Quotes from Daniel Lyons

I wanted to learn how to blog, so I was playing around with Wordpress and Typepad and Blogger, starting all these different blogs just to learn how these things work. I had a fake Sergey Brin blog, an anonymous, fake Ph.D kind of blog. I did it for, like, I don't know, six weeks, and the Steve Jobs one just caught on.

Fingerprint readers require special hardware, and a lot of people find them creepy and don't want to use them. Smart cards and tokens can be lost or stolen.

Content is supposed to be king. But in the world of electronic devices, Apple seems to be placing the crown on its own head, apparently believing that its iPad and iPhone are more important to customers than the books, movies, and music they store on them.

In addition to making Android available for free, Google also lets phone makers change the code and customize it so that an Android phone made by, say, Samsung has a different user interface than an Android phone from Motorola.

Remember the early days of the Net, when everything was going to be open and free, and we were all going to share information in a techno-utopia? That was great until people realized that their user data could be turned into gold. Now there are billions at stake, and nobody is playing nice anymore.

If your plumber or pool installer or local appliance store uses HubSpot software, HubSpot may be holding information about you without you even knowing it. We figure we're safe when we use online services. We figure we can trust the people who run them not to snoop on us. I used to believe that. I don't anymore.

Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.

Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the 'One Laptop Per Child' organization - the so-called $100 laptop - was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.

The people running Silicon Valley are not making the show because they want to do a satire of Silicon Valley. They are just comedy writers, and they want to make a funny show.

'Silicon Valley' likes being satirized. They've all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.

Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off - not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.

My role on 'Silicon Valley' was so small that I didn't have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.

I wouldn't say that I know a lot about 'Silicon Valley'. I live in Boston, for one thing. And I don't live and breathe this stuff the way most of the guys out there do.

Some people are using landline connections and dial-up modems to call ISPs in other countries and get onto the Internet. Still others are using satellite connections.

To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can 'see' what's around it.

Nvidia's self-driving-car business grew out of a long-standing relationship with auto companies. Car guys used Nvidia chips for computer-aided design, then used Nvidia supercomputer chips to do crash simulations. When the car guys started thinking about autonomous vehicles, Nvidia leaped at the chance to help them solve the problem.

The chance to interact with big shots is drawing scads of aspiring entrepreneurs to Quora, along with venture capitalists and other Valley players.

I often wonder what the world would be like if more companies were like Apple.

If a developer wants to sell something via an iPad app - it's called an 'in-app purchase' - the transaction must go through Apple, which keeps 30 percent of the money and passes 70 percent on to the developer.

Google views Facebook as a threat to its business and has been trying to launch a social-networking service to compete with it.

What needs to change is the nature of advertising itself. That business hasn't really evolved since the days of Don Draper.