"I would lose the verbs. I love the verbs, I really do, and they would be hard to lose, but they are cruft. It's not as scary as it sounds. I haven't fully worked it out (not that I am working it out, but if I was working it out, which I'm not, I wouldn't have it fully worked out). I might change my mind, but probably not. Mmmmm... verbs."
"Dubliners there was the unlovable A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which starts well, charting bold, clear routes, like “Araby,” through the trackless waters of childhood, then fouls its rotors in a dense kelpy snarl of cathected horniness, late-Victorian aesthetics, and the Jesuitical cleverness that, even in Ulysses, wearies the most true-hearted lover of Joyce."
Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)
Quit a highly paid job with a big company (my decision). Joined a smaller company (my decision). Found great people to work with (luck) who are humble, smart and willing to teach - these days I tap dance to work.
The article doesn't dig into some important possible reasons why the growth may be slowing down. When a company is shipping at a large scale (~80 million devices a year), macro factors must be playing a role -- may be the # of phones shipped in the Chinese market is lower this year than expected?, or slowdown in consumer spending? or some other macro factor. The reason I say this is because the thesis presented in the article ("No Loyalty") isn't well substantiated. There are way too many counter anecdotes available where super loyal 'mi-fans' (thats what the loyal fans of this company are called) have stood in line for hours to purchase the latest phones (a la Apple).
Their growth has been quite phenomenal -- infact, they are probably the fastest company to reach $1B in revenue ever -- which isn't a small feat. But as size grows, doesn't growth inevitably slow down (for almost every company)?
Also, as another commenter has pointed out, they really are a internet of things company, more than a smartphone company. Seeing them just as a smartphone is missing the big picture.
I fully agree. Does anyone have an insight into: Why doesn't he make the source the code he uses in his presentations (e.g. the demo in 'Inventing on Principle') available? It would be hugely instructive and joyful to play with that code :)
One of the best (and incidentally, very recent) illustration of your point was seen an AMA by Bill Murray [1]. The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them. Soon after, /u/BillMurrayTranslator (some random guy) rewrote the exact same content in a more coherent, punctuated and editorialized manner. The difference in readability is stark!
Bill's answers were quite hard to understand because of their stream of consciousness nature.
Reading these two types of writing side by side (as in this ama), convinced me that 'write as you talk' can seem quite odd.
The advice does work fantastically well with people who feel compelled to use very formal language to make their point. In those instances,
Write like you talk could mean: write in a simple way.
"The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them."
To clarify, it's widely accepted it was a Reddit admin, /u/808sandhotcakes, that was responsible for the original transcription of Bill's responses.
As has been pointed out in your child posts, the top level responses have since been edited and have improved drastically.
The Admin's username has also been removed from the OP.
To give a better idea, check this archive.is of before the edits. [1]
>Uh yes I know Tom, we called him co back then cause he was a hipster, I sent someone looking for Co looking for him years ago, this person found him and he was running for office, the person I sent was not someone your father wanted to be affiliated with while running a campaign, he was a funny guy if you're his kid you're probably funny too. Tell your Dad to lay low, his past is gonna catch up with him.
>Uh, yes, I know Tom. We called him "Co" back then, cause he was a hipster. I sent someone looking for Co looking for him years ago, this person found him, and he was running for office. The person I sent was not someone your father wanted to be affiliated with while running a campaign. He was a funny guy. If you're his kid, you're probably funny too. Tell your Dad to lay low, his past is gonna catch up with him.
The contrast between this AMA and his previous one is stark.(The previous one [2] handled by the well loved admin /u/chooter, who was recently fired.)
One should write in an audience appropriate way. The Bill Murray AMA was written by someone with no real understanding of written English.
The link you submitted seems to work for mobile only, for some reason I couldn't open it from my computer, so I give the non mobile version below [0].
Apart from that, I did compare a few of the original answers from Bill Murray and with their translated versions, but I don't think the translator makes it clearer, he just added some punctuation and some context (pause, laughs, etc.).
If you just went to that thread 15 hours ago, you did not read the original answers. It was vastly different before it was edited. It was unreadable for me.
68 words in the opening sentence for one of the replies.
I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry.
Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?
Other comments have covered this angle already; we do actively look at herbs, "traditional", and "plant-based" cures. The vast majority (99.9%+) do absolutely nothing. The tiny percentage that have some effectiveness are usually just starting points.
In fact this woman's discovery is exactly that because the malaria parasite is already developing resistance to it which is why the recommended therapy combines it with other drugs to prevent a resistant strain from spreading. That doesn't belittle her accomplishment by any means, but if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones.
Much like pyrethrin-based insecticides, this chemical is already being studied and modified in an attempt to discover variants that are easier to make, have fewer side effects, or which organisms can't develop resistance against quite as easily.
> if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones.
China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories
Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies).
Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.
> the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start
I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older.
On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s.
The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism?
I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.
> The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s
Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor).
I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research.
My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol).
The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)
Then I am certain that the scientific cataloging and analysis of the the pharmacological properties of traditional medicines started before the alternative medicine movement.
