jval

6 ms·

1.
by jval 3y ago
People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)
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by jval 11y ago
Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more cool NLP technology out there!
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by jval 12y ago
Sad thing about this article is that it is amazing, and yet the last thirty years has probably favoured well-credentialed people more so than any point in history. While there's an argument to be made that this is now turning around (a
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by jval 12y ago
The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain. Coinbase can settle most trades inte
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by jval 12y ago
1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright viola
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by jval 12y ago
The ancients used to select one of their own (sometimes even their own children) and periodically sacrifice them to the gods. The moderns instead periodically select one person and have the entire world turn on them through Twitter, having
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by jval 12y ago
I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there). I think at the moment it's too easy to hit that
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by jval 12y ago
People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early ado
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by jval 12y ago
I agree with this, but I think it is still an extremely difficult problem to solve. Most of the political problems we have are low hanging fruit from a technical perspective, the thing that renders them almost impossible is the fact that th
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by jval 12y ago
Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get
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by jval 12y ago
If you haven't already you should read his book, Avoiding the Fall, there are a number of prescriptions inside it on how to go about rebalancing the Chinese economy. It's really well written (as is his blog, especially this post).
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by jval 12y ago
I feel like this pissed you off a lot, but a lot of hiring in startups has nothing to do with people's competency, and more to do with culture fit which is generally totally out of your hands and not indicative at all of your ability.
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by jval 12y ago
What are the "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage? All the software in this business is commodity. The only real defensibility at work here are the network effects, which are totally a
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by jval 12y ago
Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's difficult and comparisons with other countries are not helpful in addressing those difficulties.
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by jval 12y ago
Sorry - edited my post to make clearer the fact that I'm not saying the US's healthcare system is good. I just think that comparisons with other countries are futile. My comment was intended to be a general one about the way polit
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by jval 12y ago
Politics is all about the money. Obviously administration is worse at scale too, but it comes down to political will in having the money to do it. The way you keep a political union together without having it break apart is by limiting the
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by jval 12y ago
The problem is that the United States isn't a 'country' in the way the UK, or Denmark, or Australia is. The entire population of Denmark is 5.59 million, the size of a single second or third tier city in the US. Australia is
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by jval 12y ago
It's sad to read stuff like this because Airbnb has enabled people like me to travel in a way I never could have previously. I travelled pre-Airbnb in Europe and was totally screwed over by estate agents and rental professionals who ta
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by jval 12y ago
You're right - the class of investor has shifted away from professionals and people wanting to leave China (the aspirational Chinese migrants we are used to) to extremely wealthy corrupt officials who are dumping their money everywhere
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by jval 12y ago
Why are we all indebted to Assange? Nobody has any idea whether what he did had a net positive or negative affect on ours or other people's lives. There's doesn't appear to be a reason behind a lot of the leaks, and worst of
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by jval 12y ago
I do think it has predictive power, in the narrow areas in which it can be applied. I think if you're a media executive and you've seen what's happened to the NYT, you know that newspapers aren't the only media vertical
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by jval 12y ago
You're right, it is an inductive assertion based off the quality of the piece and its focus, the author's profession and the author's background so I'm uncertain about that. I'm more keen on highlighting the fact th
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by jval 12y ago
I don't disagree with you that disruption is often misapplied and mindlessly praised, I just think this article didn't do a good job of illustrating either of those points. I think the NYT article I cited did a much better job of
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by jval 12y ago
Poor critiques of disruption like this one are only going to come thicker and faster now that many academics are starting to feel threatened by MOOCs and online learning. Critiques of disruption have been around for years, most notably from
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by jval 12y ago
I've always been puzzled by people who hate on recruiters contacting them through LinkedIn. If you dislike it so much, why don't you delete your LinkedIn profile? It's obviously there to facilitate exactly this kind of behavi
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by jval 12y ago
Would it be that difficult to add in an 'Abusive Off' feature? You can just flick it off and any tweets containing blacklisted words vanish. Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people
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Kogan Entrepreneur Startup Kit(kogan.com)
2 points by jval 12y ago|0 comments
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by jval 12y ago
This is a great post, thanks for the insight. I notice you work with writers and the press, most of whom I imagine would be living in NYC if not the East Coast cities. Do you think there's an advantage to being closer to that? Or do yo
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by jval 12y ago
Wow, I had no idea this was such a breakthrough. I'm not in the industry and I barely know anything about this, but can you explain what it is about recovering the booster that is such a huge breakthrough? Haven't we had recoverab
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by jval 12y ago
2024: a post-industrial dystopia where the global economy runs on a cryptocurrency called 'Bitcoin', people wear computers on their faces and the Wall Street Journal has been reduced to reprinting tweets as news.

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