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>> As a side note, bad board members are disastrous.

This is too important a point to be left as a side note; I'm sure this is the primary reason founders prefer not to have external board members.

"How to choose an external board member" would be a great follow-up essay.

dude_abideson #define CTO

Does John Carmack (one of the true legends among great programmers) still write code? If yes, then it will be intriguing to find out how he manages to do that while being CTO at Oculus.

dude_abideson Facebook Rooms

Room for Fantasy Football Sit/Start Advice - http://i.imgur.com/OVOLbjP.png

dude_abideson Data science can't be point and click

10 things statistics taught us about big data (talk by the same author, linked from the post): http://www.slideshare.net/jtleek/10-things-statistics-taught...

Yeah the heading is buzzfeed-like, but the content is great.

dude_abideson Y Combinator president upvotes Reddit with $50M investment

No, it just means that YC's head is now a big-league VC. (This is his personal investment)

dude_abideson Microsoft to Close Microsoft Research Lab in Silicon Valley

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time ever a Microsoft Research lab is being closed? It reflects a lot on how the new CEO Nadella views fundamental (academic) research in his priority list.

Though this may be the right move for MSFT shareholders, this is certainly a backward step for computer science research as a whole. MSR is the last remaining industry lab which focuses on pure academic research, and I hope MSR remains.

dude_abideson A brand new Foursquare, with a brand new logo and look

Team FourSquare (if you're reading this), please ask yourself this question:

If "x" is how much better Facebook was than MySpace, or how much better Google was than Yahoo search, then "x" is how much better you need to be than Yelp to beat Yelp.

Right now, it is debatable if you are even just better than Yelp.

dude_abideson Quora in the next YC batch

Hard to imagine what's in it for Quora.

- Network connections? Their CEO is the former CTO of Facebook.

- Help with fundraising? They raised $80mm at $900mm valuation not more than a month ago.

I strongly suspect Quora is planning a huge pivot which they feel is ambitious but doable in 3 months, and YC believes in the value of this pivot; that is the only plausible explanation I can think of.

dude_abideson Sam Altman interviewed on CNN Money [video]

Sure, but Yahoo was in 2005 when Doug Cutting started working on Hadoop there.

dude_abideson Sam Altman interviewed on CNN Money [video]

To be fair to big companies, it is quite possible for the brilliant engineer with an idea that he's passionate about, to change the world while working for a big company. Obvious examples that come to mind - Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat.

dude_abideson Klout acquired for $200 million by Lithium Technologies

200 million wow! When I think of Klout, I can only think of this brilliant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1057/

dude_abideson Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

Wow I would have thought he won it in the 80s or 90s!

dude_abideson The Founder Visa (again)

I wonder how many of the negative commenters on this thread are either citizens or permanent residents. I don't see why a techie who is not yet a citizen or permanent resident of US, and wants to be one, would be so negative about this proposal.

At worst this can lead to a few lucky immigrant founders who get free visas, but at best, this can do a lot of good to the country in terms of creating new jobs, and to the startup ecosystem (and to YC -- so what!).

dude_abideson Bill Gates: Microsoft would have bought WhatsApp too, but not for $19B

Loved this comparison of 3 visionaries of our times by one of the 3:

Gates praised Zuckerberg’s drive, but described him as “more of a product manager”, insisting that he was more of a coder starting with architecture where Zuckerberg “starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.”

Gates = sw engr; Zuck = Product Manager; Jobs = UX. (To add to it, I would say Page/Brin = research scientist.) These really reflect what each company has morphed into. MSFT ended up as the largest software company, FB is probably one of the most widely used product ever. Apple makes the best UI. And Google uses research ideas, spits them into beta products quickly and rinses and repeats.

dude_abideson Nest, Google and you

From the Q&A:

Q: Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?

A: We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.

