RuggeroAltair

There is no need to be afraid of the video. I don't think YC cares at all about how good of a speaker you are, they probably have a million applications and they just want to have a first look at the team.

For example, if you live in the same area but you don't even manage to gather and shoot a one minute matter-of-fact video that explicitly asks to avoid wasting time on it, then it'll be hard to believe that that team will be able to survive the pressure of a startup in its first couple of years.

Also, I think that in a startup environment you have to be ready sometimes to just quickly do things, and the video is a way to show that you don't need to invest three days scripting it and shooting it, but just half an hour making sure your words are audible and such.

What other startups say doesn't really matter. Startups don't have to try to guess how successful 1000 teams may be. YC has to.

Nope.

One thing is defending their website from massive account closing or effectively limiting their usage.

Another thing is that if I create a Facebook account then I can't use anymore the words wall, face and book without risking a lawsuit against Facebook.

... and a little ridiculous. "You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including ... Face, ... Book and Wall)"

Like if using a windows machine meant that I can't have any name that involves window, micro, soft, gate, intel(ligence)...

The world 'wall'? Ever been to the Western Wall? To the old Berlin? Or listened to the Pink Floyd?

Good analysis.

I think though that we can go a step forward.

I agree that we all should look at it much more in a symbolic and metaphorical way than a logical way (there are several points in which the internal logic is severely weak).

And exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned above, I've always considered the whole movie being representing something related to Cobbs.

Cobbs is the one receiving the Inception.

No matter if by God or Ariadne, or God through Ariadne or viceversa. Or if this happens in the real life, afterlife, parallel life, dream levels or what. The whole movie is about Cobbs and his subconscious. It's also interesting that Nolan used the name Cobbs for one of the characters of his first movie, Following, in which Cobbs was some sort of serial burglar. Just to keep the metaphor going.

I agree. Probably in the future we'll start more and more to have specific search engines for different things.

I think that will be somewhat wiki, somewhat social, and somewhat search engine will eventually take off.

But not necessarily in a unique aggregator. I don't go to any scientist to ask a question about science. I go to the ones who are proficient at what I'm asking.

Same with search, I'm sure in the future it'll become more and more common to have completely different search engines based on what I'm trying to find. They are already out there, maybe just a few steps away since their inception, or maybe already around for a while, it's just that not too many people are using them. When it'll become unbearable to use google for everything people will switch.

Look at Youtube, lately there is so much advertisement that I can't believe they aren't afraid of losing users massively. I almost don't want to go on it anymore for how much time I usually have to waste.

And yes, I understand google is a free service paid by the ads. But I don't care. I'm ok with the ads on a side, on top, at the bottom. But I'm not ok with wasting time waiting for an ad to play.

Yes. One of the problem with that is unfortunately quite silly. We don't know the exact position of submarines, since the water interferes with the GPS-like systems and makes them unreliable, while neutrino beams need to be highly collimated to create a big enough flux.

+1 for irony anyways...

I use a different definition of natural. The fact that the electrons, negatively charged, were moving wasn't known when they assigned the positive-negative labels. But still, although what you are saying is certainly true in proton/electron systems, it would be completely reversed in antiproton/positron systems, where the charge would be moving together with the particles. Also, don't forget of ions, or particles in space, or in particle physics experiments, where both charges move.

The point is that the natural choice that you assign would be natural just because of some contingent conventions, but it's not more natural in terms of some more fundamental/mathematical meaning. While the pi vs. tau is.

What's the kinetic energy of a unit speed, unit mass?

What's the potential energy of a unit distance unit spring constant?

What's the energy of a unit mole, unit temperature in Boltzmann units?

:-)

Nope. Although they are both conventions, in the electric charge there is really no natural choice. While mathematicians can argue whether or not a factor of 2 is a natural choice for a convention.

I wouldn't call it nonsense. If the comparisons with the virial theorem and energy isn't enough to consider it at least as a reasonable choice, at least you should consider it as such because John Baez agrees with it.

