ADRIANFR

Relevant Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7084212/is-scala-idiomati...

Is SFO-NYC a feasible route for Boom?

This title reminds me of a quote from The Simpsons: "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?"

Here is what I have done many times when a telemarketer calls I listen to what he wants to sell, the I say: “Yes, I think I’ll be interested in this, can you hold on just a bit?” Then I put down the phone and let him wait. Many times, the caller was still waiting 5 minutes later.

You have to understand that those were just slogans, with almost no practical equivalent. Corruption was rife, and taxes were almost unheard of. You get a salary (cash) and pay for goods with cash. No taxes on either end or annual tax return. Unemployment was officially inexistent, (you could go to jail if you had no job), therefore no welfare programs existed. Socialist parties in Western Europe had no clue about what they were wishing for.

The difference between socialism and communism was all in the "communist" propaganda. All east-european countries were "socialist" with the almost utopian goal of becoming "communist". It's a label that could be changed at anytime by the leaders. Technically, according to the doctrine, socialism was "everybody contributes based on ability, and receives based on the contribution", while communism was: "everybody contributes based on ability, and receives based on their needs", which was utopian. Western countries did not (want to) grasp the difference, so they just called the eastern block "communist".

Also, ideally, you don't want to add length to width, or Hertz to Becquerel (both have [1/sec] unit). This was my humble attempt to address this with a Scala Units library: https://github.com/adrianfr/scalau

If the City needs teachers, social workers and others with traditionally lower wages, wouldn't it make sense that their wages would also go up (based on demand) if the rent control goes away?

The same was launched and failed in the same place (Toronto) in the year 2000, with locations at Go and Subway stations. I think Google will want to change the business model radically in some way.

Seriously, a Phd thesis not far from now may have the title: "The limits of AI: how far can we exploit the machines before we are limited by machine rights"

A debugger loses much of its value in a functional language. Debugging Haskell or functional Scala code with a visual debugger is almost counterproductive.

The story is great, but the tile (and supposedly the moral of the story) is wrong. We should not do good deeds for some expected (or hoped-for) compensation or reward - on this world, or the other world. We should just do it.

Why don't you bookmark and cache ALL visited pages. And keep caches for, say, 30 days if space is a problem. I'm very likely to want to search/revisit something I visited 2 weeks ago. This would provide a set-it-and-forget-it approach to bookmarking.

The easiest way to informally prove that the demonstration is false is to imagine starting with a circle in a triangle instead of a circle in a square. Or with any other weird shape around the circle and follow the same "cutting" algorithm to infinity. This way you can prove that pi is equal to anything greater than pi.

This is clearly demoware, good enough to impress the general public. But once you go from "Draw a red circle" to "Draw a red circle overlapped one third with a blue square with white dots over the lower left corner" that would be progress. And then I wonder if this will also work: "Paint a white-dotted blue square that intersects over a third of a red circle in the lower-left corner. Or will it give a "compile error"

Why not just create a DSL (e.g. in Scala) with a simple standardized NL-like syntax that can give meaningful "compile errors". There is no need to impress the general public.

I started with the data from the initial version of the http://www.cofoundergoogledocs.com/

Inital traffic was from HN users, I guess. see my the initial post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058824

Technically you are right, everything has a price. Except when that price is way too high. So if you think a share is worth between say, $5 and $10, they can either say (nicely) "we're not selling shares right now", or say (rightly and rudely) "we can only sell YOU shares for $1000/share". And that may really be a fair price from their point of view, since having you (a nobody in the VC world) as an investor is really detrimental to their image.

This is very unlikely to happen because: 1. When a startup sells shares (i.e., you purchase stock) it sells them not only for money, but also for advice and connections. Most of the time these are more valuable than the cash. Since you are likely (only) an engineer/geek, your part of the deal is short. 2. Even if they would want your money, evaluating a startup's worth (for pricing your shares)is extremely difficult and/or expensive. So the won't go through this process for a few thousand dollars.

If you're hiring or looking for a co-founder, list your startup on http://www.startuplinkup.com. It's a simple, semantic wiki - a more permanent home for your search. Or you can find a startup to work for. (shameless promotion of my site)

"spreadsheet view" is there. Is just a simple semantic query: http://www.startuplinkup.com/en/Big_startup_matrix

Yes, I deleted startup155. A solution to this problem may be to enable the deletion of past revisions, I think there is an extension that allows that.

Yes, you can delete and move/rename pages, but you need to create an account for that. This is supposed to prevent vandalism. Not sure why would you need a spreadsheet view. You can always use plain search. And than there is semantic search, which I plan to add soon. Having all that data in a structured database (every field/property in a page is query-able in a semantic mediawiki app).

About people vs. startups, you are right, they are no the same. I'm not sure what to call that entity that is something between an idea and a startup. If you create an account you can list your skills in the "Person form". There will be a search for that.

Yes, I took the data, and refined it just a bit. I had to do it for about 170 of entries. A semantic wiki is better than a plain Google Doc, by having the ability to run complex queries, such as: Search for a startup located in "Florida", in the "mobile" space, who needs someone with "ruby" skills. This is all "out of the box" thanks to the Semantic Mediawiki extension

Of course this is less fancy than your regular recruiting/social networking site, but the simplicity of it must be a plus. (you don't need an account to add/edit). The success of the Google Doc idea is also due to it's simplicity.

Just click on the "Move" tab at the top of the page. Similar to the way it works in Wikipedia.

I copied (almost) all entries from the doc in a semantic wiki: http://www.startuplinkup.com Please go and search your entry there, refine it, rename it, etc. Hope this is more manageable than the google doc. Follow @startuplinkup.