esk

> Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover’s algorithm.

If 999,000 drawers are left unopened, how can the algorithm guarantee that the ball will be found?

I don't think there's any other way to read that.

Considering you're an excellent writer, I figured you must have a reason for employing redundancy. Is there a reason you don't say "starting a business" or "starting a company"?

It's not nearly as cool as Easymotion or Surround, but here it is if you're interested:

https://github.com/esk/aye-aye

Try looking at things another way—he's generously provided us all with an incredible foundation upon which to build our own things. After having read a few of his essays, I certainly feel changed.

Why is this curious?

A giant, appallingly successful company (believed by many to be "the internet") launched a beautifully designed, direct competitor to your only product. They promote their competing product on every webpage they own, and they have gone so far as to stake employee compensation on the success of their competing product.

Why on Earth wouldn't Facebook be afraid? Why wouldn't they react strongly?

This post fails to support its titular claim: that Facebook is "stumbling" all over itself. Normal, ad-clicking, non-social-media-expert users love Facebook. They love being connected, and they love broadcasting to world. Facebook is stumbling only once those users leave.

That's a wonderful way of putting it. Steve Jobs was inspirationally, infectiously passionate about making good things. Rest in peace, Steve.

If you're still following this thread, amasad and max99x, I have a simple question: how many hours did you two put into this?

Also, do you think the "Built with" blurb at the bottom adds value to the site? I know I think it's cool when I see stuff like that, but I can't imagine a non-developer caring.

Has anyone used Clojure as their introduction to the Java ecosystem? Did you survive?

For decades, affluent humans have gone out of their way to work physically harder than they need to (weight lifting, running, standing rather than sitting, etc.). Our technology is rapidly approaching a level that'll force people not to use it in order to stay mentally fit!

This is really cool technology, but I really don't want to rely on Google's engineers to tell me which words to write next.

Unless Microsoft adopts Dart, I see them fighting hard to improve the JavaScript development experience.

It's safe for people in HR to mindlessly prefer mediocre Candidate A with a degree over stellar Candidate B without one, so instead of actually examining the values the candidates can bring to the company, they take the easy, defensible path.

Part of the process of employers' recognizing that someone learning online can easily learn more than someone going to a university will be to empower HR departments to honestly examine candidates' value to the company rather than looking at increasingly irrelevant badges on their resume.

In short, employers lazily prefer people with degrees. People want employment. People seek degrees. Universities see tons of demand and little pressure to improve, so they don't. Most graduates skills are irrelevant for today's employers, so they don't get hired. Employers can break this cycle by empowering their HR departments.

And I think that's unfortunate, because they have an exceedingly valid point—American universities are making a killing churning out graduates with very few relevant skills for today's economy.

That's not to say these students are completely innocent—many, many American students view college as their "last gasp" of living without any real responsibilities, and they make make the most of that opportunity (rather than making the most of the opportunity to better themselves and prepare for today's economy).

Now and forever, using only the internet, it's possible to learn... well, nearly everything. Once employers accept this, the cost of a degree will plummet, and universities will be forced to offer something well beyond what Wikipedia, web forums, and online instructional videos can provide. That's the only way they'll stay relevant and worth the investment. I think the universities can do it, but they are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid having to change.

All large institutions do.

I thought I'd let you know that you have "DEBUG = True in your Django settings file"[1], which reveals your various routes. This might be unintentional.

[1]: http://www.parti.cl/icon/your-site/code/users-name

That being said, CoffeeScript has bugs[1]. I've run into its bugs before, and there are few things more frustrating than dealing with bugs in your language.

[1]: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues?labels=bug...

That employee (we'll call her Sarah) isn't being paid to see how a startup is created; she's paying to see how a startup is created.

She's paying heavily. She's losing money in the form of a lower salary compared to equivalent jobs, and she's losing money in the form of losing free-time compared to equivalent jobs.

Sometimes, that payment is very worth it. But it's a payment.

Solving a problem can be a lot easier the second time—what had been a tortuously long and painful process for you is often significantly easier for a competitor who had the benefit of watching.

You'll also also have this issue if you're the first to solve an easy problem, but I believe it's less exaggerated.

Do many startups try to pull stunts like that?

I can think of a few fun uses (such using them as creative replacements for looping constructs), but I'm struggling to find a problem that is most easily solvable with these.