And you don't mess with John Baez ;-)

Not only it isn't proportionally harder, but I think that Google feared your essay when you were indicating search as a possible startup.

First, Matt Cutts said "Paul's #1 suggestion is reinventing search. I happily welcome competition in search because it keeps us on our toes, but his #2 suggestion resonated with me more: reinventing email."

They just today released (for the first time, and they even call it huge news) a video about what they do on a search, I'm sure watchers must have thought that search is so advanced and hard seeing that video that they might give up ;-)

I wonder what pushed them to post this video. It's not even very informative, it talks about searches of N-grams and spell corrections, it seems more like something to show how advanced the changes they make are. It must be so hard to catch up with them ;-)

Maybe GOOG is afraid of a plethora of startups reinventing search. One may succeed.

I like some of the new features but it's nothing that exceptional. I feel like they are afraid of shifting too much from the initial (great) product, to avoid losing the customers that will feel they're losing that sense of almost invisible client/service. It's an improvement but not really a fresh new Dropbox on the web.

+1 for randomizing.

do you produce the string with the monte carlo choosing within a specific subset? I'm not sure why it wouldn't produce more than 5 combinations and then 5 different combinations...

also, if you have-time/like, you can probably implement a quick hash on the fly for the domains already returned to avoid listing the same domain twice in a search with few alternatives, it should be quick.

but cool tool!

Bah, it doesn't even randomize the access. I put consTonant consTonant and of the million possibilities it started checking all the bb___ ones... not so useful if they show just 50 and the only thing they allow you to do is to keep going with the next 50...

I wonder who designed the algorithm...

Well, not really, because as I was saying below, in a lot of cases you know that on average a certain solution is (just as an example) 10% off the best possible solution (on average, avoiding Mawell's devils). Once you know that, it's not the TSP all over again. Because you can control the first number and you expect the second to stay within 10% (on average).

An easy example is computing an integral of any function (assuming the integral exists, makes sense, blah blah blah). I can write a solution Monte Carlo style in something like 10 lines of code. It takes me 2 minutes to code and it solves most integrals. Of course, the solution isn't exact, but I can go as far as I want in precision (using a little more code if I want to use optimization methods instead of just brute force). Still, it's pretty fast to write.

Now you can write a program that actually solves the integral exactly, but that takes more time.

Or you can write a program that makes bins and calculates the hight of each bin and computes the integral (not as good, not as fast).

So, if I know I need a solution where I don't care about the forth digit precision, why wouldn't just write the Monte Carlo solution that is superfast?

Although you can try to go back to some academic problems in most cases I don't need an academic solution, so...

> While I imagine that variations of TSP occur for logistics companies, it also occurs in problems where "solve once, use many times" applies, such as electronics design.

That is true, but it's the same that I was saying (and it's why I included the many variations at the end of the statement). Basically if you have to do something once and for all, then of course you can just solve it in some sort of educated brute force and you are probably fine. It's when you have to continuously adapt the solution to a changing network that you need to be fast, and in that case you need to consider that the computation time kinda together with the traveling time (of course it's more complicated than that and you need to include the cost advantages etc.).

I agree with the graph comment, even if we are growing in the amount of data to deal with those graphs, so there will be often more and more need of simplified or shortened solutions if you want them to run in an app on a phone, or on a server (but for a million requests).

I'm not really sure what the point of this post is.

It seems pretty standard in all it says.

It's probably good to remind people that an NP-complete problem doesn't mean death, but I mean, in real world problems I think that everybody knows what the author is explaining.

I don't even think that he get the point across really well.

Two things:

- there is no emphasis on the fact that we live in a real world, so a solution to an integral at any desired accuracy is definitely enough for non academic studies;

- he forgets to mention that problems like the traveling salesman are for academics. The real world responds to the 'actual computing time of the traveling salesman + the traveling time' problem, i.e., if your exact solution is 10% better than the approximate solution but your computation time is 20 times longer so that the salesman can't even start actually traveling ;-) your best solution becomes suddenly your second best (plus many variations of it).

