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KernalSanders
Joined 23 karma

  1. Thank you for this!

    Abbreviations and acronyms are highly inefficient if not defined clearly and up front. It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't.

    I absolutely detested seeing "ISO" suddenly everywhere on Facebook and Nextdoor in place of "in search of". If you didn't know that before, you know it now, but you may also be annoyed by it not being about the international organization for standardization, which also goes by ISO, but not for any reason people would magically guess, without a background in Greek. (ISO explains that, since the acronym would differ in every language, ISO is actually derived from isos, which means "equal". Happy coincidence that it almost matches the name of the organization, but could also become obscure with time and lost history.)

    For our company, I've been very clear that we don't make up acronyms unless a layperson could reasonably guess what it stands for, and also not confuse it for something else.

  2. You'd probably end up with tighter and tighter tolerances such as they mention with the triakis tetrahedron.

    The challenge is that it gets computationally intensive the more sides that you add if you don't have shortcuts like ruling out entire blocks of orientations in their parameter space (they figured out that if one shadow, projection, protrudes significantly, then you'd need a large rotation to get that protrusion into the other shadow, thus removing all of those rotational angles and reducing the number of orientations needed to check). More sides and more symmetry make it much harder to test a candidate, but you have an interesting idea.

  3. That military career is quite a rollercoaster. Quick-thinking but also youthfully impatient, clearly disciplined enough to rise in the ranks but kicked all around based on how history went. It's pretty amazing that his achievements spanned quite different areas beyond just the military.
  4. The article isn't really for the layperson. It's confusing why several people are nitpicking at the title.
  5. It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically.

    It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.

    YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.

    These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.

    It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.

    Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.

  6. Ya, I custom coded our startups entire bespoke sensor array and smart systems. No AI. It was build before LLMs gains the traction that we see now. I tested several models to see if they could build the same. They can't yet.

    My code will never be publicly available. That's a key trade secret of our business. When investors and others tell us that someone else could build it, I let them know that they could build their own, similar version, but it wouldn't be what we have.

    We've verified that by having friends and family, some of the best coders that we know - Stanford, MIT, and other CS alum, as well as top FAANG programmers - try to reproduce it. It's always something done in their own style that doesn't do the job as it needs to be done (they work ok, but they all miss some key crucial parts of why our system succeeds at what it does).

    GitHub is good for those looking for a job or to share their projects openly. I wouldn't even trust a private repo. Everything is either on systems and servers that we have control over or in my head. As we grow and scale, we have a roadmap for how to keep control over those trade secrets until it's time to pass off the company (if we do). At that point, I'm confident that whoever takes over will realize that this will be like the Coca Cola recipe, or any other trade secret which could be reproduced but not necessarily in the same way. (Knowing the history of that recipe and what others have created that tastes identical, it's more apocryphal and maybe not a perfect example, but you get the idea).

    Anything controlled by another company is something out of your hands. Pick and choose wisely where you keep your stuff.

  7. Stealing ideas has been the name of the game for a long, long time. It doesn't have to be like that. We just spent $50k defending one of ours, which yields no ROI unless we pull through and make it a reality. If someone has - money, sales and marketing skills, or other business competency, of course they'd rather steal than invent their own thing or invite the dev on board.

    Again, this doesn't have to be this way. Either Y-Combinator needs to boot the thiefs and invite the original dev, the thiefs need to invite them in with a fair equity share, or else we continue to perpetuate this culture. And, I agree with others, creatives have already become more and more afraid of sharing their work and having it stolen. Ours was covered with a bullet proof contract that the other party presented us with. We also have a patent pending. Neither of those stop someone from stealing from you and it's your job to protect your IP (and money). It almost bankrupt us... but because it was their contract, our lawyer constantly was scratching his head since it was a slam dunk case.

    Steve Jobs and Apple stole the UI from Xerox, Tesla wasn't Elon Musk's, and you can go down the list. Look up the history of Arduino and wiring. I have no problem buying Arduino knockoffs because of it. (The two profs that didn't give their grad student attribution have a history of stuff like this as well as infighting)

    But it doesn't have to be like that, it's our choice to continue perpetuating it and it will lead to emergent properties that people won't like. The question is: how long can the party last for investors, incubators, and thief startup founders in our highly connected age?

    Instead of waiting to find out, I hope that Y-Combinator and associated investors pioneer a better culture of rejecting these people when they find out and promoting the actual creators. Michael Seibel talked about the best creators not being the best networkers back at startup grind 2019, and that the old model of investing is broken. 6 years people. (I've been building a network of us who are expert at going out and finding the best creators, but it would be nice to have the resources and platforms of larger institutions).

    Why don't we promote the actual creators OR pair those good at identifying the opportunities and pitching and marketing them. That would be WAY better, and everyone wins while making a better, long term sustainable culture and model.

  8. The fact that this post has so little traction here compared to reddit is a bit concerning. Y-Combinator should boot the other startup and bring on the original dev in their place, or at least offer to bring them into a cohort. That would be proper justice while also successfully promoting good culture and dissuading stealing attribution. If not that, then the original dev should be invited to be part of the team with a proper equity share.

    That's just the opinion and perspective of another startup founder. We identify our own opportunities and develop our own innovations instead of stealing them. We give credit where credit is due without having to be asked to. I want to crush the culture of stealing other people's ideas. It's been around for a long time but it's really not sustainable. What happens when creatives no longer share openly? Where will the ideas to steal be?

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