For women that chase rich men (not saying all women do this, but the existent and very small subset of women that do), it's often not because of the success implied. It's because of what the paper can buy.
Those women would still chase trust fund babies -- they chose to be born to those parents just as much as you chose to be cute.
Those women would still chase those that became rich out of pure luck (eg.: lottery).
Your financial success says nothing about your ability to succeed in interpersonal relationships. In fact, sometimes qualities between the two conflict with each other : being 'aggressive' in business is a sound plan to boost your competitive abilities, being 'aggressive' with your girlfriend just sounds abusive.
The whole reason the social consciousness regarding the idea of a "trophy wife" exists is to describe shallow women who emphatically don't "love you for who you are".
Also, there's a bit of philosophical conflict when it comes to the significance of "characteristics you can't do much about". The thing is, you often can't do much about any of your characteristics.
I think you're trying to argue that personal characteristics, like being smart, being funny, or being relatable, are somehow more of a choice than being pretty. But do you really have a "choice" in being smart or being funny? Isn't the grade schooler who opines after a girl who values these seemingly choose-able personal characteristics not trying his damn hardest to have those characteristics? If so, why does he fail when he does? Didn't he have a choice? No. He couldn't do anything about it, much like he couldn't do anything about his physical attractiveness. Yes, he can learn from his personal flaws and adapt his personal characteristics, but, first off : that relies on the meta-characteristic of being aware about your characteristics, which, again, not a choice or anything you can change about yourself.
Is having the characteristics to be rich or successful something you can "do much about"? Then why doesn't everyone do something about it to be rich or successful? If it's because they're lazy or aren't determined to work hard -- are those characteristics that they controlled? If it really came down to just working hard (which being rich/successful isn't, there's a lot of intuitive judgment that you either have in your instincts or don't, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), can you blame lazy people for being lazy? Did they sign up on being lazy? Do you think they chose to be lazy and undetermined? If not being lazy is so clearly better, did they ask to not be able to see that clarity?
We don't judge people based on how well they take advantage of their control, because ultimately no one has true control.
The series of actions required to become a multibillionaire with an amazing lifestyle and an absolutely lovable personality where everyone likes you is not some undefined series of actions that requires superhuman levels of magic. It's just that you don't know how or you are incapable of becoming said person; you don't know which human actions to take and decisions to make to become said person. So you become the best person your sense of control allows you to be, but did you really choose that control if it's given to you?
We judge people based on how well they suit our needs.
If one man's needs is someone who is funny and smart, so be it.
If another man's needs is someone who is physically pretty, so be it.
You really never did anything worth caring about in high school, academically, at least. Math was a series of formulas to memorize and various sequential combinations of said formulas to memorize. English and writing classes were focused on forced structure (Intro has 4 sentences, ends in thesis, each body paragraph's topic sentence must relate back to thesis, if discussing multiple stories - Intro-ABAB-Conc. structure is preferred, 3 pages long, must integrate quotes from narrative, etc.) using forced literary techniques (rhetorical devices, and general "proposals" that tell you how to write and what to write) as a (forced) lens to study ancient works of narrative that no student cares about. Then the essay is assessed on how well it fits each forced mechanism, instead of well, being assessed on whether it's good writing or not. History was a series of events and dates to memorize and recall. Natural sciences varied : HS physics was a lot like HS math, HS biology a lot like HS history, HS chemistry some mixture (zing!) of both, mostly the latter. You might notice a pattern (pattern-finding being a very valuable trait NOT taught in HS courses, because who needs patterns when you can just memorize each individual event in the textbook?) : a focus on memorization over analysis, a focus on pre-set structure over creativity.
At least Computer Science was all right. But that's only because I was lucky enough that my school's CS department was large enough to afford to be taught by some seriously smart people truly dedicated to both the study of computer science and the art of pedagogy, but small enough such that the principal let the CS dept operate as it wants without interfering with the College Board's awful way of treating every subject. Part of a course (AP Comp Sci A) absolutely required you to at least dip your toes into the College Board's bullshit, and skimming over the Barron's book/taking the actual test, it seemed like the College Board had planned a lot of tedious stuff like Java/Java's standard library details, manual loop evaluations, and that infuriating GridWorld bullshit (a complicated, but still incredibly awful simulation program; the test assesses your knowledge of GridWorld's actor types and which Bug goes which way rather than assessing ... computer science, which is honestly what I fucking signed up for). The stuff in my school's course that really intrigued me and got my mind jogging (working through sorting algorithms, data structures, and big O analysis on your own after you've been taught the absolute basics) was the stuff they cut out of the AP Computer Science AB program, which was an earlier program that was deemed too difficult, I guess. As if the College Board was intentionally avoiding stuff that required analysis or actual thought.