Of course in general there might be no way to know how much better you could do with the exact solution, but unless there is a Maxwell's devil choosing the set of your towns and roads, it's usually possible to estimate what the average error is (also in terms of some few computed cases and using Monte Carlo techniques). It won't give you the 100% certainty, but it'll give you the certainty that your solution is gonna be not that bad, given how quickly you get it.

I would suggest another thing. When you have a problem that you know it's hard to deal with, give it to a very intelligent person in your team that doesn't know it's very hard to treat. Most likely they will be more creative than you can, because they don't have that sense of hopeless you get when you know that a problem has no exact and easy solution ;-)

I'd say the real world problems are similar to the difference from math and physics according to one of my professors when I was a student. He'd say that when mathematicians and physicists try to approach a problem, their way of trying to find a solution is comparable to two guys approaching a cliff. The mathematician tries to carefully look at every rock and goes down to the ocean very very slowly, the physicist just jumps in an awkward way, kinda scared, screaming and closing their eyes and hoping they won't hit any rocks and that it won't end too bad (they aren't really risking their lives anyhow).

If what you need is a real world solution, you can just jump and see how it goes, you most likely won't die for that (because you are also probably not actually jumping off a cliff).

I'm sure your department can use Gimp ;-)

Nah. Gimp maybe isn't exactly as good as Photoshop (even though some tools were in Gimp much earlier than in Photoshop) but there is a huge difference between this website and Gimp. I appreciate the effort, but the functionalities of this website are way far from being anywhere near Gimp.

Thanks for your explanation!

By the way, just to clarify because maybe it wasn't really clear, when I said broken I didn't mean at all that the interview process at Google fails at hiring good candidates, I just meant that sometimes it takes literally months and that's too long, and that often people in the meanwhile receive other offers. For many of them it's not possible to say no to another offer just because maybe they will get an offer from Google in two months (and career wise it's not serious to jump around and leave a place after two months unless the position is a lot better).

That's all, and I think it's cool that you interview that way. Maybe I've had a biased opinion given what happened to the people that I directly talked to. Thanks again for clarifying these points.

No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement.

Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google.

One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was contacted for a PhD software engineer position, and even though he had told the HR person that he was also interviewing for another company, he had time to go through the whole interview process with the other company (consisting on several meetings), and by the time he had an offer, Google still hadn't had the phone interview with him.

I'm just saying that I had the impression that the hiring system isn't not amongst the best ones out there, but I have big respect for how the company works.

Specifically, I think it's great, for example, that they aren't afraid of trying a million things and shut them down when they're not happy. Most companies are afraid of switching and are extremely slow at making any decent change.

But so, just to understand if you want to say something about it, do you really interview a person without a position? Just for the whole company? Or do you mean that if the candidate is good you say 'hire, but for a different position'? Or do you mean something else?

Thanks!

This is from 2006, 6 years ago. If you work at Google maybe you can say more about your experience.

But what I know for sure it's not like that necessarily anymore, since I talked to many people about their interviews at google and I know some googlers as well that confirmed what I said (which is the reason I wrote it). Even when I talked to google myself, it was for an individual group, not the entire company (in my case, unlike my friends, it wasn't a software engineer position, though).

Also, and I can tell you this with 1000% certainty, even though they like to say sometimes the opposite, the people I know told me that Google instead has hired more commonly than you can think people that are sub-standard, it's not the normal usual thing, but it has indeed happened.

Also, the recruiters I met, had no clue about what a person with a certain specific Resume could have done in the company. They told me that they often decide whether or not to commit about trying to get a person interviewed based on if they believe they will get hired for a specific position (since that is how they get paid), not necessarily based on who they think is a good general candidate.

Now, I'm not saying that this is a rule, but even if you look at the positions posted now on the company website, they are so detailed and specific that it would make no sense to interview a person at the company level.

It can happen at the new grad level, but I doubt it happens on a common basis. I could be wrong, but I just speak by what I heard first hand.

