my school newspaper. I probably got 3 hours of sleep a night. My friends thought I was crazy.

When the book finally went to press and started showing up on Amazon.com and in Barnes & Noble stores, it was one of my proudest moments in my early adulthood. I just thought about how the work I did was being seen and read by thousands of people across the world. Each of those individuals would go on and use that knowledge to build web applications for other individuals. There was seemingly no limit to the impact of my work. I may have been naive, but I thought, what could be better than this?

I still remember when the editors in the UK found out I was only 16 (it was while we were negotiating payment). They were shocked, they actually didn’t believe me. They had to check with lawyers to see if they could even pay me. Then they paid me the bunch of money they owed me for my hourly editing rate and IP rights, and I had all the savings I needed to live throughout my first couple college years without asking my parents for support.

By 16, I had some unique experiences. I created a market in my skills. I built working software for companies small and large. I contributed to a project that had global impact. I made some real money. And, in my junior and senior years of high school, I got a taste of the competing demands of personal and work life.

College: Creating Value for Myself

When I got into NYU on scholarship, I was thrilled. My grades in high school let me go to a good college without breaking the bank. I would be able to attend a top-tier school without the financial stress typically associated with private schools. I’d get to stay in New York, one of my true loves. I had also been rejected by just about every other top-tier university in the country. Come to think of it, the ups and downs of the college application process was good training for startup life — especially the rejections.

I worked my butt off in college. I really got into it. Not just the coursework, but also just pursuing my passions within the student body. I held talks that tried to stoke up my peers about technology, economics and open source software, all passions of mine. My friends rarely saw me because I was often working on these and other spare time projects.

College was interesting. I worked hard, but rarely got paid for my work. In some sense, working hard in college is good preparation for a startup lifestyle. You work hard because you believe in yourself and in your own potential, not because you have a paycheck coming.

It was also in college where I came to an important realization: I am a software engineer and computer scientist. Though there are many ways for me to add value, my preparation and passions make me especially well-suited to building software. And so, that’s where I should have an impact.

Internship: Creating Value for Others

I took an internship in summer of my sophomore year where I got paid a flat $3000 to build a web application for a NYC-based non-profit, The Unemployment Action Center of NY. I probably spent 750 hours on the thing (60 hours a week), not making it a very profitable proposition. My friends again thought I was crazy — lots of them had taken well-paying and prestigious internships at software companies and banks, but I didn’t even apply to those.

This was my first experience with building a real product that people actually used. I worked entirely from home. I used my own development environment and hosting environment. I gathered requirements directly from the end-users. I made all the technical decisions and implemented all the code. That was good experience for startup life. Built useful stuff, solved real problems. Made lots of little decisions.

The case management application I built is still running today, relatively bug-free, and has helped thousands of unemployed people get legal representation for free, so that they can get justice for wrongful termination and other cases. I’m really proud of that application. I didn’t care that I got paid $4/hour for it. Looking back, I would have done it for free. What a phenomenal organization and what a great cause to apply technology toward.

Post-College: Creating Value for Money

The rest of my story is told pretty well by this NY Observer article.

I worked at Morgan Stanley for a couple of years while living at home on Long Island to save money. Working at the bank was a huge change from the rest of my life. The primary focus of my job became my paycheck. Technology decisions were made for me, by external committees. I was expected to follow all sorts of processes and procedures. I was expected to become a conventional programmer. I found myself building products that had an unclear end-user.

I did learn things there, too. I learned what it was like to work with engineers on a daily basis. I learned a lot from my managers and colleagues, many of whom were just astoundingly intelligent individuals. I learned how big companies operated. But mostly, I learned a lot about myself.

I learned that work meant more to me than a paycheck. Work should be about solving problems, helping people, and creating enduring value. Money is important, but it wasn’t what attracted me to technology in the first place. And that’s why I knew I had to leave that firm.

Startup Life: Creating Lasting Value for Myself, for Others, and for Money

I accepted this compromise: I would work at the bank to save the money I needed to build my own company. I was “realistic”, and this seemed a fair compromise.

I anticipated that I’d need at least a $20K buffer to start my startup (it ended up being more than that). And in March of last year, I quit Morgan Stanley to embark on this path. My awesome, like-minded friend from NYU, Sachin Kamdar, quit his job too. Together, we tried to build something of value, even though we didn’t know what that would be initially. We worked out of cafes, brainstorming ideas and building prototypes. We consulted on the side — I, through the boutique software engineering firm I founded, Aleph Point. Early on, my girlfriend prophetically referred to my financial strategy in all this as “putting a bandaid on a hemorrhaging femoral artery”.

Our friends thought we were crazy. Chuck a steady paycheck to work on an ill-defined “startup”? For some reason, all we could think was, hell yes we would.

Our first stroke of luck was getting into DreamIt Ventures. NYC didn’t have seed programs like Tech Stars or Seed Start yet. We moved to Philadelphia for the summer, leaving our NYC apartment leases and girlfriends behind. They thought we were crazy. The $20K from DreamIt basically covered our living expenses in Philly, but it did lift some financial pressure for a few months. We came up with a $4/person/day diet — which we called “the startup diet” — that involved eating beans, soup, romaine lettuce, and veggie burgers basically every day. We lived in a “startup house” with the founders of SeatGeek and Tidal Labs. We worked in an office with the founders of Postling, NoteHall, and other fledgling companies. We started hacking on what would eventually become Parse.ly. And for the first time in our lives, we were surrounded by individuals who also felt that what one does is more important than how one benefits.

Our second stroke of luck was finding our exceptionally talented lead engineer, Didier Deshommes, who has been with us ever since we incubated Parse.ly in Philadelphia. Ever since DreamIt, we operate on this maxim: we got our share of luck — now, let’s make our own.

Creating Your Own Luck

Perhaps our startup founding story isn’t remarkable. But lately, reflecting on the last year — where we bootstrapped and self-financed this startup, overworking ourselves and straining our personal relationships — I’ve started to feel like it is pretty remarkable.

We made our own luck. And we’ve brought all our skills and experience to bear. I’ve been preparing for running Parse.ly since the age of 15. I’ve been preparing, basically, my whole life. And I’m so glad we did this together. With all the ups and downs, if I had done this on my own, I would have given up. But we just kept pushing each other. Every time we hit a roadblock, we just said, “we can still do this.” And we did.

