pchiusano

It would be a security problem if you could cast any value to an int array without getting an exception (and without the resulting byte code containing any sort of check). And it sounds like there is no guarantee that the exception will be thrown? (Or maybe I misread) So that does seem very serious to me.

People with families can certainly be successful entrepreneurs and create companies with "explosive growth that maybe change the world". (It kinda came across like you were implying that founders with families were mostly only interested in "lifestyle businesses".)

There are so many factors that contribute to success, and they are never all equal, so any sort of up-front filtering based on some factor you think is correlated with success is going to miss out on people. And besides, I would strongly dispute any arguments that having a family is like some sort of handicap that must be overcome. In a lot of ways, I think having a family is a BETTER situation for starting a company!

My impression from reading YC's stuff is more that folks feel the value of the program comes to a large degree from the in-person interactions people have, so it makes sense to require people to be there in person.

Related, there's this scene from Moneyball, [1] that I love. They're all sitting around, discussing all this stuff that is at best tangentially related to _the actual things that matter_ for success of the team. It's very tempting and natural bias to latch on to this or that factor which you've become convinced makes a difference "all else being equal". But all else is never equal, and the question that is actually important is more the one Billy Beane keeps asking: "Yeah, but can he hit?"

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWgyy_rlmag

I think it can be tough to move to SV for someone who is married with kids. That is what has stopped me from applying, and I have definitely thought about creative ways I could make it work logistically. :)

Wow, author here, was not expecting this to end up here! This project is very much in development, it's not close to a finished product and I hope I didn't give that impression. I created the site so there'd be a space other than my blog to share updates about progress and so on. If everything I wrote sounds like nonsense, check back in 6 months. I am hoping things will be much further along, and more concrete by then. It will get there.

I definitely appreciate the feedback from folks about how it is unclear what the project even is from the descriptions. I am still trying to figure out the best way to explain it succinctly (so far haven't been too successful). Having a better demo to show would definitely go a long way.

This might help a little bit - here's a video and some explanation of the expression editor from my blog: http://pchiusano.github.io/2015-03-17/unison-update5.html The platform is going to be more than just the editor, but that might provide a feel for what the editing experience could be like. Obviously many details and polish to be worked out.

We have been using Scala pretty heavily since 2008 at Capital IQ (capitaliq.com) and ClariFI (http://clarifi.com/) - check out this writeup - http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2009/08/scala-success-story-co.... Since then we've only increased our usage and it's been working out extremely well.