Really interesting program, although, as Andrew has said, seems kinda limited. That's not your fault at all; any early project will seem limited in scope. Given some popularity and extra effort, something like this could be the Siri of the command line.
Which gets me thinking -- is stuff like Siri and Google Now really just like this? Core set of pre-set commands surrounded by regex magic to recognize said pre-set commands? Interesting.
Begs the question : is it possible, using current knowledge in machine learning and NLP, to create a English-like interface for #{some_device_or_program_here} that learns and self-develops the English commands from the user? Sort of like how Bayesian spam filters (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html) don't have core preset hardcoded set of Spam-Related Words and classify them accordingly, but instead takes an initial corpus and then learns and self-develops from the user after that.
I think having a prefix (be that "betty" "b" and/or some "mode" for your shell) that signals you want to use natural language (with all it's ambiguity) is a good idea. The zsh way of suggesting "did you mean" rather than simply erroring with "command not found/invalid syntax" drives me nuts -- but a lot of people seem like it. Having a prefix allows you more freedom at "learning" -- ambiguity isn't so terrible if the user expects it (and the simple idea of just listing alternatives that betty uses seems like a great interface. Not as sexy as "I'm feeling lucky"-style (super-)high scoring wins, middling scores ties and asks user to pick -- but I think it may win on the principle of least surprise).
Anyway, it does seem that most proof-of-concept voice-control (as opposed to text-controlled) systems use a prefix too "siri"/"glass"/<microsoft had one, can't remember which, also they have "xbox". The idea is that if the mic is always on, you don't want your drones to blow something up, just because you jokingly told a friend "kill it with fire" in a voice call. Context is hard to get right for such systems, I expect the kinetic and similar systems can do better (if user looks at computer, listen. If user is already speaking "in conversation with" to computer, listen. Otherwise ignore, unless user asks for computer by name).
As for you question, I think it should be relatively easy to train, say a music-player app to understand stuff like "next song", "accept call", "repeat" -- in any language, using simple statistical methods. Not sure how far you could take it though (example, dictation software still makes (AFAIK) enough errors that it's not really a viable option if the user already can type reasonably well (or hire an actual stenographer)).
Stuff like "next song", "accept call", etc. can be done with extensive knowledge in machine learning and some clever work.
The really tough bits will be stuff like,
"Siri, check if PBS Idea Channel has uploaded any new videos, please."
How will Siri know you mean the YouTube app? How will Siri know what "check if X has uploaded any new videos" means? How will Siri know you mean "PBS Idea Channel" and not the channel called "PBS Idea"?
Cortona was released with an API to external apps, and that only allows simple pattern matching, so that's similar. Obviously the built-in stuff is more complex. I've no idea about today, but the original Siri was mostly just chaining relationships together by keyword matching in an ontology.
You could probably train a system like this with a word alignment approach if you generated a training corpus. But ideally you'd want to be able to show the system a new manpage and have it map arguments correctly.
Also a false positive in a SPAM filter is bad, but `rm -rf`ing because of the vagaries of the English language is worse.
The same way inaccuracies about tech in movies irritate people like Jeremy, the fact that people like Jeremy even care in the first place irritates me. I know he admitted to it being pedantic and not the point, but I can't help but scoff in absolute surprise when I read that fellow programmers apparently pause films whenever a shot features a desktop monitor to make sure that all the elements on the screen make sense.
What the fuck, dude. You're not watching the results of efforts to seem technically correct ( or the results of efforts to portray Facebook -- that would be a 2-hour instructional video on how to use and the history of facebook.com's UI and features. Nor the results of efforts to portray the foundings of Facebook, either -- that would be 2 hours of Mark Zuckerberg and Co. sitting at computers typing code, maybe some business-y and legal paperwork stuff towards the end of the film) .
You're watching the efforts of concocting and creating an elegant story that pieces together elements and scenes and bits of dialogue; the efforts of producing a story that uses genius character development and interaction and conflict and some of the wittiest, fast-paced dialogue I've seen in an film, all to emotionally affect the viewer in some way.
So who gives a shit if IRL Zuckerberg -- oh, for the rest of this post I will differentiate IRL Zuckerberg from tSN Zuckerberg by using those prefixes -- because those are two veeery different people, because tSN isn't a documentary and it's perfectly fine if the studio executives asked for a movie about Facebook and Aaron Sorkin delivered a very witty, fast-paced dialogue-focused story about fleshed-out, 3D characters and their beautifully complicated developments, all meaninglessly attached to the Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook names. -- anyways, who cares if IRL Zuckerberg's intentions weren't as closely tied to women and money (which is an incredibly immature way to see tSN Zuckerberg's intents, btw, I'd say they were more focused on getting recognition, fame, feedback and, subconsciously, getting Erica back. If you pay attention you notice Sorkin made sure to get across the fact that tSN Zuckerberg doesnt care about the women or the money for their own sake, but for the sake of recognition and getting his massively arrogant and pretentious judgments about himself qualified. But I'd have to go into a full review of the film to delve into those elements).
