dhaivatpandya

> I'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians.

This may be true, but a soldier probably has a far higher likelihood of dying in a war than a civilian, thereby "paying the bill." This means that in expectation, each individual soldier pays a higher value of the bill in comparison to each individual citizen.

You can definitely use type definitions for Vue.js and React. They work very well.

It seems pretty unlikely that the data wouldn't be normalized by some metric of intensity of use since this is pretty much the first thing anyone would think of. Normalizing even by something as simple as "number of websites visited" would, I imagine, significantly reduce the contribution of such factors to the differences observed.

How is conflict of interest generally handled in this sort of situation?

Given that Elon Musk is personally major investor in SolarCity and Tesla is a publicly traded company with obligations to its shareholders, would Elon be removed or limited in his ability to control negotiations with SolarCity? Even though it seems like an acquisition of SolarCity would fit within Tesla's overarching strategy, price negotiation could probably be affected by Elon's interests within SolarCity.

They were actually acquired by Facebook some time ago.

"Docker is not an acceptable security solution for this, since it's most certainly possible to break out of containers."

Could you point to some resources that show that it is possible to break out of Docker containers? I understand that there have been bugs in the past that have caused this (using that to conclude that glot.io shouldn't use Docker is a bit like saying OpenSSL is now useless because of heartbleed) but it seems unlikely that breaking out of containers is possible due to the way Docker is designed.

Although the author may not have provided a citation for the claim, this has pretty much nothing to do with "life experience"? Roughly speaking, if you have a certain likelihood of knowing someone that dies in a car accident in a given year and every year of your life is somehow independent, it is not inconceivable that (most) people by the age of 50 know someone killed by a human-driven. car.

For some reason, the https redirect broke - working on fixing it. Rest assured, https://enveloupe.com/api/new works perfectly.

This doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I don't care about most of the stuff on Twitter. But, if I'm searching for something and a Tweet-like "post" exists that is relevant to what I'm searching for, I might like that.

There's no inherent reason why being cash flow positive is such an important consideration for a venture capital firm.

A startup that's not cash flow positive right now but could be massively so in the future (or, atleast, the market expects it to be massively cash flow positive in the future) is significantly more valuable than a startup that is cash flow positive right now but with not a ton of room for growth.

In fact, placing the requirement of cash flow positivity right at the beginning of the startup would probably squash a lot of good (i.e. valuable in the long-er term) ideas.

Interesting article. It is also possible to resolve constraints probabilistically (i.e. without gradient descent), which is a good approach for functions which are very "unsmooth." I wonder if it is possible to replicate this article using a probabilistic solver (e.g. http://poincare.github.io/DCFL/ - a Haskell probabilistic constraint solving lib. written by me).

It could be, but the primary issue with the Communication Free Learning algorithm is the fact that it is very hard to tell when a given constraint set has no feasible solution by directly trying to solve it. That's because Communication Free Learning is a probabilistic algorithm that is meant to converge to a solution over time. But, if after say 10k iterations we still haven't found a solution, that could mean that there isn't one or that we just haven't stumbled on it yet.

However, it is possible to apply the algorithm in situations where we know that there is a solution, at least with a pretty high degree of confidence.

This is an interesting question. Although I am not deeply familiar with either of the games you mention, it seems that they are inherently time-based. There are also some random elements to CivClicker (e.g. traders that come through). Given these rules, I don't think a simple constraint solver would be sufficient to "solve" the game, but it might be a part of a more complicated solution.

However, there are lots of games that essentially only involve solving constraints. A simple example is Sudoku.

Communication Free Learning is actually a recently proposed algorithm to resolve constraints. The research paper it originated from is here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3240.pdf

The "Communication Free" part of it means that we can update variables' values in parallel without having to communicate the updated variable values between the processes updating the variables.

If the pace isn't sustainable for a given person, that person probably shouldn't be trying to do a startup. This might seem a bit blunt, but I think it's probably true. There are many other options to bring the same financial and "impact" success that a startup provides and the expected value of these options is probably higher than creating a startup given an aversion to the high-intensity pace.

This is not really true. There are plenty of ideas that don't involve a significant R&D phase (i.e. consist of more or less the implementation of the idea rather than the research-based refinement of an idea) which can immensely valuable.

Plenty of examples exist such as Uber, Basecamp, etc. Although the success of these ventures is dependent on fundraising and marketing, these are certainly not the only factors and these factors apply to research-heavy startups as well.

This is an incredibly important point. We often imagine that the price of convenience is pretty high, but more often than not, the markets we serve turn out to be incredibly price conscious. Sure, there are sections of the socioeconomic pyramid that will pay a strong premium for even marginally better, smoother service but the majority of the pyramid (a surprisingly large majority) will not pay such a premium.

Fantastic product idea and a landing page that's so good that I figured out what the product does without touching my scroll wheel.

I wish however, you'd include a section that provides a reasonable explanation as to why Workroom got a 950% increase in traffic. I'm thinking that if I saw that a place was full, I'd be less likely to head over there. But, if I didn't know, I'd probably give it a whirl. Alternatively, if I've gone there a bunch of times and it's always been full, I just wouldn't go. What exactly is happening?

How does "call us back when you get to series A" entail "none of the risk, all of the upside"? The risk is that the fund has to pay a higher valuation for the same company, they might not callback, etc. and the upside is that you're...not taking on the risk right now?

Secondly, for tech hiring, a few bad hires can ruin a company. But, angel investors and small funds generally invest in a wide range of startups knowing full-well that most of them won't succeed. But, one success is all that's needed to 10x the value of the fund. Given the payout probability and payout value of startups, it's a pretty different game from tech hiring.

The "design is better" concept generally only works if the thing you're competing with is exceptionally bad in terms of design. I've found Doodle to be very easy to use, even for people who have very little experience with computers.

This is not entirely accurate. The difference is that ZeroMQ doesn't have a centralized broker, not that it doesn't allow you to work with sockets. Lots of ZeroMQ projects utilize sockets for communication. In fact, because there isn't a broker, ZeroMQ gives you more freedom as to the underlying communication medium.

Why would you have a web server that doesn't process requests async?

We can't have either.

Communication would become a bottleneck regardless of whether you're using MPI or something else. The problem you're talking about has nothing to do with MPI; it is intrinsic to distributed computing itself.

I thought the talk had a nice balance of pitching the idea of native React and the technical ideas behind it.

Why is this post being downvoted so much? Although I don't agree w/ the author's position, torture and its effectiveness are still debated.

If DO users don't need the ability to upload their own images, why is this a problem?

It would have been better if implemented under FastCGI which solves the one-process-per-request problem. I guess the intended benefit of the project isn't really the Node eventloop, it's that it allows developers to use the same language on the frontend and backend.

I agree it should be considered in an interview, but I don't think it should be the point or the focus of the interview. The idea is that even though you'd like to work with someone who has a nice personality, I'm sure you'd also like to work with someone who is competent and the company would much rather hire someone who is competent rather than only interesting.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect a Google interviewer to ask you about your "stories ... from travelling around the world." Their primary reason for hiring you is for your ability as (I'm assuming) a developer. Although your travel experience may make you a more interesting person, that isn't altogether the point of the interview.

I guess you could say that measuring the "likeableness" and culture-fit of a potential employee is important, but that can definitely be derived from the interview in general rather than from your life stories.