bovik

there is a bug if you try to change direction by rolling over left and right at the same time or up and down at the same time. hitting uo/down together and left/right together when changing direction has a weird pause effect.

It's just jargon. I really don't know why the title isn't just "Conversations with a six-year-old on functions" and "f(x) = x - 3." You lose nothing, increase your audience 100fold, and it's more intellectually honest. It is a less hackernews clickbaity title, though.

This is really just a conversation about functions...

I imagine if they started at wildly different speeds it would still converge but the convergence would take longer.

how does that make more drivers come to a specific place/time where demand is outstripping supply?

Aren't all serious Math and CS papers free on the arXiv anyway?

For this purpose mathematicians use OEIS (oeis.org). Check it out.

PG, I'm glad to see you're at least willing to engage in the discussion.

The main point was not what end-point you're aiming (large exits, which btw, are yet to be realized for either airbnb or dropbox) or merely progressively higher valuations in further rounds of funding (let's not argue over how those are beneficial to earlier investors, shall we.)

The point was that hordes of fresh graduates are working their asses off for peanuts with minuscule probability of making up for lost time and income. (That's not even including possible losses to health and any conception of what the real world looks like). Mass incubators like yc and it's ilk are rolling the dice and the invested amounts are so tiny that the only substantial losses are those incurred by the founders.

The counter-argument of course is that the founders are adults and are entering into these agreements of their own volition. That's where the whole issue of cult-like mentality and the callow youth of most of these founders comes into play. The asymmetry in knowledge and power between these founders and investors is vast.

That's why I cheer the writer of the original post for bringing the ridiculousness of the whole situation into the open. Lord knows techcrunch and other tabloids like it are not going to publish anything like that. And that's why you personally applying the kill switch on that post is so distasteful.

I won't give out specific names of course. The brainwashing is mostly around the cult of personality around pg. Everything he writes or espouses becomes gospel. Now, we all know he can write intelligently and with research on some things he knows well. But he can also sound equally confident spouting utter bullshit about stuff he knows nothing about (e.g. http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm ). Listening to ultra confident blowhards and separating bullshit from reality is a skill people tend to learn as they grow into the adult world.

But these are mostly people in their early to mid twenties who have little to no actual experience in the real world. They seem to believe startups and entrepreneurship was invented by this one man. The fact that after almost 200 investments, there are a sum total of two possibly viable businesses that may end up coming out of this enterprise seems to have no effect on that conviction (and one of them (airbnb) is teetering really close to edge of being unsustainable (pending the question of legal liabilities of renters as well city ordinances etc.)).

It really is a cult of personality with all connotations of the word "cult" coming into play.

Just read Parts I and II of that article. Really interesting perspective. I've been talking to some recent YC "grads" in the valley and the amount of brainwashing they seem to have undergone is just shocking. And yet, so many more keep flocking to them year after year like lambs to the slaughter. Amazing.

If you're actually willing to engage in this discussion, then here's your answer. YC and (other "incubators" like it) are basically opportunistically exploiting cheap/free labor of thousands of naive (mostly) young developers to play the lotto on the cheap. You throw in a laughably small amount of money for a good chunk of equity, encourage your young charges to go forth on a steady diet of ramen noodles and ketchup -- burning through 100 hour weeks to experiment with 100's of different(mostly bullshit) trendy catchwords of the day.You only need to get lucky to be able to flip a few of these companies to the next level of VC's or acquirers to make back your money multiple times over. Rest of the blood, sweat, lost sleep and trashed health of the thousand of other fools that failed is no sweat off your back.

 Care to publish aggregate statistics on the percentage of yc backed startups became profitable businesses compared to rest of the industry?

EDIT: Apparently I was mistaken. He's not actually looking to engage in a real discussion of yc's business model.

"Ok, may I humbly ask..."

"with great respect, may I ask you.."

"With all due respect PG..."

"While I don't want to second-guess your judgement..."

And these are the comments disagreeing with pg ! Wow. Either internet ain't what it used to be or there's a lot of hero worship going on here.

Come on my fearless conquerors of the Internet. Stand up for yourselves. Show some spine. You're not going to create the next billion dollar business with that sort of genuflecting attitude.

I have no doubt that pg doesn't like the article Here's a quote "...smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what hapens."

That's describing 99% of bullshit yc stratups. The 1% (or less) which succeed would have done so with or without yc. And they mostly actually involve real business models of charging for a product/service.

"one helped me out without intending to by talking about why one feature probably wouldn't work without a tweak because they found out it doesn't work without X."

Didn't you just disprove your whole point there. Your competitor revealed his/her ideas about how to solve a problem (that you hadn't even foreseen yet going by your description) and in the process hurt him/herself in the marketplace. Your advice of meeting and talking openly with your competitors didn't really work out for that person.

That's a weird dude. That's all.

"Scalia was joined in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito."

Big fing surprise.

I'm disappointed. Ars is usually pretty good about these things but in this case it sounds like a techcrunch'y over-sensationalized headline as a result of over parsing some casual statements from Eric Schmidt. Not having submitted the app to Apple yet, doesn't mean google is not building one at all. It'll be crazy for google to let go of half their local queries from mobile. It's just not going to happen.

The basic decision to not require account creation (and hence no login/password) is a key design decision that makes the app onboarding experience so pleasant. Now given that as a product requirement, what exactly would you use as encryption key other than information you can glean from the phone itself (IMEI, UDID etc.). These are numbers tied to the hardware and possible but not trivial to spoof (as you pointed out). It seems like a reasonably enough compromise for a consumer great chat sapp.

Also, for what it's worth, their biggest competitors in the field (viber, kakao etc.) picked up on that successful tactic and also don't require account creation at startup. Wonder if they've found some better ways to provide secure chat.

Is Paul Graham the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln ?

Is this the right thread ?

To reduce round trips and ease of use for the ultimate consumer. A typical whatsapp consumer is decidedly not the geek/hipster hanging out on HN. Out of the 100+ million installs they have, I doubt any more than about 0.1% care about encrypted messages et. al. Most of them do care about a large existing user-base (network effect), ease of startup (no registration/login required), ease of connecting to other users (scan phone contact list) etc. All of those things rile up the crowd that gathers here but provides real, tangible value to the ultimate users. That's the reason they have the userbase that they do despite repeated breast-beating by the crowd here about their lax security etc.

Heh... fanboy much ?

Bah... I'll wait until Apple invents this technology about five years from now. I never buy non-apple product or technologies because I'm creative.

"What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while happy to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very same free content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is installed. Talk about hypocrisy."

  What an idiotic comparison. The adblock author is directly asking money (voluntary donations actually) for something useful he made for your use. Straightforward quid-pro-quo. You know... commerce. What the hell is wrong with that ?

The extra USD 200 for the 4G model are not all about hardware you know. I doubt 4G chipset and the 32GB flash chips are costing that much.

That's a strange kind of argument for favoring something "as a techie". Wouldn't you be more excited by the two extra cores (not to mention the additional "phantom" core) that tegra 3 provides.

How's not being based on quad-core tegra3 is a plus? As for battery life, the new Fire obviously doesn't have any hands-on reviews yet but nexus 7 battery life has been very solid according to all reviews.

"Native Americans"... you keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.