Category: Uncategorized

Paul Graham has posted the talk he gave a PARC last week, entitled Hiring is Obsolete, where he encourages undergrads and grad students to start up companies with the aim of being bought out/hired by a big company:

When companies buy startups, they’re effectively fusing recruiting and product development. And I think that’s more efficient than doing the two separately, because you always get people who are really committed to what they’re working on.

Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. Any conflicts between them have been ironed out under the very hot iron of running a startup. By the time the acquirer gets them, they’re finishing one another’s sentences. That’s valuable in software, because so many bugs occur at the boundaries between different people’s code.

Paul has hinted at this strategy in some of his other essays. I think it is an intriguing idea, though I question how committed the startup’s team will be to the big company after the buy out. In my experience (I’ve been involved in two buy-outs in my life), the founders are just as likely to bail once their golden handcuffs evaporate as stick around.

Anyways, it’s an excellent read, as usual.

Dan Moniz attended the talk and blogged about it. Larry had some interesting comments on talk’s abstract.

TI’s MSP430 microprocessor has found its way into a novel and practical application: a leak detector for toilets. The device, by AquaOne, consists of a shut-off valve and two water level sensors, one for the tank, to detect slow leaks, and one for the bowl that detects overflows. Both sensors report back to the shut-off valve, which houses the controller, which can cut off the water supply if there is a problem.

Mind Hacks reader, Matt Doar outlines a trick to use the brain’s natural ability to encode context as an aid for hacking. He listens to a particular CD repeatedly when and only when he is working on a particular piece of code, thereby creating an association between the music and his memory of the code. Neat idea.

Michael writes about Louisette Lanteigne’s watchdog site, where she is posting photos of purported safety violations at a local construction site. She has come under some legal pressure from the builder, Activa Holdings Inc, to take down the site. There’s no indication whether Activa is going to investigate the alleged safety problems. They have threatened further legal action, though.

Update (2005-11-14): Activa has filed suit. Read more about it here.

Startups should hire PR firms: for and against.

Mandy thought I might be suffering from Hyperlexia. I show all the signs:

• Learn expressive language in a peculiar way, echo or memorize the sentence structure without understanding the meaning (echolalia), reverse pronouns
• Rarely initiates conversations
• An intense need to keep routines, difficulty with transitions, ritualistic behavior
• Auditory, olfactory and/or tactile sensitivity
• Self-stimulatory behavior
• specific, unusual fears
• Normal development until 18-24 months, then regression
• strong auditory and visual memory
• Difficulty answering “Wh–” questions, such as “what,” “where,” “who,” and “why”
• Think in concrete and literal terms, difficulty with abstract concepts
• Listen selectively, appear to be deaf

But it turns out I’m just an anti-social jerk. Thanks, Mind Hacks.

Apparently Frank Schmidt and Matthias Heiden are. Their company, EnOcean, develops radio switches and sensors that require no batteries. They harvest energy from the environment.

The smallest changes in temperature, vibration, pressure, light or motion all produce energy that can be harvested and used to send a signal.

The principle of energy harvesting is not new (self winding watches have a history dating back hundreds of years), even the concept of using energy from the immediate environment to power wireless sensors has been done before (using outdoor solar panels on a sunny day). EnOcean’s radical breakthrough is to reduce the energy required to send a signal to an incredibly small amount. This change in energy requirements means that EnOcean sensors operate where other technologies cannot. A simple example is when our sensors are solar powered they can operate indoors, in a low light environment.

EnOcean just raised $13 million.

The problem: My vote in a national election is practically worthless. Whoever is elected the MP for my region will be expected to vote with his party, whose agenda is driven mainly (entirely?) by corporations and special interest groups who can afford to pay full-time lobbyist to schmooze with party leaders. At best, my vote chooses which lobbyist will hold sway. Nobody in government is listening to me.

One nutty solution: A new political party; one without a platform. Instead it has a process, a process that ensures that the will of the people it represents is heard and the influence of big money is eliminated. Think of it as a government within a government.

In this new party, any MPs from the party would be bound not by party leadership, but by the will of their constituents. How? Individual constituents would be able to vote on every bill presented to parliament in an online referendum. Party MPs would vote according to the results of the referendums in their region.

Bills could be proposed by anybody anywhere in the country. Like bills in parliament, individuals would vote on proposals in online referendums. The ones that passed the referendum would be presented by a party MP to parliament.

How’s that for nutty?

[Note to self] This post is destined for Crank o’ the Day for sure.

According to a Globe and Mail story, a StatsCan survey of school libraries shows that the median amount that libraries spend on books and magazines is about $2000 per year.

“Given current costs, this would cover the purchase of one encyclopedia series,” the government agency said.

That seems awfully low to me.

In their latest press release, Aurilink Inc. claims that their new amplifier makes customized digital hearing aids obsolete:

Aurilink, Inc. has developed a “ready-to-wear” sound amplifier for individuals who want and need occasional hearing assistance due to mild hearing loss. Such assistance was previously only available with expensive custom hearing aids, but preliminary studies have shown that the Aurilink Sound Magnifier is equal or superior to the most advanced DSP (digital signal processing) hearing instruments currently available.

As part of the team that develops and produces some of the world’s most advanced DSP platforms for hearing instruments, I’m skeptical, to say the least.

Hearing aids are very similar to glasses. Just as people have different kinds of vision problems — near-sighted, far-sighted, and astigmatism — and to varying degrees, they also experience different kinds and varying degrees of hearing loss. A custom hearing aid doesn’t just make everything louder, it amplifies the specific frequencies where the wearer has suffered loss. That’s what makes them customized. Beyond that, high-end digital hearing aids offer other useful features, such as noise suppression, which can filter out the background chatter in a crowded room without affecting the voice of the person to whom the wearer is listening. The difference between a custom hearing aid and what Aurilink is selling is akin to the difference between prescription glasses from an optometrist and a the $10 reading glasses you can buy at the local drug store.

Indeed, Aurilink’s CEO admits it:

“We like to think of the Sound Magnifiers as reading glasses for your ears,” said Otis A. Whitcomb, President and CEO of Aurilink.

That’s not to say that I think their product is useless. Far from it. Reading glasses are a vast improvement over no glasses at all. Aurilink’s products offer a similar value. I’m sure it’s an excellent product for what it does (even if it is built on our competitor’s platform, which is only a guess on my part), but “equal or superior to the most advanced DSP […] hearing instruments currently available?” Come on! Who are you kidding?