Cryptography is not dead. Just because some motivated governments can theoretically attack your machine does not mean that cryptography is not useful, because for 99.9999999% of us, that outcome will never happen--and if it does happen, the information will not leak to those you want to keep it from (unless that's the government, of course). Cryptography still keeps us safe from all but three or four entities.
Put another way--the FBI can sneak into my apartment any time they want by picking my lock, but I still lock my door.
I doubt these post-mortems are accurate. If you can't create a successful company, what makes you think you know why a company was unsuccessful? It's just more mental masturbation. Even if the failure mode is identified, it doesn't help you with the next startup, as most of the time humans work by trial and error. A failure doesn't teach most how to succeed, just how not to fail in that exact way.
Penrose has for years been advocating against strong AI, instead arguing that there "magic stuff" in the brain that prevents conciousness from arising in a machine. Great mathematician, but totally off his rocker here, which is outside his field. His arguments make no sense. Someone spewing his quackery without his credentials would be laughed out of the room.
Why would you want an open source Nest? Is there a market demand for something which is uglier, harder to use, takes more time to install, and works worse? Do you also build your own toasters or automobiles?
More outrage farming without supplying all facts and context. I will give the benefit of the doubt to the jury and save my rage for a cause I am certain is just.
This is another example of how Snowden has compromised national security by leaking secret information that has nothing to do with American metadata and everything to do with the NSA's charter and legal mission.
It has been my experience that some founders can jump directly to a seed or A round without spending all that much time unemployed--or any time unemployed. This means they can draw a salary from day one. In this scenario I don't see a lot of personal risk on the founders' part--and, indeed, if they're able to get this level of funding, they can likely talk their way into a higher level at BigCompany even if the company goes belly up, netting a pay raise even in the failure case.
Now we hear otherwise. This is yet another example of how Musk is chewing on a wad of crazy--and every so often he'll spit some at you. Take what they say with a grain of salt. They will do anything, say anything to protect the company and the vision.
I see a $150M round as a failure: a company that has big dreams but can't make enough cash at what they currently do. Even Tesla only raised $200M at IPO, and that's for a car company with huge overhead and manufacturing capital costs. $150M for a company that assembles products from COTS parts in China is ridiculous.
I have a hard time believing Nest sold due to scaling issues. I find an easier time believing that they did not have the money to achieve their (expensive) vision, and selling to Google was easier than raising a massive round. It's the classic "our product is good but doesn't make any money; solution: double down." Nest has a huge staff for what it currently sells.
Do you really think you can't solve both problems, or that fixing links hurts your ability to solve bigger problems? It's $500 to a contractor. You can even have someone else find the contractor. This smells fishy.
I suspect the fix will result in a large change to the code base and you want to always own/understand the code for some reason. So if you can't fix it yourself, nobody is allowed to, either. That's fine--just admit it's your baby and you don't want to let it go.
Young children don't like losing caregivers. Too much change and the child starts to learn to stay emotionally distant from teachers (and new friends). It's heartwrenching to watch.
Is there value to maintaining this site yourself? I agree that you shouldn't spend the time to fix this issue yourself, but couldn't a contractor fix it for pocket change, at a low cognitive burden to you? Hasn't this issue been surfaced repeatedly by users, wasting the time of a good many people (including you)? Doesn't it hurt your reputation as a thoughtful and detail oriented organization?
Twitter uses open source because they do not have the resources to build and maintain custom infrastructure, nor do they think infrastructure is what distinguishes their business. It's that simple.
Because the interview process is structured to "raise the bar" but is also highly random. As with any tech company, you have to run the gauntlet to get a hire. It's politically easier to have candidates reinterview when they fail rather than get permission from executives to "lower the bar."
Rather than use a BR to make sure that a group doesn't compromise on quality, why not just have interviewers interview candidates outside of their group, or interview them for a generalist pool which are assigned to groups later, or randomly? That prevents the BR from inserting subjective bias into the process. Everyone has bias, but the best way to cancel it out is to distribute influence, not concentrate it, nor attempt to "fight" the influences of other interviewers.
I imagine using a bar raiser increases the randomness of the interview process at Amazon, as it effectively reduces the number of interviewers down to one in the veto case. Thus, more noise. However, reducing the false negative rate isn't a high priority in most organizations, and Amazon is so desperate for employees that you often see the same person interview multiple times until they get in, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
Through Prim, these Stanford grads invented low paying jobs with long hours, even by YC standards. I wish somebody would have told them what a terrible idea this is in advance--but more likely than not it would have fallen on deaf ears. People fall in love with the idea of being a startup founder and only hear what they want to hear.