Nelson69

I think impacting everyone is a big part of the idea. I'm all for every possible tactical advantages if we're risking the lives of our youth and I don't know that a full vote in both the house and senate in order to wage war is the right thing but I'd absolutely support some sort of constitutional amendment that created a tax and draft for any military engagement that lasts more than 30 or 60 days or something.

We have to pay for that stuff and we have to staff it.

The real costs of Iraq and Afghanistan will play out over the next 50 years. Vets already commit suicide at a staggering rate. We already under treat post traumatic stress. We under treat most emotional issues. We over treat "pain." The divorce rate among soldiers is something like 2 to 3x the national average. The people that go and do the fighting don't exactly make up a nice normal looking slice of our national demographics either..

Or you could make it even more simple and leave "customer service" out of it.

This case seems a little different in that it's pretty difficult to not have your personal information in their system.

You roll in to Target or Home Depot, you decide to pay with a check, card or cash. You decide to give them your information or not. You decide if you want to go back after they mismanage your information. Can you opt out of Equifax's business and still get credit or loans? Can you even opt out at all?

If you use a loyalty card at a Kroger owned store, they'll tell you if something is flagged for contamination, it's an automated call system. There is already pretty reasonable tracking on the industry side of the food equation; some things are better than others. It's just not at the point of consumption. I'm kind of okay with this, I'd rather the industry as a whole do more things to prevent contamination period. Making a more friendly notification is nice, it could be a phone call, and email, a notification with some app; it's pretty rare and I want it more rare, not a friendlier notification, that's just me though.

Now I think you could make that stuff better, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to hate on Juicero for that. Their entire play was just VC-Bingo though: they had a device, they had a subscription, they had "lock in" (device is only good with the subscription) they had internet attachment, it's a health and wellness type play, probably some other things I'm not thinking of. Anyone know if they had to subsidize the prices, that'd be the grand slam if they had to do that too. $30 a week for 5 packs of juice, that's $120 a month and you do the work and clean up the mess and you have to get different juice on the weekends. The bags aren't supposed to make that much mess but I think the psychology of it all is huge, a coffee maker doesn't make much mess either and you'll pay a gigantic premium at a coffee shop. How many months before you get a tip-top of the line cold press juicer that'll make juice out of any produce? With no subscription.

For big computers, C is good for systems programming because everyone else uses it and because of the titanic effort that has been put in to building really good optimizing C compilers. UNIX came along but when C killed pascal, IBM, Microsoft, everybody was on C's dick.

On small embedded computers, I think C is popular because it's so easy to build something that resembles a C compiler. The fact is, undergrad compiler classes almost build C compilers (some universities might actually go all the way.) You can almost build a yacc grammar that will read C and emit assembly. The small computer embedded vendors have a difficult problem, they need to provide tooling and they don't usually have giant piles of developers to sell to. So they dust off some abandoned "C compiler" they found in the gutter, add their hardware to it and call it good. At least that's my theory and I've seen some rough "compiler work" from some pretty substantial hardware vendors. In fact, if you're running a 16bit or smaller part or a weird part, I have yet to see a decent C compiler from a hardware vendor.

It's sort of silly but it's sort of not. The evidence suggests that a few really big hits doesn't do it, it's repeated medium sized head traumas that does. (ie: it happens to line men more frequently out of footballers) Quantifying the size of that head trauma is really key. Does it have to be a "hit?" I mean repeatedly hitting mogul runs put shock on your whole body, you may not hit your head but you're absorbing that up and down shock and moving side to side fairly abruptly; more so that you do just running around and your brain absolutely experiences some amount of that. Age might have a factor too, age when this trauma or shock happen.

I ski and snowboard and I'm not planning on stopping, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. I'd say that about most sports but I'm not about to let either of my kids play football or box.

We need to study this stuff a lot more.

But isn't part of that the perceived corruption in boxing? MMA has stepped in and there are youth MMA "academies" all over the place.

I know MMA fans might take exception but I think I'd lump them in with boxing fans of the past. Maybe there is some clear delimiter between MMA fans and boxing fan of the past; I can't think what it would be though.

It will?

As long as there are poor people with some athletic ability and fans willing to watch them, there will be grid iron football players.

