Peter Renshaw › Comments

""... 'Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...': Yeah that's a commercial. You are aware of that, I'm sure ..." It's sad that this quote is often mis-attributed to Kerouac from "On the road" and given some sort of literary weight. No doubt there was a bit of massaging by Apple marketing from the original quote to give an appearance of rebelliousness and authenticity but without the hassle of dealing with Kerouac and copyright. The real quote goes something like: ". . . and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'..." - Peter Renshaw

""... And how do you handle answering so many of them, fired at you all at once from multiple people in the span of 10 minutes? ..." I don't know. I'd say learn to identify the questions you can answer as best you can. This is what I mean by having some form of roleplay, verbal, improv skills. Pick the Q's you do know, pick the ones that are important to your product." - Peter Renshaw

""... You need to be prepared for tough questions. ..." I think the point of the exercise is to really nut out the obvious questions. But how do you practice answering tough questions? Reading through the posts here on prospective YC applicants highlighted the need to be able to think on ones feet. The number of questions fired at you is high. The best idea I can think to simulate this is be using skills developed by comedic improvisation. Earlier this year at an un-conference ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos...... the best session I went to was a entrepreneur/hacker who is also a comedian. Dan ~ http://twitter.com/danwalmsley explained that by play acting ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos...... meant each person could act and re-act real time. This is a skill that could be practiced post RAQ and as you correctly point out, a place to answer tough questions." - Peter Renshaw

""... Your text is incorrect. Carl would have been 75 on Monday, November 9. Cari Sagan Greene ..." Not quite." - Peter Renshaw

"try extracting the data via the simcard ~ http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to......" - Peter Renshaw

""... Imagine if you lost your phone. How long would it take you to reproduce the list? ..." You used to ask for business cards and store them on your desk in a nice little container, cross referencing them in your filofax. I had never owned a mobile till this year. I used to keep a backup in a small notebook till I lost that. My phone doesn't use anything but bluetooth and so the only way to get access to the data from the not very practical a) "memorise each phone number by heart" to the dumb b) read it off the screen or geeky c) "backup the simcard at regular intervals the hi-tech way" ~ http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to...... but thats probably a bit beyond what most would tolerate. In the end I just asked the hand full of people I do ring their number again. But for 250+ contacts it would be best use an online service to store them & print a couple of lists. But it does beg the question, do you really need to keep all 250 phone numbers in the first place?" - Peter Renshaw

""... If you were attempting a parody of amichail, you've failed, ..." Parody? No. Having just done some work on identification and analysis of bullies in social systems by mapping behaviour using network science techniques a couple of weeks ago - identifying & neutralising bullies is quite fresh in my mind. No failure on my part." - Peter Renshaw

""... What bothers me is not the fact that you want to think on problems with little practical utility. What bothers me is that you expect others to join you without showing no glimpse of a solution! ..." I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Do you have a problem with Amichail? If you keep on repeated attacking, causing distress and others join in this is technically bullying. The beaut thing is all it takes to stop even a hint of bullying is for bystanders to stand up for the attacked. So what's your call? Are you going to continue this vein of argument? Do you feel the need to continuously dominate others? Because bullies should not be tolerated and I'll stand up for Amichail." - Peter Renshaw

""... Talking about ideas was never taboo. It's just that your ideas are consistently inane and not worth talking about. ..." I don't think Amichail is inane. Inane is defined as "empty", "vain" or "lacking of meaning". I recognise the behaviour Amichail is displaying, "continuously asking lots of questions". As a kid I did this. I asked so many questions I distinctly remember my old man telling me to shut-up. So I did. Then had the problem of teachers asking me why I never bothered asking for help. In the real world continuously asking questions and being curious seems stupid, pointless and suppressed. HN isn't a slice of the regular world. Tolerance of eccentric and unusual behaviour strengthens HN not weakens it. So let Amichail ask as many questions as possible, don't suppress the questioning, it's a sign of youthful curiosity. Harnessing Amichail as a sounding board for ideas and pointing out any weakness in ideas seems more reasonable than scolding." - Peter Renshaw

""... This guy's a class act. That level of professionalism is something we don't see often enough in this industry ..." I'd tend to agree with you here. I remember Don really getting stuck into YC, not in a negative way but fundamentally questioning the reasons for the niche b/w Angel and VC. Once explained what was going on and the reasons (benefits to Startups, VC's, customers, companies). Given the evidence and seeing the advantages Don changed tack. So it's not the first time I've seen how well Don has behaved in the sometimes bitchy world of Tech." - Peter Renshaw

""... Reasons to stay at three founders ..." One reason not to have odd number of founders where n>1 is pair-ups. When people work in groups they tend to pair up and form dyads. Especially when times get tough. This is a very natural and stable work configuration. An odd number of founders means someone is left out. It's no co-incidence the most basic army formation, a brick is 2x2. I'm wondering though, would it hold true for 2 extro and 1 introvert founder?" - Peter Renshaw

""... No, not really the primitive one is quite good ..." Does make me wonder why a negative comment was included." - Peter Renshaw

""... Unlike Ruby, Clojure doesn’t come with a precooked readline-equipped REPL, but you can get a primitive one going in a simple shell script ..." Big oversight?" - Peter Renshaw

