Ok, wild guess here but Sundar is cleaning out the house? It's kind of hard to give direction to some who's been there forever, actually achieved more technologically and financially, and more critically would not listen to you.
No wonder Larry decided to create Alphabet, stayed out of all the office politics. I would take a bet that Jeff Dean and Urs Holzle will leave in the next year or two.
Great points. One thing I would add is to pay a lot of attention to your team's dynamics. One bad (or just not as engaged) team member could derail the whole team's morale. Friction should be dealt with immediately, even if it's really minor.
There is value in advertising: as an information source and a mechanism to establish trust. The former value has been diminished by the internet (which some people call the information age). Advertising is still valuable for establishing trust between the two unknown parties though. Ads in Google work partly because of Google the brand name. Ads on Reddit r/HateSomething will not because, well, you know why. So it's in Google's interest to have good and safe ads (or the perception that they do).
Can you share the requirements that you employer needs? Box has been trying to get into enterprise for a long time, and has many 'enterprise' features, but we all know how well Box is doing financially. I think the problem with Box is "it's just a feature, not a product", especially in the presence of other alternatives like One Drive, Google Drive, Amazon Drive and what not. It might be a feature done better than the others, but it's not a product by itself to be bought in a stand alone package. There is no differentiation, actually it's even worse as I can't edit my documents unlike with Google/MS. Pricing is definitely not better than any of the competitors.
Well, for some people, myself included, the not-going-so-well recent IPOs (Square, Box, etc.) would help deflate the pressure on housing prices in SF/BA. I feel for the workers at these company, but it's becoming impossible to raise a family here when the rent/mortgage is creeping up to more than half of most people's salary.
which is OK, as long as there is a community to support the effort. I remember when Pidgin (or another IM client) had to keep up with not one, but three protocols: MSN, Yahoo and AOL. And that was done before the age of Github and pull requests.
Would it be suffice with an .edu email, or does one need a formal document from university officials? I tried to click through from the sandbox link, but a Yahoo account is required.
Java has both int (32 bit) and long (64 bit) types. What did you refer to as 'native'?
Lucene, the popular core search library, has always used int as internal document IDs. As a result, the number of documents in one Lucene index is limited to 2 billions (Java int are signed). It's even worse if there are many deleted docs in the index as they are are just marked as deleted and consume up IDs. There are a number of reasons why no one is keen on moving internal docIDs to long, and performance is one of them.
Shhtttt don't ask, the YC president never held a real job but that doesn't stop him from talking like he knows everything from astrophysics to socioeconomic stuff either.
It's easy to pay lip service like "We are deeply sorry for those that are no longer part of Mixpanel". I would be interested more in "Show me the money" like talks.
The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
I think she is already wealthy enough from the VMW IPO (if not even before that). At this time, she's probably more concerned with her long term legacy, so putting this money into a charity account (DAF) is probably the best decision. The money gets to be invested tax free, and she still has the full option of what to do with it later when she's got more time and/or opportunities.
I think the novelty for Pinterest will wear off. There is only so much gratification in viewing beautiful pictures put together. I don't see any other value Pinterest is providing.
Snapchat, on the other hand, at least provides a communication channel for a very active demographics. Yes, it has to compete with a lot of big guys in the space, but the utility is there in the product.
Actually the price tracked FB expected revenue very well. For some time after IPO, there was serious doubt on FB mobile ad revenue (as the desktop ad was not growing enough). They somehow grew the mobile add very well and that's when the stock price made the U-turn. Whether the mobile ad is a proven business or not is still the 100B dollar question.
Eh, many of the startups now are selling services for less than you'd pay for, with the difference subsidized by VCs. Granted, some services have close to zero costs, but one can also argues that many of them have close to zero values too. There will always be a few winners and a lot of losers in any periods. The last bubble brought us Amazon, Google, ebay, etc. I am sure some of the current unicorns will become big household names, but many others will fade away.
What are the downsides with SQS if you expect a small number of large massages (well, not larger than the 4K limit I think)? The bill should be a lot cheaper than running a broker your self. Are you worried about lock-in? SQS APIs are simple enough to replicate with a REST service backed by a database for low usage scenarios.
I think he does. I believe that reading is one of the few things that Gates (and people like him) truly enjoy doing. It's like video games, exercising or playing music to some other people. It's really like a physical addiction.
Is the outsider not needed for this line of reasoning to work assuming that the total number of people doesn't change? All the 100 blue eyed would commit suicide after a hundred days after the creation of the island since they work out they have blue eyes. I think the main challenge in this puzzle is the lack of assumption on what kind of reasoning the islanders are capable of doing and what the initial conditions are.
Hi Mike, nice to see you here. In your opinion, what would be the best way to visualize a bipartie graph where the edges have weights and other properties? More background if you're interested: the graph is some result from an LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) analysis on a set of documents. There are a couple of hundreds topics and a few thousands word/phrases. Thanks!
You should put some effort on designing the key schema, especially the hash key. Don't do timestamp, or sequence. I had to do a 'encrypted' key schema on my sequence IDs so sequential records are spread into different partitions. Actually it worked out well as I can exposed these encrypted keys externally too.
FTA even the chairman of the board who, by definition, is Jack's direct boss had to taxicab him to have their weekly one on one. I am not sure I buy this, unless Jack is avoiding these meetings. WTF else is Jack doing? For God's sake, the other guy is not just some type of investment bank MBAs, he's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Kordestani and was early employee and executive at both Netscape and Google.
I really think the future is bleak for both Twitter and Square.
And I used Lucene as the data backend for an inference engine recently :) If there is one library that keeps me in the Java world, it's Lucene. No other open source comes close to Lucene in its category.
This is so true. What's concerning is that terms are usually confidential and not available to most employees (including the top technical contributors). Given the info on Square on Box, it seems we should expect the last round investors are guaranteed at least 20% return regardless of the exit valuation before everyone else gets a dip.
Yes, every language/framework is good at something and bad at some other. They are just tools. What matters is what one builds. A lot of technical news these days are about tools, not products.
For startups this size, evaluations are usually in the range of 10-30 revenues, so it's reasonably safe to assume their revenue is in the range of 40-100M.
Classification problems in a medical domain. It literally took me 30 minutes to install madlib and run logistic regression on a table. It then probably took me a few more days to do some analysis, try out various algorithms and productionize the predictor.
I've used madlib[1] before and was quite happy with that. Maybe you can do a feature comparison with similar existing solutions as many people don't have the bandwidth to go through your documentations.