Zero to One


Book Description

WHAT VALUABLE COMPANY IS NOBODY BUILDING? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. ‘Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.’ ELON MUSK, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla ‘This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.’ MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO of Facebook ‘When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.’ NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, author of The Black Swan




Soul of the Sea


Book Description

This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind's relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation.




The Complete E-Commerce Book


Book Description

The Complete E-Commerce Book offers a wealth of information on how to design, build and maintain a successful web-based business.... Many of the chapters are filled with advice and information on how to incorporate current e-business principles o




An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups


Book Description

This book covers topics of interest to anyone who wants to work at startups:1. How do you get a job at a startup?2. How do I choose which startups to talk to?3. How does one approach interviewing at a startup?4. Once an offer is pending, how do I negotiate compensation?5. Once at a startup, what should I do to maximize any gains from my stock options?Drawing from 17 years of work at various pre-IPO corporations in Silicon Valley, the author provides answers to the above questions, including extensive examples, case studies and detailed background.




A Curious Moon


Book Description

Starting an application is simple enough, whether you use migrations, a model-synchronizer or good old-fashioned hand-rolled SQL. A year from now, however, when your app has grown and you're trying to measure what's happened... the story can quickly change when data is overwhelming you and you need to make sense of what's been accumulating. Learning how PostgreSQL works is just one aspect of working with data. PostgreSQL is there to enable, enhance and extend what you do as a developer/DBA. And just like any tool in your toolbox, it can help you create crap, slice off some fingers, or help you be the superstar that you are.That's the perspective of A Curious Moon - data is the truth, data is your friend, data is your business. The tools you use (namely PostgreSQL) are simply there to safeguard your treasure and help you understand what it's telling you.But what does it mean to be "data-minded"? How do you even get started? These are good questions and ones I struggled with when outlining this book. I quickly realized that the only way you could truly understand the power and necessity of solid databsae design was to live the life of a new DBA... thrown into the fire like we all were at some point...Meet Dee Yan, our fictional intern at Red:4 Aerospace. She's just been handed the keys to a massive set of data, straight from Saturn, and she has to load it up, evaluate it and then analyze it for a critical project. She knows that PostgreSQL exists... but that's about it.Much more than a tutorial, this book has a narrative element to it a bit like The Martian, where you get to know Dee and the problems she faces as a new developer/DBA... and how she solves them.The truth is in the data...




Weapons of Math Destruction


Book Description

"A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling, a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality,"--NoveList.




Big Data


Book Description

A exploration of the latest trend in technology and the impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.




The Outer Limits of Reason


Book Description

This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.




Grokking Algorithms


Book Description

"This book does the impossible: it makes math fun and easy!" - Sander Rossel, COAS Software Systems Grokking Algorithms is a fully illustrated, friendly guide that teaches you how to apply common algorithms to the practical problems you face every day as a programmer. You'll start with sorting and searching and, as you build up your skills in thinking algorithmically, you'll tackle more complex concerns such as data compression and artificial intelligence. Each carefully presented example includes helpful diagrams and fully annotated code samples in Python. Learning about algorithms doesn't have to be boring! Get a sneak peek at the fun, illustrated, and friendly examples you'll find in Grokking Algorithms on Manning Publications' YouTube channel. Continue your journey into the world of algorithms with Algorithms in Motion, a practical, hands-on video course available exclusively at Manning.com (www.manning.com/livevideo/algorithms-?in-motion). Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology An algorithm is nothing more than a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem. The algorithms you'll use most often as a programmer have already been discovered, tested, and proven. If you want to understand them but refuse to slog through dense multipage proofs, this is the book for you. This fully illustrated and engaging guide makes it easy to learn how to use the most important algorithms effectively in your own programs. About the Book Grokking Algorithms is a friendly take on this core computer science topic. In it, you'll learn how to apply common algorithms to the practical programming problems you face every day. You'll start with tasks like sorting and searching. As you build up your skills, you'll tackle more complex problems like data compression and artificial intelligence. Each carefully presented example includes helpful diagrams and fully annotated code samples in Python. By the end of this book, you will have mastered widely applicable algorithms as well as how and when to use them. What's Inside Covers search, sort, and graph algorithms Over 400 pictures with detailed walkthroughs Performance trade-offs between algorithms Python-based code samples About the Reader This easy-to-read, picture-heavy introduction is suitable for self-taught programmers, engineers, or anyone who wants to brush up on algorithms. About the Author Aditya Bhargava is a Software Engineer with a dual background in Computer Science and Fine Arts. He blogs on programming at adit.io. Table of Contents Introduction to algorithms Selection sort Recursion Quicksort Hash tables Breadth-first search Dijkstra's algorithm Greedy algorithms Dynamic programming K-nearest neighbors