Paul Buchheit

"It's taken 41 years, but a previously unseen set of photos of the mighty Niagara Falls reduced to nothing more than a barren cliff-top have finally surfaced. The stark images reveal North America's iconic - and most powerful - waterfall to be almost as dry as a desert. In June 1969, U.S. engineers diverted the flow of the Niagara River away from the American side of the falls for several months." - Paul Buchheit

Mark: Apparently ice dams can stop water flow altogether, but it hasn't happened since maybe 1848. What happens is that ice ends up covering the river and the falls (such that you were allowed to walk on it up to about 100 years ago), but the water still flows underneath it. - Gabe

I'm on your side Paul! :) - Oguz Serdar

remember android too wasn't taken seriously by many in its initial stages it was expected to fade away, but then google gave nexus with help from manufacturers, chrome os comes with a hardware it mght be difficult but lets see how laptop companies see it do they bring out chrome os based notebooks? because it ight actually cut costs, a chrome os notebook is expected to be cheaper than usual win or iOS based notebooks even netbooks lets see how asus sees it - testbeta

Sure! iPad changed the game - Guy Vander Heyden

it's still on amazon's best sellers list - mr. lambert

while te idea of being generous is nice, the quote characterizes a person to which I'd not like to be closer than a gunshot range. - 9000

roissy-lookalike theses analyzed: http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510... - 9000

"The first commercial spacecraft to return from a low-Earth orbit splashed into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday about 500 miles off the coast of Southern California. The Dragon, a craft developed by the company SpaceX, was concluding a brief but possibly historic flight for the infant commercial space travel industry. The vehicle hit the water shortly after 2 p.m. ET, a little more than three hours after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Before splashing down, the Dragon orbited earth at more than 17,000 mph. Only six nations or government agencies have recovered a spacecraft from a low orbit: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India and the European Space Agency." - Paul Buchheit

crap! Time to get cracking on that UFO. - Private Sanjeev

Another giant leap for the PayPal legacy. - Toph Tucker

Wow - Scoble, Alex Scoble

It happens in Great America? What has happened to the West? - ThinkEzy

"I feel like we're at a tipping point here. A lot of VCs still act as if founders retaining board control after a series A is unheard-of. A lot of them try to make you feel bad if you even ask—as if you're a noob or a control freak for wanting such a thing. But the founders I heard from aren't noobs or control freaks. Or if they are, they are, like Mark Zuckerberg, the kind of noobs and control freaks VCs should be trying to fund more of. Founders retaining control after a series A is clearly heard-of. And barring financial catastrophe, I think in the coming year it will become the norm." - Paul Buchheit

Like that "unoriginal" element there. - Hutch Carpenter

re.edit, quick post. - Keith

"their education and upbringing" - Impro - Paul Buchheit

Then we could work on exercising their thought processes and coaxing them back into being flexible. - Matt M (inactive)

Ken Robinson has the thought that we grow out of creativity ( or rather, that we get educated out of it). He's given a few talks at TEDx. - Roberto Bonini

"socialisation , environment, & education" - Cool Wired

"“In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,” Paul insisted. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it." - Paul Buchheit

So simple - Alberto D'Ottavi

And theres more! Should be interesting what Wikileaks will reveal about the banking system soon..http://www.ft.com/cms... - Jason

what a line "we need more wikileaks" so what do we know about so many things? homeopathy, UFOs, NASA's officials coming out with ET & alien spacecraft sightings, delta, area 51, so many other things sometimes it infuriates to the extent that i want to go on my own and check tings for myself, i love this "we need more wikileaks" it is a soothing thing to hear in so much that is being said thanks paul for the links - testbeta

Duckies! - Paul Buchheit

Awwww! I've never seen anything like that. If I saw that, I'd want to rush over and try to help the babies that were blowing too far away. Though I see that they took care of themselves. Their feathers were barely ruffled. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden.  The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade.  And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them.  To accomplish that, they're actually advocating -- somehow with a straight face -- the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world.  That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned." - Paul Buchheit

"So what is causing the delay? The likely culprit is disagreement on the design, purpose and execution of the project. One of our sources told us that he/she has heard “tales of disorganization and too many different teams working parallel or in conflict.”" - Paul Buchheit

Around the same time you posted this, Peter posted a link to a blog post praising the culture of engineers at Google http://friendfeed.com/peterno... But I think that culture can also be a problem. Engineers can make the coolest products in the world, but do they understand how the masses are using social? How frictionless it needs to be? How, as Charlene Li says, in the future social will just be "like air"? If Google can't get all that right, they won't be competing well in this space, and their track record is not good, I'm afraid. - Laura Norvig

"The barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten. For example, Internet commerce startups the time needed to get the first product to market has been cut by a factor of ten, the dollars needed to get the first product to market cut by a factor of ten, the number of sources of initial capital for entrepreneurs has increased by a factor of ten, etc." - Paul Buchheit

