jaspertheghost's comments

hmm is this effective altruism, seems like they used it to cover massive fraud.

did you use vectorbt or event driven backtesting?

At first glance, it seems very logical. Why do you need a middle man, these companies will all die out. The problem with this argument is that he doesn't realize advertising is 600B globally. Each of the small boxes there is 1b-40b depending the bucket (from tag management to mobile (100b)). When you realize that there's only 15 companies serving a 1 billion dollar market, you realize that it's not that small.

Granted. There will be companies that will die in the ecosystem, but the logic is poor. It's like saying why do you need a CRM system, it's just a tool standing between the sales person and the customer.

Because Rapgenius hasn't profited out of the lyrics yet. DMCA focused on monetization of other people's content as one of the main criterias for violation. It doesn't matter whether it's UGC or not.

Grit & determination are for me defining factors in a person's character IMO. What initially turned me onto this was the Teach for America article on the effectiveness of teachers. One of the most surprising items on the research was the effect of grit on the teacher. More specifically:

"What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives—and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance. In a study published in TheJournal of Positive Psychology in November 2009, they evaluated 390 Teach for America instructors before and after a year of teaching. Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)"

That started the initial conversation with Adam Smith. This let to a fascinating conversation with respect to startups, teaching, and everything else too.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

There are a couple of things:

1. The servers aren't all application servers. There's load balancers, memcache servers, lossy memcache servers, etc.

2. It's the cloud. It includes large instances, HA-Proxies, memcache servers, etc. 3. There's very high write characteristics for social gaming's data store, but the read is similar to normal web application.

4. He took an aggregate server #, and generalized it over a period of 30 weeks. It's directionally accurate, but I wouldn't take it literally.

I disagree with this. You want to go after roads that give you greater option value. Adult industry is not a career killer per se, but provides you less option value in terms of industry experience (for example, Linkedin provided the insight to go into FB for Matt Cohler).

Who you are is a more accurate predictor of entrepreneurship and success. That being said the two schools that have the best track records are Stanford and UIUC. Stanford (Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems) and UIUC (Netscape, Paypal, YouTube, Oracle, Yelp, Farmville)

http://www.quora.com/What-startups-have-come-out-of-Stanford... http://www.quora.com/What-startups-have-come-out-of-Universi...

Social network composes of three parts: social graph, reach applications, and games. Slide provides social media applications and the expertise to make them. The part about FB profile data is not true, and based on ToS, they wouldn't be able to use it.

Slide started out as a global recommendation push engine for shopping items. They pivoted to a widget company when it took off.

I believe that tenacity leads to luck, simply through more tries:

Chance II springs from your energetic, generalized motor activities... the freer they are, the better.

[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, "Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/luck-and-the-entrepreneu...

It's about time. Google AppEngine (Map Reduce, GFS, etc) has always lacked behind the Dynamo architecture in terms of winning developer mind share and specing the right features. The inherent problem with Google App Engine is it's not backwards compatible with existing system.

It's hard to tell. For salary info go to: glassdoor.com

I think the core of the question is can you start a technical company if you have a MBA. Yes you can, but you have to have a strong technical founder. Sun Microsystems had Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy. EA had David Maynard. Genetech had Herbert W. Boyer. Macromedia had Marc Canter. Akamai started from technical founders ... etc. etc. Having a MBA doesn't preclude from being a founder (i.e. Intuit), but you better start finding a good technical co-founder.

Read this:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html

"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."

"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.

This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).

My family is in the biotech/pharma side, and I'm on the computer science side, fyi just to add credibility to my argument.

The issue is your field. If you just had a B.S. and you were doing computer science, I'd say go for startups, but the barriers to entry for biotech firms are much higher. Typically they fund professors and Ph.D's and not undergrads.

Innovation and utility is defined by use. If people want to use social networks and not some microformats to enable the semantic web, that's innovation. All this complaining about working on worthwhile products has some truth to it, but look at the utility of lasers. In the end, lasers enabled cd/dvd's for millions of people to watch movies and music, and that's the ultimate utility.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.