Paul Graham came out publicly to defend Sam, and we instantly have this blog post about, wait, just a sec, let's dissect actually why Sam is still evil.
Can we believe that Sam could actually be a good person? Today, Kara Swisher in her podcast on Pivot said, "Every time I tell people I actually like Sam, they become widely offended".
I mean, yeah, same thought after seeing the signatories. What are some of the cliches being used around here ? Toothpaste is out of the tub? Arrow has left the bow. The dye is cast. The ship has sailed. (Thanks ChatGPT).
Interests align - those who keep the secrets are better off for keeping them (not just for punishment of breaking NDAs, but the fruits (pun intended) of revealing something wonderful).
> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own.
Then give up majority control.
This article needs a listen in compassion. It's all, "no we're not", instead of, "we understand why people feel this way and this is what we need to do"
I think one of the comments said vulgar and predatory. I second this. You don't need a bootcamp to break into Data Science, or Data Engineering, or Data anything.
This is my main grip with YC touting startups as a great place to join, but not helping them negotiating fair equity. Yes, founders deserve credit because they took risk, but they need to spread the wealth for execution. It should almost be illegal to give employees such low equity, relative to what founders get.
You also want to have someone doing a scientific study to be as unbiased as possible. As I understand it, (most of?) his family is immunocompromised. This doesn't mean he shouldn't do it, nor that what he's doing is not saving millions of lives, but it's a little easier to question the "salesmanship" aspect of it when he hasn't spent a lot of time in the field.
When giving out numbers scientifically, it's important to be precise, or have the uncertainty known. In that case, 96% is widely different than 70%. As Andy Slavitt says in his April 22 podcast, when someone claims to know something too precisely in regards to this pandemic, and they don't say "we don't know" enough, run the other direction.
I would argue that Apple is a luxury brand, and iPad Pro is an Apple product. If you're saying the Surface Pro can make people happy too, I'll give you that. It doesn't make me happy though.
We need to stop seeing the iPad Pro and Surface Pro as equals. iPad Pro is a luxury item, and it gives me so much more pleasure to use it. Aesthetics, design, the way I feel - these things matter. And they matter to most humans. We're not robots who only need to get a certain task accomplished. We need to feel happy.
And Elizabeth Warren wrote it in her book, The Two Income Trap. Such a a great read! This was before I knew she was running for president, many years ago.
I have some criticism of the idea, actually. As someone who doesn't think they have good taste in clothes, I would not use this. I would want to upgrade my wardrobe and improve my style.
Eh, kind of a naive view. There's a moat in all the data Uber's collected, and analytics it's performed. Not to mention R&D into things like automatous driving, etc...
My biggest problem with the advice from YC and Startup school notes like this is that they pretend they're the first to ever discover these ideas or principles. They have experience with many start-ups over the last decade, which is true, but the concepts and ideas here are very old. They're rediscovering the Polio vaccine.
Furthermore, they are extremely biased towards start-ups, which is understandable. You could not easily make a worse financial decision, statistically speaking. But they need most of us to do it for them to stay in business.
A lot of people seem to forget that Apple is a luxury brand. Their tech is not going to be the latest. Does Louis Vuitton care about the latest fabric ? No, cuz you're gonna pay a lot for it anyways!
I also saw that his new deep learning courses are in Python. He may have changed his mind about teaching in Octave for his traditional Machine Learning courses, but I still learned a great deal and I feel like I have a strong intuition of how ML algorithms (and neural nets) work.
There is some truth to Octave having a faster turnaround than Python, if you're new to programming. I feel like with Deep Learning you really have to bite the bullet, but his courses are just fine with Octave/Matlab - with respect to getting an intuitive feel for the algorithms.
Just wanted to chime in - you mentioned Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Coursera lectures are outdated. I want to say that while this could be true, the reason he does everything in Octave is because he finds that students learn faster when programming in Octave. He's aware that Python is the leading practical machine-learning tool. His focus is on learning the fundamentals and gaining an intuitive feel for the algorithms. I greatly enjoyed using Octave, which I felt was actually faster than if I had done everything in Python.
With that said, I'm so excited to learn from your new course, and can't wait to start.
This is what I learned from Dale Carnegie, which seems to help. Imagine the very worst thing that can possibly happen, and try to imagine your life with that reality. See that it's not actually so bad. Then, do everything you can to prevent that from actually happening. Taking action, instead of thinking about it, helps. Also, distract yourself with positive relationships and exercise.
And a quote which is a little lighthearted - Michel de Montaigne said: “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened"
I'm not disagreeing that one should become a founder if they don't like the early employee packages. I'm saying we should make early employee packages suck less.