How To Get Accepted Into Stanford

About once a month, I get an email from a student in high school (and sometimes middle school) who wants advice about how to get accepted at Stanford.

They want to know what they should be doing to prepare for college applications – what clubs they should join, what sports they should play, and what activities they should get involved in. They want to learn the “secrets” that will make themselves appealing to admissions officers.

Read the rest of this entry »

YouTube Instant. The last two days…

The last two days of my life have been amazing, insane, sleepless, and humbling!

After the Google Instant announcement on Wednesday, I decided to build YouTube Instant, a site that lets you search across the vast YouTube video database in real-time.

Visit YouTube Instant

It started out as a bet with my roommate, Jake Becker. I bet him I could build real-time YouTube search in less than an hour. Sadly, I lost the bet – It took me 3 hours to finish it, and another couple hours to polish the user interface into what you see now at YTInstant.com. But, I’m happy with the result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Psh… Google Instant? I built YouTube Instant.

Check it out: YouTube Instant.

Cult of Done

Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

from Bre Pettis – The Cult of Done. Via Soleio.

Web Security and Privacy

This is a research paper I wrote about Web Security and Privacy. It’s quite an interesting read, if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare.

(Interesting fact: I wrote the entire final draft of this 25-page paper in less than 24 hours. Coding up the proof-of-concept attack page demo took two days, and gathering information took several weeks, but I finished the actual writing in less than one full day.)