Good chess player - sign of a great mind. Great chess player - sign of a wasted mind.

Wasted in what sense? What do you consider a better use that could have been made of a great chess player's mind?

It's just a saying I heard a long time ago from one of my professors. He probably meant it in the academic sense, i.e. the person could otherwise use that mental energy to do great research.

This point of view is understandable coming from a scientist, but essentially he could've said the same about van Beethoven or Dostoyevsky :)

Their works please us - not unlike the greatest chess games - but do they broaden our knowledge?

And where lies the value of great research anyway? In its practical appliance?

Grigori Perelman's research on the Poincaré conjecture is beyond brilliant, but has it improved our life more than the Immortal Game (Anderssen - Kieseritzky)?

Or is there innate value in scientific research, which comes solely from the virtue of being scientific? This approach strikes me as para-religious.

Refutation of the Evans gambit is some sort of knowledge as well. It's even peer reviewed :)

Of course it's not useful, but, for instance, is knowing what god was worshipped by the Khori-Tumed tribe 1200 years ago (fruit of hard and deep historical research work as it might be) more useful?

I think I may have just come up with their new slogan: "The seedless watermelon of mattresses".

Huh? This is gross oversimplification of both APIs and the role of business development. The author somehow conflates deals with API integration. Not all deals (and not all deals are term sheets, whatever) result in APIs integration. Not all API integration coincides with business development activity.

I feel like people who deny the business model of app.net are trying to refute the existence and success of HBO. You don't need to operate at the scale of Facebook, Twitter or cable networks to be successful, mainly because your criteria for success are very different with a pay-for, ad-free product.

Moreover I don't need to be a victim of guns (sorry for referring to a lightning rod of an issue, but bare with me) to advocate gun control. Same way you don't have to be a developer victimized by Twitter and Facebook to think that there might be a better way.

And for the record, I did put my money where my mouth is.

HBO's success doesn't depend on my friends also watching HBO.

But you are much more likely to pay for HBO if all your friends watch it and talk about the shows.

My wife and I live in a ~300 square foot apartment in NYC, although we don't feel like we've got plenty of room, we never feel cramped either. Moreover, we often have people sleep over in our "living room". A lot of it is about light and how high your ceilings are.

I guess what I am saying is that the absolute minimum square footage you think you need is a malleable concept.

I like the idea, but I cannot imagine normals using it en masse. It seems so natural to those familiar with software engineering because it's basically a little language embedded into email conversations. For someone unfamiliar with computer science concepts like translation, languages, compilers, etc, it would be a formidable thing to learn and use.

I agree that it is a major concern, and we're trying to break down this barrier by making the language as human readable as possible.

Thanks. Never thought the name would be a turn off, but you have a point.

I built this little app over the last few weekends. The idea was to help me to organize my thoughts for the different projects I was mulling over. I really feel like writing things down can be a great way to get to the essence of what it is you are trying to do and why.

This is just a simple realization of that idea. Implemented in Python using Heroku's Cedar stack.

Noted. I didn't mean to come off as adversarial or manipulative. This is really a conversation starter, and I rarely just write down the answer and move on.

But I do feel like it helps me learn a whole lot about the candidate without compromising that trust or condescending to them with "what's your biggest weakness?" or some such.

Since I ask this all the time, I can vouch that it rarely results in the candidate criticizing their previous employer (unless the previous employer did something truly egregious).