I certainly see in the web app world things move really fast. There are also some physical products like t-shirts, EyeFi, Square, FitBit where the web made it easy to customize/market/sell the product. However I don't have a good sense of how much change there's been for entrepreneurs working in other markets — beer, automobiles, plywood, packaged food, air conditioners, etc. - Amit Patel

It is definitely a pleasant dream in which the country and the whole world suddenly behaves like Bay Area does. I have my doubts though. Happy Thanksgiving! - eugenio

Beer has all kinds of new viral marketing strategies now. Automobiles: look at Local Motors for manufacturing, zipcar for auto transportation. The Information Age can affect existing industries as radically as the Industrial Age affected agriculture. - Bruce Lewis

I would vote for that guy - Alex Scrivener

Tudor, I already donate money in the form of taxes, but I'd have been happy to have the tax rate raised for everyone in the apartment complex effected by that dysfunctional light. - no name

"Playboy: One of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish, and for it to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail. Jobs: That's simply untrue. Insisting that we need one standard now is like saying that they needed one standard for automobiles in 1920." - Simon

"The minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. It's easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote. When you've gotten to a place where you at least have a chance of implementing your ideas, there's a lot more responsibility in that." - Paul Buchheit

"we discovered that, at least as of a few years ago, every tactical nuclear weapon in Europe manned by U.S. personnel was targeted by an Apple II computer. Now, we didn't sell computers to the military; they went out and bought them at a dealer's, I guess. But it didn't make us feel good to know that our computers were being used to target nuclear weapons in Europe. The only bright side of it was that at least they weren't [Radio Shack] TRS-80s! Thank God for that. The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don't find personally pleasing. And it's ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways." - Simon

To find a way to actually go out and create that masterpiece it takes more than ability and talent. It takes time and money. Its when this power is given to the artist, the magic begins to manifest. Damn these days. damn em to hell. Things need to change, so much can happen on the basis of a single idea. Its like that wise man said, Plans are worthless, but planning is essential. There comes a point when you have to throw away the plan and play ball in the moment. Boy, my current endeavors are about to take a major left turn. Nice sharing info there Paul. I enjoy the information bouncing of so many cool people in the world. - Keith

So awesome. - Paul Buchheit

This guy is amusing and inspiring, not to mention more than a bit daft. How long before he has a show on the Discovery Channel? ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

YC interviewees beware, I suppose :) - Eric Florenzano

Foreign investments maybe? ;-) - Aron Michalski

Originally at http://hbr.org/2010..., but mostly taken down in order to sell subscriptions :( - Paul Buchheit

ⓞnor that is what makes it inspiring. - Jason McGowan

"We're delighted to announce that Y Combinator is getting two new partners, the first we've added since we started YC in 2005. In case anyone doesn't already know who he is, Paul Buchheit was responsible for three of the best things Google has done: he wrote GMail, built the original prototype of AdSense, and came up with the phrase "Don't be evil." After leaving Google he started FriendFeed, which last year became Facebook's largest acquisition to date. He's a good friend as well as one of the world's best hackers; for years we've considered him an honorary YC partner. We hired Harj Taggar earlier this year to work advising startups alongside me. He wasn't technically a partner, but we quickly realized that he was one de facto—that among us his opinion carried as much weight as any of ours—and that it would be mean of us to delay recognizing this officially. Harj's arrival significantly improved how well YC operated. He's a large part of the reason we were able to fund 36 startups in the summer 2010 cycle." - Paul Buchheit

Cheers.,. - OT

"The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question -- tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun." - Paul Buchheit

"In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance." - Simon

Very funny. - Sue - Friendfeed is best

Let's restrict the mindless dogmatic arguing to rival chatbots running in a sandbox... The rest of the Web will feel so much better ! - Jean-Marc Liotier

I was thinking the same thing when I looked at this map earlier... - Ross Miller

Are there really so many growers among the general population of the county? - Andrew C (✔)

http://sdgln.com/files... - Laura Norvig

Paul: that's exactly how I voted too. Pete's recommendations, except that I voted Yes on prop 21. - Tudor Bosman

:( - Spidra Webster

may his soul rest in peace, - marco

Good for you, paul! - Eric Borisch

So much money! - Vezquex

"Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic consequences. ... The third problem with our drug policy is that it creates crime and empowers gangs. “The only groups that benefit from continuing to keep marijuana illegal are the violent gangs and cartels that control its distribution and reap immense profits from it through the black market,” a group of current and former police officers, judges and prosecutors wrote last month in an open letter to voters in California." - Paul Buchheit

April Russo: Don't worry; there's plenty more to be made in taxes than what they can confiscate from drug dealers. What they get now doesn't even pay for the resources to track down and confiscate it. - Gabe