They need to take that money, break Yahoo up into pieces, sell it, and then whatever money they have they should fund 100,000 startups and see what rises from the ashes.
We're a little crazy. Think of the families of the people who work at Yahoo.
We're also a little overbearing. Who are we to say what others should do with what they own?
I prefer that they posted it as an HN comment. Scrolling isn't difficult, and mobile users rarely click on links. I probably wouldn't have read it if it was in a pastebin or linked to a source.
Civilizations that have (generally) destructive, punitive, insular, judging, self-righteous, and violent myths don't.
This seems to be the opposite of history. Until recently, violence was one of the only ways for any civilization to persist. The advent of nuclear weapons changed that somewhat (but not if civilizations begin to use them). And most of the myths of a civilization seem to be a byproduct of their actions.
The main problem is power. There's no way to project light into the retina without power, and it's difficult to get power to the lens without using wires. Induction is promising, but the falloff is dramatic. Meaning your inductive power generator would have to be pretty much on top of your eyes for it to power your contacts.
Glasses plus contacts might be a good idea. The generator could sit on the frames. The contacts would allow you to use a small amount of light to get the same effect as an Oculus, which means much smaller power requirements.
Still, to project light, you need some way of projecting light. It's hard to imagine something that can be embedded into a contact lens which is also transparent. And if it's not transparent, it's not really augmented reality.
Fun to imagine. Hopefully someone will come up with something.
3 million dollars is nothing. It took a million dollars to make a single very low-quality video game, circa 2008. Salaries are expensive.
The investment model is set up to let founders "burn through" money while they explore new approaches to old industries. The investors don't really care that the money is lost. To be an investor, you have to assume 9 out of 10 of your investments will be write-offs.
So if you're not defending the investors' money, and if the founders are happy doing this, then why are you intentionally being harsh? Let them do their thing. Yeah they might fail, but so what? It's the only path to success.
It's not really productive to try to save people or companies via internet comments. You're more likely to demoralize them than to change their minds. Unfortunately, demoralization is often someone's hidden motive.
And I'm saying, yes, you're right. But have hope. That's something to watch out for going forward, but we can go forward.
This thread's article is interesting, because it's the first step toward a world you describe. But reason has a way of prevailing. Not always, but usually.
One thing that's missing now, that someone here might want to cook up, is a good explanation. The topic of crypto is difficult. Not just because it's hard like calculus, but because there are a lot of subtleties. Old analogies to locks and doors aren't really applicable. What we need is a way of highlighting what's going on, why people should care, and what they can do.
There are a variety of algorithms which are safe in a post-quantum crypto world. Developing and deploying them will take time, but they exist. Making them safe will take longer, but it will happen.
The threat you describe sounds like a race. But in fact, it's more like a switch. Right now the world is pre-quantum. When the switch is flipped, to post-quantum, a lot of algorithms will break. But not all of them.
Regarding your point, I don't think that people here are being dismissive of your ideas. You're quite right. But there are reasons to be positive about the future, while highlighting the negatives. Isn't it so interesting that certain algorithms can be safe in a pqcrypto world?
Notice where the algorithms spring up from. You mention a hackathon, but that's not where these algorithms root. They're from universities. And universities are interesting. If the legislation will face resistance, it will probably be from academics, like in the last crypto war.
If that's true, then it should be easy to name some startups that fell into technical mediocrity and recovered. Are there any?
I saw the opposite happen firsthand: a company that was about to get steamrolled by a competitor, and they knew it. There was nothing they could do, even though they had over two years to prepare. The reason they couldn't do anything was because their team was mediocre. Last I checked, that company no longer had any job listings.
How many people here have similar stories? It's tempting to believe that mediocre programmers can be mentored, but it doesn't seem that simple.
And yet, if you proceed as if it were correct, you'll be amazed at what you'll accomplish. The comment I was replying to was essentially asking, "What would've helped you back when you were in my position?" Ten out of ten times, I'd choose to tell myself, "Stop trying to read about how graphics engines work. Figure out how to get triangles up on the screen, without copying someone else."
The best I can say is that my career began from that method. And by asking a lot of questions on IRC.
Mmhm. As with everything, it's a balance. It's important to understand that reading is one of the most effective forms of procrastination that has ever been invented. It's also the prism through which your entire future passes, but everyone already knows that.
For example, Carmack was able to "invent" BSP because he was (as far as I've heard) an avid reader of medical journals. Specifically, journals and papers about the graphics techniques they used at the time. The field of medicine turns out to be very lucrative for an ambitious graphics programmer, because they're often at the frontiers of what's currently possible. So apparently BSP was used in accelerating medical renderings, and Carmack was able to see their potential for realtime graphics. The only reason he was able to do that was by reading pretty much every possible thing.