Who gives a shit if saying "LAMP" was off. Who gives a shit if the hacking competition was not realistic.
At the end of the day, it's still a brilliant story and that brilliant story could only be told if the writers were more focused on masterfully adding, removing, and resolving plot elements and character developments than focused on fucking going to hackathons in order to portray them more realistically.
And those scenes still do their intended jobs perfectly . OS scene's intent was to portray and further the idea that tSN Zuckerberg was a precocious CS prodigy, but he has ego problems hindering his ability to interact with other humans regarding that advanced skill. It still does that perfectly, so what if the actual CS is wrong. Hacking competition scene still does it's intention perfectly, which is to portray tSN Facebook and the environment that tSN Zuckerberg was creating
as a fun, exciting environment with a lot of potential for growth.
And if Sorkin/Fincher and co. have to spend more time on the scene's additions to the core story and character development than they spend time on technical accuracy, so be it. I'd rather see Sorkin's interpretation of the hero's journey told through the lens of an arrgant, precocious teenager. Not like I'm watching the movie to make sure they accurately portray hackathons in the first place.
And this reminds me of all the people that criticize tSN by saying it's trying to say that creating a tech startup involves a lot of money and parties and sex and drinking -as well as the members of the exploding SV startup coolboy brogrammer "social webapp" hypeshow shitfest that exist because of that massive misinterpretation of the film's intentions. Again, that's not what the film is saying, or is about.
It's about a precocious prodigy who's incredibly arrogant because of his skills. When his arrogance and pretentiousness gets in the way of his human interaction and connectedness, he goes down a road of trials in an effort to get what he had with Erica. At first, he thought recognition (both in terms of social relevance, money, and women) would get him that -- and this is why he thinks mentioning Facebook when he meets up with Erica again in the restaurant will make her attracted to him again, and why he's so hurt when he realizes that's wrong ("WE NEED TO EXPAND!", he aggressively demands, as he thinks the answer to the connection he had with Erica is MORE recognition and relevance). Later, he meets a man who has the energy he thinks he wants and a thousand times more (Sean Parker, who's portrayed as someone who has all the social relevance, sex, and money that Zuckerberg wants), and latches on to him. Later, his conflict and dick behavior with the Winklevi (promising to work on something and then not working on it, even if tSN Facebook was nothing like tSN ConnectU and the tSN lawsuit was bullshit) and tSN Wardo (sort of letting tSN Sean Parker backstab his own best friend and replace him as lead business guy and money hustler in the company, even if Wardo didn't respect the potential FB had the same way Zucks did) further help him develop into realizing his initial goal (social relevance, money, sex) will never get him what he wants (human connection). At the end of the film, we see the protagonist finally notices the error in his ways and become a better person (the significance of "Go home, Sean." and the heavy implication of him being the one who called the cops, and finally him adding Erica as a Friend on Facebook). This all told using brilliantly fast-paced dialogue and fleshed-out characters. And all of that is far more beautiful and significant than whether the fucking hackathon was portrayed correctly.
I'd have to do a scene-by-scene analysis to really get across my point regarding the film's quality and it's character development and how it's sorely misinterpreted by techies and SV brogrammers, which isn't what I came into this thread to post.
So trust my ability to expand on this brief divulgation I left here if you want me to PROVE how good the film really is and how it's not about, or trying to be about, irl Mark Zuckerberg or irl Facebook or an inaccurate representation of the experience of starting a startup.
And if you don't trust that I have that ability, ask yourself this question (meant for blog author and anyone who enjoyed the film "despite it's inaccuracies", which I assume is a lot of people cause the film got raving reviews) : why do you think you enjoyed tSN more than the other "bad Hollywood representations of the tech industry"? Do you think it's really because the film is slightly more accurate than the other films and because Mark uses Emacs? No, there's obviously something about this story that intuitively attracted your inborn senses to appreciate good films (because good films are those appreciated by a lot of people, by tautological definition), even if you don't understand that intuitive attraction.
Pretty insignificant. You can't spend that money. No one can.
; YC, financially, is enough money for you to live in the Bay Area to work on your company for a fixed time in which you're expected to grow and acquire more capital and a probability assessment on your potential future value.
Keywords, 'potential' and 'future'.
You can't up and sell your company for $1.7M, Sam Altman can't, no one can because no one would buy it because YC isn't saying "You are now in possession of, and operating something, that is worth $1.7M to the world." At such an early stage, all they're really saying is, "There is a probability that your company will be worth $1.7M, and the probability is high enough such that we're willing to put our money where our mouths are."
