urs2102

One of my favorite classes with Bjarne from college was Bjarne telling us the story of a ten year-old who wrote him asking if it was too late to start programming and what he should learn so he can work as a programmer (to get started so he could be one of the best in the world at something in the field).

Bjarne says he responded by telling the kid to stop worrying about work or what he wanted to work as, and to spend time playing (both on the computer and just outside) because it was just as good as good for the mind as sitting in front of the computer and that ten year-olds could often be the best in the world at playing.

Similar to his penchant for fiction here, this is something I’ve always loved about Bjarne... despite being so good at one thing: finding the beauty in balance.

Okay, you got me: """tech company""".

I think it's probably a financial engineering company over everything else, but I mean "tech company" insofar as this post is going to the top of HN in a way a post about Regus might not.

Additionally, I think this is great to think about as far as the entire story of IPOing a big tech company in 2019.

You start with the story the bankers sell you. They all want to tell you you're going to be bigger than you ever thought possible, because, well... those fees are awfully nice.

"We're going to IPO you at 20% of $PREVIOUS_VALUATION"

The counter-argument was, well, "We don't think you're worth that much, you're probably worth only $20B."

The problem is here... well there's not really a financial position you can take here especially as the short price skyrockets. Maybe you get some smug satisfaction, but overall, everyone in the early stage of trying to win the IPO for their bank is going to tell you what you want to hear.

Now... things suddenly change, you need to shop it around. Well, maybe you don't get the number you want. Maybe you do? You edge it a little down. Yet, all the benefits you have as a private company (insert your It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Pepe Silvia meme of Mack trying to connect the dots) you can't really keep entirely as you try to collect that public check.

Matt was spot on here, of course, they're going to try and take apart some of those political rights that usually people grumble about (see Snapchat IPO) and then somewhat get over as time goes on.

Yet even that didn't do the trick! So you slash the economic upside, and once again that's not enough.

Maybe you even set the price low enough that you can hype it and it will go up, but at some point, the market will give its verdict and in this case: WeWork didn't cut it.

In many ways, it's an interesting litmus test of the health of the tech industry. Yes, there's been a bull market for this last decade, but bubble... maybe not. Maybe, this is great example of Wall Street being serious about how much large private companies are worth? Either way, what a crazy saga nonetheless. I wonder if they'll be able to (somewhat paraphrasing Matt) turn the dial from growth to revenue and approach the market later? Time will tell I guess.

Maybe we'll get an Alex Gibney documentary out of it!

It's been incredible watching each part of this unfold exactly as Matt Levine called it each week prior.

Any information on the state of the patient’s vision both pre and post-op?

If you’re going from, let’s assume, blindness, to now full vision: how does your visual cortex move from dormant to active? Is it jarring?

The rise in the popularity of self-checkout is shown to also spike incidents of shop lifting from people who were unlikely to shop lift given that defrauding a machine can feel quite different to defrauding... well, a person. With all the discussion on HN about Amazon Go and shops using CV to handle self checkout, thought this would be a great share.

This is fantastic, I think for first time founders there’s a little bit of a gap between how they see their business (primarily product focused) and how an investor sees their business (primarily market focused).

Obviously as companies mature, founders see their business and can capture the value proposition of their business in a more metric focused manner, but I’m always looking for resources like this to get a peek into what people look for in the latter stages.

From a blog I discovered earlier today, I felt like the content was apt for Hacker News bringing a sort of Girardian narrative to the startup world. Saw no comments, so thought people here would like it!

Great piece! For reference, here’s the comment thread the first time posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13562968

I’ve seen discussion about this all over Twitter and thought it would be interesting to share regarding if the experiment is more correlatory than causal or vice-versa.

Probably the least stressful major version bump I've seen. Props to the team for solving the 4.4.x problem and pushing this out. Took a few minutes to update and now everything is great!

Congratulations on your launch! I think this space is going to be super interesting and allowing companies to build products like this by simply adding an API to their pipeline is awesome. I had a question, how would you point out the differences between you and Scale API[0]?

[0] https://scale.ai

I'd really like to improve my intuition around linear algebra. It's been a little while since college, but sometimes I find that my natural understanding isn't as rock solid as I'd like. I guess its a matter of where to start...

Maybe I'll dive into some Three Blue One Brown videos now.

Haven't seen any discussion for this on HN, but came across Schmidt Futures.

Seems like Eric and Wendy Schmidt's version of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but wanted to see if the challenges were of interest to anyone or if anyone here knows anything about it.

I love the frontend markup in Lisp. Honestly, it's exciting to see a developed web application in Lisp outside of a standard web framework (granted these are all just files without context).

I feel that the syntaxlessness of the Lisp makes it fun to see how different people approach writing the same thing in a way that is a lot more reminiscent of creative writing than software.

This is super cool!

I remember guestbooks! This is awesome, I remember making my Guestbook in fifth grade to take song and music video requests I would embed on a separate page.

All you're missing is an animated mouse and a hit counter. This really made me smile.

Firstly, this is super cool. Writing loading this easily based on different connections is going to be awesome. The suspense stuff is great.

Secondly, Dan has to be one of the nicest people on the internet. If you don't follow him on Twitter, give him a follow. He is so helpful, and understanding of his users' problems. I think it's a huge reason why the React team is constantly pushing boundaries. They really do listen.

It's not just Dan though, the community really has some great people. Dan had actually tweeted a bunch of people worth following a couple months back, which I compiled into a list: https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/lists/react

Is this an argument against the idea of estate tax or the implementation of estate tax in the United States?

It reads likes the latter, but the more interesting discussion is regarding the former.

Awesome! Thanks.

