jermaink

Very cool!

Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer?

Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer for presentations?

HN is a perfect example of an classic, evergreen product. Or call it a crocodile product, as crocodiles are somewhat location-loyal.

Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly?

If you consider the sentiment on the recent GMail redesign, Facebook, .. it often appears that product managers are the only ones that want to change the product and its appeal. I think Reddit also had the crocodile concept for long time. Google‘s main search page changed minor since the past 10 years. I guess there are more examples (Quora, Craigslist, Wikipedia..?)

@pavlov your examples capture the could-be quite well.

The irony. 404 comments.

I really hope that the ShareLaTeX UX will survive. If I had to use Overleaf's UI, I might seriously consider canceling the subscription. The dark theme is nothing you want to use on a daily basis. Otherwise, ShareLaTeX also worked much faster and had way better example snippets, I think?

I'm optimistic that you do the transition, with Open Source.

Note: 2013.

This series might be interesting for anyone interested in a personal story of science at the intersection of research, speaking, travels, and family. Enjoy!

"A paper from the Open Science Collaboration (Research Articles, 28 August 2015,aac4716) attempting to replicate 100 published studies suggests that the reproducibility of psychological science is surprisingly low. We show that this article contains three statistical errors and provides no support for such a conclusion. Indeed, the data are consistent with the opposite conclusion, namely, that the reproducibility of psychological science is quite high."

Shannon numbers: Chess: ~ 10^123. Go 19x19: ~ 10^360. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity

As a non-expert, may I ask (as the term does not appear in the paper): How valuable is the Shannon number in order to evaluate "complexity" in your context?

It's just a recommendation to improve the reporting, no general defense of p-values. Pearson does not imply to analyze a causal relationship. I see the point it's not linear (then you would have had a fitted linear reg, I assume) but still can tell you that missing p-values may cause arching eyebrows :)

In small sample sizes, correlation can easily be significant, often at the cost of low confidence. To the opposite, in large sample sizes, the magnitude of the effect may be lower but at higher confidence. In both cases, results have to be interpreted with caution. The recent p-value debate points towards a lot of issues here. For instance, there have been medical studies overestimating correlations in small sample sizes while other authors seemed to underestimate their long-term large-sample results with correlations in the ballpark of 0.15 (p<0.05).

In the evaluation of correlations, it can always be informative to know the confidence interval for r, with all caution towards p-value interpretation.

Surely, correlation provides information on association rather than cause and effect (causation should rather be modeled with Granger and other regression models). Sample sizes and variances will certainly contribute to different p-value outcomes. This is because p-values reward low variance more than the magnitude of impact (Type I/II error etc.). If you have p-values, better report them and add a footnote on how to interpret them.

Interesting! My question is: How do the p-values of your Pearson correlations look like? Correlations alone are vague. Please insert :-)

Who is your favorite?

You should also checkout project Pantheon: http://pantheon.media.mit.edu

So Tesla goes Android.

Hey Firebase team, I really liked how you did the https://www.firebase.com/tutorial/ !

I like that you put the ticker query into the browser tab :)

Cool project! Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

Knowing some MIT startups pretty well for some time, I can only partly confirm the comparison for the past. Since the school pushed some entrepreneurship activities across campus (100k, Idea Lab, Beehive, Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, MediaLab) and departments, lots of things changed. It might be true that the school tries to learn from the West in terms of marketing and communications. I might agree that the talent of the East is still more on the engine while the West is better at chassis. It might also be true that the average MIT student rather enjoys being defined as a product magician solving a complex problem than a salesman wo re-invents the way how the product is packaged and communicated (both deserves its credit). However, the focus is merely on the product solution where thinking about the end-consumer often flows in a little later, sometimes too late. But as some successful examples show, the ugly duckling often bears a beautiful swan inside, once someone puts hands on user experience. Also, there are a few collaborative startups coming up in the recent two years, where founders join from different coasts and try to match the best of two worlds. At least that was my observation.

Last but not least, the YC embassadors in the Boston area and alumni (Dropbox etc.) did a great job in sharing their experiences.

Hello everyone, I just want to shout out to those who cross their fingers in front of the screens, hoping for an invitation or being afraid of a rejection. While I'm writing this, I have to say that I didn't apply (this year), but have been in touch with a few YC teams in the last years.

Everyone who goes through the application process knows what time it takes and what it's worth. Especially worth, because it enables you to reflect on many points and it forces you to make a point. If you are at an early stage working on your product and still iterate lots of ideas you exactly know how challenging that can be. Even recording a 1-min video can be very challenging, if the founders are not at the same time at the same place or have totally different risk aversions. Just ask yourself how much time you invested into the last point and how that could equal in lines of code for your product.

