31reasons

>>How did Slack blow up so quickly?

I am pretty sure even founders don't know. It just happens with a combination of lot of luck and a very good product.

Some kind of machine learning based answering system that look like Stack Overflow but answers come from analyzing chats!

Speaking of CRISPR, how big of a discovery/invention is that ? Is it going to change medicine forever ?

Changes of what? There are millions of parameters that affect each other in a nonlinear fashion due to genetics, environment, diet etc. Getting such data from the living system would be prohibitively invasive, blood tests have their limitations and doesn't provide real-time data.

Studies like these always make me think how little we know about human body. I wonder when are we going to stop doing these kind of studies and learn from human body as purely engineering system. By simulating it at a molecular level and understanding it that way.

Where are the chips that mimic cells and help create complete simulation of a trillion+ cell system? We need Elon Musk of human body :)

Chinese are just waiting until it succeeds. Their hackers are probably on stand-by to download the blueprints and the code. lol

We are witnessing 0-1 technology of space exploration and its amazing. Its going to be an inflection point in the history of our species.

Yes its a very hard problem but what makes it hard ? Is it engineering of the components, algorithms or expensive tests and economics of it ? Maybe people before Elon Musk were not interested in solving this problem not because its technically hard problem but because their existing business model is much more lucrative.

>>It took several more years before mathematicians succeeded in even constructing the monster group, but they had a good excuse: The monster has more than 10^53 elements, which is more than the number of atoms in a thousand Earths.

Did they create a set of numbers the size of 10^53 ? That seems impossible since you need more capacity then all atoms of 1000 Earths!

I think lot of people have that issue. Maybe the person you are placating is placating back to you. I learned that you are helping both of you by leaving the conversation if its not interesting to you.

>>Imagine an ETF that pools shares in pre ipo stocks. Now you can take the positions that the unicorns are over priced and short them. This should give us much better insight into what the entire market thinks these startups are worth.

That goes against the practice of "pump and dump". Investors who invest 50mil+ and raise valuation to billions and sell the company to Googles of the world not going to like your idea. They might do anything in their power to stop it.

If you bill daily, how many hours would you work per day ? 8 or 10 or 16?

If you wait long periods of time, does that not reduce your overall hourly rate? Because if you are doing nothing your hourly rate is $0. With such a strategy can you make as much as someone who is full time employee or someone who charges much less but who is filling most of his/her hours?

I agree but idea of legalized drugs does not fit well with capitalism. As we know wherever there is market there is profit to be made. Companies will pop up advertising whatever drug they are selling. And as we know companies are always interested in increasing their customer base. If a substance is addictive enough it will reach millions of people very quickly and destroy society in the process. However if we keep the drugs away from capitalism that would be the way to go.

"Tim asks everyone to sit around on the floor in a circle and reflect deeply on a particular passage from the Bible."

This is when I stopped reading the article. Asking teammates to do meditation before coding is one thing, but asking them to read a passage from the Bible. whoa..

As we know there not just 3 currencies in the world. It could be Yen, Rupee or Ugandan shilling or any one of the 180 currencies.

I think your question is legit. It shouldn't be down voted. It doesn't apply to science and engineering disciplines because we humans have made those disciplines "human proof" by rigorous analysis and testing. Here when people say "winging it" is I think meant to point out that Humans are limited in their capacity to know everything about things ,especially predict the future yet people sometime act like they do know. "Winging" might be a coping mechanism we have to employ to stay relevant in the rapidly changing world. It may not have been true 100 years ago.

All the things you described can also increase your bad-luck surface area. You are confusing bad-luck with inaction, which is not the same. You might end-up meeting wrong people, work on wrong ideas, hire wrong people, get wrong publicity, wrong timing etc etc.

There should be another coffee startup that would ask you if they should automatically post the picture of the coffee on my Instagram. Now thats a time saver.

All of this boils down to one word : GREED. Most people starting startup in bubble by definition greedy. They are not there to change the world per se, like Elon Musk. They want to have more equity when they sell the company. Period.

I believe first 5 people in the company should be given double digit equity.

Exactly, its a horrible policy. I can't believe it even exists. Imagine if Gas companies lock you into using only certain brands of cars. OR If your computer comes locked with Comcast internet access only!

But here is what goes through the mind of a manager who never been a programmer:

If John is working only 4 hours coding everyday and gets stuff done. He can do double in 8 hours. So I should ask John to not goof around and focus on getting more things done.

You email address is not working dude. I sent you an email and it bounced!

>>observing highly successful people after they are already successful is not terribly useful.

Its called Survival Bias!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Did you read the blog the original commenter wrote ? I was responding to that blog.

Well its hard to explain value when you can't put it in numbers. Web developers/SEO consultants can easily calculate their contribution by increase traffic. What can an iOS developer do ? Most of my work goes inside an App making it highly robust and smooth performance. But you can't put a number on it. People don't appreciate contributions that stop bad things from happening rather than creating visibly good things.

I charge $100/hour and I had extremely hard time finding work for last two years. Primarily because most client's think I charge way too much. I live in Los Angeles! Last year I worked at a mid-size multinational tech company as iOS developer at a $700/Day rate. The manager probably told me 100 times that I am very expensive and they have to let me go after project is over. I am not sure if companies are spoiled by offshore low rates or something else is going on. If Plumbers are making $100/hour, why do they think Software Developers should be cheaper than that!

As a freelancer , after making 1/4 of what I can make as Full-time developer I am going back to the full-time Job.

IBM is not a live entity it is composed of people.

The slides have 10.4 million views! Are there even that many programmers in the US ?

AI is already dangerous with its recommendation engines shaping our lives and used for decision making in lot of unethical places we don't know about. Every technology has a dark side. It does not need to reach human level intelligence or beyond it.