RuggeroAltair

It's interesting since, apart from all the talking about the social network in real life (didn't it use to be 'always' in real life before the internet?), we will probably see more and more of entrepreneurial attempts to include time in their explicit vision (there is plenty in the implicit vision).

Pg explains some of the underlying idea already in a few essays, like http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html , and we can see how this emerging concept of time well spent vs time wasted, and what their meaning really is, sooner or later will make its way into products.

In the future the way we spend our time will be so important since time will be so precious, that there is lots of space for innovation.

There is lots of ways to, for example, save time through software, kind of by definition. The app that saves me 10 minutes a day for catching the bus at the right time is valuable. The concept of bus itself is a way to save time. That's always been around.

But it's interesting to see ideas that relate more on the time that you are consuming somewhere, as opposed to what you are consuming.

Of course, 2001 has so much good visual material that such a recut was possible.

But this confirms why I stopped watching previews.

1. They are rarely a reflection of a movie style, although they are at least forced to use the same images (but weird fact, not the soundtrack, why?)

2. They give away too many twists, what's the point of showing some major twist that in the movie happens 30 minutes after the beginning?

3. They are not helping you understand whether you'd like a movie or not, they are there to maximize the number of people going to the theaters.

I know it's more complicated than that. But roughly that's what comes down to it, for me.

Some of the trailers are so much similar to each other that it's hard to think it's not pure software what's making them.

Imaging going to watch the above advertised 2001, what would you think after watching the real movie?

For completeness, the original trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8TABIFAN4o

Oh, I agree with you. Since I wrote a lot I didn't want to be so detailed, but basically I meant that I hear a lot of 'college is useless, I can learn by starting a company', and I disagree about the fact that you are learning the same things.

Of course you certainly learn a lot by starting a company, it's a matter of making sure you are choosing that over college for the right reasons, and not 'only' because you feel like you will be the next twitter in a year, which most likely won't happen.

I think that there might be a more natural order in going to school first, then starting a business. But it's not necessarily the unique or the right way. It's what I think.

Ultimately it depends on the person. It's just hard to judge well about college when you haven't really gone through college, and I think that starting too early could be worse than starting a couple of years later. Just my opinion.

It's not like there won't be any opportunities after college. So I just feel that I would expect a strong reason to feel like I can't wait anymore. But if the reason is that one thinks that in college you don't learn anything but working for someone, then I think that's the wrong reason. That's all.

I understand what you are trying to say, but this article is silly from many points of view. I don't want to answer with wise-ass comments like "you went to the wrong college" and such, so I'll give you a couple of arguments:

- College isn't only CS.

- Pure (computer or not) science isn't 'working for someone'. It's 'learning how to do (computer) science correctly', hopefully.

- Plagiarism is not what you are saying, which is superficial. Citing a paper and using previous work in academia isn't plagiarism, for example. Copying someone else's paper and putting your name on it is. Which IS bad. I can't take a linux distribution and tell the world I wrote it. But I can use it and (depending on the license) sell it. Or make something else with it and add my name on it.

- Performance matters or not depending on the users, obviously. But if you don't know that your algorithms are bad, or if you don't know how to fix them when you hit scaling problems, then what do you do with all your users? Sure, you can hire someone who went to college or learned that somewhere else, but then you'd be supporting the idea that there is no need to be technical to be founders, which is partly true but if google and others taught us something is that the technical founders tend to be able to understand some problems better (and solve them better).

- Learning the concepts behind the list you wrote isn't incompatible with college. If you take some business classes you can learn a lot of it. No one is forcing you not to take those classes or a major in CS and a minor in Economics.

- From college you don't get only the classes, but also the interaction with a lot of smart people, diversity, challenge and many other things. It changes you, hopefully in better.

- Getting excited about being entrepreneurs doesn't always mean the sooner the better. It depends if one is ready. Like with startup ideas, arriving too early may be as bad as arriving late. So, if you quit college for the sake of being an entrepreneur when you are 19 and then you fail, you lost the chance of getting 'more' ready through college.

