bspn

> The FDA is necessary but I do think it could stand to adopt a little bit of the Silicon Valley ethos

They're moving closer to the "move-fast" thinking (although not the "break things" part fortunately) under the new administration: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21739157-drug-regulat...

I don't understand how this feature changes anything? If he operates via DM them you and his other victims can pretty easily share the evidence with management today. I don't think this feature is going to a be a magic cure-all where management pro-actively monitors communications for this type of behavior - it will still require individual(s) to escalate a complaint that management can then investigate.

But it's not really a loss, but rather a continuing bet on the company's growth prospects. Reinvesting free cash flows at the expense of paying dividends is arguably one of the main reasons Amazon is the behemoth it is today. Investors "afforded" them that luxury because they believed in the potential.

I was a long-time Nexus 5 user and upgraded to the Essential PH-1 last year and can't say I regret the decision. The 5 is still my favorite all-time phone given context, but the PH-1 is a pretty significant step up and has one of the prettiest form factors I've experienced. Some owners have experienced teething issues with the device, but it's been super smooth for me and I've been impressed with the speed of the updates (as you'd expect being an Andy Rubin company).

IANAL, but I believe the Federal NLRA trumps any state-level at-will provision in much the same way as the EEOC operates. I don't even think formalizing a union is required, but simply banding together to improve working conditions automatically gives you protected status.

> ASP increased to $800 dollars (!) which would point to the iPhone X doing relatively well, despite not being available for the entire quarter.

I'm not sure that is necessarily true. The iPhone 8 pricing ranges from $699 to $849, the 8 Plus from $799 to $949 and the X from $999 to $1149. A higher ASP doesn't necessarily indicate that the X has performed well, as it's possible the higher priced 8s have contributed to the overall increase.

I don't follow Snap well enough to know the cause of the dive, but they did release their first ever annual report as a public company this morning:

https://investor.snap.com/financial-information/sec-filings

I was driving through Atlanta the other day for the first time and now appreciate the value of lane guidance. You can be on an 8 lane highway with three simultaneous exit options. If you find yourself in the wrong lane it is not an enjoyable experience.

It also puts you squarely in PCI scope which is a massive burden. I believe many of the modern payment processors offer embedded iframe solutions these days where they handle the sensitive bits (card and CVV#) but allow you to style the payment form however you like.

Here's some background from a TG insider:

"I seem to recall Walter Day had sold the rights to TG a couple years back. I used to work for TG some years ago, but hated it. My brother I and were constantly having to fight with what I call "the old guard" comprised of record holders from the early 80's. First, they resisted every one of our innovative new ideas like speed-gaming records for consoles, and then later we discovered a lot of the records from the '80s were bogus because video proof was not required back then. The worst was "Mr. Activision" (aka Todd Rogers), where I and several others were able to prepare a case and conclusively prove Todd had been completely fabricating world records for various Atari games. To name a few:

Barnstorming (2600): Todd's record, which stood for many years, was proven to be impossible once we broke down the game code and stripped the stage of any obstacles. With the stage completely blank, flying a straight line to the finish was slower than Todd's record. When we presented this evidence, we were attacked by fans and supporters of Todd, and eventually an excuse was cooked up that I lovingly refer to as "the coffee stain excuse". Yes, after being attacked and told we were clueless about how good Todd was, one of the referees covered for him and claimed the 'document' detailing his record had a coffee stain on the part where the record time was listed. Instead of throwing the record out and forcing Todd to do a legit one on video tape, they just simply adjusted the record to be MAYBE possible by adding a half-second to the time."

Source: http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=31&thread...

Not OP and I have no inside info, but if we take the $25m as given and assume that investors owned 20-30% on a $2m check with a vanilla preferred that brings the founders/team share down to somewhere in the the $17.5-20m range with the lion's share going to the founders.

Sounds nice, right?!

But, and this is admittedly a big assumption, this smelt like an acquihire at the time so I imagine the deal was structured in a way that allowed the financial investors to cash out with a respectable return while the founders committed to some form of earn-out to ensure their commitment and loyalty to making the platform a success for CNN. Given how quickly the shutdown occurred, you have to assume they didn't meet the metrics in the buy-out so will be leaving some (a lot?) of that purchase price on the table. If we assume a 50% discount that brings the net price down to under $10m split across a group of 10+ employees with the two founders presumably capturing about 80% of that. After tax ~ possibly at their prevailing income tax rate vs long-term capital gains ~ he may have realized a low-single digit million exit which is nothing to sneeze at for the vast majority of us especially given the quick turnaround. Now, if CNN negotiated hard on the earn-out or the investors had something other than 1x preferred it's possible that number is significantly lower, but none of us really know.

