_dps

17 ms·

271.
by _dps 13y ago
I'm a former professor, now startup founder, and I know many people who have followed similar paths. Email me (see my profile), ideally with a copy of your CV, if you'd like to chat in detail :-)
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by _dps 13y ago
Feynman once said, speaking of the merits of seeking inspiration from experiments rather than isolated theory, "The imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man." Riffing on this idea, the imagination of a human op
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by _dps 13y ago
If you are genuinely taking requests, I'd personally ask you to ask your friend to query their YC contacts on these subjects: 1) whether they can actually describe in some detail what JL / KN / CL do at YC (hint: they're
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by _dps 13y ago
... and lest anyone think this is limited just to (the extremely helpful and insightful) JL, we (a recent-batch YC company) have been repeatedly and substantially helped on important strategy matters by KN and CL. Reducing their roles to &q
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by _dps 13y ago
> But "consulting" is toxic to the species of startup we talk about on HN. FWIW, we grew out of a consultancy into a more HN-compatible startup through precisely the path you describe. Most of our investors, who are traditional
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by _dps 13y ago
> Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. You're smart enough to know it's not that simple; even if one were willing to "just do it" it's not clear the unintended consequences would not result in a net-ne
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by _dps 13y ago
This only adds (Bayesian) evidence to an abstract frame of knowledge that doesn't matter to anyone in real decision making processes: a frame in which the observer uniformly samples all startups. People who actually care about these od
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by _dps 13y ago
> A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you command them. This seems like a one-sided and unproductively emotional framing. One could easily flip the emotional bias and say "A job market is where greedy people wit
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by _dps 13y ago
> Payroll tax is levied on companies not people As a purely practical matter, payroll tax is levied on both sides of the employment transaction in the US [0]. Beyond that, diverse economic research in and out of the US suggests that the
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by _dps 13y ago
I share your dislike for a central language authority, but I think there are non-authoritative solutions that are consistent with the missions and practices of dictionaries. One possibility: dictionaries could report that a large fraction o
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by _dps 13y ago
It is mostly the same, though in my experience it is easier to stop this in Lua than in JS (just attach a metamethod to the globals table to raise an error on lookups for keys with undefined values... this is similar in practice to JS stric
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by _dps 13y ago
I was tempted not to reply because I think we're just arguing over the many possible definitions of the word "valid", and that can quickly become uninteresting. Here's a stab at not being too much of a hair-splitter. In
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by _dps 13y ago
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. I think this is objectively wrong for the specif
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by _dps 13y ago
As Hamming says in his excellent essay "You and Your Research", there are two components to an "important problem": an objective one and a subjective one. The objective requirement: in the success-case the project must h
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by _dps 13y ago
This thread has probably gone too long, and I thank you for your time and comments so far. I will close by saying that, while I agree with you that CFFI doesn't make the problem of writing memory-safe C extensions to the Python VM any
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by _dps 13y ago
> For interfacing with C, I think cython is better than cffi. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. To quote the CFFI project description [0]: the goal is to be able to seamlessly call C from Python without having to lear
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by _dps 13y ago
> You loose CPU-bound parallelism with threading, but you gain easy to write C extensions I'm extremely interested in your thoughts on this subject as a NumPy developer. To what extent do you think C interop designs like Python CFFI
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by _dps 14y ago
FWIW Chuck, I agree that the phrase "VC-istan" rubs me the wrong way in Michael's otherwise quite interesting and compelling writing. For me there are two reasons, one bad and one not-terrible (note I don't have any "strong" reasons... as C
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by _dps 14y ago
Let me add my favorite hobby horse to your point 4: LuaJIT's C FFI is a tremendous and undervalued advantage compared to any other language/implementation I've used. Its core value proposition: 0) It can parse C header files and automatical
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by _dps 14y ago
The reason is threefold: morale, liability, and inability to use the worker for any long-term planning. Having a person who knows they will be fired roaming the halls, poorly motivated is an obvious risk for the morale of the remaining empl
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by _dps 14y ago
FWIW, I personally don't think you need to dodge the "data entry as job training" angle. It's easy for us on HN to feel uncomfortable about this because we see data entry as among the lowest jobs one could have in the IT ecosystem. But I'd
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by _dps 14y ago
> Then I noticed that the way you talk about p-value doesn't sound very frequenty. I think a lot of people improperly understand the Frequentist/Bayesian divide; both look at likelihood functions but the Frequentists assert, as a matter
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by _dps 14y ago
> To complete a PhD, you really have to have to want a research career. (disclosure: loved my Ph.D., was a professor, now doing a startup) This is almost true, and I don't mean to quibble, but the slight inaccuracy is an important one:
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by _dps 14y ago
The compiler alone cannot do this, but the compiler combined with judicious use of the type system can. This is really the big value-add of Haskell/ML-style type systems; you can fit so many useful constraints into the type system that yo
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by _dps 14y ago
> Australians have now accumulated well north of a trillion dollars of assets against their retirement. Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on how this is implemented practically? Social Security, on the face, presents itself a lot li
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by _dps 14y ago
Very crudely (Haskell experts please chime in!): Every Haskell program is a lazily-evaluated tree of expressions; the program output itself is the root node and links represent data flow dependencies. The Haskell compiler turns source code
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by _dps 14y ago
Seconded. I'd add that languages like Python hide an enormous amount of not-close-to-the-metal-ness in every single statement, because every single statement has the implicit context "Interpreter, please interpret this string relative to yo
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by _dps 14y ago
This is pretty deep in the thread, but I'll bite because I have a few counterintuitive ideas I'd like to share. Apologies for the lengthy prose. > Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless Perhaps controversially, I'm not
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by _dps 14y ago
The big deal is that journal publications are a by-product of some kinds of research, and not in themselves proof of good work. Unfortunately, it's the dominant mechanistic (I won't use the word "objective") way of evaluating academic job p
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by _dps 14y ago
> You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure. I am not aware of such a thing, and if it were offered to me I would say "That's not really tenure.", but I believe you that some schools do it

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