None of that will help you unless you force yourself to do and not read, though.
This domain is unique in that it's not a good idea to read. The most effective way to navigate this territory seems to be: Think of a simple goal, then force yourself to solve it. Don't look up how to solve it until you're so frustrated that you want to throw your monitor across your room.
Actionable advice: Set up a program such that you have an array of pixels. Say, 512x512. Now write a while loop which randomizes those pixels. Finally, figure out some way to "create a window and put those pixels on the screen."
You now have a game loop. This is roughly how every game works at a basic level.
The next step is to realize that a triangle is the fundamental way to draw shapes quickly. Want to draw a square? That's two triangles. Want to draw a humanoid? Sounds complicated, but artists approximate humanoids with a combination of spheres, cylinders, cubes, etc. And all of those can be divided up into triangles.
So a triangle is therefore the first place to start in understanding graphics in general. What's the goal? "Create a data structure to represent a triangle. Now try to draw a white triangle into your little pixel array."
It's going to be tough. But tough work is good. I remember how difficult it was for me to even get a basic white triangle up on the screen. But the rewards are worthwhile, because at this point a lot of other things will start to click. A "vertex buffer" will no longer be mysterious, for example, because you'll immediately see that your triangle structure (whatever you came up with) was really just "a vertex buffer with three vertices." And then you'll start to wonder why graphics programmers came up with such complicated words to describe such simple concepts...
At this point, you'll have the ability to go in one of two directions: "Notch" or "Carmack." It depends entirely on what you find interesting. If you like the idea of making games, concentrate on creating Pong. (You have everything you need, because you just got a triangle up on the screen, after all.) If you like more along the lines of what the article talks about, then concentrate on creating a software rasterizer. "Software rasterizer" is another one of those terms that turn out to sound scary, but is way easier than you'd expect. It's hard in the same way that learning to ride a bike is hard: it'll take awhile, but you'll never forget it. After that, nothing else you ever do (in graphics) will ever seem even slightly mysterious. I have some thoughts on how to learn the latter, if anyone's interested.
When I targeted asm.js, the result wasn't much faster than plain js. Also, asm.js recently made it into Node, but Node doesn't tell you when your asm.js code is valid or not. And when it's invalid, it doesn't produce any errors.
It's more common nowadays for an 18 year old to have 10 years of experience programming.
Certainly it's uncommon, but the set of all 18 year olds who've been programming for 10 years are a subset of those who'd benefit tremendously from a YC program for young adults. And YC has shown that even though money is a focus, it's not their primary focus.
Is there value in such a program? I think so. Even if the program serves as nothing more than a reminder to young people that there are those in the world who believe in them, it would be a win. Getting young people to consider "What are some strategies for me to change the world?" before "What type of job do I want?" might yield a better world.
The success of an endeavor is proportional to the number of shitty hacks that have come before it. Sometimes this it true in a literal sense -- sometimes a project consists of shitty hacks. But the astute reader will notice that a hack is only known to be shitty because someone did it, and had the courage to make their example public.
Do we reward their courage? No. We act like cliquish teenagers and rip them apart.
I don't mean to single you out. But this subthread consists of a developer at Amazon, an unknown, and a founder -- the very types of people I wanted to respect -- yet the content is little more than "Look at how stupid these people are." What kind of example are we setting here?
Be excited about X! Whether X is FOAM, Javascript, COBOL, C++, Python, Erlang, Scheme, NPM, ASDF, Vim, Stallman, or a song. Be happy. Be amused. Be anything but bitter.
In this instance, FOAM shows what's possible. Is it necessarily a good idea? Who cares! We've learned something new! Be excited!
How certain are you that an idea that strikes you as bad is actually bad? For every possible circumstance? What about with a slight tweak? In fact, "An idea that seems bad" is the short definition of "startup."
Most ideas that seem bad are, in fact, bad. But it's important to fully explore the problem space before dismissing them, else you'll dismiss Facebook.
This subthread is about a software technique, not a startup idea. But is it really such a different domain? Would the idea of Python have survived if it had been introduced in the era of Multics? It wasn't a compiled language, so it couldn't hope to survive back then. Yet its time was coming, whether or not it would have been dismissed at the time.
"Under what circumstances could this be a good idea?" That's the valuable question. And if you also have a good answer to "Why now?" then you may be onto something. In fact, you might be one of the first people to notice that an idea has flipped from bad to good. Seems like a pretty powerful position.
It seems like most influential work started as a hack. (TeX is a notable exception.) So if you want to do influential work, be delighted by hacks. It'll make them easier to explore, and you might end up in a position few others realize is valuable.
We're a little crazy. Think of the families of the people who work at Yahoo.
We're also a little overbearing. Who are we to say what others should do with what they own?