Saw this on Twitter (https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/929862403763798016) and wanted to carry the conversation here to see the discussion unfold.

This would make an incredible Black Mirror episode.

These are incredible. I was recommended at Warby Parker (since they didn’t do same-day) to visit them when I was visiting San Francisco, and was in the need of a new pair of glasses.

I had an eye test onsite, picked frames, and picked up glasses all within 75 minutes. Awesome experience! I think they are off Powell and O’Farrell, and I’m wearing them right now.

Hey Bretts89, this seems cool! I'm curious, who expressed that they wanted this? It's an interesting place between a MOOC and a podcast, just curious why this intersection was interesting to you?

Did you make it for you? Friends? And is there a reason you picked audio as a medium?

Absolutely! Oh, don’t get me wrong (again, Common Lisp/Scheme were instrumental in getting me into programming so you’re preaching to the choir), but I guess the point I was trying to make is that there is a real difference between the Lisp approach to standardization and of course C++. Apologies for not being more clear.

There are definite ways to standardize a Lisp, I mean look at all the awesome work Rich Hickey as done on building out Clojure. I just feel that the Lisp (huge generalization incoming) may not care for standardization in the same way Bjarne does when developing C++.

The point I was trying to make (let’s take an example Bjarne cared about that isn’t compatability) is that people in different language communities care about different things. I think it’s fair to say that Ruby developers don’t think about speed as much as people working on C++. It’s not that they don’t care, but ‘programmer happiness’ in the way Matz thinks about Ruby (having an ‘unless’ keyword for example) is more important to Matz than speed. Again, it would be crazy to say Matz doesn’t care about speed, but he, like Bjarne, obviously prioritizes some things over others.

For a college student taking the class, it may seem obvious (“well of course you should build a language focused on certain metrics”), but it’s easier said than done. I remember working on a compiler my junior year where I all I wanted to do was continually add features to my language. Often the problem with the language was with the goals I’d set forth and addressing the problem I was trying to solve, not simply adding more features.

Focus over features is the idea I think Bjarne got across super well.

So there are a number of examples, but Bjarne used to stress 'compatibility' for example. It was a really important idea for him, that despite the really clean and smaller language that he could have developed, it was very important for him to have tighter compatibility with C.

In many ways, he discussed how he hasn't built a 'perfect language', and that as languages operate as tools, it's very important to be focused and decide what matters over what doesn't.

Sure you could have a prettier language, but as programmers there is a cost to everything and sometimes we are so eager to see the benefits in any new tool, it's easy to forget to measure the costs (he also really, really enjoyed having us benchmark things to see the cost in using x method over y method).

Making it explicitly clear what you intend to focus on, and setting a standard for not just yourself, but your community encourages the language to grow in a way that it remains useful and sustainable. He mentioned that if he built out this tighter/cleaner language, it's also possible that the language would have failed to generate any traction at all.

I'm not entirely sure of cultures that have flourished or faded particular ideas, but if you look at how despite newer languages are constantly taking old ideas from Lisp, how come Lisp didn't take off (and I say this as a true fan of Lisp)? Again, I'm totally hypothesizing, but it may have to do with compatibility.

You can say that Lisp's syntax (or lack thereof) is really important to not just how macros are developed, but for Lisp programmers to have a language that evolves. Yet at the same time, Lisp's greatest strength is often its biggest weakness. You can't really standardize something that evolves all the time, and as such, can't really have compatability. How do I build a library for a language that despite becoming more powerful for the particular purpose I started using it for, looks nothing like anything else out there?

I think his main point tended to be, pick things that matter to you: metrics that matter to you, ideas that matter to you, a mission that matters to you and just really work on that. It's easy to get distracted and just add features "just because", but make sure they conform to the metrics you set forth for yourself.

Good to see you here (again) Prakhar! Didn't know you audited Prof. Stroustrup's class.

If I can recommend a project for the HN community to check out, it's krat0sprakhar's JSJS project. One of the prettiest projects I've seen in my time at college as well [0].

[0] https://prakhar.me/projects/

I was just curious on how other people think this through.

It's a question I love hearing feedback on from other hackers who are building things to solve problems. A useful way I like to think about the MVP is : "if I removed everything, what's the last thing I could possibly remove without the solution no longer addressing the problem?"

I try to stop just before that line. That being said, it's always easier said than done.

DM me on Twitter/I just followed you! I'd love to try out your product when you're ready!

Took a class with him in college, perhaps one of the smartest people I've had the opportunity to meet.

Nobody tells a story quite like Bjarne, and nothing beats the classes he would open with a story straight out of Bell Labs. Him and his brilliant TA, David (if you're reading this definitely send me a message!), were awesome in showing not just how C++ has been built over the years, but how a steadfast approach to building a culture focused on particular metrics was crucial to C++'s development (and to the development of any other project as well).

Congratulations Bjarne; learned a lot about benchmarking from your class!

The term "launch early" can often get blurred. Dropbox famously had a landing page, and then a video, and then iterated to a product.

Is Dropbox considered a product that "launched early", despite them waiting to receive feedback on a video before building software?

Additionally, what tracks better: a good screencast or a bad useable demo (I imagine a good demo is obviously better than a good screencast)?

Otherwise, great list, and thank you for putting it together.

Larry Page did not want to answer anything.

I guess this is why they're seeking a 'round 2'.

Uber: Google invested in Uber; correct?

Page: Yes.

Uber: Do you recall when?

Page: My answer is yes.

I'm definitely interested in some folks from Google chiming with respect to Larry's comments regarded starting side businesses at Google. Does anyone have any experience doing that? Is that allowed? I would imagine not, but I'm interested.