""... Who can recommend good books/articles on negotiation? ..." Negotiation is as much about non-verbal as it is verbal. So what's a good way to learn negotiation aside from watching "Lie to me" or "Hustle"? What about playing and learning poker? In any sort of negotiation it helps if you can understand a) where the person you are negotiating with is coming from and b) what they are really thinking.This is where playing poker can help. To win you sometimes have to bluff (or lie) about your hand. People who are superior at understand and reading what others are thinking can use this to their advantage. Next some books on psychology. A good start is understanding "cognitive bias" (how individual psychology can influence individual decisions) ~ http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki..." - Peter Renshaw

""... The idea of a state machine, and most of the command set, is adopted from Processing, an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. ..." Processing boxed up as an app. I would like to give it a try but I'm nix, bsd and at last resort *Win. What I do like about it is it makes doing the same thing with processing, easier. So for that reason alone the product is worth learning from. - http://processing.org/ & http://mobile.processing.org/ - http://processingjs.org (javascript)" - Peter Renshaw

"visiting Singapore" get a hair cut - Peter Renshaw

""... Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, though. ..." That's a pretty good insight. Understanding someone else requires you get "theory of mind" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... It lets you understand how to get the best out of somebody by understanding their viewpoint. Punishing them for making a simple error shows judgment and taking on failure, leadership. Now if the person didn't learn, that's where things get interesting." - Peter Renshaw

""... I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff ..." There are possible explanations to this idea in an article I read yesterday ~ "Welcome to China's millennium", Martin Jacques ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment......" - Peter Renshaw

""... I can testify it contains less jungle survival knowledge than most boyscouts pick up during their training. ..." thanks I didn't expect IDF basic to be so "basic". "... his odds would be pretty much the same as the average young backpacker. ..." Didn't expect that." - Peter Renshaw

""... We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to built stuff on top of it. .." Is building apps using Twitter what building apps to MS was?" - Peter Renshaw

""... We contacted about 30, resulting in around 7 hits. Some of our biggest hits were secondary though, larger blogs would see us on smaller ones and contact us for a demo code. ..." Nice hack and something I appreciate because it's such a simple thing to do. "... Lots of sites have feedburner badges to give subscriber counts. ..." Did you try to obtain the stats from each site?" - Peter Renshaw

Hum... Of course you can do whatever you want with your blog. Just don't expect me to subscribe or even read. - directeur

Thanks for your replies, Peter, John and Heather! The kind of blogs that you're talking about are those that interest me. Alas, the trend is something completly different nowadays. - directeur

"If wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself. The Super-Pattern, 2nd para needs "If 'I' wrote a new essay"." - Peter Renshaw

Also, there is this interview of Jimmy Cobb ; the drummer in this album here http://www.jazz.com/feature... (three parts) really interesting! :) - directeur from NoiseRiver Extra!

+infinity Chris. Amazing, awesome album. - Jason Huebel

""... No matter how great a shape you get into, there's always something artificial about the gym. ..." Better air, less people." - Peter Renshaw

""... First of all, we don't need to learn survival. We know it. Nobody needs any course, any kit, any book. It's completely nonsense. We know survival very well, that's what we know best. ..." There are 2 reasons this statement could be wrong. The first is this survivor bias, we dont read the stories of non survivors. The second from the transcript... "... Well, the obvious reason was I finished my military service. ..." Basic includes lots of handy tips for survival. Untrained beginner he aint." - Peter Renshaw

"*"... I've made an MP3 of his talk because I want to make it available to people in my family as a podcast. I hope Bruce and the people at Reboot don't mind ..."* Like coming over to Daves house, there's always something good on." - Peter Renshaw

""... Activity for activity's sake isn't necessarily a good thing ..." Good point you need a purpose but I figure when I leave this earth I'm going in a well used, experienced and smashed up body. To get the best out of things you really have to push it. I train x-country ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos...... & http://www.flickr.com/photos...... "... lack of any external movement, combined with emotional challenges from games, movies, and such, mean that we've got these bodies made for running around and physically stimulating ourselves yet we're pushing them to sit still and run on artificially-induced stress. ..." Agreed. You fair much better physically hard psychologically. The thing I've most noted is this takes time in modern lifestyles. Who else takes out at least 2hrs/day to do this? For bench warmers this is what it takes minimum to get optimum benefit." - Peter Renshaw

""... Modern US infantrymen patrol with gear that must be damn near 50% bodyweight if not more. As for the Roman legionaries, who set up a fortified camp every night, a marathon and a half? ..." USMC require individuals to be able to march 50Miles in battle order per day. Don't know for how long they can keep this up for. But to give you an idea how far people can be pushed the best time for the in Melbourne is 100Km/h (62 Ml) for a team of four to traverse the course is 10 hours and 35 minutes, over rough terrain. They must be pretty fit because the "Queen's Gurkha Signals Regiment HK" team ran it 11 hours 27 minutes in 2003 ~ http://www2.oxfam.org.au/trailwa......" - Peter Renshaw

""... We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear," McAllister replied. These people were much more robust than we were. ... Generalisation but I tend to agree as I go off and do my 970/1000Km pt this year in an experiment in failure. I want to see how hard I can repeatedly push myself before I crack, 10Km at a time. Haven't yet. The insights have some implications for motivation, completion of tasks and failure. "... The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days. 'We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven't developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn't come close to replicating that. ..." The question is do you want to? I know people in trades, hard manual..." - Peter Renshaw