I’m really proud of this company and our team. We’ve built a real, valuable technology of lasting value. We’ve learned so much. And we’ve done it all against the odds. We are a small NYC startup with two no-name founders. Neither of us have “prior exits” or “a solid track record”. Neither of us have built and launched startups before. But none of that matters. We discovered that people want their content filtered and prioritized and that online publishers want their content optimized, and we used elbow grease, hustle, and dedicated hacking to make the rest happen.

Our startup is three hard-working and optimistic guys who believe that we can change the world. We put it all on the line to create something from nothing. Our work is still in progress, and there are still challenges ahead. There are easier things we could be doing, but we don’t care. You may think we’re crazy, and you may be right.

But that’s the final lesson of startups, isn’t it? You have to be a little crazy.

—

Thanks to Sachin Kamdar for editing this essay. And thanks to our awesome friends, significant others, and families for still cheering us on even as they rightfully thought we were crazy.

Nobody moves to New York because they think they’re just like everybody else. A young kid, fueled by a toxic blend of bravado and wicked insecurity, can expend a truly terrifying amount of energy trying to prove her exceptionalism, prove that she is different (read: better) than the dull hometown peers she left behind, who go to uncreative jobs in uncreative clothes, eat at Chili’s, practice monogamy.

Describes many non-native New Yorkers really well. No offense non-natives, but some of you are definitely trying to prove something! From Dirty pictures I didn’t want taken

When I signed up for a business checking account at Chase, the branch manager who I worked with (and who now no longer works there) encouraged me to sign up for a business credit card, as well. I thought, hey, why not — I’m just going to use it for small purchases like monthly hosting fees and the like.

Recently, I made a relatively large purchase at Best Buy for a client, which I was going to be reimbursed for. It was about $200. I already had a balance of $350 on my account, and a few days later my account was closing for the month.

When I looked over my account information a few days later, I found a strange charge. $39 OVERLIMIT FEE. What’s that, I thought?

Well, I went to my branch to find out. The branch manager explained that my credit card had a credit limit of $500. Wow. That’s a low credit limit. I explained that I sometimes make reimbursed purchases of more than $500, so this was quite strange value to pick. Further, I already had multiple other credit cards with much higher limits, so I don’t get why they would choose such a small limit for me. “Oh”, the branch manager said, “that’s because we’re picking $500 limits for all new business customers.” Hmph, fine… seems strange, but fine. (The engineer in me thinks, “Couldn’t they have done an analysis of my cash flow to figure out a more reasonable limit? Of course not — this is a bank, after all. That’s expecting them to be smart.”)

“OK,” I said. “So I have a $500 limit on the account. But why is there an OVERLIMIT FEE? Shouldn’t it just be declined? What is that about?” She says, “Oh, unfortunately, I can’t explain why that was charged. You’ll have to call the number on the back of the card.” I say, “Really? Why?” She says, “Unfortunately, we can’t discuss credit card fees at the branch.” This strikes me as a very strange policy, probably just put in place as a deterrent for people actually contesting their fees. Very sneaky little bastards, these Chase guys. But fine, for now I’ll follow the policy.

A couple days later, I call up the number on the back of the card. I ask about the fee. He says, “Yes, sir, that is a completely valid fee.” I reply, “Valid? Who cares if it is valid? Any fee you guys put on my account is ‘valid’. The question is, why was it put there? And is it justified?” He replied, “It was put there because you went over your $500 limit.” I asked, “Why did you let me go over the $500 limit? If I have a limit, shouldn’t I get TRANSACTION DECLINED when I go over? Isn’t that the whole point of a limit?”

The guy on the phone laughs. Literally, he laughed at me. “No, Chase provides overlimit protection as a convenience to our customers. So that if, for example, you’re taking a client out to dinner, you won’t be embarrassed by going over your limit.”

I didn’t respond for a couple of seconds, because I was parsing his sentence. “So, this isn’t so much a fee, as much as a convenient service Chase is providing me. You guys are saving my embarrassment for the mere cost of $39. I get it now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Apparently, the guy didn’t get my sarcasm. “Here’s what I think,” I continued. “I think you guys are just ripping me off. There is absolutely no reason not to decline the transaction, except that in allowing the transaction to go through, you now assess a fee. It doesn’t cost you anything for me to go $50 over limit, as I did. And I paid down the account in full through my automatic payment system just a few days later. So, I think you guys just figured — hey, here’s an easy way to make free money off our consumers. Here’s another fee we can invent because we are greedy bastards.”

He seemed a little taken aback, and then said, “No, sir. Chase does not rip off its customers. Chase is here to serve its customers.”

“OK,” I say. “I’ve been your customer for more than a decade. So since you’re in the business of serving customers, I suppose you’ll have no problem removing this fee, which is completely unjustified.”

“Unfortunately, sir,” he responds, “I cannot remove the fee.”

“What do you mean? Of course you can remove it,” I say, incredulous. “Just pull up my account and press delete on the line that says, OVERLIMIT FEE.”

“No, sir, I cannot. It is a valid fee. Valid fees cannot be removed.”

“There’s that word again. Here is another example of a valid fee: $500 for transferring money between my checking and savings account on a Wednesday. If you guys had that policy, that would be a valid fee.”

“We don’t have that policy.”

“Listen,” I’m revving now. “It would be one thing if you guys charged $1 for going over my credit limit. But you charge $39. You know how you guys came up with the number $39?”

“This fee is set by the executives of the banks.”

“Wow, I wish I had just recorded that to send to Congress! No, really –”, I interrupt. “I don’t care who came up with the number. But I’ll tell you how $39 was picked. It was picked because after rigorous market testing, they found that if the fee were $40, people would grab their kitchen knife, run out in the street, and kill every fucking Chase banker in sight.”

He was silent.

“So, the executives decided — better make it $39.”

He didn’t laugh this time. No sense of humor. “Listen, just let me speak to a supervisor to get this issue resolved.”

He insists, “Sir, no supervisor can remove this fee. The executives mandate that we cannot remove it.”