- Same applies for grad school. You might not need to go to grad school to do anything. But a lot of people change the way they see the world going to grad school, which, if it made you wiser, could be a good quality to have when founding a startup (plus the extra knowledge).

All this to say that if you think that you can say "all this does is this" I think you might want to rethink a little bit, since it's rare that such absolutists ideas about things so controversial are ever correct.

I've had this funny song in my playlist for a long time. I used to listen to it when I didn't know any english and it's amazing how at the time I couldn't distinguish it from normal english, since often in songs it's hard to catch all the words (and in some cases you even have to find the lyrics to get them all right).

I must add that sounds in languages are a very strange thing. When my american friends who don't speak italian try to say something in fake-italian, sometimes the accent is so strange that I tend to assume they were speaking in english and I just didn't hear well. Then, only after they make it very explicit that they are trying to speak or sound italian, I change my mental setup and can guess what they are saying. Otherwise to me it sounds like something indecipherable. It is kind of accessing different areas of the brain based on which language I'm listening to. Which doesn't happen with actual americans or italians since in that case the accent itself is obvious and makes me switch immediately.

Now though I can really appreciate how close his accent is to the american accent.

But in general, I would say that this is a good occasion to look him up on youtube or any online (or not) music store, his music and his lyrics are great. He also made an album with Mina, who is recognized pretty much unanimously as the best italian female singer, ever.

The first * isn't necessarily true. For a small startup I know several people with H1Bs that are paid just slightly above $50k, but yes, I think you do need an office address, since the H1B is usually tied with a specific branch/office/address, even within the same organization/company (it's not like it can't change, but modifications have to be submitted).

The information does not travel faster than light.

I agree with everything you said. I hope you'll make it into YC. Good luck guys!

Why did you take off your kickstarter? Are you trying different ways of getting funded? I almost thought you gave up since the kickstarter page doesn't say much about the cancelation.

thanks, will do...

pg says in the application page: "The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple." so I hope that wasn't the reason why we got discarded. But if it really is a hard rule it'd be a strange rule, any 4 person team would pretend to be a 3 person team and include the "extra person" immediately after getting in...

2 PhD's of quantitative fields (lots of coding experience)

2 MS's in CS that were already in a startup (<20 ppl) that sold for several $M's (as early engineers)

we are all 30-32 yo. (no family/kids yet) but maybe the age? seems like a good team (and a good idea), but oh well...

Thanks for your answer.

I think your idea is good and has a lot of potential.

Don't get me wrong. I understand what you say, but still I'm not sure I get what the relation with YC really is. To me it doesn't matter if I make it into the startup world with or without YC, it matters if I make it. And YC is not as important for the funding, as much as it is for the advice and the experience.

They could help you avoid making mistakes.

Best of luck with Persona! I think I'll sign up.

From what they explained that means that the application itself didn't motivate them to open the demo/video. Sorry to hear.

Sorry, I just wrote too fast and didn't want to get into details. Of course I didn't mean literally they had zero experience, I am writing from Chrome and use Google Earth pretty often myself (SketchUp etc...).

I just wonder how many apple and windows developers they have and how many projects they have to follow/develop.

Personally, I'd prefer Dropbox, since it's a company dedicated to one thing and so far they have been doing it well.

I'm happy that google has their own product so that I can have more free space and potentially it'll lower the price of such services in general.

If it gets much better than Dropbox I'll switch completely, but let's see what this better is. For example, I don't need to edit documents with google docs, since I can never manage to print anything decent with it. So for me, integration of Google Drive and Google Docs wouldn't be a good enough extra feature.

Same reason I don't want $everything-facebook I also don't want $everything-google.

Plus google has little to zero experience at offering big products on non unix/android platforms.

EDIT: I didn't literally mean zero, since I'm writing from Chrome

I think it creates a dictionary of n-grams. Adjusting heuristically the probabilities the algorithm probably chooses the one with the best chances. There is probably some assumption about the fitness function that can be tuned to include more special cases.

