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Blockstack Update
Albert Wenger – Oct 26, 2017
I last wrote about Blockstack early in 2016 when the team announced the goals of the project. Since then a lot of progress has been made. The team has released a browser which is now available for Mac, Windows and [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Fat Tails
Albert Wenger – Oct 25, 2017
So last Uncertainty Wednesday we encountered a random variable that does not have an expected value. Now if you read that post you might ask, was this just an artificially constructed example or do random variables like that actually occur? [...] Read more
Rebecca Kaden: New Partner at USV
Albert Wenger – Oct 23, 2017
Last week was a big week for us at Union Square Ventures. We had the MongoDB IPO on Thursday and on Friday Rebecca Kaden announced that she has joined USV as a partner. Rebecca is a New Yorker and after [...] Read more
MongoDB IPO and New York Tech
Albert Wenger – Oct 20, 2017
I spent much of yesterday morning at the NASDAQ for the IPO of our portfolio company MongoDB (now trading as MDB). This is a big milestone for technology companies in New York. We have had New York IPOs before, including [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: A Random Variable without Expected Value
Albert Wenger – Oct 18, 2017
I ended the previous Uncertainty Wednesday post asking whether an expected value always exists. Going back to the definition, the expected value is the “probability weighted average of a random variable.” So let’s construct an example of a random variable [...] Read more
Blog Panic (Backing Up Cloud Services)
Albert Wenger – Oct 16, 2017
I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous: At first I figured that maybe [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3)
Albert Wenger – Oct 11, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means. I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, [...] Read more
Support idyll – Interactive Narratives
Albert Wenger – Oct 9, 2017
I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyll The project seems like an important step in the direction of an interactive learning environment that seamlessly combines text, [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Cont’d)
Albert Wenger – Oct 4, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability [...] Read more