Snowden indiscriminately leaked a huge trove of classified information to the press. Governments desperately want to know what has been compromised and what has not. What Snowden stole, they want to steal back, or at least catalog. Is there honor among thieves?
Every organization generates information of some kind; nation states especially, but even aid groups and corporations. Spying on the heads of these organizations is a very efficient way to get at the most important, post-filtered information these groups have uncovered or generated.
If you assume NSA spying net benefits the United States, then a U.S. citizen should count it beneficial that the extent of the surveillance is so comprehensive. If you don't, or have interests not aligned with the U.S., these revelations are pretty horrible.
Supporting more memory carries significant performance penalties. Until they make jumbo DIMMs which are as fast as smaller ones, perhaps it's not a good idea to offer the option.
The core argument that Bitcoin is deflationary is irrelevant to the fitness of Bitcoin, at least for online transactions. To me, the chief value of Bitcoin is that it enables super cheap micro (and macro) transactions online. Goodbye silly debit and credit card interchange fees! Used in this way, dollars are held in Bitcoin form for only the tiniest of moments before being converted back into dollars. Long term fluctuations in exchange rates don't matter.
I look forward to using micro payments for content online. Ad supported content and the inevitable vending of my personal data is distasteful to me.
How does YCVC work exactly? YC invests in startups directly already, so why bring in unnecessary partner money? Is it that the YC front runs the investment and the YCVCs are allowed to come on board slightly later at worse terms? If so, that's a good deal for YC, and even if the IRR doesn't work out, the VCs are paying for access to a pool of potential deals. If that's the case VC churn doesn't send the best signal.
Personally, every single bicycle commuter I have known has been involved in an accident, often multiple. The consequences are much worse than an auto accident. If I didn't wear a helmet, I might not have the courage to ride at all--even if they help only in some scenarios. I often see the risks of bicycling and not wearing a helmet downplayed, but to me this rings of agenda and not reality on the road. For example, it seems like all arguments against helmeted cycling also apply to helmeted motorcycling. Should we encourage motorcyclists not to wear helmets?
It doesn't help that Snowden divulged all the classified information he could get his hands on, even that unrelated to domestic spying. It comes across as a desire for fame rather than a principled action.
Soylent is going to have a very, very hard time with new customer acquisition. Right now it's riding a wave of novelty, but as it solves a problem very few people have, and solves it in a way that leaves people craving the innate satisfaction of eating, it's not going to go far. But there are founders with more ambition than sense. In fact I suspect that's most of them.
SMB and NFSv4 have support for something similar in their protocols. Nice to see it generalized. The file protocol versions only chain RPCs on success. You can't operate directly on the result.
Interesting: to a close approximation, the odds of a positive payoff from YC (vs opportunity cost) is about the same as buying a California scratch ticket--about one in ten.
Not if Google also requested images from invalid addresses. But usually you'll get a failure in the SMTP transaction if the email address is not valid. Otherwise a simple typo would send your important email into a black hole.
The NSA has stated that they cannot be effective at paying internationally without picking up data on Americans every so often. The effort to reduce the number of accidental collections to zero would be astronomical. Given that, Americans must decide if they want a foreign intelligence service like every other world power, or not.
In my experience many homeless are mentally ill, but not to the level where they should be committed to an institution. This puts society in a bind: do you take away their freedoms because they are odd ducks (treatment is not yet possible), or do you let them do what they want, which typically results in their homelessness? Has there ever been a society without homeless?
Even if you could trust these RNGs, it is possible that they will malfunction at any time through a manufacturing defect or thermal issue. Blindly trusting hardware is naive. Linux never did, and decisions like this make me less likely to ever use BSD again. The critical mass of talent is just not there.
America is a republic and not a direct democracy. Sometimes the professional makes better decisions then millions of less informed armchair quarterbacks that consider the issues for minutes each year--and of course it's impossible to please everyone. Unfortunately, these professionals must pander to the mob every so often to get elected.
Are treaties normally negotiated in public? I don't recall Obama live tweeting any closed door talks with Putin--it's just not a good idea. You can't be frank when you have to worry about covering your ass to prevent attacks from every nutjob special interest group at home.
In other words, a potential highjacker would be a allowed to being a gun aboard if it is small enough and attached to a monkey? I dub this the "monkey loophole."
Is there an canonical opinionated configuration of Emacs where each component works relatively well with all others? I love Emacs but I don't want to spend 100 hours on research and tinkering to have something modern.
If you were a doctor, would you rather charge more, or less? What keeps you from charging the highest fees in the world? Your reputation. If you're not the best, you cannot charge the most. All of capitalism works this way.
If 1,000 CS grads found startups attempting to solve a problem they each have, are they guaranteed success? Or will there be five outliers which exit for billions and then tell everyone all they need to do is to solve their own problems?
Telling others to solve a problem they have seems more like an algorithm to generate at least some successes by guaranteeing diversity. This million monkeys approach is a strength of capitalism, but I wonder if it's the method which maximizes expected value for a would be founder. It seems more of a method to guarantee a minimum return for a VC.
This would be more attractive if Amazon Fresh weren't completely unreliable--it's often out of stock of the products I want. I must throw my recipie plan in the trash on a regular basis. Whole Foods or PCC it is most definitely not.
Typically larger startups are sold as an acquire for peanuts and their failure is spun as a success. Often the employees get better jobs than they had, so they're not out on the street. If you have any contacts at larger companies, use them now.
I should note that less experienced programmers tend to start with higher level languages, as a rule, so the average experience of a C programmer is likely higher than that of the HLL programmer. This general experience level alone gives the resulting code a reliability boost.
While I think it is much more useful to learn from others' success than others' failure (lessons from your own failures are invaluable), let's not forget selection bias. A lot of startup success is luck--or, in other words, factors outside of the control of the founders or their advisors.
Many, if not most, founders aren't even aware of these factors, don't appreciate them fully, or won't acknowledge them out of ego. In many cases the advice should be "work hard, be smart, and buy the winning lottery ticket."
My advice is to attempt startups in the center of a confluence of macrotrends; that will tilt the odds more in your favor.