Not knowing the algorithm I can't be sure, but I guess what it's showing is that we are usually pretty bad at generating numbers, since it's hard, for example, for each person not thinking about it, to keep the same frequency of 3-words as 000, 010, 110, 111 etc...

Your idea of using the Fibonacci series is good. I tried something similar. I tried once implementing the integer series, :-), 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101... and I won. Now with that I lose. So maybe the algorithm has been changed to take that into account. I tried other series and I won, but I guess it could also be because it's hard to get any significant pattern in a 100 move game when the series are complicated. It's possible, though, that the same algorithm would win against deterministic patterns if given enough time.

It would be interesting to try with prime numbers as well. It may be easily hard coded as prediction, though.

Honestly I don't understand from your post what the reason for not applying to YC was.

At a quick look in one case this function was generating more 1s than 0s.

It seems also that it generated very often a 1 after a 0 (more than twice as many times than it generates another 0).

Now I got curious, I'll do more tests and look at the documentation for Math.random

Certainly I won't ever use it for any important feature of a website!

EDIT: it seems that with large enough numbers it's not too bad, so I might be able to say more after reading the documentation. At any rate using the strings generated with the khanacademy link I was able to win few times in a row.

I guess JavaScript has a pretty bad random number generator. The tool I linked does a good job at showing that. If you post a string here I'd be curious to look at it.

In the past computers where using generators that under some particular tests turned out to be performing really really bad.

What are you using to generate the strings?

Am I the only one who thinks that the new UI is not very pretty? It's all (un)balanced to the left (for big enough screens) and the gray frame feels like a cage.

Maybe some things work better, but I didn't have a good gut reaction at all seeing the new thing.

P.S. I didn't watch the explanatory video, they are good at those but I wanted to see what it was without guidance.

Not sure what you guys mean.

For example, I don't think of YC as a way of getting funding, but as a way of getting things done well, thank to the possibly unbeatable amount of white board advice from so many good people that it's very hard to get otherwise.

You can have a great idea, have a great team and even have good money, but you could still make a mistake in choosing one of the key strategies of your product.

I, for example, think that YC is perfect at trying to avoid making this kind of mistakes and helping you make your idea stronger.

Although I don't mean that the other ones aren't worth working for, I'd say I'm surprised that you don't think Flutter is an interesting company to work for.

It seems like it could be a very exciting playground for an engineer.

I think, and maybe here I'm stating the obvious, that a big problem is how people sometimes think that their idea is the real deal, while the implementation is just a matter of paying somebody.

I think that most people don't realize that most ideas aren't original, and that if you think of something, just by sociological statistics, most likely somebody else has already thought of it.

So what really matters isn't a detailed plan, but a person who builds it well.

Making a very good programmer a technical co-founder is probably the best move.

Giving away 30% of your startup, but locking in a very good technical person, is probably going to give you more success than that 30% that you wanted to keep.

Maybe somebody can point at some statistics, but I feel like that it shouldn't be difficult to have a rough idea of the success rate of technical founders' startups vs non-technical founder ones.

I would like to understand why a few people say that the recommendation is so important.

If it is, then it means that the application process isn't working very well.

I understand that it can help if for some reason the application isn't very clear, but it shouldn't help "a lot", like someone said in one of the links.

By the way, do they realize that their ask people to apply through their Facebook accounts?

Maybe they seem ridiculous to you if you don't get that my comparisons were purposely exaggerated.

The point is that facebook didn't invent face, didn't invent book, and didn't invent wall (not even in the ACTUAL meaning they are used in facebook itself).

If I want to create a website with social tools that for some reason involves wall or book I don't see why I have to risk to be suit based on a user agreement (that usually nobody reads).

Say that I want to open a social network for old book lovers. I can't call you the old book or the ancient book or whatever you can think of just because facebook thinks they own the word book?

Or what if I want to use the metaphor of the berlin wall to open a thematic social network for human right causes and maybe also use the idea that you can place notes on this wall?

Do you think that in that case am I actually infringing the Facebook trademark?

Yet I'm sure they could try to sue me if I'm a Facebook user and agreed to their fluff.

It would be interesting to know the distribution of submissions versus time.