Note to self, as I seem to need to do this on every new install:

Ubuntu ships with vim-tiny, which doesn’t support syntax highlighting. Do this:

sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo vi /etc/vim/vimrc
( Remove the quote mark from the "syntax on" line, uncommenting it)

Impressive Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie on how stories, and in particular “single stories”, shape our views of cultures. Many parallels with how people typically see Iran.

A great quote from the talk: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue – it is that they are incomplete“.

I used to read the local newspaper. It was a fairly poor quality view of world events.

As news sources moved to the web I started to read a wider variety of sources – BBC, Le Monde, Haaretz, NY Times, Google News, various Iranian publications, and so forth. I had a better view.

As RSS took over I started to spend more time in Google Reader, with a larger number of sources. The sources, however, were hand-picked by me and the topics they covered were much more niche.

Sure, I had the feed from the NY Times, BBC, etc, but they just couldn’t compete with the blogs. I would only read them occasionally, and finally I gave up and removed them from my feed.

Nowadays I hang out on Twitter, to the detriment of Google Reader.

My sources of news are even more niche, even more hand-picked, and the news itself is headline-only.

It strikes me that I’ve lost something valuable here. I went from being exposed to a world view, much of which I didn’t agree with, to a series of very short, niche, hand-picked news sources.

I have unwittingly self-applied blinders.

An odd and disturbing trend. Nothing is stopping me from regaining the world view, other than my own choices. Yet I remain mostly blind.

I’m noticing how much the practice of finding a candidate and interviewing them has changed over the years.

First step is to look up the person on the web. Since I’m looking for a technical person I’m expecting a blog, contributions to open source projects, a twitter presence, etc. If I don’t find them, the candidate becomes less attractive.

If I do find a blog or twitter feed, I take some time to read them. You can tell a lot about a person with just a short overview – for example, even a delicious feed can give you a very good feel for how good someone is technically.

Hopefully the person has an open source project or two they’ve contributed. If so you can dive right into the code and get a good sense of their skills at work. I love this – you can see great coders almost immediately. And of course bad ones.

If the person is still looking good it’s time for a review of the resume and their linkedin profile.

By the time I followup with the person I have a very good sense of who this person is, what they’ve done in the past, and what their real-world coding looks like. The people who make it to the interview are so well filtered you almost can’t go wrong.

It’s very time consuming, but if you’re as fanatical about hiring good people as I am it’s worth it.

Contrast this with the old pile-o-resumes approach, or the recruiter-filter-by-keyword approach, and I think we’re in a much better place.

Now if I could only find a recruiter I could trust to do the technical deep dive I’ve described here and be ingenious enough to find diamonds in the rough I’d be a very happy man.

I used to be a vi guy who finally made the move to graphical editors. I looked for the simplest, lightest possible solutions, using ConTEXT for quite a while.

Some years ago I was forced into using Eclipse for reasons I can’t quite recall; probably Java development. I didn’t like it – the forced Project concept, the bloat, the general slowness.

Eventually I got comfortable with it, got PyDev installed, and made it my primary development environment. These days most of my development lives in Eclipse.

With the 1.5 release PyDev included quite a few previously pay-only features in the free / open source version. Since then I’ve found I’ve become even more productive in the environment, and now actually enjoy it.

In particular, the code analysis is very useful. I love the fact that it points out unused imports and variables as well as syntax errors. Going through old code I was surprised at how many spurious imports I had, as well as a few actual errors in code that had been in production for several years in rarely exercised branches.

If you’re doing python development I recommend you take a look at Eclipse+PyDev. I was surprised at the level of increased productivity it brought me.

My buddy Paul Kedrosky (disclosure: an advisor to my company) has an interesting piece on why he loves venture capitalists. I love them too, but mostly for a singular reason.

Paul’s posts starts with some excellent arguments, but alas, in the third paragraph he starts to lose me

To pick on a few things:

“the idea that anyone at all would build a business around funding startups is the remarkable thing”. Indeed. So is the fact that there exist professional gamblers. The odds are against them, most lose money, but a few end up with very good returns.

“Failure rates among venture-backed firms are lower in the first few years, but higher later on”. What we’re saying here is that companies who start out with more money take a longer amount of time to run out of money. Hmm. I don’t know if that says anything about the nature of VCs, other than they carry money.

“But that doesn’t mean VCs are quacks. Or that what they do isn’t hard. Or that it’s unimportant. Because it is important, and the good ones are smart, and what they do is very, very hard.” - I can almost make the same case for degenerate gamblers: what they do is hard, and the good ones are smart. Most are quacks though.

The difference is what they use their money for.

The saving grace of venture capitalists, god bless them all, is that they put their money to use in building business and innovation.

It’s not about loving venture capitalists. It’s about loving their money. And how they use their money.

Now think about it: hand somebody a big pile of money, pay them a handsome income, and have people begging them for money all day every day. What type of personality do think will emerge in them? Is it all possible they’ll start to think a little too highly of themselves?

So here’s to venture capital. I think it was Steve Martin who said something like: France is a  lovely country, except for all those damned French who live there. Well, venture capital is a lovely country too.

I kid, I kid. Particularly the VCs I’m talking to next week, plus all my VC friends, plus everyone I’m likely to raise money from in the future, I really don’t mean you guys. You guys bring a lot of value to the table besides money. You really do. I meant the other guys.

