Notes from a Google Entreprenuer Day

These are notes I had lying around from a Google Entrepreneur Day.

• Small teams, Flat structure. Adaptibility. Agile, flexible, high sharing of data.
• Meritocracy and Transparency. Helps make passionate people.
• Execution. Experiment often, fail quickly. Testing and Auditing. Reward risk, do not punish failure.
• Collect and aggregate usage data. Data should not lie, and it will keep you honest.
• 3 A's of entrepreneurship:
  
  1. Audit Data and yourself.
  2. Admit when things are not working.
  3. Adapt in order to survive.

 Understand your user

• Australia has the highest internet penetration. Best place to actually test. South Korea, UK and US are other penetration markets.
• Trends: Mobility, Video, Social, Cloud.
• Consumerism of IT. Take Consumer technology (phones, tablets, etc) into the business.

BigQuery

• Big Data is "When the cost of throwing away data becomes higher than technology used to store it"
• Batch-based solutions were not fast enough (for data-driven decision making)
• Accessed via RESTful API. Make it into a service.
• Suitable for aggregation and predictions.

Go

• Small language
• Simple type system
• Fast runtime properties
• Native concurrency support
• Fast development workflow
• Comprehensive standard library
• Standard library includes JSON, XML, net, SQL database and command line flags

Lean platforms for lean start-ups

• You are not the only one working on it. You do not always have a great idea.
• Steps:
1. Start small, start fast
2. Learn like a scientist. Rigorous, precise, learn from failure.
3. Minimise friction to ship
• Advatange is that a start-up can focus on markets no-one cares about.
• Move fast and break things

Notes for Think Again: How to reason and argue (Sharpen Edges & Organise Parts)

These are my course notes for the Coursera course "Think Again" by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong at Duke University and Ram Neta at University of North Carolina.

This follows on from my earlier notes. And these.

Sharpen Edges

• We should seek adequate precision and adequate clarity, because absolute or perfect precision and/or clarity is futile and endless.
• When clarifying a claim, do not claim more than the speaker has to claim. ALWAYS CHOOSE THE MORE CHARITABLE OPTION.
• Clarification happens better when you are working with smaller premises (without distortion).
• Dependent clauses: These are premises that are dependent on another premise (usually given to help support our assertions). However, it depends on context on whether you break up dependent clauses into it's own premise.
• Dependent clauses are usually marked by that, which and who.

Organise Parts

• Liner structure:
  Premise 1 leads to conclusion 2, which is a premise for conclusion 3... etc
  1 -> 2 -> 3
• Branching structure:
  Each premise given can independently support the conclusion, Missing one premise will not diminish the argument.
  3 <- 1
  ^
  |
  2 
• Joint structure:
  Premises work togetherto provide support for the conclusion, and neither premise alone is sufficient for the conclusion.
  1 + 2
  ______
  3

We can combine one or more of the structures.