How to run a vague biz dev meeting
THREAD: How to run a vague biz dev meeting. Some tips I've learned and observed from some of the best (including one favorite from Sheryl Sandberg) over the years. 👇 If you're in any medium/big company (or even a small one), you'll eventually be pulled into a vague partner meeting. Where some partner company will bring their execs/CEO over to visit (or you go visit them). These can be confusing if you work in product/eng but they needn't be! What makes them confusing: there are multiple stake...
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IT’S THE PEOPLE
People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust. Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coachi...
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Objective: Not everything is possible
Not everything is possible. You can’t jump twelve feet in the air. And while many children dream of becoming an astronaut, only a few will actually pilot a spacecraft. Impossibility isn’t a popular topic in our culture, where we say that you can be anything that you want to be, do anything if you put your mind to it. But in this chapter we’ll stare impossibility straight in the eye—though we won’t sacrifice our optimism in exchange. Instead, we’ll discover a source of optimism that embraces the...
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Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
When the first voice-activated speakers were released—products like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod—I asked a friend what he liked about the product he had purchased. He said it was just easier to say “Play some country music” than to pull out his phone, open the music app, and pick a playlist. Of course, just a few years earlier, having unlimited access to music in your pocket was a remarkably frictionless behavior compared to driving to the store and buying a CD. Business is a neve...
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DrQA
This is a PyTorch implementation of the DrQA system. DrQA is a system for reading comprehension applied to open-domain question answering. DrQA is targeted at the task of machine reading at scale (MRS). In this setting, we are searching for an answer to a question in a potentially very large corpus of unstructured documents, that may not be redundant. Thus, the system has to combine the challenges of document retrieval, i.e. finding the relevant documents, with that of machine comprehension of t...
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The Byzantine Generals’ Problem
After verification, transactions are relayed to other nodes in the peer-to-peer network. The other nodes will repeat the verification and relay the transaction to more nodes. Within seconds, the transaction should reach most of the nodes on the network. Transactions are then held in pools on the nodes awaiting insertion into the block chain, which is a public record of all transactions that have ever occurred in the Bitcoin network. The block chain is not just a simple list of transaction receip...
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Merkle Trees
Cryptographic hash functions are often used to verify the integrity of a list of items, such as the broken-up chunks of a large download. In such cases, one option is to merge all the chunks and take the hash of the complete download. The problem with this is that if one chunk is corrupted, the user won’t find out until the entire download is complete, and even then they won’t know which chunk is corrupt. A better solution is to take the hash of each chunk individually so that each chunk can be ...
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We Are Data
[Book recommendation: We Are Data by John Cheney-Lippold] This book has two intersecting purposes. First is to understand how algorithms transcode concepts like gender, race, class, and even citizenship into quantitative, measurable-type forms. Second is to recognize how these measurable types reconfigure our conceptions of control and power in a digitally networked world. The political battles that surround structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism writ large must necessarily a...
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11 CHARLIE MUNGER quotes I like
“It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, “It’s the strong swimmers who drown.” —CHARLIE MUNGER, WESCO ANNUAL REPORT, 1989   What’s the flip side, what can go wrong that I haven’t seen? —CHARLIE MUNGER, FORBES, 1969” “The idea that everyone can have wonderful results from stocks is inherently crazy. Nobody expects everyone to succeed at ...
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5 Quotes I was thinking about today
I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happin...
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