mrhektor

On a related note, I had a weird experience where I was talking about a trip to Vietnam with my friends. A few hours later, I saw an ad for air travel to Vietnam on my FB page.

Now I'm 100% sure I hadn't googled or searched for Vietnam previously. At first, the conspiracy theorist inside said "they're listening!" through my phone microphone or whatever. But then, I thought, could they have been forming a pattern of my behaviour over the past several days, cross-referenced across several platforms (maybe I had searched for "Travel destinations" and also a friend had given a travel recommendation of Vietnam on chat)? Have the algorithms gotten that advanced?

What's even worse is that the guy that got phished is responsible for U.S. cybersecurity. (http://time.com/4881849/white-house-email-prank/)

I think that while these tactics are grey area for sure (specially in the case of Airbnb), I firmly believe that this would fall in the, for lack of a better word, "hustle" category. I would guess that most of the companies listed here tried multiple tactics, and these are the ones that worked. From my own experience as an entrepreneur, you just have to keep experimenting with various channels until one sticks, without getting too bogged down with the wider implications.

This is an excellent point. Sometimes, I think certain things just shouldn't get coverage, like a particularly silly / obviously wrong thing Trump tweets.

Thanks, they're on my reading list!

Does anybody know of any good links / blog posts that explain the actual inner workings of a quantum computer in more detail?

Bit of background: my company is doing fintech and often there are seemingly insurmountable problems related to regulation or certain counter-parties. Taking a step back is a huge help in these cases as well; often the solution is just better negotiation or a call to your lawyer friend.

I used to get frustrated and send angry emails / phone calls. Now I get away from the desk for a bit and mull it over for a few hours before doing anything. The method hasn't failed me yet

Science and the City by Laurie Winkless was a fun read. Some parts of it are a bit hype-y, and some parts are a bit obvious, but overall it's a great read to find out the mechanics behind things we take for granted

Agreed! However, data cleaning is a pretty hard problem. My previous company stored merchant credit card transactions, and these transactions were large unwieldy beasts whose data model had changed many times over the course of the company. Old data was completely invalid, and yet we couldn't remove it because the dollars and cents had to add up. The cleaning significantly hindered new development. Validations when storing new data definitely help, but changes to the data model are tough to reconcile with old data.

I found this quite cool. 1 line pitches in the comments that you can get instant feedback on. Full disclosure, I'm an alumnus of this accelerator.

Thanks for the advice, I think we'll fill out an application and see what happens :)

What is an ideal stage for a company to apply to YC? We've gotten together an excellent team and partners, and are just starting to build out the value prop. However, we don't have any customers / traction yet. Should we wait to apply, or apply right now?

Singaporean startup founder here who moved from the US. I have yet to meet a psychopathic CEO here in Singapore, but I've met and heard about quite a few in Silicon Valley / Bay Area. It may just be selection bias (a lot more companies are founded in the Bay Area) but I wonder if there's something more. Any other insights into Bay Area startups vs. international startups here?

While the tool is definitely useful, I agree with your comment. Too often, tech that is quite simple is misrepresented as AI because it makes for better headlines / a larger investment round in the case of startups

No it wasn't a complete rewrite. We started by separating out the most mission critical components. Maybe that's where we went wrong; the most mission critical components were quite large and unwieldy to split out all at once. There was also the overhead of keeping the newly separated out component and the monolithic app in sync.

We did have a lead with a vision, and part of the vision was standards for each service (for example, file structure in Go). I can see the rationale behind it; a new dev can onboard very quickly on to a new service. But in hindsight, maybe it wasn't thought out enough.

We were looking to break up our monolithic rails app into micro-services so devs could iterate and develop faster. We also thought that the application as a whole would become more failure resistant. Unfortunately, inter-dependancies among the services themselves meant that the failure-resistance didn't pan out as we thought.

Hi Stepan!

"-No, look into microservices. It’s the future. It’s how we do everything now. You take your monolithic app and you split it into like 12 services. One for each job you do.

That seems excessive"

A 100 times yes. We tried to split our monolithic Rails app into micro-services built in Go. 2 years and many fires later, we decided to abandon the project. It was mostly because the monitoring and alerting were now split into many different pieces. Also, the team spent too much time debating standards etc. I think micro-services can be valuable, but we definitely didn't do it right, and I think a lot of companies get it wrong. Any positive experiences with micro-services here?