I.M.H.O.

> In Java, you can forget about doing it in the cleanest or the best way, because that is impossible. Whatever you do, however hard you try, the code will come out mediocre, verbose, redundant, and bloated

(reason for liking Java)

Well, here are some other reason for liking Java: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/da3b2c180e9c

But I really believe the future of software is affected more by having better programmers rather than having better languages.

Yes, it helps to have cool languages like Julia, Nimrod, Rust, even Scala (which I think is the best statically typed JVM language out there). But I tend to think that a good developer will be good in any language, Haskell, C, Java or LOLCODE.

I think that a good developer "forced" to use Java will find tools that bring out the good parts of the language: Dropwizard, Play framework / Akka, even latest versions of Spring and Java EE are much more convention over configuration and lightweight than before.
They will use Guava and Apache commons to streamline common Java verbosity and bloat.
They'll use Java 8 which allows much more robust and concise syntax to common problems.

But I don't think that the language is the problem. I think that a great developer will be able to tackle any problem with the language itself easily, because the real problem is not how to implement X, but more what is X. Designing the software correctly is the main problem at hand, not how to move input to output. This is what stackoverflow is for.

One…

The list ("standout posts" are according to Forbes):

1. On Startups (onstartups.com)
2. For Entrepreneurs (forentrepreneurs.com)
3. Steve Blank (steveblank.com)
4. Startup Lawyer (startuplawyer.com)
5. Rock the Post (rockthepost.com)
6. Venture Hacks (venturehacks.com)
7. Dutiee (dutiee.com)
8. Chris Dixon --> standout post (http://cdixon.org/2013/06/01/some-thoughts-on-mobile/)
9. Quora (I mean, Quora's awesome, but they just phoned this one in)
10. Ladieswholaunch (Ladieswholaunch.com)
11. Angel List (angel.co)
12. First Round Capital (firstround.com/review)
13. Epic Launch (epiclaunch.com)
14. A VC (avc.com)
15. Business Owner's Toolkit --> standout post http://www.bizfilings.com/toolkit/sbg/run-a-business/exiting/tax-aspects-of-selling-business.aspx
16. Tom Tunguz's blog (tomtunguz.com)
17. Chic CEO (chic-ceo.com)
18. This is Going to be Big --> standout post: http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2013/7/18/the-hook-the-most-important-part-of-a-pitch.html
19. All Business --> standout post: http://experts.allbusiness.com/5-seo-bare-minimums-busy-business-owner/11204/#.UoMwjZSkfgF
20. Above the Crowd --> standout post: http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/08/24/what-is-really-happening-to-the-venture-capital-industry/
21. Forte Foundation (fortefoundation.org)
22. PG's blog --> standout post: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
23. Medium --> standout post: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/40cf0a8919cb
24. Ben Horowitz's blog --> standout post:…

iOS7 design is weak, with reason. This page is just quoting tweets, but there many in-depth criticism on the many obvious flaws everywhere on the blogosphere.

From the objective to the subjective:

- Complete redesign makes it too different from iOS 6 and OS X, throws away all learnability

- Icons have no consistency whatsoever

- Toolbar icons are so abstract as to be useless

- Legibility suffers from Helvetica Light on bright white, everywhere

- Got rid of affordances, you don't know what is a button anymore (same mistake as WP and some Google apps)

- Control panel is a mess

- Color palette is poor and tacky. You have a true to life display to work with, but limit yourself to primary and secondary, over-saturated hues... just stupid

To be fair, usability increased in many places as in multi-tasking and better use of gesture, although that's hardly innovation - they are just copying tried and true interactions from software both on iOS platform (e.g. Gmail for iOS, Mailbox) and others (webOS, Android).

Overall the UI looks like designed by someone who designs print media and has no clue what they are doing.

This article wraps it up: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/275a56688510

The problem I see is that you have a lot of new SaaS startups where their is not a low marginal cost to add people. This is particularly true in the developer space where there are any number of startups that will record events from websites and mobile apps for anything from performance monitoring to analytics. Each free customer they add has a cost in terms of data, infrastructure and building code to scale massively. Thus, they are forced to raise ever bigger amounts of money from VCs to keep going. Contrast this with 37signals - where adding another free client really did have very little cost.

And at the same time, all these services are, as the article points out, becoming commodified. Thus, recognizing that they really can't make money in the SMB market with such low switching costs, they decide to move to the enterprise market and thus the whole economics of SaaS are blown up, and they look very much like a traditional enterprise software business - and SaaS becomes a delivery methodology rather than business model.

My own article on this issue (shameless plug): https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/a2cc0d5ba431

The worst part of this thing is that students loans do not need to be that high because college costs should not be that high. Student loans are artificially high because of two reasons:
1. Government subsidies
2. Increasing college costs

Government subsidies are there because the government knows that a kid who goes to college will be able to give a better return on it 'public' investment, since lifetime earnings for a college educated individual are about 50-100% higher than a high school one. This will make them pay more taxes etc.

The schools on the other hand are taking the subsidized college loans in the form of tuition and fees and using them not to increase educational standards, but rather, invest in extracurriculars, building etc. The government does not tie college loan financing to college performance at all, so effectively it just subsidizes the borrowing costs for school in the form of cheap college loans.

(shameless plug) I wrote a blog post about this if anyone is interested to read more:

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/35d383a4fbad

I like this approach of setting a ceiling on the potential value:

The world GDP is somewhere around 50 Trillion Dollars ($50 x 10^12). Bitcoin is designed so that there will never be more than 21 Million in existence. Let’s say that there is a possibility that Bitcoin could one day constitute 1% of world transactions. (I could envision the percentage being much higher, or 0%, but 1% is a good place to start). If this were the case, then

($50T x 1%) / 21M BTC = $23,809.52 / BTC

(Again, this isn’t a scientific treatment of the valuation of a currency, but a back-of-the-envelope approach.)

So we could see how the price of a single Bitcoin could increase from its current value of ~ $550.00 to $23,809.52. What is the likelihood of Bitcoin succeeding in being the currency used in 1% of world transactions? Let’s say it’s 10%. (Again, exact value not important.) You get a risk-adjusted value of $2,3809.52.

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/468e11b9f95