Impossible Ideas

As a codicil to Paul Graham's frighteningly ambitious startup ideas, I have started a list of impossible ideas that interest me personally.

• ubiquitous, secure, painless (one-click) bitcoin payment
• ubiquitous, effortless, anonymous, encrypted communication
• painless, anonymous, decentralized internet access
• effortless expense/receipt management
• effortless information management / mind mapping

Working on an impossible task is like exercise. If that exercise produces something that is good enough, then you have something that is better than any existing similar product.

You say priori, I say posteriori

Levels of aspiration:

Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are tell-tale signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical hierarchy and your cue to just quietly back out of the debate. —DHH 

I bet you over-engineered your startup:

Of the three startups I've worked with, two of the three were ridiculously over-engineered monstrosities that were way over time budget. It was clear that the CIO/CTO wanted to do cool fun stuff and not build a marketable product.

The other was cobbled together with completely shit code, was constantly breaking on releases, and was glued together with perl scripts. They're now publicly traded. 

Character-level diff in git gui

Per-character differences are often more usable than line-level differences.¹ WinMerge has pretty decent character-scoped diffing:

...but git gui  defaults to line-level "unified diff":

To get word-level diff, you can specify:

--color-words --word-diff

...but I want something closer to character-level diff.

Talk: Silicon Carbide and Body-Machine Interfaces

Here are my notes from Dr. Stephen E. Saddow's presentation, "Silicon Carbide Biomedical Technology for Bone Implants, Stents and Brain-Machine Interfaces".

Electrical Engineering Department
Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology
University of South Florida

Abstract: Amorphous silicon carbide (SiC) has been used for several years as a non-biofouling coating in biomedical devices such as coronary stents and bone implants. However, up to recently, the biocompatibility of single crystal SiC, which presents appealing bio-sensing potentialities, has been in question. A comprehensive study of the biocompatibility of this wide band-gap semiconductor has been performed with extremely promising results which show the higher performance of SiC in bio-environments with respect to Si, the leading semiconductor, and introduce SiC into a unique class of materials that is both bio- and hemocompatible. 

Project reference strictness in Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2008 happily allows you to reference .NET 3.5-dependent projects from a project that targets .NET framework 2.0—because the CLR version is the same for both frameworks. On the contrary, Visual Studio 2010 refuses to build such a solution, perhaps out of a desire to enforce Best Practices For Creating Reliable Builds, and gives missing namespace errors:

The name 'FooTools' does not exist in the current context

and warnings such as:

The primary reference "System.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the framework assembly "System.Xml.Linq, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" which could not be resolved in the currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v2.0". To resolve this problem, either remove the reference "System.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or retarget your application to a framework version which contains "System.Xml.Linq, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089".