“Who can I contact to appeal the fee, AND the policy that does not allow it be removed, AND the appointment of the executive who instituted it?”

“You can write a letter to business services in Delaware,” the representative says.

Frustrated, I end with a rant. It was long-winded and I won’t produce the whole thing here. It talked about my prior blog post, which pointed out how Chase ran an insecure document exchange system. It talked about how there are currently 21 Chase customers who are “mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore”, ranting on my site about how crappy Chase is. And I discussed how even after contacting Chase about this issue, even after pointing them to a significant problem with numerous angry customers, they do nothing. Just like they are doing nothing now. A company that is like a black hole.

“And as a systems engineer,” I conclude, “the fact that you guys can’t remove this fee just makes me so god-damn depressed, I can’t even express it to you. We have managed to put a man on the moon, but JPMorgan Chase bank cannot hit delete on a fucking spreadsheet. How pathetic is that?”

I resignedly ask for the complaint address. I write it down. And I end the conversation with, “Listen, I know you’re just doing your job. But I want to make it clear to you that your company does not deserve a single god-damn dime of my money. Neither the money in my personal checking account, nor in my business checking account, nor any of the money my representatives awarded you in that $25 billion bailout that saved your company’s greedy ass. It’s not your fault — it’s your company’s fault. But for the love of everything good and just in this world, man, why the hell do you work for these clowns?”

That bit of humanity connected with him, just a little. I could hear it in his voice. “I hope things turnaround for you with Chase. I really do. But there’s nothing I can do for you at this time.”

I hope things turn around, too. In the meanwhile, I’ll sharpen my kitchen knife.

I highly recommend the entire book. It is not so much a book about beautiful code as about passionate and opinionated programmers and their tastes. But this is a good thing. It was one of the few books about software that I have read in the last decade or so that actually gave me entirely positive feelings about my profession. There is so much raw creativity and thought captured in these few essays. What Brian Kernighan finds beautiful is entirely different from what Matz or simonpj find beautiful. And that’s the thing about a fundamentally creative craft like software. You put five software engineers in a room with a piece of code, and you’re lucky if you come out with only six different opinions about it. It’s like art, or writing. Taste matters.

I don’t recommend people read Beautiful Code to try to imitate some of the code described therein. Instead, I recommend you read it as a sociological or psychological study of what makes proud and bright software engineers tick. For example, for Kernighan it is the simplicity and minimalism that is embodied in UNIX. For Matz, it is the notion that the programming language should be as syntactically flexible as our real languages are. For simonpj, it’s that complicated can be made easy, given the right abstractions. And for Jon Bentley, in one of the more thought-provoking essays in the book, beauty and elegance was only perceived as the size of his code shrank.

The essay about the SVN Delta Editor not only illuminates the internals of SVN, but also illustrates the social dimension to software engineering and design. It is a story about programmers, debating an API, producing it, and then putting it into practice. It is about give and take, and an unteachable skill in problem size and complexity reduction. All this in C! There was a period of time in university where I actually programmed in C full-time, so I have a lot of respect for the elegance with which they crafted this powerful API. C gives you few tools (like OO or explicit interfaces) for doing this kind of work; they had to work in spite of the language’s features and plan carefully.

I have about twenty students in my class, so I was going to print up one copy and get it copied and stapled at a local print shop. (See note on copyright below.) I opened up my ebook PDF of Beautiful Code with acroread on UNIX. I navigated to the right chapter and realized that I wanted to print just that single chapter. I always remember being annoyed whenever I had to do this, for a number of reasons.

1. PDF ebooks sometimes lack the proper “bookmark” information to navigate to the right section to print
2. Since ebooks were once print copies, they tend to have page numbers at the bottom of each page. But since the ebook itself has a different page numbering scheme, all sorts of psychic dissonance occurs. You navigate to page 30 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually page 42 in the ebook. You then navigate to page 45 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually 57 in the ebook.
3. OK, now I know what I need to print… I think. So now I have to enter one of those print ranges in the “Print” dialog. Is it 30-42? No, wait, it’s 42-45… I mean, 42-57 — that’s it! Is that inclusive or exclusive? Oh, my…

It’s really not that bad, and it’s only an occasional annoyance, but it’s always there. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

I had recently upgraded to acroread and noticed that the UI was all spiffed up. And I noticed that this ebook had the right metadata for the bookmarks. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if acroread supported printing a chapter?” I right-clicked on the first entry in the chapter bookmark and was astonished. Lo and behold, my feature existed! (See the image to the right.) I clicked the “Print Pages…” button with a bit of discomfort. I don’t trust software too often, and am always suspicious when I find a feature I didn’t expect to be there. It’s like my inner programmer is saying, “Yea, right — too good to be true.”

A few minutes later, my chapter was printed. I looked it over, and brought it with my other materials to the local print shop. One hour later, I picked up my copies and brought them home to look them over.

I noticed something very strange. Instead of my copies containing pages 42-57, they contained pages 42, 43, 46, 51, 55, and 57. Damn it. There didn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason to the pages that were selected. What kind of sequence was this? I felt that there must be some pattern, some fibonacci-like, non-obvious sequence that applied to these pages. I suspected the first, and obvious, culprit: that the printer had made a mistake. Maybe it’s a human error. But then I looked over my original and indeed, the original only had those pages. Not a human error. I thought to myself, “How is this possible?”

Of course, I’ve probably given you enough information that you’ve already figured it out. Especially if you’re a programmer. We’re just wired to think this way. But in case you haven’t figured it out, I’ll indulge you.

When I went back into acroread, tracing back my steps, I noticed something about that menu item I clicked. It didn’t say Print chapter. Instead, it said, Print pages. Now, conceptually that seems like a small distinction, but I picked up on it.

I started to think like a programmer, rather than a user. This function with a for loop emerged from the program and hovered above it, almost magically. It said:

def print_pages(self, selected):
    to_print = []
    for bookmark in selected.self_and_bookmarked_children():
        to_print.append(bookmark.page())
    PrintSubsystem.queue_job(to_print)

Then I realized the pattern in the pages it picked. There was no pattern. This was a beautiful little bug. A butterfly.