> ETHNOBOTANY is virtually a new field of research, a field which, if investigated thoroughly and systematically, will yield results of great value to the ethnologist and incidentally also to the botanist. Ethnobotany is a science, consequently scientific methods of study and investigation must be adopted and adhered to as strictly as in any of the older divisions of scientific work. It is a comparatively easy matter for one to collect plants, to procure their names from the Indians, then to send the plants to a botanist for determination, and ultimately to formulate a list of plants and their accompanying Indian names, with some notes regarding their medicinal and other uses. ...
> Ethnobotanical research is concerned with several important questions: (a) What are primitive ideas and conceptions of plant life? (b) What are the effects of a given plant environment on the lives, customs, religion, thoughts, and everyday practical affairs of the people studied ? (c) What use do they make of the plants about them for food, for medicine, for material culture, for ceremonial purposes? ....
Ive heard of people who dedicate their studies to this. Also Ive an anthropologist friend who spent time living in a developing country studying how people culture blended their traditional vs modern medicine usage.
IMO a real boon for medicine will be increasing sophisticated personal monitoring and the data this makes accessible to the world when shared. If sure we'll see some amazing cause/effect relationships from all sort of areas being identified in coming years .
can we patent them? or is traditional going to be considered prior art? because I don't see big pharma jumping in without profit and with all the regulations around it it's going to be very hard to pay for all the tests for societies not part of the big entourage.
There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not biocompatibility with humans.)
The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.
The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.
The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.
In many cases , the right method to test medicinal properties of plants is to break them into their contituents and test each separately ? and you miss a lot by not doing so(although it is hard) ?
Yes. While most of the components of a plant will have no particular effect, the one component that you're looking for may be lost in the noise. Worse, it could be cancelled out by some other component or components. (Think of proteins which inactivate other proteins.)
I had the good fortune of reading his autobiography. I highly recommend it. It explains the events described in this article (eg the ostracization; allegations of being a communist; attacks on his character; the affairs; seizure of his wealth by the government and the fact that he had to stay away from the country that he loved and called his home for majority of his life). I truly walked away feeling deeply pained and felt sorry for him -- here was a man born into extreme poverty (the scene in one of his movies where the tramp eats a shoe due to extreme hunger, was a part of Chaplin's childhood). His mother went insane (became catatonic) due to hunger. As a small boy he saw his mother being taken away by the police and put into an asylum. And this person, spent his entire life making people laugh.
He was born to make us laugh. I think instead of focussing on his shortcomings and marriages, it is far more important to focus and discuss his craft.
The lookup Hanna speech [1] at the end of the great dictator is must read / listen. One of the best monologues in movie history. Tell me if this speech doesn't move you!
Depending on the size of the team, this is a good thing. As long as you have one "alpha", a designated or undesignated person who makes a call when contentious views are blocking progress.
I believe that a flat structure would be best
You'd want to be careful of premature optimization here. I know what you are trying to get at (i.e. ensuring that you are setting up titles and roles that people can grow into), but this may not be the right time to do it.
Any structure is good, bad, best depending on the situation you are in, the size of the group, the problem you are trying to solve etc. The point is not to see hierarchy & structure as inhenrently good or bad -- but to work back from what you are trying to accomplish to the structure you need. Lets say you were trying to organize a 6 month expedition to a remote area with a group of people that you just met. How would you or this group go about it? I don't think you'd setup titles or hierarchy -- you'd probably go with "role clarity", and doing things that engender "excellence" in their respective tasks.
In a startup, one expects an organization to be driven by passion, creativity and very little structure. This is an important part of why people are there. Traditional forms of motivation or organization often don't work very well (e.g. hierarchy money, title or fear). Once the group is large, then there are companies that go for military style "command & control" structures. Even military is organized differently during war time and peace time. This comes back to the context of your particular situation & what you are trying to do. Are you in war time or peace time? :)
The most important thing is that you have a process that everybody understands -- you may never codify that process, but everyone on the team should know that it is there. And the process is: "To get things done & make a difference". What is the best way to do this?
You want to give a sense of progression, via money & title etc. These are good things, but there are more levers you can pull. In a small group, it is obvious who is kicking-ass and who isn't. You should let them, create an atmosphere first where they can do this -- and then, when they are. Talk to them about what they want. Do they want to run a team? Do they want more money? Do they want a more senior title? Do they want more free time? Do they want more flexibility? Do they want more responsibility (e.g. looking at 3 workstreams, instead of one)? Your answers will evolve. But don't take your eye off the prize -- and the prize is to create an atmosphere where people can excel.
Judging merit
You make this sound hard, but is it? In a small group, isn't it obvious when someone is kicking ass? The problem you are worrying about is that when somoene is kicking-ass, how do I make sure they are rewarded, so that they continue kicking ass. I would say, let people kick-ass first, and understand why they are -- lets say they inherently love 'solving problems', then give them problems to solve that honors & respects their talents.
I wouldn't shower more praise on this game than folks have already done. Great article. Great HN thread. A happy day.