in the short term this is annoying, but in the long term I think this is really great. it's almost as if the market is pushing people to adopt decentralization technologies, which would have been difficult to get adoption without this type of push.
This is a problem because it results in vendors with huge budget to dominate the open source space. This in itself is fine, but the side effect is that it discourages all the grass roots innovations that could have happened, and effectively kills off all the small time competition with no budget.
normally these large vendors have every interest to stay away from implementing anything that undermines their power in the ecosystem.
When that happens, people can “fork” out of the project since it’s open, you may say.
But imagine even thinking about forming something like react.js or tensorflow. Unless you have very strong motivation it would be very discouraging to even start.
So I think the problem with these large vendors dominating open source is that when things come to this state, we don’t have an alternative and everyone is locked into the “open source” projects given to us by those small number of companies. Not so much different from their own services dominating consumer market share.
>But imagine even thinking about forming something like react.js or tensorflow. Unless you have very strong motivation it would be very discouraging to even start.
Nope, your sentences are not as valuable as you think. Neither is mine. But a great book containing thousands of sentences is valuable enough to to be purchased.
I agree. Personally I think it's a great tool, run by a wrong company. If some other company--say Google, Microsoft, or even Amazon--acquired this I would trust it 100 times more. This is not just because of their history of betraying their own developer ecosystem but more importantly because Twitter has never known (and still doesn't know) what they want to be (which in turn was the cause of aforementioned betrayal). All that fluff on the Wired article is just a fluff. Yeah sure you collect more data and sell it to advertisers to make more money, but tomorrow they may find out that the model doesn't work so well and may ditch it.
> I'd close the first, say, $200k from the first reasonably good investors that offer it on reasonable terms--say a $5 million pre-money valuation or higher. This removes some uncertainty and pressure, gives you capital to execute with while raising the rest of your round, puts you in a stronger position, etc. It's worth a discount for all of this.
Wow 5MM pre-money for seed is considered reasonable (and considered a discount) nowadays? Or have I misinterpreted?
Keep in mind the "tech startup slowdown" that the media is talking about right now is pretty much concentrated in the late stage: Series A and later. There are still tons of angel investors out there.
> Anyone of us could code some assembler - like OP said, it's fun and easy. We teach our 14 years olds how to code assembler - it's that easy. You don't honestly think you can compete with those skills? You need to learn the hard stuff.
Aside from rest of the comments, this is such a ridiculous comment that I can't tell if it's a joke or not. Have you actually built anything meaningful with assembly language?
The language isn't particularly complicated, but with the assembly it's very easy to lose the sight of the forest for the trees.
I think that's why barely anyone uses raw assembly for any big pieces of code, unless they either have to (severe hardware constraints, lack of any compilers, or some specific needs) or want to challenge themselves. Higher level languages are there for a reason :)
That doesn't make this guy's comment anything close to true. It's like saying "Writing a piece of English literature is easy. All you need to know is alphabets. Really that's all you need to know." It is hard to express yourself using assembly, and like you said that's why there are higher level languages. Of course you don't need to know what a car is made up of in order to be a good driver, but it's idiotic to think the internal technology is simple.
This just means you haven't met enough people. You probably met some people who worked on embedded systems where they only need to use a simple set of instructions predefined by the device. But imagine doing that for your laptop. Personally I learned assembly when I was into hacking operating systems (not as in the diluted 'hacker' notion people throw around nowadays for merely being able to write a simple html code, but as in actual 'hacking' to make the OS work in ways its designer had not intended) and from my experience it is the farthest thing possible from being simple. Teaching 14 year olds to write assembly code? Read up on my analogy above.
I don't want to get into a pointless internet argument. But I have been into schools and helped teach coding. Kids pick up assembler a lot quicker than other high level languages. But they are more productive in high level languages.
You can write complex systems in either. I'm sure we could both come up with examples of complexity all day.
While some of the approaches mentioned below do work to some extent (TRIZ, etc.), they won't really make you "inventive". Personally I think they're all gimmicks (although to be fair they are gimmicks that work). I think what you really want is to "become" an inventive person instead of trying to force invent stuff. Read this book for starters: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/15944853...
He was mostly interested in how exactly to develop a creativity trait, and came up with something called a "Theory of a Creative Personality Development", a further generalisation of TRIZ.
There are some anecdotal confirmations from various schools across the former USSR that this approach is known to produce some stable results. So at least it worth looking into.
As i mentioned it does work. And it is a good guideline to look at when you're stuck. But it's not the fundamental solution. TRIZ teaches you to emulate creativity. The whole idea is "how can an even ordinary person come up with creative ideas?" My point was that's all fine and it's good to learn that skill, but it would be better if you shoot for actually "becoming a creative person" instead of "ordinary person coming up with creative ideas". I suggested that book above because I found it helpful from that point of view.
I suspect, there is no such a thing as an inherently "creative" person. I very closely followed the biographies of many of the greatest minds, and I'm yet to see a compelling evidence that creativity is some kind of a special trait which cannot be acquired.
There are just people who somehow know the creativity tricks (either deliberately learned or randomly discovered), and the "ordinary" people who happen to have a little gap in their education. Learning the formal approaches to creativity could help to close this gap.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm basically agreeing with you that there is no inherently creative person and you can acquire it. I'm just making a distinction between becoming actually creative vs. emulating creativity. I would rather "become a creative person" than "use techniques to come up with creative solutions" if I were to pick one.
Firstly, as I said, all the post-TRIZ works by Altshuller were exactly about training the creativity as a personality trait, not about the formal invention methods.
Secondly, if simulating creativity is indistinguishable (by the outcome) from a "true" creativity, then the very existence of creativity is questionable, and it is likely that all forms of creativity can be explained by simply knowing (maybe subconsciously) a number of techniques of "simulating" the creativity.
I didn't say TRIZ is bad. I even said it's a good technique to learn. I just pointed out that anyone can be creative without "training". The concept of training is based on the assumption that people are not naturally creative. I think anyone has potential to come up with creative achievements in their lives but only small number of people get the opportunity or motivation to do so. I think in many cases it's just a matter of changing your mindset and putting yourself in the right environment. Anyway, if you haven't read that book I recommended above please take a look.
I once lived there for a few months. The first day I arrived, I opened by window and looked at the view and thought "Wow this place has a beautiful view, no buildings, all nature... wait... what are all those things on the ground?"
I guess this counts as "technical" to people at Deloitte.