throwaway7808

Dream on. Most likely you and your kids are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines just in a few decades.

>> Readability is mostly a matter of experience.

"It is totaly bogus claim." A single example of Perl, Brainfuck or Ocaml can prove that you are wrong. "The only people that can't read their own Perl after 6 months are the people that don't really know Perl." "Replace "perl" with "APL" or "BrainFuck" (or any language with baroque syntax) and the above sentence is as (in)valid."

Oh. Ocaml again. Well, I'll chirp on the opposite side of discusion. The syntax is completely <->:%^&#$^ $% %^&*% up. Unreadable. Yes, it maybe somewhat pleasant to write code in such syntax, but readability sucks. Just like perl. Also ugly as perl as well. When do you people learn the lessons from C, Python and Haskell? That _readability_ is _the most important thing_ for any language. Now about design. Ocaml allows a mix of imperative+functional+oop! Which means that there are uncountably many ways to screw up the design, and only a few to get it right. And each OCaml primadonna developer thinks that his way is the right way. And the rest can't read his code. Fuck that.

To CEO of Esper. Interesting. How many decades of experience do you have? How many projects you've successfully shipped? How many of these there using this approach of using non-mainstream languages?

Dream on. Most likely you are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines just in a few decades.

Hmm.

I'm considering a start-up that would make special EMF field interacting hammers that could be used to reset large scale neuro-networks. Could thing, is that I think these hammers could actually be used on both, biological and silicon computational devices! And considering that it probably would be hard to get an FDA approval [needs about a .1 billion dollars lobbying moneys], at first we can sell as a panacea-fix-it-all solution for Mac Pro, TV Sets and Bimmer owners.

Anyone wants to join?

[in 5 years in a "Science of EMF Hammers article": “Can anyone tell me why this procedure does what it does?” ...

“Well,” says Yllek Etoof, “we know a lot, but not everything.” .... "More than 100,000 people around the world have undergone EMF Hammers since it was first approved, in the 2016s, for the treatment of movement disorders. Today, besides providing relief for people with Parkinson’s disease, dystonia (characterized by involuntary muscl ..... isorder and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as well as early signs that it may improve memory in Alzheimer’s patients.

Suddenly it’s one of the most exciting treatments in modern medicine. With seemingly millions of potential EMF Hammers patients, it’s easy to imagine a future where EMF minihammers may become as common as hip replacements. .... But Nuko says more than 90 percent of their patients rate themselves as “much improved” or “very much improved” on standard postoperative outcome scales.

In the 12 years since they joined forces, Nuko and Etoof have seen EMF Hammers evolve, in Nuko’s words, “from crazy, to kind of cool but not completely accepted, to accepted.” Nuko, 42, recalls: “When I first got hired here, my chief said to me, ‘You’re a nice kid, you’re a polite kid, but don’t embarrass us.’”]

An identical twin is a clone. Do you have anything against identical twins?

I don't think you can have both - super-happy and super-smart. But otherwise, yes. I see no problems with you creating super-smart children that will be able to wipe out all the stupid ones. Who knows, maybe this is the only way to save humanity from AI menace ;)

> ... Like his idol Steve Jobs .... , Lucas Duplan is an expert salesman. You need to be, to persuade Silicon Valley investors and engineers to take a chance on a startup.

Not surprising. He probably was consciously trying to emulate worst aspects of Jobs. Sad thing is that such people often end up being successful.

> Examples: 4cm by 2cm, red PCB: $12 for 10 copies - This should go on the front page.

Funny. It would be a thing that would discourage me from using your site. Lack of graphic and flashy ads actually is very pleasant to the eye.

Death.

And from an economic competitiveness aspect, as a world?

I would very much agree. Tribalism should stand alongside the greatest achievements of humanity, like Religion, the discovery of War or "the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them".

Well, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.

Ocaml 3.12.1; Ubuntu 13.10. X server is available, Desktop is MATE 1.6.0, OpenGL also seems to work (glxgears works).

