sirbetsalot

Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media. Filled to the brim with garbage, everyone who floats in it drinks the water, dies and joins the floating corpse pile at the end of the data funnel. you can't have a fresh mountain spring of great data when you let people pollute constantly with their verbal offal.

Vancouver has a real problem, these company founders aside from dwave and shoes.com are fundamentally weak on the vision side. They often have some bizarre cultural aesthetic that drives away people who can actually perform in high tech. I mean the HR person for hootsuite probably cant even add together integers for gods sake.

This isn't silicon Valley, this is shitty vancouver where "me too" companies are the norm. D-wave is the only company going for a moonshot here.

BECAUSE THAT WOULD REQUIRE COMMON SENSE.

cool what about competing with Harvard and Stanford Grads. I have never been to the Bay area but I really want to work down there. It seems like all data scientist postings that are serious want PhD's from the Ivy league so I figured my Resume would just print out into a printer chute directly into a shredder lol. Any insight on how to stand out in the Bay Area?

thanks for the reply, its really weird going from a board member in a startup to searching for meaningful work again. Maybe ill try to pack up and get down to the Bay Area and see who I can meet.

Just in case you don't get it. This is the typical train of thinking on Twitter. You say something intelligent looking for conversation, and eventually you are going to run into the crazies on the platform just looking to broadcast thoughts that have nothing to do with the original point and then quickly turns into negative, abusive slop. (the blue cheese remark should have clued you in.) I understand fully what you are saying, but respectfully disagree. Clearly tales of abuse and outright ugly human behaviour turn millions upon millions of core users off the platform. This has been said a dozen times by Dick Costello himself. That being said, I can see your point, and will pontificate on it.

Satire is not your strong point?

So lets see. in about 30 minutes I can deck into the Twitter API and create about 100 accounts and cron job your Twitter account for a post and then inundate you with thousands of crazy insults from random accounts. I can do all of this because you said you didn't like blue cheese and I for one sir think you are an IDIOT and should be taught a severe lesson for not liking blue cheese. ~Twitter Reality.

personally I couldn't care less about Twitter, used it once or twice and bailed, but usually when the CEO tells you its a BIG problem... http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-me...

I think you can simply google Dick Costolo and hear him say it directly about 100 times.

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction. Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.

yah this idea will never be smart for one very good reason. The probability of the bottom 99% of VC ever rising up to challenge john doeer, chris sacca and the rest is near zero.

In sports you have the probability of a lower tier athlete going off on any given day and that probability is high enough to create uncertainty, For this model to actually work you need a VC like "HighlineVC" to hit a unicorn. Fat chance of that every happening, they are orders of magnitude more stupid then sequioa.

99% of developers cannot organize themselves and develop a monstrous amount of high quality code in a short period of time. 100% of developers can demand big paychecks, all of the perks, working from wherever they want, never working in an office and work on their own time when they feel like it.

As an employer I used to be upfront and tell developers there is a 90% chance you will be gone in the first week, but if you make it i'll pay you 15k a month no problems and give you anything you want.

I went from a 75% bad hire rate to a 0% bad hire rate after that. just 1 data point here.

Sadly this is still a relevant question due to the fact that if you give your programmers every leeway they will take advantage, not work, slack for 2 weeks and do nothing. happens all the time.

As a boss nothing angers you more then paying someone 7-10k a month on top of all the taxes and costs and watching them bitch and complain about coming to the office and commit nothing until the "feel like it" under the guise of "programming happens when it happens". This is real money and it is painful to raise it and just give it away. The developer doesn't have to answer to the angry investors and have their reputation ruined forever when the company fails. They get to skate off and go work at Facebook with valuable "startup experience" under their belt.

The reality is that 99% of programmers have bad attitudes and if you find the gem that actually pulls the cart with you, hold on to that unicorn with every ounce of your being.

I think one of the hardest thing about hiring is that if I am an "A" player, I am usually financially sound because of it and I just don't want to put in months of effort trying to get a job at a good work environment.

Usually jobs just find me, but I don't really need them and often I see cool openings in San Francisco (I live in Canada) but I just don't go after them.

I think about having to make a cool resume that stands out, having to do all the social media stuff, (i just want to program in the top 1%, not be some social god and I only use snapchat these days) It just gets tiring for a 35 year old. (do startups even hire 35 year olds? probably not.)

Can I program? Oh yes, when I dig in, I top perform and give everything to the people I work for. In my opinion most of the top talent goes unnoticed and are not offered top positions, simply because they couldn't bother with the hiring process. Meanwhile these companies have to siphon through a glut of bottom performers who are trying to get in cool companies (and wont) because they are desperate to get their foot in and learn.

If the great valley of silicon, lol, can do anything for startups, it would be to better promote services and technologies that match up people with good jobs.

I would love to solve a problem online say in machine learning or Erlang or something and just SHOW how I top perform instead of having to reach out for 3 months wasting time talking to hiring managers. No thanks. I already make enough money you know? Just my two cents I guess.

Degree is worthless, top tier ivy league, even worse. As long as the person is smart, doesn't struggle with programming languages and willing to get better, start them small and build up.

its worth exactly $0 unless you have customers paying for it right now.

have vast amounts of cash and friends in the monied circles.

good guy, doesn't give a shit about the corpo-academic kleptocracy. For the love of math, that is all.

I plan to most def, and I plan on open sourcing the machine learning tech once I hit my first million next year. The odds are nothing like poker however, it takes a long long time to understand all the ins and outs of making money in sports gambling and the strategy is much different. FYI: I am awful at poker.

Yes that is an interesting question. My co-founders were so incompetent at this business that I took over all business development. I personally met with a dozen casinos owners in Las Vegas, 4 massive odds tech companies in Great Britain and about 7 off shore, billion dollar gambling firms like pinnacle, william hill and the like.

Not a single one committed on the spot to give me money despite my API being faster (in GPU and C++) smarter (generating 6% ROI on the dollar staked ON TOP of their juice) and better coded (All Haskell, Python and occasionally C). I was floored. Technology meant nothing to these wealthy people.

I realized that the people who ran the sports books were so lazy and incompetent that they would never understand what convex optimization was and that If I instead committed to learning how to bet, I would eventually grind millions of dollars out of their archaic systems. Quite simply, anyone with enough commitment and resources can outsmart the index.

Its not that they were dolts, but that their focus was not on math and better real-time odds; the focus was on bilking very poor bettors out of their money and preying on them as much as possible. These guys just worked 9 to 5 collected fat paychecks, basically work in palaces with sweet perks, and abhorred (and scoffed) change of any kind.

Once I realized that being smart and capable would never sell, it was an elementary decision. I quit, let my investors down, left a quarter million on the table (which my foolish co-founder burnt through and AGAIN got a $3m term sheet pulled at the last minute by the SAME jewish lawyer investor guy lol) and simply said, life is easier when I only have to deal with myself. The rest is history, I surpassed a half million dollars and now sustain an excellent lifestyle. hit me up anytime at @ess2dashizzleC on twitter. (yah I like snoop dogg)

Started a startup in Vancouver using Machine learning to automate the sports betting odds generating stack. Got two cofounders one MBA (yah i know) and a fundraiser, both failed badly as I did all the code. ended up doing 40% of the fundraising. fired the MBA for incompetence, 4 coders I had all left when other co founder did a deal where the term sheet was pulled last second. packed up left the company to the fundraiser and used all 12 man years of work to bet on sports. Now a successful sports gambler, completely financially free. Single most deadly killer to startups is a bad cofounder.