At different points in time, I lived with a few other YC applicant companies under one roof and could pretty well observe how each handled the application process and feedback. The most important take-away was that those teams were invited and accepted, who did not care very much about the outcome, while the others studied HN and the application chronologies like monks the Genesis and Levitikus. One team even developed a pathological detail in collecting recommendations from YC alumni, while other teams could tell you the number and names of teams within the last four badges. Unfortunately, the rather too-well informed teams had in common that they struggled to break down their idea into a single sentence.

YC is not about rejection, it's rather about selection. There is no inversion of this argument, so don't think you're not good enough. It's rather like the Matrix, selecting their Neo-teams with some mixture of likelihood and gut feeling. Just imagine the amount of applications they receive and the short time that allows them to go through it. There are so many small details and factors that flow into a decision that it would take days to summarize them. If you go only through traction and team behind your product, there might be a good chance to find a weak spot already.

Without any doubt, Y Combinator is a great way to start a company. In this regard, the book title "launch pad" might be just right. It’s just as great as getting into a top university, because you get social proof and a valuable network in many ways (especially the internal startup economy and experience exchange has its benefits). 3, 2, 1 lift off. But at the same point, being at YC might be no self-fulfilling prophecy, even if someone could easily calculate the valuation effects (on paper). Also, getting into YC should not be for the sake of getting into YC. If you really believe into yourself and your idea, you have to make it without a program like this - like all the successful entrepreneurs did before accelerators even existed. Even if there was a launch pad, they still needed to work on their rocket too. Today, you even have a big advantage: YC and its alumni offer so much for free. Not only HN but all the input on the website, blogs, alumni advice, startup school etc. From my experience, the network is not a closed fortress but a very open community with people that care much more about your own ideas than your credentials and affiliations. It's an open university where you can access many resources that might be helpful as long as you don’t read them like the truth and the only truth. Now I don't want to put my head above the parapet and speculate too much, but at the core of YC might be a socratic method, which is about finding truth within the dialogue. Literally, dialogue means the exchange (dia) of reason (logos), where reason means anything between rational, valid and practical. Partners challenge your ideas and approaches and as a result of dialogue, both of you are likely to find something useful to take-away. The advantage of this is that while your best friends are rather likely to tell you lots of things that sounds good to you but are not necessarily the truth, YC might be brutally honest in sending you reasonable signals.

To come to a point: If you don't make it into YC, my advice is to take care about four things:

1. Find people (friends and customers) who give you honest signals and that let you know when you're running into the wrong direction.

2. PG essays are like the encyclicals of the YC community and they have great points. But be sure to read between the lines and to find your personal take-away, your reason.

3. Do not study how to apply successfully or how to hack the process. This is no GMAT or a gumball machine. Try to find out how YC helped the companies who started here, struggled after demo day or came up with a new idea. Maybe, you can emulate some of these things and benefit from information.

4. If you have problems making decisions –like continuing on an idea or not as a result of not being accepted - throw a coin into the air and decide for head or tail with each one decision. The outcome that you desire while the coin still twists in the air is what you should do.

Surely, these methods don't replace an office hour but they at least enable you to improve your experience.

Good luck and march on!

Yes, thanks for the remark! Some people of that course sent us really nice feedback. The list of universities and courses using MG grows, which is really cool.

http://moviegalaxies.com

We're working on visualizing the social network within movies. :)

It would be interesting to know more about the (historical) distribution of the overall applications, especially how many are settled within the last one percent quantile of time.

Assuming a distribution and working with a simple e-function, around 3.500 total applications with an acceptance rate around 1.25% (batch<50) might be a ballpark estimate.

Dear Gregory, this is really brilliant! Very well done!

Got it.

What would you say is the biggest difference compared to Svbtle and Medium?

From a first glimpse:

Plus: - Good design, simple to use, friendly colors. - MIT license. - Well done support forum.

Minus: - Features should be more clear. - I might be mean but when I read "Just a blogging platform", I automatically read "Just a(nother) blogging platform." - Better replace the laptop+wodden table+moleskine+coffee stock image with something better. Everyone is using that stuff right now. If you want to be different, better look different. - Why the name "Ghost"? Maybe it has some meaning? - Git Link way too hidden.

Good job!

More: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/october/sudhof-nobel-priz...

I really like what you created!

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/