So fundamentally as an angel you're in early. That usually means that you face dilution. I also wouldn't think it would be that unusual for the business to make a pretty dramatic pivot or two and that initial angel investment may have been for something else entirely by the time the company finds its legs. There are basically 3 things you can do in that dilution situation: 1) Do nothing and go from basically owning the business to not. (You still get to watch and be part of the ride) 2) Pony up more money to match the big investors, assuming the terms allow it, or 3) Fight it or any change every step of the way.

A VC once told me that there were "good angels and bad angels" Too many bad ones and he wouldn't invest. A couple specific bad ones and he wouldn't invest. To that, there are also good angels that will make introductions, spend time coaching, and really help beyond what I'd call a "hobby." It seems like there are good people out there with money and knowledge and they really want to help out others in an angelic sort of way knowing full well they will likely lose their investment.

May I ask where you live to get the drilling done in that price range? Just curious. At $10k it's insanely compelling.

Is that established? I believe that there are major giant cities that operate with a lower CO2 footprint than suburban and rural areas might, per capita. But there is the cost of all the CO2 that allowed that urbanization; NYC didn't get the subway without a carbon cost, all that steel in the buildings released a lot of carbon, etc..

In the designing of CPUs or if they are designed for running various neural networks? Because Nvidia seemed to be building giant products aimed pretty much exclusively at that. Google has their own "TPUs" for that. Intel's next Phi is designed for running that stuff.

As for the design of CPUs, they do some automated layouts and some things like that, but I think that might not be what you mean.

Give Roverandom a try, I thought it turned out pretty good.

Aqui-hire. Google already established Levandowski as a hundred-millon dollar man, didn't they?

It's complete BS but that's the reason for the valuation, he can do it, Google already paid him that much and he 'wanted to do his own thing,' it's going to cost you to hire that guy.

Can you even spin up and staff a company in that time frame and integrate a lot of the technical parts in to something very meaningful in 9 months? With custom hardware and stuff that seems insanely tight (but there is a lot of money at play, you push hard) Even if there are off the shelf components that do most of the work and they're pre-integrated that seems insanely aggressive. I can only assume Otto didn't have any IP of real value other than a staff.

Questions...

This is civil, so a preponderance of evidence is the burden here. Can he fight that at all without talking? Google has a ton of evidence that he 'downloaded' a lot of stuff. It's not a big jump to see Otto/Uber made a tremendous amount of progress pretty rapidly too. I'm not the judge but being an engineer, knowing other engineers, hearing Google's story about the data he took, seeing the dollar figures, it seems damning. What evidence is there to the other side if he won't explain things?

Isn't the selling point aesthetics? It's very clearly not for everybody, not yet, anyways.

In Colorado it's against the laws for HOAs to ban solar systems, there are some tricks though because they can require certain roofs that you can't really put solar on. Certain tiles and 'presidential' grade roofing which typically cost more than normal shingles as it is. If you live in one of those types of places and want an energy system, then this is what you want. Honestly, I've not heard a lot of complaints about the aesthetics of a conventional solar system, in fact I think some people like it because it's really obvious looking; but if you have the funds and really value the look, then there is an option for you.

It's probably not that different from the market for a Model S vs a Honda Accord. The S is 3+x the cost of the Accord, has fewer fueling stations, can't be serviced nearly as easily, probably is less 'practical' in a handful of other ways but there are still people that buy and drive Model S Tesla cars.

Aren't the interest rates and credit ratings supposed to factor that in?

What's Google's policy on side businesses? They're cool if you work on self-driving cars and start LIDAR and "self-driving truck" side projects?

Did Levandowski have some sort of special pass due to the unicorn nature of his experience and expertise?

After 14 weeks? I'd side on which ever side was going to prevail with my vote. I think I'd just want it to be over and get back to repairing the damage to my life that 14 weeks on a jury inflicted.

How old are you and do you need to "believe?"

When I was younger, I couldn't really push hard and work really hard unless I believed in the mission. I had to have that passion fuel to do it. It's fun, it feels good when it's there, it's like being in love in a way. And I'd do 'heroic' stuff because of it. I've found, personally, that that passion fuel is more like adrenaline than actual fuel though. It tends to dry up after a while; I think this is do to life changes, if you're in a relationship or having a child or something like that, those things just dramatically outweigh "building some app" or learning some new tech. At this point in my life (married with a couple kids) I get buzzed about startup opportunities and stuff, but I don't think there is any code that will come close to what my family brings me in terms of that passion. You've made it 4 years so I'd guess you're not running on passion alone.

