ub's comments | WingNews

ub | 11 years ago | on: The days are long but the decades are short

Agreed.Read a meme somewhere that if only hardwork and perseverance resulted in success, then African village women would have been millionaires.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Where does money for research come from in the US?

This is the key reason for the decline of innovation in the US. VCs are never going to have a long view and will continue to fund the next lame messaging app. But we need federal investment in basic research to drive step-function innovation that will move humanity forward.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Chinese mobile phone app lets you hire thugs to carry out beatings

Technology is disrupting crime now.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands

No experience but looks like they are organizing a summer school on probabilistic programming languages. http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/wiki/SummerSchools/2015/Announc...

ub | 11 years ago | on: Welcome Peter

Taking a contrarian viewpoint. Does the convergence of all talent into one team actually reduce the innovation in the startup ecosystem. Similar to your sports analogy, the best games result when multiple talented teams fight it out. If all startups that become big are YC-funded, then we might see just the YC-influenced style of running a company whereas other models may not see the light of the day.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student

I had attended a talk by Vint Cerf at Stanford where he had posited that the reason the web took off was because people could see the HTML source of websites and start writing their own HTML.This, he believed, led to the exponential growth of web content. So, I guess then, "view source" was quite common.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Microsoft CEO explains his remark on women asking for raises

I must say I find his apology very sincere. Increased my respect for him. It also brings to the fore the point that without enough women representation, it's hard for men to put themselves in the shoes of women and understand the world from their perspective.

ub | 11 years ago | on: Lecture 2: How to Start a Startup

Usually, I have found that taking a step back and understanding that the startup is a part of your life, and not your entire life (even though it may feel like it consumes you),helps in preventing burnout. Having friends and family around or even a hobby can help. The other tip I have discovered is looking at the burnout as a problem solving exercise. Think of why everything seems hard, why you're not motivated, figure out which parts you can solve and which you can't, and solve the parts you can, piece by piece.

ub | 11 years ago | on: InfiniDB goes out of business

My experience with MongoDB has been terrible. Apart from just look-ups I don't think it's meant for much data wrangling. Joins with different collections are harder to do. I see the best use case of Mongo is for data dumps.

ub | 12 years ago | on: Why Things Are Getting Better for Women in Startups

The challenge of getting more women in tech needs to involve the whole community - investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, both male and female. It cannot be a female only dialogue. I am a technical woman founder myself. And,my biggest challenge is fighting those subtle biases that men have. When I am in a meeting with investors, I find that I am treated in a patronizing fashion vs my male co-founders. Whenever the investor is speaking, he's addressing my male colleagues more and I am ignored. The only way to fight these is to make men aware of how they behave. Women already know it, since they are at the receiving end. Hence, I do not like closed, women only conferences.

ub | 12 years ago | on: Online advertisers: unwittingly funding cybercriminals since 2011

I believe that crime will increasingly move online,including wars. Cyberwars and cyber-fraud are the growing menaces of today's world. And, the NSA revelations about deliberately injecting weaknesses into encryption algorithms have only made it worse. The challenge here is that these crimes are faceless and borderless. So each of us is left to our own to protect the devices we use and thus, ourselves from an unknown enemy/criminal.

ub | 12 years ago | on: Twitter Files For IPO

I have thought about this long and hard. Advertising seems like a necessary evil. Free services help to democratize the internet to some extent. Imagine if you had to pay for Google searches! Today, a kid in India can use the same search engine as a kid in the US. However, to address your question, advertising will not be able to support all the businesses of the future.

The reason for the reliance on advertising for revenues is because of the shift of ad dollars to the internet from old media such as radio, print etc. Advertising seems like this massive source of revenue waiting to be tapped. It is really a temporary illusion of growth. Overall ad spending is not increasing dramatically, it's only being reallocated. Once the shift to digital is complete, digital advertising will track GDP growth (similar to offline advertising today). But complete allocation will take several decades more.

A second reason for this reliance is lack of competition. Only a few companies have the scale needed to be attractive to advertisers. Hence, all ad dollars go to these companies. The success of these companies creates a lot of me-toos. Once there are a few more companies with the scale of Google/FB fighting for the same dollars, advertising will cease to be as attractive.