I'm Luke Groesbeck, one of the cofounders of JobAlchemist, a Y Combinator-backed company that builds...job software. I use this to curate + share.
I love California and live in SF.
Quality is fractal. Just by touching a product you can make reasonable assumptions about the characteristics (or the corporate pathologies) of the people who made it.
Y Combinator vs. Graduate School
Y Combinator* is the new Graduate School.
In some ways, it’s better:
- You pay to go to graduate school. YC pays you.
- After school, you get a job. After YC, you create jobs.
- You repeat the works of the greats in school. YC expects you to do original work.
- In school, you are graded on an arbitrary scale by arbitrary people. After YC, you are graded by the real world.Some day, most schools in most disciplines will be like this.
* – Of course, “Y Combinator” is a generic term for Techstars, I/O Ventures, SeedCamp, Capital Factory, Founders Institute, and all of the other similar pre-angel incubators.
via Naval.
So true in my case. The best way to learn is to learn by doing, and YC, et al, are all about building.
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Having a drink on the deck at the top of the world in SF.
The rest of it is, too.Comments [0]
Call it the First Law of 21st Century Economics: today's great challenge isn't making the same old toxic junk, whether CDOs, Hummers, or soda, more efficiently — it's making stuff that's not toxic junk in the first place. That's the challenge of going from great to good — and becoming what I've been calling a "Constructive Capitalist.
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Aeolus is an investigation into acoustics, wind and architecture and was inspired by Luke Jerram's research trip to Iran where he saw the wind towers of Yadz, and interviewed a Qanat well digger in Esfahan. The well digger spoke of the desert wells singing in the wind.
A specially designed architectural space is being designed that will resonate and sing with the wind. With a major grant from EPRSC and the support of the acoustic engineering departments at the University of Southampton (ISVR) and University of Salford, a number of engineering options have been explored that make the movement of wind audible without any electrical power or amplification. Mapping the shifting landscape of wind around the building, the acoustics will change as the wind alters its direction and strength.
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New from Erik Otto - be sure to check out the whole series at his site. Love this guy's work.
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In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)
Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
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