TED, I think, serves as a modern version of high-brow oration as the middle letter suggests: Entertainment. It's a double-ended marketplace platform of content providers (speakers) and content consumers (paid attendees and non-paid viewers). Since the cost is high to paid attendees, the content must be as good and fresh as humanly possible. From what I've seen as a non-paid viewer, I think TED accomplishes this reasonably well. It seems hard to have perfect criterion to choose whom to select and whom to not, when there is an abundance of interesting of voices, but unselected folks can always speak and publish on other platforms.
(Forward thinking can be controversial, but in order to not offend audiences and prevent attracting the wrong elements, it seems customary that such topics are passed on because the forum (e.g., intended audience/speaker experience) is inappropriate, although the topic may be vital, insightful and have a legitimate fora elsewhere. (Blasphemy, politics, etc.))
Turbo/Borland Pascal used a NUL-optional string format of length (byte IIRC) followed by data. [0]
Java IIRC also uses a length-oriented format for string constants in .class files. [1] It's been a while since I wrote a .java to MIPS asm compiler in C++ from scratch (don't ask).
This is because real-world strings may contain 0 to N NULs and escaping them is too much of a PITA for serialized formats, so it's easier and common to do things like TYPE LENGTH DATA de/serialization. For modern, efficient binary de/ser, check out binc and msgpack [2,3].
Low-level code often omits high-level intended behavior (description, pseduocode, documentation, test cases, etc.) and semantic meaning like variable names. In such styled codebases, the absence of these makes it harder to refactor, reuse and/or modify than say concisely & precisely documented codebases in higher-level languages (Python, Ruby, Go) or quality asm.
As an aside: Michelin Red guides are like Yelp, but Francophile-centric, uses dedicated reviewers instead of crowdsourcing and without the extortion. The issue with Michelin is that places outside France aren't rated very often (6 months to 2 years). And like a newspaper, the physical Red guides get outdated as soon as they're printed. Most people are better off with Yelp, especially if they can determine whether an establishment pays the Yelp "tax" or not. Speaking of which, a great personal project would be an invite-only, private Yelp scraper that doesn't play by the "tax" ranking rules (don't get busted by keeping it anonymous, obviously).
Try this at home (and only at home), on a signal generator:
EAS combined tone (TV) 853 Hz sine-wave + 960 Hz sine-wave ("+" means simply combine both waves together, neither modulation nor any other fancy convolutions)
Stanford has its own cogen steam and chilled water (underground "ice cube") capabilities, in addition to power generation. Many such campuses use the industrial central plant model because it's cheaper and more efficient at scale. Residential areas could leverage this and other utilities (like internet) if people get out there, organize and develop compelling, sustainable operational (quasi-business) models that can compete with for-profit. Because it doesn't make sense to have an entire neighborhood with excess internet capacity and individual wifi boxes, having to have one "own" of everything is demonstrably wasteful compared to "sharing economy" alternatives. (Steam and chilled water as well, since temperature regulation is usually the number one energy consumer in a household without an EV.)
People with the least power tend to desire assertion of control of minutia and others (probably a sizable portion of LEOs). By contrast, people with more power delegate and are fine to live with the decision of others because it doesn't matter. It's like the guy that won't pull over and ask for directions, or the small coffee shop that has a key to use a restroom (permission-based, control-freak culture, e.g., dog people) instead of an internal lock (delegation, freedom, e.g., cat people).
Wasted energy is the absence of strategic laziness.
0. Spread time in coffee shops in tech areas, go to conferences snd events
1. Talk to people, be nice, sincere, helpful and polite. Give and get contact info (cards or details). (But don't let them milk you for too many freebies, at some point you need to charge for your time. Be clear and upfront about what you're willing and not willing to give away. Beware the "friend" psuedoclient that wants to pick your brain at all hours, at random without golden-rule consideration.)
It's one thing to demonstrate a PoC live on life/safety critical systems, it's another to brag about sources & methods on social media, leave your machine powered-on and blab contents to anyone and everyone whom can be called as a witness (whether hostile, material or voluntary).
0. NEVER TALK TO THE COPS. [0]
1. NEVER LEAVE ENCRYPTED MACHINES HOT (decryption keys or filesystem cache in memory). FireVault 2 optionally leaves keys in memory [1, 2]
2. NEVER REUSE PASSWORDS OR PREVIOUSLY CONFISCATED GEAR (start fresh, beware of firmware and other hard-to-detect hw mods)
Presume mil/gov vuln shops have high cost USB, FireWire and Thunderbolt DMA memory cloning capabilities. If a machine has gone out of your possession, good luck finding which injection-molded part now contains a keylogger which will allow them to unlock your cloned disk images and RAM image after-the-fact (to get your password to get your fv key). (It's not tinfoil far-fetched if you go out of your way to get on one of the various govts department's radar.)
BTW, laptop was a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)
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It sounds like it's far too early and you would blow your chances with investors, and probably even angels. If you could manage to take on experienced business co-founder, that might signal some validation that the venture might have legs. But you're not going to get very far in the jungle of business on a wing and a prayer alone, you need someone and/or advisors with experience. If you could convince someone that has exited before, that would add to overall perception and validation. If investment were absolutely required for a venture to survive, it often comes across as desperation and a red flag to investors that makes them wary of the founders' ability to manage money and contain costs... ignorance is no excuse when it comes to money. That said, it is imperative for founders to track and minimize costs to demonstrate penny- and pound-wisdom to potential investors. Demonstrating religious accounting hygiene may mean the difference between investment and non-investment (see also: Felix Dennis).
I hope your venture is successful and be sure to keep the team together and pivot into something else if the current thing doesn't work out... good teams are hard to come by. (The more valuable thing than success is learning what mistakes were made and what move/s would have been better.)
Hopefully the responding on-call engineers aren't tired folks but folks in other timezones. The reason that the risk of compounding the situation is lessened, because trying to fix important shit when tired is like driving without a seatbelt.
Update: seems to be back, so it doesn't matter unless someone's having an early morning.