Buildsystem guy at Unity; also into graphics and math, used to be into robotics and computer vision. Worked in analytics for a while. Used to fence competitively, and coach fencing.
Email is a gmail address with same name as HN username.
Both you and cperciva seem to be fundamentally theory people. IMO, you both completely missed what mencius meant when he wrote 'soundest.' When he says sound, he means that a field is worthwhile, both because it has problems that are interesting in a purely technical way and because solutions to them are in some way actually useful to non-CS humanity. When you say sound, you mean pedantically verifiable for the benefit of other theorists. Graphics is sound because not only does it have interesting math, it aids or entertains laymen; PL research isn't, because nobody except PL researchers cares.
Well, okay, but the point of the normal free time argument is that agricultural people have more time, and are therefore able to do more stuff. My point is, it may not be the case that agricultural people have more time on average, but it is the case that agricultural societies give enough people free time to do many more interesting things, and especially, enough free time to concentrate in cities and do things they couldn't do while not in cities. Which more or less negates the whole agriculture-is-a-mistake argument; once you show that agriculture lets you do lots of amazing things in cities, you can argue that those things are worth the various bugs in agriculture (most of which eventually get fixed anyway).
Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.
2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.
3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.
I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer, then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society, on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer maybe spends half or maybe a little more of his waking time farming). Thus, farming does, in fact, lead to time freed up from acquiring food, but it does so unequally, letting those who choose to farm farm, and letting everybody else do something else.
Women, yes, but I'm fairly sure that's evolutionarily hardwired. I have absolutely no sense for clothing on either women or men. Especially not color clash. I was presented with what I was later told was the absolute most clashing colors, period (a green and an almost-green), and had no idea that they were particularly bad.
Pittsburgh sucks mightily. I don't know anybody who would stay there given the choice to move somewhere real, like the Bay Area or Boston or New York or LA or San Diego or Chicago or Philadelphia or pretty much any kind of real city, especially one near a coast. The only people I know of who choose to stay there have been there so long that they've forgotten the taste of real food (i.e. food that is not drowned in grease and has not been sitting in a warehouse for three months) and the feeling of living in a real city with real culture.
Now, people who invest generally have money. People who have money generally have a choice of where to live, and are aware of what it's like to live in a real city. Thus, they do not touch Pittsburgh with a ten foot pole.
One nitpick: They talked about the "zone-out" button, which students are supposed to press when they've zoned out of a presentation. There are two show-stopper problems with that.
One, having zoned out reasonably much in my undergrad career, I can tell you that zoning out is not something that hits a threshold, and then you realize "I've zoned out." That is, unless you're consciously zoning out, in which case you consciously aren't interested in the material, in which case you would never press the button, since you don't want the professor to get mad.
Two, that assumes that everybody has a laptop (generally, only 20-50% do), AND, even less plausibly, that they're all looking at the professor's presentation with their browsers. (probably 1% of all undergrads would ever do that)
That just demonstrated to me how I have exactly zero visual aesthetic sense. All four of those cars seem completely equivalent to me, aside from being functionally different. I'm beyond not having a visual design sense; I can't even notice good visual design when it hits me over the head.
It's just visual that's the problem, though-- I know elegance in proofs and programs, and I know good music; a Monet, though, does no more for me than a hotel painting, in that they're both kind of blurry.
I can still find things like Myspace obnoxious compared to Facebook, but only because of functionality and usage patterns, not any sense of aesthetics.
I know a guy like that. His take on it is that it's a combination of social pressure and families: families are often more expensive than any of ivankirigin's doing things to extremes, and they get more expensive as you put them in richer peer groups. I suspect that if you were single, being worth $10 million would sit with you just fine, even if you wanted to do extravagant things.
(Not that that would make me choose to be single, though.)
The point isn't which Lisp. It teaches all the concepts common to both Lisps; of the ones from CL, it only misses the idea of a generic function model of OO, and macros. And honestly, once you've had your mind expanded enough by SICP, learning the rest of CL is a snap. (I know; it took me only a couple weeks to become proficient at CL after taking Berkeley's SICP-based course. I wasn't blindingly amazing at macros, but there's On Lisp for that.)
Yeah, but startups, for most founders, are a HUGE schlep. And, the return on the schlep is nonlinear in the size of the schlep; it's more like exponential, assuming you keep winning your rolls of the dice. And, the n+1th roll of the dice has a much higher expectation than the nth. In other words, they've come all this way, and they're ALMOST at fuck-you money-- they wouldn't want to come back 20 years later and go through the whole process again.
The way Google does it, it's almost hiring, just with slightly bigger starting bonuses, and a different interview process. None of the normal trappings of acquisitions (integrations and fuck-you money spring to mind) are there.
If you already have windows hardware, Ubuntu will autodetect all your hardware automatically. I've installed it on both my desktop and laptop, and it detected everything (wireless, sound, video, you name it) without a hitch. Insertion of install CD to up-and-running time: about 30-40 minutes.
So, even if your time is expensive, it still takes less time than it does to go get a Mac.
Low millions probably means low ones-of-millions, which is non-fuck-you money in return for a situation which you'd probably want to say fuck-you to, at least if you believe the general sense around here that Google's status as the ultimate hacker's mecca has begun to fade.
Do you think you would have gone that far when Google was just a search bar with better results? (I'm not particularly claiming that this is the next Google, only that the next Google is extremely hard to spot)
Maybe you read more general startup-covering press than I do, but for my own part, I read NYT, programming.reddit, and news.yc. There's a lot of sampling bias there towards YC companies, because the NYT doesn't do that much startup at all, while the other two go crazy on YC. So I wouldn't be surprised that I and maybe you have heard of all the YC companies but none of the CRV ones.
As to the usefulness of the fund, it seems like a perfectly good second round of funding if you start at YC, or a first round if you don't get into YC. (maybe you can pay for PR with the extra bucks)
If I were Larry/Sergei/Schmidt, I'd vote against it too, just because I get annoyed when random shareholders try to tell me what to do with my company. When I first read this in a different context, it was worded so that the shareholders who weren't otherwise involved in the company brought up this proposal to force the company to do this stuff. IMO, even if I were going to follow the general intent of the proposal, I wouldn't want these random people who bought a bunch of stock to start snooping over my shoulder all the time.
Furthermore, the measure seems likely to prevent the governments of said countries from allowing Google into them at all. It is debatable whether having a censored Google or no Google is better for oppressed peoples.
That wouldn't fix the current situation, since if you wanted to reduce somebody's karma, you just downmod their positive submissions. Almost all submissions are positive, so nevermind. People with mostly negative submissions are probably spammers anyway.
Innovations may come out of MSFT, but they come out in the form of papers and research, not in the form of products. MSFT does not produce innovative products. It produces innovative research, and because of organizational dysfunction never the two shall meet.
I have some experience with writing in Lisp without good libraries for what I'm doing. It turns out not to be an enormous amount of work to turn an unmaintained unusable FFI to the C library you want into a highly usable, Lispish library. It can at times even be useful for understanding said library. I'm not saying this isn't a drawback of Lisp, but it's also not as huge a barrier as some might think. FFI's have gotten good enough that it doesn't really matter that much what language the library is written in.
Seems like Google is beginning to do what they said they wouldn't in their statement at their IPO, which is bend to the short-term demands of shareholders.
If this had the same title, but without the FREE at the end, I probably would have clicked on it. It kind of goes without saying that most things on the internet, particularly random technical services like this, are free.