You see, within the narrow world of this Print Pages function, the “feature” works as expected. But from a user’s perspective, it makes absolutely no sense. Rather than printing everything from that bookmark to the next bookmark at the same level (that is, rather than printing a chapter), it printed each individual page that happened to be physically bookmarked (or ‘sub-bookmarked’) in the PDF, at or below that level. This resulted in a bunch of pages being printed that happened to be the pages on which subsections began. But this left out most of the chapter, somewhat randomly.

The worst traits of our profession come out when it is at its least social. I have no doubt that this function that prints these pages was written by a single programmer in a windowless room, without any peer review, pair programming, or other check on his logic. I am sure that he was given the narrow and ill-defined requirement to enable an action to “print bookmark pages”. He needed to think, but instead, he decided to code. And coding got “it” done, for some very weird value of “it”. He was probably under time pressure. But one thing is certain to me: he was alone. No two programmers, debating the design and implementation of this feature, would let each other make this mistake.

The behavior it exhibited truly caught me by surprise. Strange as it sounds, I admired how easily I had been duped by this feature. The human error — the anti-social error — made by that programmer exhibited an odd and enigmatic computer behavior. A human inelegance created a strange sort of cruel machine elegance.

I found it ironic that in trying to print a chapter about beautiful design from a book called Beautiful Code, I came across this beautiful bug. I call the bug beautiful because it managed to fool me, to get me to suffer its wrath while thinking I was getting some convenience. It exhibited behavior that challenged me to identify a pattern, where there was none. It was so clever, it even cost me money (the printing charges). And even though I was a discerning programmer — skeptical of the feature, and so unsure of the software’s operation that I checked the output, albeit too briefly — this little bug managed to outsmart me.

My students will have to live without the chapter, or read it online on their own. I’m not upset about it. There can be beauty, even in failure.

A note about copyright: some readers on reddit and on my comments section suggested that I might be ignoring copyright issues by thinking that I could just photocopy a chapter from this book to distribute to my students. Trust me, I know about copyright. The content of this chapter happens to be available online for free under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Karl Fogel, the author of the article, has even given his informal blessing in my comments section. And finally, by most people’s interpretation of the rules of Fair Use, it was OK for me to copy a chapter for my classroom. I’m surprised no one suggested that this bug might be beautiful in another way: that it saved me from a copyright disaster. I don’t think it was that good… If you are really interested in seeing a debate about this, you can read this thread on reddit. Warning, somewhat painful and longwinded. (Also, if you clicked the anchor link within the article to get to this note, simply click “back” in your browser to return and continue reading.)

This trip emerged as a major convenience for me. My brother was heading out to California for the Real Estate Connect conference, since his company is intimately involved with Real Estate technologies. But he didn’t want to go alone, so he paid for my plane ticket and hotel stay the first few nights to convince me to come out. (Thanks, Alex!)

I got in touch with some people I knew out there, but many of them weren’t going to be around during my stay, due to summer vacations, etc.

Joseph Sofaer, a friend of mine from NYU, was gracious enough to delay a trip to Europe to show me around the area. I was even lucky enough that the first first day I was there, he invited me to a party at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, where I briefly met Mark Zuckerberg, saw Robert Scoble walking around, and met about twenty other software developers in a room of 300, who worked for companies like Yahoo, Pandora, del.icio.us, and, of course, Facebook itself.

The train ride home, I was riding with the creator of the MillionDollarHomepage, probably the best website idea of all time.

Palo Alto and Software is Sexy
—
The vibe in Palo Alto was enviable, especially for a native New Yorker. When I pull out my laptop on the train or in a cafe in NY, screens full of code or running with full-screen vterms, I get stares and strange looks. (Including right now, as I write this blog post on the LIRR…) In Palo Alto, my brother and I walked by two or three cafes, and in each I saw young guys and gals at their laptops, coding away, screens full of GNU make output scroling by, emacs and vim buffers splitting off. I overheard conversation snippets like, “we’re hoping to release our next version in a couple weeks”, “you have got to try metaclass programming with Python”, and “did you see that article on /.?”

In New York, people aren’t that proud to be a geek. You go to a typical gathering and say, “I’m a software developer” and the typical response is, “Oh…”, followed by silence, followed by, “I think I need another drink…”. Sexy in New York, programming isn’t. If you want sex appeal, go into finance, law, or politics.

Opposite in Palo Alto, of course. Which makes you feel great as a software developer. What are you into? If you answer, “Stocks, bonds, and the market” you’ll get the treatment I described above. You answer, “Ruby on Rails” and you’ll be having a 2-hour, heated conversation.

BTW, the Silicon Valley excitement about Ruby on Rails is palpable. Everyone wants a Rails developer.

A quick anecdote to illustrate the NY disdain for geeks: I was out with a friend once who had attend culinary school and was trying her way up the restaurant ladder, to become a chef. She complained, however, that the money in these entry level jobs (food preparer, etc.) in the kitchen was way too little, that it was difficult to get by. So, someone suggested, “Why don’t you waitress on the side?”

Her response, “Waitress? I’m trying to become a chef. That’s like saying to someone who wants to run a company, ‘Why don’t you work as an IT guy?’”

Something tells me that joke wouldn’t work that well in Palo Alto.

San Francisco and Good Coffee
—
It was great to be able to get a little sense of the Silicon Valley vibe on my first day in Northern California. But by the end of the day, my head was spinning. I was ready to head back to an environment that was less technobubble, something a bit more real.

My second day there, I walked around some neighborhoods on my own, particularly Union Square (which is a bit of a tourist center), the Mission (which reminds me of Astoria, but with a different set of ethnic groups), and Noe Valley (which reminds me of the Upper East Side, but with houses instead of apartment buildings).

In the Mission, I ended up stopping by a coffee place named Philz. I asked for an iced coffee. I then watched as the barrista (who I think was Phil!) took a scoop of coffee beans, ground them in a grinder, put them in a coffee machine, and made a fresh cup of coffee. Some ice went in with frothed milk atop it. I kid you not, the BEST iced coffee I have ever had.

Later in the day, when I met up with Joey at his apartment, I mentioned that I had just stumbled upon the best iced coffee of my life a couple hours ago. And he said, “Oh, man… if you want good coffee, you have to try this place Philz.”