For a while, I tried to be really unemotional about work, I just wanted to be a professional and do that job. Honestly, I can do this, I know some people cannot. I enjoy making software, regardless of the project I can usually find aspects to enjoy and just enjoy the craft. You really don't need to give a shit to fix some bugs, at least I don't, they pay me and I do the work. That too tends to result in my relative unhappiness after a while; I feel like certain creative aspects aren't being honored if I'm just doing the job; also when the rest of my life is in disorder it's more difficult to find any satisfaction in just being a professional.

It's going to sound cliche but it's really all about balance, at least for me it is. I try to place the passion more directly in the craft and technology. I'm passionate about building great teams. I'm passionate about working with those teams as a team, I really love seeing others grow. I like my current company's mission and it's something I can get really passionate about but I try not to get too bent about the details and specifics. Something else which in ways feels bad to say and it took me a while to really admit it: I'm kind of passionate about financial successes, my company is making money and that cures a lot of the little things for me. I've worked on my priorities a lot and I know that I'd rather be part of something that we build in to success rather than having my product vision completely realized and fail. Boot strapping a start up can be remarkably emotional, you work close with people, you get close, product passions rather than craft passions can make it really difficult. You want some passion and you want to be a pro at the same time and you want to balance those things and it's probably a life long learning exercise to continually tweak them.

Take a real vacation, turn off your phones and devices, spend some time away from it all and then look at it again.

Sure it could.

At the same time, this company has printed money for 30 years, not just beat the competition but killed the competition in many cases, and even made that an internal mantra. They have a pile of very smart people, money, etc.. there are also browser compatibility test services. They could have a VM grid with every interesting browser ever and it's not a big cost to them. A 15 person startup? I get they you might skip some browsers and focus on a key supported set. The tooling for that VM grid is also something I think a lot of the community would eat up of MS made available, there are lots of ways to build good karma and improve community relations.

Intentional or not, it's just bad optics, if nothing else. A slate with the windows 10 linux subsystem looked like an interesting environment to play around with and maybe give a shot. This sort of thing makes it look a lot less interesting. No joke, I was thinking of getting my kids one.

Can you qualify that third point?

What's considered reliance? What's the name of some place that stopped using email? I can see a drop in businesses that are running their own email, and that outsourcing maybe represents a big shift in terms of how they see it as "not critical and must be kept in house" but I don't know that they rely upon it much less.

How are these businesses messaging and communicating?

How would a warrant work in this case?

BestBuy reports that they found child porn, but proceeds to give the computer back to the owner? Is that legal or are they trafficking?

Meanwhile the FBI goes and requests a warrant based upon what they heard from BestBuy? That seems almost more slippery to me, does the FBI just need to "hear something" from somebody to get a warrant to look around? Or is it even possible for them to get a warrant in a case like this, save for BestBuy involving them like they do?

This seems like the step that causes a warrant to be issued for more stuff. How I'd imagine it goes: 1) BestBuy worker finds child porn while doing normal work. 2) BestBuy worker does "extra work" to report child porn to FBI and does not return the machine, he files some paperwork, maybe makes a full backup, etc.. 3) BestBuy employee signs a deposition, BestBuy hands machine over to FBI with owner's information 4) BestBuy or BestBuy employee gets some money (I'd think BestBuy would want their cut but that's a detail, maybe they're cool to their people in that way) for doing "extra work" and reporting crime. 5) FBI and federal prosecutors look at evidence, seek warrant for other evidence, start planning case. Perhaps said warrant makes a big case or identifies nothing else. 6) BestBuy worker may potentially be called to testify. Sadly at the end of the day $500 isn't going to pay much for a personal lawyer and I think it would be ill-advised to show up to court in any capacity in a federal case without one. ...

Anyone remember Sun's "blackbox?"

https://www.engadget.com/2006/10/18/suns-project-blackbox-da...