This fucking sucks, man. Tom's always seemed like an awesome guy.
As always, absolutely overblown PR messes like this are a result of faulty communication.
Without proper context or research done about it by Internet warriors frothing at the mouth, a one-off donation ruins Brendan Eich's once rich and successful career. Partly because Internet warriors tend to make emotional judgments before they properly study the evidence and contex and before they think through things, but also because Eich ... never responded. He never let the facts through, never let out an, "Oh, sorry guys. This donation was done because of X and Y and Z (don't support marriage as a whole/don't want government getting it's hands in things/etc.,etc.) and it doesn't reflect my current views on sexual orientation or that people with certain sexual orientations deserve less opportunities.", he never gave proper context and evidence to suggest that he wasn't a bad character.
Similarly with this. People are (conveniently?) keeping facts back, giving very vague stories, saying very little with a lot of words, etc., etc. If we are to believe that this thing was a huge misunderstanding and GitHub doesn't employ a bunch of mysognisitic, immature people, why hasn't Tom spoke up? I'm sure that GitHub is internally a lot better than it's image on the Internet right now is -- why doesn't anyone speak up?
Or is it really as bad as the Internet's image of it is?
Agreed. I don't think the author ever said hacking was an inferior or unreasonable tactic -- she never said clever kitchen extensions were bad. She just wanted people to be able to separate and properly judge what is a clever kitchen extension and what is proper house foundation, and know when to use each.
However, I don't agree that hacks are inherently short-term only. It's possible, although very difficult, to come across a quick, easy decision that will improve your long-term as well as your short-term.
Like what Twitter did at SXSW 2007. They set up 2 huge 60 inch plasma TVs in conference hallways -- that one small, quick, dirty easy decision caused them to explode in popularity.
It seems like she said that growth hacking wasn't a thing that exists. I suspect that if asked, she would with you that it does exist as an action but that as a title it is nonsensical. A startup's marketing can't be made of hacks for the same reason that if a programmer spends all of her time hacking, she'll end up with an incoherent mess of spaghetti instead of a solid foundation to build more of a business on.
Yea, I agree with all of that. The main point, I think, is that you should think of marketing in broader terms than "find the best growth hack." That doesn't mean that "find the best growth hack" shouldn't happen.
Those women would still chase trust fund babies -- they chose to be born to those parents just as much as you chose to be cute.
Those women would still chase those that became rich out of pure luck (eg.: lottery).
Your financial success says nothing about your ability to succeed in interpersonal relationships. In fact, sometimes qualities between the two conflict with each other : being 'aggressive' in business is a sound plan to boost your competitive abilities, being 'aggressive' with your girlfriend just sounds abusive.
The whole reason the social consciousness regarding the idea of a "trophy wife" exists is to describe shallow women who emphatically don't "love you for who you are".
Also, there's a bit of philosophical conflict when it comes to the significance of "characteristics you can't do much about". The thing is, you often can't do much about any of your characteristics.
I think you're trying to argue that personal characteristics, like being smart, being funny, or being relatable, are somehow more of a choice than being pretty. But do you really have a "choice" in being smart or being funny? Isn't the grade schooler who opines after a girl who values these seemingly choose-able personal characteristics not trying his damn hardest to have those characteristics? If so, why does he fail when he does? Didn't he have a choice? No. He couldn't do anything about it, much like he couldn't do anything about his physical attractiveness. Yes, he can learn from his personal flaws and adapt his personal characteristics, but, first off : that relies on the meta-characteristic of being aware about your characteristics, which, again, not a choice or anything you can change about yourself.
Is having the characteristics to be rich or successful something you can "do much about"? Then why doesn't everyone do something about it to be rich or successful? If it's because they're lazy or aren't determined to work hard -- are those characteristics that they controlled? If it really came down to just working hard (which being rich/successful isn't, there's a lot of intuitive judgment that you either have in your instincts or don't, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), can you blame lazy people for being lazy? Did they sign up on being lazy? Do you think they chose to be lazy and undetermined? If not being lazy is so clearly better, did they ask to not be able to see that clarity?
We don't judge people based on how well they take advantage of their control, because ultimately no one has true control.
The series of actions required to become a multibillionaire with an amazing lifestyle and an absolutely lovable personality where everyone likes you is not some undefined series of actions that requires superhuman levels of magic. It's just that you don't know how or you are incapable of becoming said person; you don't know which human actions to take and decisions to make to become said person. So you become the best person your sense of control allows you to be, but did you really choose that control if it's given to you?
We judge people based on how well they suit our needs.
If one man's needs is someone who is funny and smart, so be it.
If another man's needs is someone who is physically pretty, so be it.