I laughed and said “THAT’s exactly where I was!” and he responded, “Man, you had ‘just stumbled upon’ possibly the best coffee in the world.” So that was a bit of good luck. We ended up going back to Philz later that day

Joey had to leave the next day for Europe, but we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about software ideas, in particular details about his latest idea, a Blackboard replacement application hosted on the Facebook Platform. If you’re on the Facebook, check out the application called “Courses”. It’s quite cool, even if it is in the early stages.

The Weekend
—
My brother’s real estate conference was winding down, so he snuck me in so I could catch the last couple presenters. Unfortunately, I had missed the presentation by Craig Newmark (of craiglist fame), which was apparently pretty good. Instead, I caught a panel by some head honchos of real estate technology at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Realtor.com.This panel was mighty uninteresting. Despite the fact that these guys were all supposed to be team leads and head-techies-in-charge, they all gave tired lines and made me question whether they actually knew what they were talking about.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to see a conference of this kind — lots of buzz, lots of software developers all gathered together, a lot of excitement about an emerging market.

That afternoon, we took a bus tour of San Francisco, which was well worth it due to the hilarious tour guide named “Silvio.”

We spent that night at a Vietnamese Restaurant named “La Colonial“. Excellent.

Saturday morning, we walked around the city, starting out in Union Square, moving through to Civic Center. We stopped at the Asian Art Museum, where I saw an exhibit on Manga and Japanese Wood Block art, both very good, among others. Finally, we ended up in the Lower Haight and Haight Ashbury, where we spent the afternoon lounging and exploring.

At night, we headed to North Beach and ate dinner there. We ended the night at the bar at the top of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, which my brother said reminded him a bit of Windows on the World, when that was still around.

Conclusion
—

For a short trip, I got to see a good chunk of the city, and even got to take that important visit outside the city. Overall, I had a great time.

As a technologist based out of New York, I have to say that San Francisco is quite appealing. The weather, the laid back attitude, the independent shops, cafes and restaurants, the technology buzz. But moving there would certainly seem like selling out. Sure, we may not be able to reproduce Silicon Valley but we can do our own thing. New York is too strong a city to be left in the hands of financiers and lawyers.

Stay tuned.

One thing I have wanted to do is to create a “schism” in my blog between the political and technological sections. I realize there is no sense forcing my audience to wade through technology posts to get to the political stuff they may be interested in, and vice versa.

The main thing stopping me from doing so is the fact that even as I have a single blog for these two topics, I hardly find the time to post to either of them. That isn’t to say I don’t have much to say. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Lisp (for the first time in my life), and have interesting ideas surrounding my use of Eclipse technologies and modeling tools at work. I have been following a lot on the political side of things, from Libby’s commuted sentence to debates over globalization, to WSJ’s potential new owner. And I’ve finished a slew of books, from John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

But I just lack the time to write. I’m busy at work (at least 10-12 hours a day, when you include commute time), and the last thing I want to do when I get home is use computers some more. Which is sad, but an inevitable result of my situation.

I truly do not want this blog to die. How might I save it?

I have been perpetually delaying a review of Capitalism 3.0 and Dreaming in Code, both of whom deserve it. But I promise one soon. I use Hofstadter’s Rule of Thumb lately for estimating time: however long you think it’s gonna take, double it and add a unit of time. So if you think it’ll take two hours, it’ll really take four days. If you think it’ll take five days, it’ll really take 10 weeks. And so on.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been busy at work — actually working on some cool stuff from a technology standpoint, mainly in the realm of hacking with pieces of the Eclipse Modeling Framework, and its related projects like GMF, RCP, Eclipse Core, etc.

On my commute, I’ve been enjoying reading Making Globalization Work by Stiglitz. Although one of my friends mentioned to me that this book would be quite boring, and for the most part he was right. Not the lofty stuff of Barnes in Capitalism 3.0; but perhaps Stiglitz’s recommendations are much more practical for ways to improve the current system.

The other book I started recently is a long, written interview with John Kenneth Galbraith (much in the style of Socrates) which is entitled, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics. What’s amazing is to see Galbraith, this towering (literally) Keynesian economic thinker, speaking in the 70s of the growth of corporate power, the undermining of labor, and the insidious nature of market fundamentalism. And yet, here we are, 30 years later, heeding none of his warnings, and entering into the new “global age” of “The World is Flat”.

Oh yes indeed, I do need to write some reviews very soon.

I’d post a longer review, but I’m headed down to New Orleans today. Will post a longer review when I get back, hopefully also of Capitalism 3.0, whose ideas have been swimming in my head the last few days of commute.  I think they really deserve to be summarized and presented here.

In the meanwhile, I’ve started reading Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. This book, in particular, has been a kind of catharsis for most of my armchair ideas in economics, at least so far.  It’s a very strange feeling to read the ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank explaining his own ideas about overcoming the zealousness of “market fundamentalism” prevalent in economic circles, while I, who never studied economics formally, think, “Why would anyone trained in this discipline actually believe that markets are a magic force that work on their own?”  But I guess ideology always trumps rationality.

Today after work I headed to NYU to hear Jimmy Wales give a talk on Wikipedia, but was dismayed to discover that the auditorium was packed and I couldn’t get in.

Then, I noticed that Ralph Nader was at the IFC Theater on 6th Avenue presenting the new documentary made about him called “An Unreasonable Man,” and I was about to go to the 4:55pm showing of that, but tickets sold out for that! Man, what bad luck!

At the end of the day, I ended up meeting Max for drinks at McSorley’s, so that’s not so bad. We talked a bit about Richard Dawkin’s book “The God Delusion,” and whether it’s a good thing that there is a zealous atheist roaming the streets of intellectual-dom.

This is one of the hottest parenting issues (along with breastfeeding and sleeping). I am not surprised that Salon is already flooded with letters and the emotions are rising high on both sides. I am the mother of a 3-year-old boy. He is uncircumcised and the idea of having him circumcised never even crossed my mind. I am from Europe, therefore circumcision is not part of my culture. My husband is a Hindu from India, so it isn’t part of his culture either. There is more and more evidence that shows that circumcision is an unnecessary procedure. There are more and more organizations and individuals trying to educate the public about this. Two of my favorites are: www.jewsagainstcircumcision.org and www.nocirc.org.