Of course if with project you mean a specific individual project than I agree, but the company now it's rather big, there is many organizations and stuff that probably don't even know what the others do (still comments from Googlers). This is quite normal since Google can be compared to a campus, in any University nowadays you can be in the same department and do research in a field that is completely unknown to the person sitting next to you in the office since they might work on a different field and it takes years to actually start understanding something about it.

I don't think this is true at all. I'm not saying that they will never hire an extra person in case they find two truly exceptional people (exceptional as in they feel like they really are missing out sending one home, not just that they are good programmers), but I'm sure that most of the times the hiring mechanism is quite compartmented.

If you interview with a specific group/organization, they need some people to do something in that group/organization. Now, it's possible that they leave a good comment about the "second" candidate, and it's possible that other groups eventually will contact them I guess, but I find unlikely that they will just hire two people in a group if they need one.

It's not like the people who interview you are interviewing you for the entire Google.

Most likely for 100 positions they are interviewing several hundred candidates. If their reasoning was like you were suggesting they would end up hiring about 200 people each time. 100 of which would have to find a group to work for.

Not a good idea.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean. But this is going even further, when the search depends on the physical location, not only on my friends, it could really impact how a young person can find things online, and how their interests could be slightly pushed towards their local/social area.

The point being, I don't even think it's better targeting, because it doesn't really focus on the user but on where the user is, while one of the good things about the Internet was that whatever I liked, I could have had the same chances of finding what I wanted no matter where I was. Now the where changes things. For some topics it's for the good, for others I believe it's not.

Good article.

But I think that there is also another point to make. It's true that there is often space to be the one idea that delivers in a way that is easy enough to use for the general user to the point of having the chance to be the winning product. But I believe that that kind of answers from investors shows in general a pretty clouded judgement.

I think that when they respond like that, it means that they don't actually like the idea in the first place.

Otherwise, exactly "because" there is some other similar product around, that in general means that there is some level of market validation. And if it's possible to show that those companies are profitable, then it's likely, if they trust your team, that also your company will be profitable.

This should be enough, you don't necessarily need to convince them that you will kill them all, you just need to convince them that you will make money.

Then, after you convinced them, you can keep going with your goal of being the unique winner of that market.

I think that the article is identifying just one little secret, and not necessarily an important one.

There is a lot of reasons why silicon valley is productive, one for all is that most people with decisional power are also expert in the field.

Certainly if you plot the percentage of managers that are competent (with possibly degrees) in the field between silicon valley companies and startup compared to all the rest of the world, I'm sure that managers or CEOs with just MBAs are less present in the Silicon Valley than in other areas.

But I still think that the main reason for the productivity in the Silicon Valley is that the people are in general good and most companies and startups aren't just dinosaurs that need $M's a year in consulting services to make any changes or improve their results.

The consulting companies themselves are dinosaurs, which is one of the reasons there is a discrete number of startups that are attempting to create new ways of performing consulting.

I agree with this as well.

My second point was maybe short but it was about the revenue per user. I certainly believe that Facebook will increase the amount of revenue per user, but there is where I believe that they can do a lot but not too much without risking to crunch.

I really liked your Dawkins/Dennett reference. In this case, I believe that people feel like Facebook is unstoppable and that can do more than Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on. In my opinion this is understandable since so many people spend time on it that they can't believe it'll disappear.

The reason why I think they are wrong just relies on how I think these things go. I am not saying that Facebook will stop growing or disappear in less than 2 years, I would be just silly.

I'm saying that if you compare Google, Microsoft and Apple, just to mention few of the big ones, to Facebook, they have many many more products. It's true that the search doesn't increase too much in the US for Google, but they are developing many products like wallet or automated cars or (huge list). Apple is doing the same.

But I think that there is a physical limit. How can a software company (maybe also hardware in the future), be orders and orders of magnitude larger than all the other ones. By the time you are so much bigger than the other ones, natural selection rules start pressuring you and you'll have to stop trying to be everything.

Now, Apple is probably considered to be worth $500B and Microsoft and Google a couple of hundred billions, and, to me, Facebook still needs to do a lot of work to shift enough to be like them. The difference is that they have only one product: a website. If they start losing Facebook users, they might not have a lot of time to shift, because they might lose them all. Yahoo made some mistakes when they were pretty strong and lost traction.

