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Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School

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49 pointsalaskamiller23 comments

First, thanks to the management for hosting a fabulous event. That was the most entertaining day I've had in a long time. I'd like to add some additional comments to Mr. Arrington's:

- Although Jeff Bezos didn't directly comment on Google App Engine, he did an awful lot of indirect commenting, by way of pointing out features of AWS that are noticeably absent from Google App Engine.

- After the day was done, I overheard some folks who sounded bored and disappointed by Peter Norvig's talk, which focused on the application of large data sets and machine learning to practical problems. I was shocked by the reaction, as it seemed to me that Norvig was basically giving us a roadmap for (a) finding interesting problems and (b) solving them. Short of writing a check, I'm not sure what else he could have done for the audience.

- Am I the only one who thinks it's funny - and a sad comment on the software development community - that technical conferences always have the most technical problems?

- Paul Buchheit is Bob Newhart. And I mean that as a compliment.

People were all psyched up for more self affirming startup things. Even I seem to operate in a 'startup' mode and a hacker mode. It seems weird. I spent most of my week on machine learning. Yet after hours of talks on entrepreneurship, Norvig's talk of clustering and segmentation made my mental gears switch. I don't think people expected it.

Is there a good text you could recommend on the topic?

If you spend a weekend or two watching machine learning Google tech talks you can start with a roar.

There's also 'Programming Collective Intelligence', Norvig's own book 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach', and the growing Netflix literature.

One of the interesting things people discovered while attacking the netflix problem is that the rating graph encodes features like 'heroism', 'horror', 'absurdity', 'romance', 'political protest', and 'not monty python' -- you only need a little ingenuity to assign words to said features by looking at extreme feature exemplars.

Thank you.

Best highlight: Very nervous guy thanks Bezos for gmail.

Here's the link: http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos/27:35

poor guy

that's terrible it was clear that he was excited to ask him a question, and he knew what to ask him about. rockets. mars bitches

That's quite a strange list of highlights.

That's what I thought. Seems there's a subtext missing.

Another highlight: Arrington's desktop.

(Did anybody get a good shot of what was on there?)

I couldn't make out anything interesting. There was a Word document called "FINAL draft FINAL final" though, which I chuckled at.

check justin tv archive

We missed it unfortunately. I think that was when someone spilled coffee on our power strip :-/

It's on Valleywag...

Are videos of the complete talks going to be posted some place? The recoding on Justin.tv is spotty and incomplete.

Someone (Paul Graham?) mentioned that Omnisio was also recoring the proceedings. (At the very least there were certainly two cameras so we can be reasonably confident a second version will appear.)

Video will be up soon, Don't worry Omnisio will post about it very soon.

We can't wait, this is the INTERNET!

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School

That link has only a part (about 1 hour and 45 min) of the morning's talks. To see all the talks on justin.tv, go to the hackterv channel archive: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/archive

The full day's video is broken up into segments and the beginning of a lot of talks are missing. Almost all of David Lawee's talk is missing.

I was too sick to go, even though I got accepted, so having this video is some solace. Thanks justin.tv.

Looking forward to the omnisio version to fill in the gaps.

where's the damn video?

Videos are going up now at http://omnisio.com/startupschool08

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