Seriously, I kid.

Let’s finish with a quote that made me laugh from an entrepreneur buddy of mine (who shall remain nameless): “I aspire to live a lifestyle where my hobbies are funded by other people’s money. Two ways I know to do that: get NSF funding or raise venture capital.”

I asked my brother Pooya, a former resident of Manhattan, what bridge-and-tunnel (off-island) adventures he’d recommend and where we should eat. Here’s his response, for your benefit:

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Hey man,

For directions to all these places, use hotstop, gives you subway and walking directions, very nice, there’s an iphone version too.

First of all, why would you ever want to get off the island?

But if you do, definitely go to Brooklyn instead of Queens, the only interesting thing in Queens is little india.  In Brooklyn, you can go to Prospect park, the whole neighborhood there is pretty cool in a hipsterish kinda way. You could also go all the way out to Coney Island, kinda neat to see once, they have the nathans hot dogs and the old rollercoasters.
F train towards Coney Island, get off at Prospect park (for Prospect park) or go all the way and get to Coney Island.

BROOKLYN:

My recommendation, take the F train to Prospect park, look around the park and then walk around the corner to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, makes a nice day.

You can also head to the Bronx to see the zoo (though living in San Diego, it’s probably not worth it).  If you want to get away from the city feel, you can hop over to Governor’s island, go down to battery park, head a little north and there’s a free ferry that takes you out to this almost deserted island, used to be a navy base or something, take some picnic food and lounge out looking back at the manhattan skyline.  But given your limited time, I would recommend sticking to Manhattan.

Places to Eat:

Check out all the menus and phone numbers: menupages .

Village:

John’s Pizza – good pizza in the village, whole pies only, no slices, another branch in times sq and lots more to eat in the village, so up to you [Me: I wasn't crazy about John's Pizza, but plenty of people like it]

Mamouns (you know about) [Me: we always end up eating here a ridiculous number of times. Really excellent falafels. I recommend the falafel sandwich with baba ganouj. In fact my mouth is watering as I write this. The MacDougal location is nice; you can walk over to Rocco's for desert from there: 119 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012 212-674-8685]

Rocco’s – dessert, definitely get the canolis
243 Bleecker Street (past 6th Ave) [Me: I ended up over dosing on canolis. The mini eclairs, the napoleans, and just about everything else is good too, so experiment]

Brunos – dessert, especially the chocolate mousse
506 Laguardia Pl & Bleecker St (near wash sq park, NYU)

Thai: Spice – cool looking place and good food, great value (on your way from the village to union sq)
39 E 13th St (at University Pl) [Me: Spice is not high end, but it's actually really good. Another place we ended up eating at multiple times. Several locations in the city so it's easy to get to.]

Sushi – Tomoe Sushi is a nice place, but surprisingly the prepared sushi from Morton Williams supermarket (Bleecker and LaGuardia) is also fresh and excellent.

Times Sq Area:

John’s Pizza – best thing if you have to be in Times Sq for a play or something
260 W 44th St (Btwn 7th & 8th Ave)

Margon – Cuban sandwich place, deli style – get a cuban sandwich or the special (oh crap, forgot the ham thing, still get an oxtail soup)
136 W 46th St  (Btwn 6th & 7th Ave)

Lupa – if you’re going to do a an up-scale meal but dont want to spend too much, this italian place is great, modern (mario battali place)
170 Thompson St (Btwn Houston & Bleecker St)

Soho:

Lombardis pizza – crowded, but worth it, you can call ahead and pick up
32 Spring St  (At Mott St)

Sullivan St Bakery- great soho snack as you’re shopping, fresh bread, the olive is great
533 W 47th St (Btwn 10th & 11th Ave)

Kees Chocolates – you have to try the passion fruit chocolates, take some home too
80 Thompson Street (Spring St)

Katz Deli – really for pastrami so not sure if it’s worth it for you guys
205 E Houston St | At Ludlow St

Central Park area:

Burger Joint – great burgers, simple menu, buy and take to the park for a picnic
118 W 57th St (Btwn 6th & 7th Ave) – hard to find, in the lobby of the Le Meridien hotel, look for a small neon burger sign or just ask in the lobby

Other random places:

Sahara’s – Turkish place on the east side mid 20’s , fresh bread, appetizers
513 2nd Ave (Btwn 28th & 29th St)

Shake shack – Burgers in Madison Sq Park
11 Madison Ave | At 23rd St

Pomme Frites – Belgian fries, lots of topping choices, east village snack if you’re near st. marks
123 2nd Ave | Btwn 7th St & St Marks Pl [Me: these are really excellent, give them a try]
Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.  Keep in mind I haven’t lived there in 3 years so things may have changed, but I’ve been going to my favorites (Katz, Lomardis, Brunos, Roccos) regularly on my visits and can still vouch for them,

Enjoy and bon appetit.

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Other random thoughts from me:

Taking out a row boat in central park is surprisingly fun. I recommend it.

The trip back to JFK, should you decide to take the metro and AirTrain, is extremely long. Coupled with the fact that most airlines don’t offer food anymore on the flight, you’ll want to bring some food with you. A couple of slices of pizza and some pad thai from Spice will do you well.

Turns out Delta charges for checking in even a single bag. That annoys me, so I don’t think I’ll be flying them again.