Will Facebook be able to sustain the impact of a $100B evaluation without making (big) mistakes?

Maybe I'm naive, but I believe that they will start selling physical things and will have their OS and all that, but just because they will become an entire world like PC vs MAC vs Linux then they will probably sattle near those companies, probably at the same order of magnitude evaluation.

Speaking of memes, maybe I'm naive, again, but something called Facebook can only cross some lines, but it can't be the internet or too much related to a product that doesn't exist any more.

Shifting is very complex in a world where the imprinting is so strong (try play loose the first game of poker with some players, they will be convinced you are a loose player for a long time, even if you are a tight player and played loose only the first game to throw them off).

Same, in my opinion, goes with Dropbox. They can probably absorb the $250M investment to buy more servers/expand/develop new features. But it triggers my attention when a company does that. Because first, it basically means that they will never sell any more (to whom at this point? Facebook maybe? ;-) ). And second, because I wonder why a company that is supposed to have something on the order of $250M revenue per year needs a $250M investment. It scares me (it scares me also becuase they don't seem very concerned about security). And the meme is strange also over there. Can I immagine some sort of generic OS or product called dropbox? I can sell harddrives called dropbox, I can sell a place where to look at pictures called dropbox, I can sell some sort of Netflix machine called dropbox, but can I sell a phone called dropbox? Or a laptop? Again, I'm not saying they'll crash or anything. But I'm just looking at them with suspicion, maybe intrigued to see what they come up with.

It's all about "shifting wisely" after all when you get so big, and unlike Google and Apple that accomplished so much shifting, Facebook so far has shifted very very little (and so has Dropbox). The code is maybe different, the look maybe a little more elegant, the platform for developers maybe a lot more elaborated, but overall it's still pretty maniacally and maybe dangerously close to what it was on day 1.

OK sorry, I didn't mean to write an essay! But it's done, so...

Sure, although, there is one thing that bothers me, Facebook reaches so many people so quickly that even reasonably big companies now use a Facebook page instead of a website. There is something intrinsically wrong with this, because Facebook cannot (hopefully) become a synonym of internet.

I'm cool with iPad apps, with iPhone apps and Android apps, but stopping using websites and just focus on Facebook apps seems to be a false step, maybe good for now, but not very envisioning. Unless...

...unless Facebook starts mutating towards an actual product. To be clear like the blackberry with the old blackberry chat, you'll buy one (of the many) Facebook things, like a Facebook pad, and you'll have your Facebook OS with all the Facebook apps running on it.

And I think this is the direction they are headed to... but still, they can't take down the house (the whole world), sooner or later something else will need to put some checks and balances.

They can't become infinitely rich, I don't think the market and the planet will allow it. They can be a little dominant, but not like emperor dominant.

Plus, it's still a website based on participation, if the people get bored or there is some wikileaks kinda breach (think of some crazy attempt to make public all the private messages and pictures on a mirror evil site), many many users could leave is a second... (although ultimately we are just going to be forced to redefine what we consider privacy, in general, not just in this unlikely case)

> If "Can it go up 5X" were the threshold for going public, investors would price this in, so the actual threshold would drop.

I agree with this. All I'm saying is that most companies can in general grow, and so it depends on you whether or not you want to buy stocks.

In Google case, they underestimated it. And who bought might be doing quite well right now.

In Facebook case, in my opinion they aren't underestimating it, and I just think it's hard to grow much more than they are already.

First, they have already 1 billion users (order of magnitude). There is no way they can go to 10 billions, just because they don't exist.

Second, I believe that the external pressure from other companies will somehow kick in, not allowing one only company to rule the world. Maybe some anti monopoly laws, some other platform, a yahoo -> google effect, I don't know.

It just seems unlikely to me that Facebook will be doing much much better. I may be wrong, but in the long run I'd still buy GOOG or AAPL towards whatever Facebook code will be.

What the stock will do in the short run is a different thing, maybe boosted by the media, who knows...