There is lots of very useful information regarding this topic. There are a few points I’d like to make for the sake of argument against it. Some fathers say: I want my son to look like me. So if you had a finger, a hand, or an arm missing from birth or as a result of an accident would you want to chop off your child’s corresponding body part just to make him look like you? (Sorry this is not my own idea but I like it a lot). The other point is my original thought: we, as Western society are outraged by the practice of female circumcision (mostly practiced in Africa and some predominantly Muslim areas elsewhere). What is the difference? That female circumcision is not a tradition in our culture. So it’s O.K. to keep mutilating our boys as long as we leave our girls alone… How hypocritical! And on top of that both traditions originate on the same basis: to reduce sexual pleasure and the desire to masturbate and enjoy sex.

As per some first person accounts from men who grew into adulthood intact and then got circumcised, they tell exactly how much less pleasurable sex is afterwards… Do a search on your favorite search engine for more info on the topic.

So as a parent of a boy I will leave my son’ penis alone and will make sure that everybody else does until he is old enough to make a decision about having his own body part cut off (which I think would only occur if he ends up having problems with having foreskin and sex would be unpleasant or painful).

I am not condemning people who think differently. I simply feel sorry for their baby boys… I hope one day we’ll come to our senses about this painful and inhumane practice.

As for the author, I feel sorry for him too, that he had to go through this emotionally painful experience to come to understand that he made the wrong choice.

I have a lot more to say on this topic (in fact, in college I wrote long research papers on the topic, including some original research into grotesque Victorian age masturbation control techniques, which were the precursors to routine circumcision), but probably won’t get the time to write it up. If you’re wondering about it, drop me a line.

LINUX AND FREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

The State of the F/OSS World Update
with talk/demo by Andrew Montalenti

December 5, 2006 @ 7pm
Room 813, Warren Weaver Hall

Open source software is now mainstream. Whether it’s the nearly ubiquitous Mozilla Firefox browser, the Azureus peer-to-peer client, the Eclipse IDE, or the Linux kernel, almost everything in the computer world has been touched by free / open source software developers collaborating across the globe.

Judging by the state of the community, this movement doesn’t seem to be losing steam. With Microsoft Windows Vista around the corner offering a potentially bloated and hardware-requirements-heavy experience, desktop Linux operating systems are taking aim at the big giant, with big support around Ubuntu, Fedora (Redhat), and SuSE (Novell), among others.

So, what’s next for the free / open source world? That’s what this talk is meant to help you find out. After explaining a bit of the history of free and open source software, and the history of recent community and corporate efforts to make it widely available, this talk will show off some of the new, cool technologies coming out of the open source community, such as 3D desktop effects, productivity tools, enhanced multimedia support, better support for laptops, and a full suite of industry-grade development tools. The talk will also discuss some of the legal and intellectual property issues facing the open source community, with a particular focus on the recent news coming from the Novell / Microsoft deal and Sun’s decision to open source Java.

Who is this talk meant for? Anyone who hasn’t tried out Linux on their desktop, or anyone who is at least mildly interested in the current and future state of the computer industry. Free / Open Source software has completely rocked the industry, changing every aspect of it from top to bottom, and this wave is only growing bigger every day. NYU students interested in copyright issues surrounding open source may also find this talk valuable.

In any event, this won’t be a boring lecture — it’s meant to be interactive and fun!

The speaker will be bringing free CDs of Ubuntu Linux, a community-driven desktop Linux operating system which you can install on almost any home PC! Come for the free CDs, stay for the revolution.

It went very well, with about 10 people in the audience. You can download the slides in OpenOffice or PDF. Admittedly, the slides aren’t as cool without the live demo of Beryl I did at the talk itself. Yay 3D desktop effects.

Tonight I violated my own rule (hence the 2am post), but will probably pay for it tomorrow in coffee during the day.

I need a kick-ass job that’s only part time but pays full time salaries.

p.s. been using the Spring Framework extensively on a project at work. All I can say is, “Wow.” I’m finally enjoying Java development again. The framework truly rocks, but you just need to give it some time. Once it grows on you (I suggest Manning Press’ “Spring in Action”), it becomes like a fungus that permeates the way you think about software design. Really cool.

p.p.s. it fucking rocks, btw, that the Dems won the House and Senate. Bill Moyers 2008?

Stay tuned.

I did think it kind of odd when I started receiving letters in the mail offering me things like ice sculptures at wholesale prices, china with my restaurant logo imprinted on it, and kitchen supplies. Clearly, someone was told that my name was simply the name of a badass italian restaurant in Manhasset, and it’s stuck.

Well, every time someone has posted a profile on my “restaurant,” I’ve requested it be taken down. But the folks at MyTravelGuide.com are basically unresponsive. So, I decided to post a photograph of the restaurant, since I know it better than anyone else.

Does anyone know how to find out what marketing database thinks I am a restaurant, so I can purge this misconception once and for all?

On the bright side, I’m going to Argentina for six weeks. See you in Buenos Aires.

The main reason we’re depressed is because, though both Sak and I like the Facebook and are users, we can’t help noticing one thing:

It’s not that complicated to build a website like that.

In fact, it’s downright easy. If I weren’t so busy with computer science classes, I probably could have threw something like it together myself.

Now, we know that business opportunities don’t have to be complicated to make money. They just have to be Right, that is in the Right place, with the Right look, taking advantage of the Right fad, etc.

But doesn’t it seem to you that a straightforward PHP/MySQL application just isn’t worth $2 billion? I mean, that’s $2,000 million. That’s $2,000,000,000.

Yet, I can’t say I’m entirely unhappy about it. Mark Zuckerberg, here’s to you, man. You’re my age, and you did exactly what I wish I had done. Built some crappy website, and made out like a bandit with sacks of cash. Kudos. You’re honestly my fucking hero.

(Wow, that’s a lot of acronyms. Computers…)

I personally find this to be very true in my life.