IANAL but I don't think it's necessarily illegal by default under the ADA. The first thing the employee has to do is establish that their condition falls under a protected class and then they can request an accommodation. If the employer can demonstrate that there's no way to reasonably accommodate the employee then I believe they're off the hook - that is a much higher burden for a large company to satisfy than say for a small 10 person start-up.

My favorite part of the aborted Friday (EST) launch was when the Kiwi controller was asking the American launch director whether he wanted any pre-determined halts in the launch sequence. It took them 3 goes for the American to understand what he was asking :)

Wouldn't that depend on the details of any tax treaty your home country has with the US?

If you don't mind, can I ask what particular issues you faced? We're looking at moving from Slack to Mattermost later this year to help streamline the security clearance process so it's a little concerning to hear that it wasn't solid enough for something as simple as family communication.

Probably not theft, but I think it would qualify as criminal conversion. Google would likely need to complain though for the authorities to do anything about it, and I can't see them doing that.

> Maybe the lifestyle is different as a VC, but as an engineer, this seems so disjointed from reality that it's almost farcical. I can barely get some of my coworkers to stop talking about code for more than a breath

I think you and most of us on here fall within "the vast majority" referenced in the article:

"Still, the vast majority of people in Silicon Valley have no idea these kinds of sex parties are happening at all"

Your neighborhood would be an ideal candidate for something like this wireless mesh network solution currently in development: https://8rivers.com/portfolio/8-rivers-networks/

But even that is only as good as the infrastructure behind it. I landed at Dulles on an international flight one day and the entire immigration system was down so none of the self-service kiosks or agent terminals were working creating huge backlogs. In the end US passport holders were let through with a visual passport check while all others were SOL until the system came back online.

I once clicked on a recipe that was pinned to a Pinterest board and it would not allow me to view it without registering for an account. They lost my eyeballs forever that day and I'm sure there's many others like me out there. Given their target revenue model was presumably ad/affiliate referral based, keeping potential consumers outside the wall made zero sense to me.

It appears he had a bad experience with them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833815

and is writing a book about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12749364

Here's NZ's proposed (extreme) response to the foreign buyer problem: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41745129

> You'd also learn a lot from ex-Amazon engineers

Reading the thread, it appears they were at most SWE interns at Amazon so the learning opportunities would be minimal I imagine. This feels all sorts of icky and the poster did the right thing by just walking away IMO.

I can already see Luxotica's new Fall line branding: "Face ID compatible sunglasses!"

For the founders this represents a very nice exit but for investors, not so much. It obviously depends on when they entered, but later stage investors aren't likely to be making much (if anything) off the exit. Getting money back from a struggling investment is always nice, but I doubt the VCs will be touting this as one of their success stories in the quarterly report.

No, it was genuinely stressful! I forget the name of the plant now, but too much sun and it would die. Too little sun, same result. Move it the wrong way and, yep you guessed it, death. And that's before we even get to the watering requirements!

I once agreed to take care of a friend's plant while they were overseas - it was a terrifying day-to-day experience. Don't ask your friends to look after a plant.

I'm learning more and more about this by talking to my wife's doctors, and you're right in the sense that there are some forms of depression that can be cured, but sadly not all.

I'm broadly generalizing here, but depression caused by a physical condition (e.g. an autoimmune deficiency) can typically be cured by attacking the underlying cause, but depression caused by a psychiatric condition is much harder to "cure" in the traditional sense and instead can be managed via modern pharmaceuticals. Now, those drugs come with some strings attached, but if they help a patient get out of the bed and function in the morning (as they do with my wife) then that's a net positive, but we're realistic about the fact this is likely a life-long battle that will require constant work to stay on top of.

It's a condition that can largely be controlled through medication, but based on my wife's experience it's a condition that has a horrible tendency to rear it's ugly head without notice and for seemingly no apparent reason so I'm not sure I'd generalize it as being "treatable" for everyone.

This is great advice, which surprisingly few people follow.

A few years back I scanned all of our personal records, tax returns, visas, dog vaccinations etc and created a dedicated Box account with a Google Drive backup. It was a massive undertaking at the time, but now whenever we receive something new it's a pretty painless task to scan it and upload it to cloud storage.

An added bonus is that after years of stockpiling paper we now have virtually no paper records anymore other than the things that absolutely have to be: passports, SSNs, birth certificates etc.