1,607 karma · joined May 27, 2014
example: as an employee you own 10% of the company. The 10% is worth $10. After company raises a 100M round and dilution has occurred, you own 1% of the company, but that 1% is now worth $50
who is being treated unfairly? I don't quite understand
If there is Demand (people willing to pay), there will most likely be lots of folks happy to Supply (merchants willing to sell).
The opposite is not true. If you ramp up Supply (add more good merchants), it's hard to ramp up Demand to match (getting more customers).
Hence, "the customer is always right".
I checked your website but it looks like it's down due to PHP errors. How can I contact you? My email is in my HN profile. confiscate [at] gmail
Most of the time in enterprise sales, the potential customer is too busy to try software himself. Learning a new piece of software takes a lot of time and effort.
Unless you are a techie, it's easier to just have salespeople do the work of walking you through quick demos. Or have someone junior at your own company, take care of the "dirty work" of figuring out new software and tell you the results. It sounds like you are that junior person at your company :)
They want to make an AI that can teach new ideas to humans. New strategies that human bodies are physically capable of executing, but no human was "smart enough" to think of yet. An example is when the AI built a high number of probes at the start. That's "smart".
The only way to train an AI to be able to come up with new ideas, is to force it to be "slow". Otherwise, it will just always do the easiest way to win, which is out-micro. There is nothing interesting about a game like that. That only shows the AI is fast, but it won't be clear that it's "smart"
Is the outcome prediction score, itself, also produced by AI training?
It has to be, right? Because it's clearly not just calculating the outcome based on Army Size of the AI and the human. There must be some non-direct way it's calculating the outcome prediction.
I mean, the hard part is accurate outcome prediction. Once you have that, it's easy to train an AI by just throwing CPU's at the problem and making the AI play a crazy lots of games
It sounded like that was based partly on Supply (Army size). But the AI only knows it's own Army Size, and not the human's army size.
So how can the AI's outcome prediction be so accurate? At game 3 against Mana, the AI's outcome prediction changed from 60% win to 99% win, before the AI decide to go up the ramp. It had no way to know if the human had more army up that ramp
Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do
I think it would benefit if you wrote a blurb about yourself at the end. I.e. your accomplishments and where you are now etc. The story would be more interesting if we knew the person behind the story!
The reporter is supposed to be an expert in this field. That's why 60 minutes hired him, instead of someone else, for the job. I am sure there was no shortage of applicants who wanted this job.
Why couldn't he be more open-minded and supportive of a startup like Amazon? Instead of constantly laughing at Amazon and Jeff Bezos (like his choice of cars)
So why be a snob? As you said, no one knows what will happen. Why laugh at the little guy? You don't know what's going to happen
But, the 60-minutes reporter didn't justify his claims based on risk or on math. He was skeptical because Sears is huge, and to him it was laughable [and yes, he did literally laugh many times in that interview] that Amazon can someday be worth more than Sears. To him it was "messed up", and a sign of things wrong with the world
https://youtu.be/VuI-ss5aQU8?t=629
"how do you view that phenomenon [laugh] that Amazon is worth more than Sears!? [condescending laugh]"
"a couple of geeks [laugh laugh], who sketched out some software, could destroy Sears Roebuck [laugh]"
same 60 minutes "expert", telling young Bezos, Amazon stock was wildly expensive
https://youtu.be/dTxuzW9RAO8?t=20
"Amazon is worth more than a major industrial company, like Texaco ... that didn't blow your mind?"
e.g. if the CEO is doing this as a way to recruit you, don't say out loud in the meeting "I am going to start my own company after this". It will embarrass her in front of her team.
2. try to schedule the meetings to near end-of-day, and see if you can get to a social-event (e.g. after-work drinks) with the CEO and other executives. That's usually where the real conversations happen, and you find out the real "behind-the-scenes" info
"people helping him put packages on their porches"
as well as their friends who pretended to "steal" the package.
Because the original goal was to uncover dishonest people, and so now you've actually found even more dishonest people, who were taped on video
the trick is to first, roll in the "opposite" direction.
When you are sitting down, roll backwards so the back of your neck is touching the snow, and the bottom of your board is pointing towards the sky
At this point, gravity is trying to pull you back down. Now, along with gravity, kick your legs to roll forward quickly. Gravity and momentum should effortlessly roll your upper body to be above the board.
this allows you to avoid having to use your arms to "push" your upper body above the board.
it's also much quicker, so you don't waste effort standing up, and can save your energy for actually snowboarding down hill
But still, at best he can be a mentor for when you fundraise. But would you hire him or pay him, to be a fundraising consultant?
1. Juicero who burned through $118 million with nothing to show for it
2. bootstrapped startup with $0 funding that made profits
What is your point again?
Either way, you will always be at the whims of your customer. So why is that a disadvantage when bootstrapping?
As you said, founders should focus on making great companies (not just great products), so they should not focus on the outcome release time.
If you get into YC that's great. If not, you are still going to build your company anyways. There's not going to be a change in direction of your company either way.
YC is an accelerator. It accelerates your progress up a path, but ultimately you are responsible for setting the path and running up it.
Please don't consider suicide over a YC application. There's going to be a lot more obstacles ahead, that will be more stressful than applying to YC.
basically at this point you would have a lot of if-else statements, like a "Expert System" AI in the 80s.
so much so that it would be better to use a NN to replace the loss/error/verification function instead of coding it by hand?
I don't think the argument is conclusively "Done" after naming one important relationship he formed in NYC.
I can name one important relationship he would have formed if he stayed in SF. A relationship with the founders of Instagram. That relationship is valuable too.
What makes you doubt that this choice is less important than other choices he will make in the future?
You don't need to consider the infinite possibility of events that could have unfolded. You really only have to consider the origin event--if you had the chance to choose again, would you make the same choice.