

Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School - alaskamiller
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/19/packed-house-at-y-combinator-startup-school/

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projectileboy
First, thanks to the management for hosting a fabulous event. That was the
most entertaining day I've had in a long time. I'd like to add some additional
comments to Mr. Arrington's:

\- Although Jeff Bezos didn't _directly_ comment on Google App Engine, he did
an awful lot of _indirect_ commenting, by way of pointing out features of AWS
that are noticeably absent from Google App Engine.

\- After the day was done, I overheard some folks who sounded bored and
disappointed by Peter Norvig's talk, which focused on the application of large
data sets and machine learning to practical problems. I was shocked by the
reaction, as it seemed to me that Norvig was basically giving us a roadmap for
(a) finding interesting problems and (b) solving them. Short of writing a
check, I'm not sure what else he could have done for the audience.

\- Am I the only one who thinks it's funny - and a sad comment on the software
development community - that technical conferences always have the most
technical problems?

\- Paul Buchheit _is_ Bob Newhart. And I mean that as a compliment.

~~~
DaniFong
People were all psyched up for more self affirming startup things. Even I seem
to operate in a 'startup' mode and a hacker mode. It seems weird. I spent most
of my week on machine learning. Yet after hours of talks on entrepreneurship,
Norvig's talk of clustering and segmentation made my mental gears switch. I
don't think people expected it.

~~~
comatose_kid
Is there a good text you could recommend on the topic?

~~~
DaniFong
If you spend a weekend or two watching machine learning Google tech talks you
can start with a roar.

There's also 'Programming Collective Intelligence', Norvig's own book
'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach', and the growing Netflix
literature.

One of the interesting things people discovered while attacking the netflix
problem is that the rating graph encodes features like 'heroism', 'horror',
'absurdity', 'romance', 'political protest', and 'not monty python' -- you
only need a little ingenuity to assign words to said features by looking at
extreme feature exemplars.

~~~
comatose_kid
Thank you.

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csmajorfive
Best highlight: Very nervous guy thanks Bezos for gmail.

~~~
ryan
Here's the link: <http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/jeff-bezos/27:35>

poor guy

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gruseom
That's quite a strange list of highlights.

~~~
yters
That's what I thought. Seems there's a subtext missing.

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yangyang42
Another highlight: Arrington's desktop.

(Did anybody get a good shot of what was on there?)

~~~
cstejerean
check justin tv archive

~~~
abstractbill
We missed it unfortunately. I think that was when someone spilled coffee on
our power strip :-/

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pmorici
Are videos of the complete talks going to be posted some place? The recoding
on Justin.tv is spotty and incomplete.

~~~
eworoshow
Someone (Paul Graham?) mentioned that Omnisio was also recoring the
proceedings. (At the very least there were certainly two cameras so we can be
reasonably confident a second version will appear.)

~~~
lyime
Video will be up soon, Don't worry Omnisio will post about it very soon.

~~~
henning
We can't wait, this is the INTERNET!

~~~
samratjp
<http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School>

~~~
soundsop
That link has only a part (about 1 hour and 45 min) of the morning's talks. To
see all the talks on justin.tv, go to the hackterv channel archive:
<http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/archive>

The full day's video is broken up into segments and the beginning of a lot of
talks are missing. Almost all of David Lawee's talk is missing.

I was too sick to go, even though I got accepted, so having this video is some
solace. Thanks justin.tv.

Looking forward to the omnisio version to fill in the gaps.

