We are human beings. We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be – but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down.
This speech, given by a high school valedictorian at her graduation, is worth reading.
Andrew: I actually went to the way back machine to see what you were up to before you did this, to see who you were. And you had your resume up and I looked at it and it’s pretty freaking impressive. In addition to three degrees from MIT which a lot of us have seen in news stories about you and the one from Harvard, you worked at Oracle. You worked at a venture capital firm. You were on a path to be one of these rich people of Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be that now, right? Not with this.
Sal: Unless they make a movie about the Khan Academy. Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When I was working at a hedge fund, the six years after business school, I was the senior analyst at a hedge fund, and it was doing well. And then, my manager retired. He encouraged me to start my own fund. So, I was on that track to kind of be a hedge fund manager and all of that. But, the whole time I kind of rationalized that the only reason that I’m doing this is because I want to, one day, start a school. In my mind, I didn’t want to start a school, write grants and go to the Department of Education and get a charter and all of that. I felt the constraints. I just want to become really rich and just do it on my own terms. So, that was my rationalization for just trying to generate alpha day and night.
From Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interview with Salman “Sal” Khan, who has created more than 1,500 free educational videos on YouTube, which you can check out here.
I received the following AIM message a little while ago:
Curious, I responded back to Qtpiegirl8394. Here’s the transcript:
I thought this was pretty well done for several reasons:
Not bad though.
I bet the conversation rates on this method blow the direct-spam rates out of the water. They could do a lot better still with some calculating A/B tests.
The illusive fluid-fixed layout has the following properties:
I rarely remember the CSS syntax to do this, so I’m posting it here both as a reference for myself as well as for anyone else looking for a solution.
Screenshot:
Code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Fixed-Fluid Example</title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
color: white;
}
#wrapper {
float: left;
width: 100%;
}
#fluid {
background-color: #336699;
margin-right: 200px;
}
#right-col {
background-color: #bd2115;
width: 200px;
float: right;
margin-left: -100%;
}
.padded-content {
padding: 5px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="fluid">
<div class="padded-content">Fluid</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="right-col">
<div class="padded-content">Fixed at 200px</div>
</div>
</body>
From the source code of WakeInteractive.com:
This site has become one of the most pirated web designs. If you are here learning about web design and development by studying our code, then welcome. However, if you're editing a copy of this file to be used for your personal or commercial work, then kindly piss off. (Thanks for the idea Shaun)
Yeah nice idea Shaun, because that’s going to stop people.
Preceden’s going through its post-launch press phase at the moment and even though I know its fleeting, it’s still absolutely thrilling.
It started when I submitted Preceden to KillerStartups, a year to the day (coincidentally) after they covered Domain Pigeon. The only difference this time around is that I submitted Preceden to them, whereas they reviewed Domain Pigeon on their own.
Here’s the rollup:
Very cool.
The mistake I made with Domain Pigeon, and that I find myself wanting to make with Preceden, is equating this initial traffic with success. The trick is realizing that a lot of the visitors were early adopters who found Preceden through technology news websites. These visitors are, by their nature, not long term users, which is really what you need if you are going to have a successful web app.
That being said, a nontrivial fraction of the tweets about Preceden have been by teachers, which is an excellent sign that there is an audience beyond the early adopters. Usage of the site also makes me optimistic, but I’ll save that for another post.
Time will tell (pun intended).
PS: Check out Preceden’s Precden timeline if you found this post interesting.
Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules (“reality”). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.
Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform “miracles” — things which violate the perceived rules.
Read more on Paul Buchheit’s recent blog post, Applied Philosophy, aka ‘Hacking’.
Paul is also speaking at Startup School–I can’t wait.
I put together this chart showing the organization of a small Bitmap file:
(click to expand)
I used Wikipedia’s Bitmap File Format article in conjunction with UltraEdit and PowerPoint to analyze this 10 x 10 pixel Bitmap image:
There are only two bytes unaccounted for: the 6B 22 at the end of the file. Anyone know what their purpose is?
Really good presentation by Stephen Anderson on design:
If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it.
– Albert Einstein
I’m taking a break this month in order to brainstorm and figure out what to work on next.
I hope to start hacking away again sometime during the next few weeks and honestly I can’t wait; the idleness is driving me crazy ;)
Hello and welcome!
I am a Philadelphia-based nights & weekends hacker with aspirations of one day founding a tech startup.
“Find a happy person, and you will find a project.”
Sonja Lyubomirsky
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