When I was in high school, I prided myself (from the point of view of “tools”) as knowing graphic design (Photoshop/Illustrator), web development, and print/page layout. Handy tools to know for (1) making money and (2) working on a high school newspaper. The only real programming languages I knew back then were Actionscript (for Flash), JavaScript, and (eegads) Perl. Then I got to college and armed myself with algorithms, data structures, and systems, and started picking up Java and C on my own. Now I consider myself well-versed in those, and this past summer learned Python and used that on a lot of different projects. Then this semester I got interested in C++ and used that a lot. Nowadays, when I look at problems, I look at them in terms of my tools. Text parsing problem? Wow, Python’s re (regular expressions) module could handle that pretty easily. Big engineering project? Wow, using templates and OO features in C++ may lead to a nice design. Database-driven web application? Well, Java/JSP may fit you nicely. (I know, I know, what am I doing not knowing Ruby on Rails!)

I think Mark’s onto something. Changing toolsets often is definitely useful. Even though I couldn’t write full programs for you in Perl nowadays, what I do know about it (its limitations, capabilities) is definitely good enough to see when it may be the best choice for the job.

As for academic tools — very true. A lot of techniques I learned in e.g. Discrete Math, Linear Algebra were in one ear and out the other. Alas, I think the main point is to learn them once and then be able to Wikipedia them later, when needed

That said, stuff I learned in my algorithms and data structures and operating systems courses have stayed with me. I think some of that stuff is just essential.

Look, you have to understand. If you want to be a “Halo Killer” (and every single game is a halo killer, these days! Don’t bother judging the game on its own merits. The only question is, does it kill Halo?), you have to match the control scheme that made Halo popular. And that control scheme is: A clumsy replication of PC FPS controls shoehorned into a Dual Shock II workalike format.

After all, everyone knows that what made Halo popular was the radical and unnatural retraining that is required when you take a control scheme that was designed and perfected for a mouse and keyboard, and just jam it unceremoniously underneath two thumb-controlled joysticks and a maze of randomly positioned multicolored buttons. Unless Nintendo can replicate that kind of hand-eye coordination dissonance, they’ll never get anywhere with their Halo killing, I mean console, business. My suggestion: They should duct-tape a cinderblock to the Revolution remote. Then everyone will just eat it right up!

Someone then dumbwittedly replied,

why the hell would retraining yourself to a new control system make a game more popular? people get way too worked up about controllers and how much they think they suck at console FPSes. Trust me, I play enough Counterstrike to count myself as a PC gamer, and I have little-to-no problems dealing with a gamepad. You adapt and you do fine.

He just doesn’t get it. But what I loved is that someone then pointed out this being a classic example of sarchasm. That is, a coined word to mean “the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.” I think I’ll use that in the future.

That said, after spending some time in the humanities (where writing quality is high) and much time in Computer Science (where literacy is defined as being able to read code), coming back to traditional math textbooks has been quite a culture shock. They are so horribly written, it really blows my mind.

So, in response to my horrible Calculus II textbook (published at NYU only for NYU classes, this book features minimal explanation and the maximum amount of notation), I have been using it only for the homework problems and using instead James Stewart’s excellent book, Calculus: Early Transcendentals for rigorous proofs of concepts (because Stewart really does present them nicely), and the lighter but infinitely more illuminating Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus Thompson.

A somewhat controversial book, Calculus Made Easy chooses to skip the notation-laden explanations of Calculus concepts provided by typical textbooks, and opts instead of a clear, textual elucidation of core concepts in the context of their applications. The philosophy of the book is well-described by this excerpt from the Epilogue.

I think this is wonderful writing, however damning it may be:

It may be confidently assumed that when this tractate Calculus Made Easy falls into the hands of the professional mathematicians, they will (if not too lazy) rise up as one man, and damn it as being a thoroughly bad book. Of that there can be, from their point of view, no possible manner of doubt whatever. It commits several most grievous and deplorable errors.

First, it shows how ridiculously easy most of the operations of the calculus really are.

Secondly, it gives away so many trade secrets. By showing you that what one fool can do, other fools can do also, it lets you see that these mathematical swells, who pride themselves on having mastered such an awfully difficult subject as the calculus, have no such great reason to be puffed up. They like you to think how terribly difficult it is, and don’t want that superstition to be rudely dissipated.

Thirdly, among the dreadful things they will say about “So Easy” is this: that there is an utter failure on the part of the author to demonstrate with rigid and satisfactory completeness the validity of sundry methods which he has presented in simple fashion, and has even dared to use in solving problems! But why should he not? You don’t forbid the use of a watch to every person who does not know how to make one? You don’t object to the musician playing on a violin that he has not himself constructed. You don’t teach the rules of syntax to children until they have already become fluent in the use of speech. It would be equally absurd to require general rigid demonstrations to be expounded to beginners of the calculus.

One thing will the professed mathematicians say about this thoroughly bad and vicious book: that the reason why it is so easy is because the author has left out all the things that are really difficult. And the ghastly fact about this accusation is that — it is true! That is, indeed, why the book has been written — written for the legion of innocents who have hitherto been deterred from acquiring elements of the calculus by the stupid way in which its teaching is almost always presented.

I should note that my Calculus professor is actually quite good, and provides very nice explanations of complex topics, usually beginning with an elucidation of the general idea, and then going on to the formalities. But our assigned textbook is not nearly as clear, and many professors I’ve had in the past have lived entirely inside their constructed notational apparatus.

This reminds me of an old joke I heard awhile back:

A math professor begins his lecture by writing on the blackboard. He only pauses for brief moments of notational explanation, but continues writing and writing, one symbol after the other, for thirty minutes on end. He fills up six blackboards full of derivation, algebraic manipulation, and what have you. At the end, he smiles and draws the open box, indicating the completion of the proof. “Is that clear?” the professor asks. Blank stares all around.

At that point, the professor stops himself. “Oh, no, I believe I’ve made a mistake.” He then looks at the six boards of writing, and begins pointing at certain sections while nodding his head, clearly doing calculations internally. He then paces back and forth across the front of the classroom, with his head bent down and his fist to his chin. For five full minutes, he paces and nods, thinking about the proof just presented.

Then he stops pacing, looks at the students, and says, “Ah, yes, yes. It’s clear.”

