brey

The next sentence after your quoted section:

“Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.”

I work at Featurespace - we stop fraud, scams, money laundering and other financial crimes.

We build software that runs real-time machine learning models at scale, deep in the financial 'rails' that move money around, and we license it to banks and other financial institutions.

A surprisingly large number of my colleagues are here because of similar reasons - we like making a positive societal contribution.

We're hiring!

'permissible' isn't quite the point ... if it makes the jury think you're lying, maybe it isn't the best strategy.

The laws of physics permit (physically allow) me to punch someone in the face. The laws of my country say if I do that, there will be consequences.

This is all about the level of abstraction

The ‘laws of physics’ in a game may allow you to do unintended things, it’s a complex system. Doesn’t mean that it’s OK at a higher abstraction.

That does seem the better outcome - there’s no downside in being lenient here.

I did a quick scan of the Alexa Top 1 Million list. Currently around 0,06 % are affected

Only affects a small minority of mailservers, and even then only 0.06% of domains.

I have, it's worth getting, it definitely scratches the same 'must ... optimise ... better ...' itches.

It's early access but very playable and feature complete, but it does feel less polished than factorio (obviously can't compare to an 8 year development effort!)

Satisfactory is another great play for fans of the genre.

Both games are 3D, and both use the additional dimension well. You can play them fine just like factorio (I did the first runthrough) and treat 3D as eye candy, but you'll do better if you 'cut with the grain' and learn how to build 3D factories.

in an enclosure of chrome steel uprights, mounted on a wooden base, with a handle at each end

That sounds so much better than “built on an upturned coffee table” ;-)

But I jest - it’s very cool. I love the physicality - makes it feel much more real than 3D graphs represented on a screen.

what is the best calculation to make when trading off code quality vs features?

do most YC startups write tests and try to write cleanish code in V1 or does none of this matter?

It only matters when bad code hurts your overall business velocity - what that means, only you can answer.

Nobody's writing tests for their purist aethestics, they're there to let you go faster - but there's an up-front cost you have to pay for them. Sometimes that's worth paying, sometimes the land grab is more important.

There's no single answer to this question.

a few principles I've found helpful:

There are no coincidences, unless proven otherwise.

If something smells wrong, it probably is. Trust your gut.

Make sure you're building the right thing, before you build the thing right.

Don't be clever. Elegant one-liners that make you feel like a genius when writing it are probably not very maintainable.

The second best piece of code is the one you just deleted. The best one is the one you didn't write in the first place.

Plan to fail, and gracefully degrade.

I've been through deals with large financial institutions that have taken 2-3 years from an initial incredibly positive demo and PoC and strong buying signals, through to a signed contract.

IMO going through that successfully is also sending a signal that you have sufficient endurance - there's a large risk for a corporate to sign up for a long contract with a startup, they don't know how long you're going to be in business for. If the startup doesn't have the appetite to spend 2-3 years to get a contract over the line, then they aren't going to be a stable partner for the long term.

You need to also have sufficient numbers of small/medium scale deals so you're not 100% relying on elephant hunting.

Yes, I'd be interested. We're evaluating Slack, MS Teams and Mattermost as a successor to Hipchat.

Something to move the needle commercially in favour of on-premise would be helpful in that evaluation.

For some reason, in the UK at least, desks do seem to be measured in mm, yes. It's not a particularly common unit for measuring other large items though, more generally we'll use metres and centimetres (with the correct spelling ;-)

As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law

that's pretty subjective.

I wonder how long until we have that kind of computing power on our phones and look back with a wry smile ...

or - how long ago would $173M have bought you the kind of power we carry around today in a pocket?

Understood - I appreciate why light, or any unaccelerated object, cannot leave a black hole.

But does that same restriction prevent a rocket which wants to coast at 1m/s - under constant acceleration - from the surface to infinity?

I.e.: is the schwartzchild radius only a point of no return to light, not rockets?

And if not a hard limit to rockets - oh, I guess that's fun to know :-)

(Yes clearly utterly impractical - trying to understand if there's any fundamental reasons at play here)

yes - my question is whether escape velocity is necessary to leave a gravity well.

and if it's not, taking that to its logical conclusion - why do we NEED to go faster than the speed of light to escape from inside the schwarzschild radius of a black hole? can't we leave under constant thrust at 1 m/s?

"Do you believe in God?"

"I believe in one fewer than you"

this one always bugged me a little

a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out.

yes, I know - Tsiolkovsky, reaction mass, delta-v etc etc clearly that's wildly impractical

but MUST the rocket achieve its 'escape velocity' in order to escape? why can't we have a casual stroll out of the gravity well?

escape velocity applies for an unpowered vehicle, right? throw a rock, it's gotta be going at least at the escape velocity or it won't escape. but throw a rock that's propelling upwards itself all the way out ...

if I want to climb stairs, I propel myself gradually on every step, I don't require that I launch myself off step 1 with the speed to get me to the top.

what am I missing here?

There is only one currency: time.

You can trade this for everything else - the exchange rate is up to you.

There's a phrase I'm fond of:

The man who says it can't be done needs to get out of the way of the man who's doing it.

I hire plenty of data scientists - if I had to give a single piece of advice: gain a deep understanding of the techniques you're using.

it's not sufficient to say "oh, we used a support vector machine", and when prompted for more detail about how it works to shrug and say you just copied and pasted code from the internet and tweaked parameters until it worked.

The value I get from ORM isn't the sql generation, it's in the removal of tedious boilerplate to map between a single row of a query result and an object.

Passion. Engagement. Curiosity. Being the absolute best possible at something - I don't really care what, but being mediocre at lots of things is a turnoff. Ability to learn new stuff, more so than any specific skill (although YMMV with this one).

Any interview I walk out of thinking I've had a 2-way meeting of minds, a genuinely engaged conversation as if we're already peers, rather than an attempt to simply answer a list of questions is going to do well.

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Dalla, do you have a few minutes to share your opinions with us?”

ME: “Sure, why not? Go ahead.”

love the design, shall be recommending it to my gliding club.

RASP is the gold standard of guessing in which direction you're going to land out today, but my god it is ugly.

yes please, high level winds also!

ah, yes, good point. if margin only includes cost of production, that's valid.

unless I'm misunderstanding, isn't this double counting the costs? wouldn't the margin (revenue-costs / revenue) already take into account the cost of acquiring customers?

in their example, 52% margin and a $400 CAC:

  LTV/CAC = 0.25 years x $2160/year x 52% / $400 = 0.70x

Very elegant, I like it.

Except I'm now having a major case of semantic satiation for the word "Tarzan"...

  ... similarities I found between me and John Carmack ...
  We both experimented with burglary as teenagers (he was caught; I wasn't).

Does one discover one's inner burglar?

I don't think this factors in the cost of selling and buying all your stocks twice a year.