Seriously. You are so biased that it is easier for you to believe that other people are downright lying than to accept inconvenient truth. I was running it in the interpreted mode. Isn't that how one is supposed to run tutorials code? And obviously I've added the following:

  #load "graphics.cma";;

into the file first. And forgot about it, when writing the post. So no magic here. "Beautiful" syntax by the way.

And no, I wasn't trolling. I just wanted to see what that recursion would do. The code is not exactly crystal clear there, with names like start_x and such. But it really did not work. And the syntax is really ugly. And you can believe what you like.

The trouble with Ocaml is that you will probably get something like:

  $ ocaml o.ml
   File "o.ml", line 2, characters 0-13:
   Error: Unbound module Graphics

And after you've googled for a while and had done:

  sudo apt-get install liblablgl-ocaml-dev

The thing would install 23(!) packages. And after that you will get:

  $ ocaml o.ml
   Exception: Graphics.Graphic_failure "fatal I/O error".

After which, if you've been in the industry for a decade or two, you will probably decide that you'd better stop wasting your time on that particular language. Besides. It just looks ugly. Almost as ugly as perl.

I don't know. Maybe I'm very wrong here. But I think there is a correlation between 'fighting for scraps' behaviour and 'recent immigrant'. I do not have statistics to confirm that.

A bit of advice. Do check that you are not doing an internship with immature first time CEOs/CTOs.

I've seen an intern lied to, abused and dismissed without recommendation letter and promised salary by a CEO/primary founder of a YC company that I was with. This was no fault of that intern and AFAIK was done primarily because that [recently immigrated from India] CEO wanted to save about $3k of moneys. One of the reasons I've left that company and dropped from YC BTW...

edit: a clarification. this is anecdotal evidence and probably doesn't reflect statistics of YC companies in general.

The first thing that came into my mind when reading this was "You are a fool of a great intelligence."

Type-safe format strings should never be mixed with plain strings, constant strings, byte strings, unicode strings, batteries strings, byte array strings, char array strings, string buffers or any other type of string supported by ocaml. Keep your types pure and never mix them with any other types. Never. And you will never have any problem. And these python developers are lunatics. It is preposterous to use 'if' condition on a Date object and expect anything good. Idiots. They should have at least written a type-safe wrapper.

For what it is worth, I have anecdotal evidence that thinking in a foreign language in fact does somewhat inhibit emotional and experiential (common sense) subsystems. So beware.

Still, I would advice not to disregard this study completely and at least be careful about making decisions when using a foreign language. It well might be true that the emotional and other subsystems are somewhat inhibited when thinking in a foreign language and that might have both positive and negative consequences.

The thing about YC, is that it is the 'Steve Jobs way', the way of brilliant showmanship. But also the way of blatant lies and distortions fields. It is not the 'Wozniak Way'.

(I'm also a YC dropout.)

Nope. Think British selling opium in India, ethical? And notably, selling a variety of addictive dopamine stimulants [including cocaine and methamphetamine] other than games is considered to be unethical.

That reminds me of Feynman's Thesis and his (failed) attempt to build his Feynman's Radio...

Your friend had made a mistake. He should not have continued working without pay. There is nothing to be done here now. This CEO have an upper hand and your friend is not in a position to make any bargains. A take-away lesson - do not work without pay.

(just for a reference, what nationality is the CEO?

I don't think that employee unions are helpful in the long term. I'd rather see individuals exercising some common sense and making good informed decisions. Like instantly recognizing bullies and not working for (with) them. Quitting, the moment such behaviour is directed toward anyone in the company. After all, if you see someone else being bullied/not paid/whatever, given time, there's a good chance it would apply to you as well.

Only the life is unfair and the distribution of power is completely asymmetric here. You may actually need a positive reference about you and the company usually don't care what you say. You also don't have any way to verify and prosecute a company, if your former boss actually makes a negative comment about you (think a start-up, an immature founder gradually turning into a complete ass-hole under the pressure of real life and when feeling that you are deserting, when you decide to leave).

And how would you feel about chatting with startup founders there when you yourself is not one of them?