Clever play on words. "Taking privacy seriously" will not change, but "policy on customer data being shared with Google" can obviously change :)

dude_abideson Amazon Redshift – New Features

We're using it as a replacement for our enterprise data warehouse. Total size so far ~1 TB compressed, daily delta ~10s of GB compressed. We're using a two XL node cluster. The best part is that you can increase the cluster size without downtime (except you can't switch from XL to 8XL this way). Right now we have a single digit number of simultaneous users (analysts). Did not have to tweak the Workload Management configurations too much so far.

I'd be interested to hear from others with bigger workload than ours. For example, someone from Netflix (They switched their data warehouse from Vertica to Redshift this year)

dude_abideson Presto: Interacting with petabytes of data at Facebook

Ah that makes sense! Looking at their results and how RedShift was so much faster in every scenario, it looked like something was amiss. Is Parquet Cloudera-only like Impala or is it available with vanilla Hadoop?

dude_abideson Presto: Interacting with petabytes of data at Facebook

This is awesome, thanks for sharing!

Redshift looks to be order-of-magnitude faster than Impala or Shark in all the test. Does this mean that once RedShift supports user-defined functions, there is no competing solution that is any match? (Unless you want to avoid using the cloud)

dude_abideson Presto: Interacting with petabytes of data at Facebook

Will be very interesting if someone does a benchmark comparison of Presto with Cloudera Impala, Amazon RedShift and Apache Drill.

Also, very curious to know (from any Googlers browsing HN) if Dremel is still the state-of-the-art within Google, or if there is already a newer replacement.

dude_abideson Google and IBM to work on self-driving cars with Continental

Some context for those wondering: A few years back, Continental bought the Siemens VDO Automotive business unit from Siemens. Siemens had been powering the dashboard and computing units of several auto companies, which is now owned by Continental.

dude_abideson Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3

My field is data analytics, and the companies that come to mind are Vertica, Tokutek, Hadapt, Autonomy. Clearly Palo Alto has Cloudera, Hortonworks, Trifacta, and I'm sure countless others. I was generalizing incorrectly.

The point I was really making was that most YC startups are focused on solving for inefficiencies in various verticals (inspired by AirBnB I guess). Very few are focused on core CS. So I was pleasantly surprised to read about CoreOS.

dude_abideson Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 3

CoreOS.com sounds super promising. I'm gonna be rooting for them. It's been a while since I last saw a real CS startup come out of Silicon Valley, much less YC. The action in this space seems to all be happening in Boston.

dude_abideson CSV as a Data Source

Eg. http://www.trifacta.com/ founded by the guys who started DataWrangler :)

dude_abideson How things get done

This is great advice for YC-stage companies. For bigger companies, the biggest challenge is how to continue to focus on the “write code and talk to users” part, while having to deal with everything else, which unfortunately becomes harder to ignore as you grow. "Why organizations tend towards inefficiency as they grow" should be a fascinating chapter in the "How things get done" book.

dude_abideson Unshackle the Middle Class

More accurately, Sarbox is keeping 96% of Americans away from some crazy volatility -- they are missing out on MSFTesque price appreciation as well as potential bankrupcy of countless new public companies.

dude_abideson Thalmic Labs (YC W13) Raises $14.5M

MYO is one of those products that, if executed right, can be the harbinger of a new age of computing. Neuro is still at least a few years away, voice is dorky, vision is flaky.

Now if only they had come up with a cooler name than MYO!

dude_abideson What people use their Raspberry Pi's for

I use gnump3d ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/ ) for this exact same purpose. It's quite an awesome piece of software and worth checking out.

dude_abideson Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin?

Some possible reasons are:

- He's just too humble to want the fame. Gavin Andresen could then be a likely candidate.

- Scared, maybe by what happened to Julian Assange. However, unlike WikiLeaks, it's hard to imagine what law Bitcoin breaks.

- He wanted to make money off it and move on. That would suggest Jed McCaleb, who founded and then sold MtGox.

Other reasons?

dude_abideson RethinkDB 1.5 released: secondary indexes, soft durability, perf improvements

It makes joins possible without going through mapreduce.

This is pure gold https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says material :)

dude_abideson How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."

I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.