malanj

8 ms·

31.
by malanj 10y ago
I'm not Kenyan, but South African, but have been to Kenya to look at mobile payments there. Are you sure about this? My understanding was that M-Pesa started as a domestic remittance solution. Kenya doesn't have a well developed A
32.
by malanj 10y ago
Payments is an especially interesting example to take in emerging markets. The delta between developed and emerging is often especially huge in payments and banking. I was part of the founding team of a mobile payments startup SnapScan ( ht
33.
by malanj 10y ago
When I was in high school I used Perlin noise to create some 3D terrain. Being young and naive I emailed Ken Perlin and asked him some questions about it. To my surprise he responded and was super nice :-)
34.
by malanj 10y ago
The app allows you to specify your home city (as long as it's in the US)
35.
by malanj 10y ago
Facebook seems to slowly be building out the feature set that WeChat ( https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ ) has had for ages. It seems like Facebook first set out to capture the whole
36.
The US used a standard issue $5.50 flag on the moon(jsc.nasa.gov)
5 points by malanj 11y ago|1 comments
37.
by malanj 11y ago
After the first 3 games I thought that AlphaGo was far beyond human level, but it's a harder call to make now. It seems very unlikely that an AI would be very close to exactly matching a human, one would expect it to be much stronger o
38.
by malanj 11y ago
Is running AlphaGo really that expensive? I get that training deep learning systems is very computationally expensive, but my understanding is that running them is orders of magnitude cheaper. edit: table showing gains as CPUs are added -
39.
by malanj 11y ago
Actually both parts are a joke, but only if you don't look for it.
40.
by malanj 11y ago
Example of PaperBack's output: https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/574/7105/8d/www.extremetech.com/...
41.
by malanj 11y ago
These results are super interesting, but I wonder how much can be attributed to the Hawthorn Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect ). I.e. will this result be generalizable and stable over time.
42.
by malanj 11y ago
I think it's quite reasonable to make that argument. The idea that high growth vs. low growth as an attribute matters more than the "industry" a startup operates in. So all high growth companies are more like each other, than
43.
by malanj 11y ago
You can think of preferred stock as both a loan and shares. If the current valuation is $3m and you have 10% preferred stock, then you have the choice of taking your loan back ($300k) or keeping your shares. If things go well (company value
44.
by malanj 11y ago
One way to figure it out is to calculate what the 5% is worth. Here's a very rough/inaccurate calculation - that ignores option prices etc - that might give you an idea: Lets say the company's post seed valuation is $3m (rand
45.
by malanj 11y ago
Really cool work - nice going! Great application of Deep Leaning. I'm really curious about the Whatsapp and Facebook messenger integration, given that they don't seem to have published APIs. How did you do it?
46.
by malanj 11y ago
Starting a company when there are already established and strong competitors probably counts as "looks like a bad idea". I think the point is that the company (or project) seemed like a bad idea, not necessarily the market as a
47.
by malanj 11y ago
Average time could be very misleading here. I would assume that it's a bimodal distribution (or something similar), with many decks that get almost no time and some that get a lot of time. So assuming a VC will spend ~4 minutes on your
48.
by malanj 11y ago
I've been on the opposite side of the fence; I was a founder of a (~20 person at the time) startup when one of the engineers told me they had cancer. We did everything we could to help him. He didn't want to just sit at home and f
49.
by malanj 11y ago
Obligatory (and analogous) XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
50.
by malanj 12y ago
I can see people who haven't hit that level of burnout might think Yishan is being crazy or an idiot. The truth is that startups can be insanely difficult and stressful, especially if it's your first time. Once you've hit the
51.
by malanj 12y ago
This is how I understand it: 1) JPEG file structure is complex (much more so than a BMP file for example). 2) Imagine you didn't know what it looked, but had a tool that could "read" them. djpeg in this case 3) What the fuzz
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by malanj 12y ago
When I read the investment announcement I thought "Hmm, there must be something big/new I'm missing." If this author is correct, then there is nothing new here. Just the insanity of thinking you can transfer power effici
53.
by malanj 12y ago
I'm one of the guys behind this. Happy to answer any questions/get feedback! We've basically allocated about 30% of our startup to this project for the next while, so it's important to us that we really help people with
54.
by malanj 12y ago
All the top tier VCs (including YC) repeat the mantra "don't sweat the terms". It also appears on Ron Conway's slide in this lecture. There seems to be a dangerous line between taking a good deal as offered and getting n
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by malanj 12y ago
It feels worth pointing out that this is a free event. So expecting lots of infrastructure (like an abundance of power sockets) does seem a bit unrealistic? It was pretty cool to see some startup "legends" in real life. There wher
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by malanj 12y ago
I would suggest that you start with "customer development" in the Steve Blank sense of the word. See http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/ In my experience you can get very far with not bu
57.
by malanj 12y ago
My understanding is that Techstars is a "franchise model" of sorts. So Techstars Chicago, as described in the post, could be quite different from another city's Techstars? If anyone on HN have been through any Techstars progr
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by malanj 12y ago
Yes - this has changed. See http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal
59.
by malanj 12y ago
This is a really useful perspective for undergrads. I would have gained a lot of value if I could have read this while studying. I started a startup during my undergrad degree, and ended up finishing my degree at the same time. I made a dea
60.
by malanj 12y ago
This might be the only way the NSA is going to get paid for what they do directly by the users of Tor. (To avoid looking suspicious the NSA will probably have to list some of their Tor nodes here)

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