I can't find the original stuff anymore, the "martian picture" was actually in Sun's collateral on their website though. You can't make stuff like that up. There is a certain magic when a corporation with real money produces that kind of marketing buzz. I vaguely remember a picture of a Katrina-like situation with a black box too, cause you need processing power when the city floods and people are dying, I can't remember if that was part of the official messaging or not, maybe I just dreamed it up..

There is absolutely some appeal to full turn-key looking solutions for things that pretty clearly don't have them. It strikes me a perfect "inside the echochamber" thinking to dream up a farm in a box like this. I'd bet not everyone on the design team even has a home garden. Sometimes they day dream up a new paradigm and a lot of times it's just pretty marketing buzz. 2 acre open field farming doesn't seem like a good fit, I could see some success if this was scaled in to modular green house farming or something like that, maybe more on the gardening scale than the farming one.

Is it limited to audio output? What about the playing quality or the emotional aspect of playing a great instrument played by other great musicians?

There are an awful lot of variables, especially regarding listening conditions. And then the strings are going to be different too.

You're definitely the odd man out if you don't prefer a Strad to a modern instrument, that strikes me as an odd thing. If it's so overwhelming then there should certainly be something measurable in the audio or there would be differences due to taste and preference, right?

Is this a policy problem?

I'd entertain a discussion that it was a policy problem and we should have had plans as we engaged in freer trade and globalization and saw imports starting to eat away at these jobs.

I don't think there is a policy to put the genie back in the bottle now and I don't think these people want anything else but that. (to speak in gross generalizations)

The old school manufacturing base provided jobs where a single earner with no notable education could buy a home, raise a family, maybe send his kids to college. And he had a union. It's hard to imagine it being that way ever again. You can re-train them but they aren't going to just become knowledge workers; worse they have to want retraining and this election sure didn't make it sound like they want that..

Capitalism and competition can be rough. Ways of life, jobs, ways of doing things, products, all that stuff can go away with ruthless efficiency in a free market.

There are 2 factors here. 1) If he's simply a mediocre IT jockey and then his NSA contractor status resulted in him pulling in $200+k a year, that's a bad look. 2) If he's average and he somehow managed to defeat the NSA at what the NSA does, that's also a bad look.

Now it's likely a policy problem, that contractors can access these quantities of data with access to physically removable media and such seems like a policy problem. On the other hand if he's some kind of computer super genius then he was given a little trust and took advantage of it.

Is there anything that competes with that in terms of catalog? Redbox has replaced all the local rental places around here (Colorado) If something isn't streamed then dvd.netflix.com is the only option I know of.

I was going to mention this. Is there anything worse than getting in to a show and then comes that shark jumping season? THey are far more obvious with binge watching too.

It seems like in the old days, network series (22-24 shows per season) had a sort of peak around seasons 2-4 where everything was firing on all cylinders, nobody left, the story had enough legs to keep people wanting. If they last much longer they tended to get mediocre. Binge watching has changed it, binge watch X-files, you'll probably have to quit before the end, there is at least a solid weak season (maybe it's 6 or 7) at the time watching week to week it didn't feel that way but day to day it's really obvious.

I don't have the same amount of TV time now, startup, family, etc.. eats a lot but what I like is to find a show that's been on about 3 season, has some popularity and just watch it at my leisure 2 years after everybody else. You can get a good idea if it's worth your time before you spend any on it. (Yes, I know, that makes me old and lame, but it's just TV..)

I, too, kind of like it. Conceptually to me, it's a media player and store and that doesn't seem like it's doing "too much." Splitting out iBooks made sense. Splitting out device sync makes a ton of sense and I think you could have a headless homesharing system as well. But as a media player, it's not bad, I don't need skins and visualizations and such.

Where I think it is weak though is it's meta data format, it's some structured unified file that is opaque. As your media library grows things slow down. I'm somewhat confident that it can be corrupted but I have limited visibility in to how it's corrupted and less in to how to fix it. Thing is, people have gigantic media collections, I'd think something like sqlite could fix it. Along with that, as it has morphed over the years, there is this divide as to where the data lives. Like your podcast subscriptions can be duplicated in the cloud (makes sense so you can pull them on your phone) It's not super clear where the data really lives or where the canonical source of truth should be for it.