nimble

> There is no mental overhead like with Python where you have to use square brackets for lists and curly braces for dictionaries.

Seriously?

From your link:

> The only thing that will be different is that we will have MANY different roads that will compete with each other.

LOL

What percentage of your motivation for writing this post was a desire to talk about making products for coders in general and what percentage was wanting people to check out your site?

http://www.enginehere.com

Be honest :)

I agree with you that 'designed' is the word he probably ought to use and that 'invented' is pretentious, ... but I don't think it's wrong.

> The top score in Juárez Correa’s class was 921. [...] The top score in the entire country was also 921.

> Ten got math scores that placed them in the 99.99th percentile.

These facts are fishy. These standardized tests are usually pretty easy and have a high number of perfect scores.

invent: create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.

So invent and design are near synonyms. There are subtle differences, of course. For example, I don't think it would be right to accuse you of designing the distinction you're making here. ;)

Why do you write 'at least'? Isn't this strictly superior to Schneier's light idea?

> more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American population combined.

Sounds like a statistic designed to rile people who don't understand the difference between wealth and income. You can be living quite comfortably but with no wealth accumulation (no savings or property). If you're also in debt, your wealth is negative. That bottom 40% probably includes a good number of people making over $100K per year.

All true. Now explain why if 5% of bitcoins were destroyed that would result in a 5% increase in the value of the remaining bitcoins.

That would be a fun conversation to see. You with your 1.5 billion dollar bitcoin trying to haggle someone down from 0.2 bitcoins to 0.00000002 bitcoins for a pair of pants.

Again, flawed reasoning. If all bitcoins were destroyed except for one, how much do you think it would be worth? There is no intrinsic demand for bitcoins, only inertia behind perceived value. And it looks to me that the inertia is mostly behind the price per bitcoin rather than total value of all bitcoins.

This line of reasoning works when you have a fixed number of shares that represent ownership in something real, but I don't see how it works with bitcoins that have no intrinsic value. Bitcoins only hold value by inertia. People think they have value because they're accepted by other people because other people think they have value. I see no rational mechanism by which this feedback loop should jump 5% when 5% of bitcoins are lost.

> Agda and Coq retain inference and decidability by sacrificing Turing completeness.

I don't know if I would phrase it that way, but there's a more important slight of hand going on here and I think chongli was right in spirit. Haskell takes care of (most) type level things for you with inference. Coq and Agda allow you to give very precise types to things, but those very precise types involve values that are not automatically inferred for you. It's certainly not the case that you can write the same annotation-free function in Coq that you would have written in Haskell and have a very precise type inferred for you.

That's funny. The first thing that came to my mind was turnips. Maybe there should be a parsnip and a turnips in the logo. Maybe a parsnip pointing down between two turnips, in a T formation.

I'd rather see:

  exact: Who said, "To hair is human?"

Quotes are too easy to be used accidentally by laymen.

What do you think Google should do with the following search:

   Who said, "To hair is human?"

Just sew the end of time up to the beginning of time and the electrons never need to turn around.

Who says the probabilities are going to be accurate? The point is that it's better to guess at probabilities for outcomes and then calculate than it is to blind guess at valuations. Presumably, YC will be in a better position than most to estimate the probabilities.

Instructions for playing this game in functional style are included, but you need to order 25 copies of the game.

More seriously: I don't think the game is too biased towards imperative style and would be useful foundation for any future language choice. Yes, it is technically imperative, but those cards don't move the turtle as side-effects. That's their primary effect. A stack of cards behaves much like a function. Similarly to how concatenative languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenative_programming_langu...) are usually viewed as functional rather than as imperative stack manipulation.

> Therefore, if you believe the company to be of the A type ...

That's the problem I have with this line of thinking. An investor doesn't "believe" it to be type A. An investor gambles that it's going to be type A. Reasoning after the fact that you should have been willing to spend more on the winner, without accounting for probabilities, is flawed reasoning. If anyone could see five years ago that the company was certainly going to be worth $10b today, then it would have been worth $10b five years ago (after adjusting for inflation). If no one else could see it but you, and yet you were somehow certain, then sure, but that's not typically the situation.

[Before continuing, let me point out that you flubbed the math: 20% of $10b is $2b, not $200m. The difference between A and B equity is $1.98b, not $180m. This wasn't particularly important to your point, but since I am continuing this example I thought it might avoid confusion to note the error.]

Since most people generally prefer frequentist reasoning, here's another try. Suppose you invested in 100 companies, one of which was company A and the other 99 of which failed. If you invested at 20% in all 100 companies valued at $40m each, then you've spent $800m and have $2b in equity. If you invested in those same companies at $400m valuation each, then you spent $8b for that same equity of $2b.

> The basic rules of expected value don't apply to startups

If you'd reword that as "the basic rules of expected value are difficult to apply to startups", there'd be some chance it was true :).

And yet, difficult as it may be to apply, expected value is the framework to rationally make a decision about low probability / high payoff investments. Of course, if YCombinator is already invested at an early stage (note: when the valuation is quite low), I can understand why pg wouldn't care too much about the later stage valuations. If you look at what's best for YC, it's first and foremost that companies get the money they need to succeed (an incentive aligned with the founders and any investors) but probably also that the valuations (after their own investment) be as high as possible so that more of the pie remains for later investments. This latter incentive is clearly not aligned with investors and as an investor I'd take the advice to disregard valuation with a big grain of salt.

What do you mean they don't make money that way? Do you just mean that $100m isn't a hit? If that's all you mean, change that number to $1b or $10b or one hundred... billion dollars (pinky to lip). But I think what you mean is that investors make money by finding companies that are grossly undervalued, to the point that an order of magnitude change in valuation shouldn't affect the decision. I'm still skeptical of this claim. How many companies valued at $10m do you think have a 10% chance of ending up at $1b+?

> Since phase 2 prices vary at most 10x and the big successes generate returns of at least 100x, investors should pick startups entirely based on their estimate of the probability that the company will be a big success and hardly at all on price.

Can someone explain the reasoning here? Investing at a lower valuation means that for the same money in, the investor gets a higher cut of any payout, right? If an investor judges your company to have a 1% chance of ending up worth $100m and a 99% chance of it ending up at $0m, then they should be willing to invest if the valuation is << $1m and not if the valuation is >> $1m. Or not?