Here’s an interesting read, by the way. Came as especially relevant to me, as I “rediscover” math for math’s sake.

Here’s the blurb I sent out when I advertised the talk:

Have you wanted to work on open source projects, but just don’t know how to get started? This talk will provide the basics you need to start working on open source software the next time you sit down at your computer.

In particular, this talk will cover:

(1) A brief overview of open source development in the industry and press.

(2) The UNIX development platform. A brief and whimsical overview of the UNIX shell, its surrounding tools, and the power of shell scripting. (Useful to anyone wanting to learn more about UNIX tools.) Learn how to do in a few lines of shell script what you only thought was possible with a big, extravagant hundred- or thousand- line program, and learn why so many of the world’s best hackers hack on a *nix system.

(3) The basics you need in order to hack on open source project: how mailing lists, wikis, bugzillas, source code revision systems all come together to form an organic code management process, and how to get started using those tools and others to learn about a project and what parts need development work done. This will include a brief introduction to CVS.

(4) The last part of the talk will involve actually watching open source development in action. In particular, the speaker will checkout some code from a source repository, make a change to it, create a patchfile from that change, then track down the mailing list or bugzilla related to the project and submit the patch to the maintainer. You will actually get to see open source “in action,” and will want to do it right when you get home!

If you’re a Windows or Mac OS developer who has always wanted to learn more about *nix systems, or if you’re a developer who wants to either take his own project open source or work on existing open source projects, this talk is for you.

Of course, if you’re someone who is just interested in the concept of open source, this talk will give you an inside look at “how things get done” in this community.

This talk was at least partially inspired by Nat Friedman’s blog post, check it out here:

“How to be a Hacker”

The talk was a general success, I think. About 12 people attended. You can see the talk in PDF or ODP formats, and you can also download the patches I wrote specifically for the talk to illustrate “open source development in action.” The patches are pretty stupid, but do illustrate the point, at least. Plus, each of the three patches served one of my own goals (hacking my CPU frequency scaler, fixing a gnome-terminal bug, and hacking galeon “for fun”), so that’s that. I think it’d be cool to give this talk again (maybe a little refined to include less basic UNIX tools and more hacking stuff) at a later date. We’ll see.

More than anything else, what is probably helping is that I’ve been laying off my right hand entirely. Rest is the best form of healing.

About a half-hour ago, I experienced a weird sensation. I was icing my wrist as I usually do, and at a certain point I realized my wrist was really cold. I then performed Tinel’s test and found the pins and needles sensation that I have never felt before. When I tapped on the base of my wrist I could feel pins and needles all the way up into my three primary digits: my thumb, index and middle fingers. I could literally feel exactly where the median nerve was running. I didn’t really know whether this is a bad sign; I’ll ask my doctor tomorrow. I can only get a positive Tinel’s sign result when my wrist is under ice for a long time, like 10 or 15 minutes. What’s the physiological reason for that? I’ll have to find out tomorrow.

Till then, keep your nerves healthy.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how carpal tunnel syndrome seems to be more congenital than it is acquired through repetitive strain. That’s not to say that repetitive strain does not exist; only that some have a predisposition for acquiring the painful symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. My mother had carpal tunnel syndrome — which she got over through conservative treatments — so it would make at least some sense.

I don’t want to come to any conclusions at this point, and I’m enjoying the break that I have from computing, so I will continue to lay off this blog for a while, at least until all of my major symptoms subside. Until then, keep thinking about all the issues that you think are important, and maybe while I’m taking a rest for my thinking chair, you’ll stand up and act. For starters, how about we oppose this horrible reconstruction of Washington Square Park which is going to ruin my commencement/graduation from NYU?

Last semester, I took a long break from computers and saw my RSI symptoms disappear. Once I got back to work last semester, they came back even worse than before, and it even affected my performance in classes and such due to the strain and time I had to spend nursing the injury.

This break, I’ve been researching ways to get over this problem. I am still not sure if what I have is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, DeQuervain’s Syndrome, a muscle inflammation or pinched nerve (or all of the above), but I’m trying self-treatment by immobilizing my right wrist in a wrist splint, taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (i.e. ibuprofen) and using my left hand for as much as I can.

We’ll see how it goes, but I have to take a break from this blog for a couple weeks, most likely. (Unless I get Dragon Naturally Speaking working under Windows!)

So here, let me propose my new Facebook profile so it can be more amenable to social pressures. I’ve decided that the Facebook has become just as insane as real life, and, unfortunately, just as predictable.

Here is my Facebook profile for the alternate reality in which I care about making Facebook friends:

Relationship: Married to someone of my own sex even though I’m obviously straight. Hah hah, I’m so ironic.

Political Views: Moderate, even though I’m obviously liberal or conservative, but I don’t want to offend anyone. It’s not cool to talk about politics!

Interests: in truth, none whatsoever, so let me just write cute unfunny stuff here, like “Drinking with roomie,” or “duh, The Facebook.”

Favorite Music: A mish-mash of hip-hop, indy rock, and classic rock, because then you’ll know my musical palate isn’t vulgar.

Favorite Movies: here’s my chance to wow everyone with how cultured I am, so I’ll have at least one Coen Brothers movie here, and one or both of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Waking Life.

Favorite Books: I don’t read on my own, because that’s not being social. So here are my choices: (1) my textbooks, because that’s ironic, and dodges the issue; (2) Catcher in the Rye or 1984, because I read that in high school and maybe no one will notice; or, (3) obviously bad books I’ve never read and no one will think I have, like “Treason” by Ann Coulter.

Favorite Quote: Something my roommate said while drunk. Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it? No, really, it’s funny… you had to be there. Or, if I take myself a bit more seriously that I can at least allow a quote, make sure it’s something about postmodernism or from a modern poem that makes minimal sense.

Now that you guys see I am capable of writing a Facebook profile exactly like all the others, perhaps you’ll stop asking me to. In the meanwhile, to make you all more comfortable being apathetic, I’ve censored political content from my interests. I’ve also deleted references to a comedian you’ve never heard of from my quotes section. If you’re lucky, I’ll promptly replace them with Jon Stewart quotes. (Politics is cool, apparently, only if it’s on TV.)