Congrats to David Ulevitch for building a great company and taking it to a successful conclusion! Well done. I could tell he was on a good trajectory when he hired away one of my more capable colleagues at a previous employer. :)
8,041 karma · joined July 10, 2012
Again, thanks for the advice, and I plan to follow it as quickly as possible.
Coincidentally we started sending out beta invitations last night to the first group of people on our list before a planned public launch next month. Our recommendation engine is built on Google App Engine, which should (we hope) allow us to scale. My office-hour question for Sam and Kevin would be: What advice do you have for us at this stage?
The 9th Circuit said "no," but the court's reasoning wasn't based on privacy concerns. The reasoning was that companies can only be forced to comply with wiretaps when the order would cause a "minimum of interference" (and the FBI's tap would have disabled the call-an-operator feature if there were an emergency, which exceeded the "minimum of interference" threshold).
This is not unique to Google, which has done a better job than just about any company I can think of at fighting off overly broad surveillance demands; see my post from two years ago for examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5725899
Why could Apple, Microsoft, or Samsung not be compelled -- let's assume an actual court order exists -- to deliver a software update to a specific user that allows FBI agents remote access to that device microphone? Or AT&T? Or Verizon? We know from recent history that AT&T is hardly likely to put up a fight.
I wrote more about the outer limits of the Feds' surveillance authority here: http://www.cnet.com/news/how-the-u-s-forces-net-firms-to-coo... Excerpt: "Precedents were established a decade or so ago when the government obtained legal orders compelling companies to install custom eavesdropping hardware on their networks..." And earlier: "In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that surveillance law is a "direct command to federal courts to compel, upon request, any assistance necessary to accomplish an electronic interception..."
In terms of a hierarchy of privacy protection, I trust technology > courts > Congress > DOJ oversight > FBI.
But Apple didn't do that. Instead their email includes language about "indemnifying Apple" from legal liability. It also includes open-ended language about "placing advertising next to or near your content...without compensation to you" in a way that might ordinarily require a license. I wonder if this language would be viewed as legally binding if Apple can demonstrate that the recipient, say, logged into News Publisher to check their settings but chose not to opt out.
On the other hand, as a practical matter, I suspect bloggers will not be lining up to sue Apple in federal court...
[By way of disclosure, I'm a founder of https://recent.io/, which is in the same space as Apple News. We plan to submit our iOS version for Apple's TestFlight beta testing program this week. Fingers crossed!]
Another reason is specific to this use: Amazon distributes a Linux command line tool called KindleGen that converts HTML to .mobi formats. You could install KindleGen on a Linode box in seconds and have a proof-of-concept converter running in hours.
I suppose you could reimplement KindleGen yourself for iOS if you had unlimited free time, but it likely wasn't worth it for this particular project. Just look at the release notes for a single version of KindleGen:
-) Enabled support for JP vertical rendering and multiple page writing modes (L to R, R to L)
-) Enabled support for facing pages (left or right)
-) Enabled support for double page spreads
-) Enabled properties to support spine for fixed format content
-) Added KF8 and M7 file size stats that will be displayed after conversion
-) Added Mobi7 support for HTML tags with multiple classes (e.g., class="class1 class2 class3")
-) Data URI support for images and embedded fonts so that they can be referred directly in HTML and CSS files
-) Multiple bug fixes and enhancements.
And remember the author of the linked article wrote that the purpose of the app was to "experiment with various revenue models on the App Store..."
But the value for me was in interacting with a large number of people, and I suspect even charging a few dollars a year would lead to the vast majority of accounts disappearing, reducing the remaining users' incentive to pay, leading to more accounts disappearing, etc.
That was my intuition as well. But it turns out that you can generate good recommendations without tons of info -- as long as you are selective about what signals you use.
We learned this firsthand when building https://recent.io/ for news recommendations -- the backend is able to generate relevant suggestions that appear in the app after users have read an average of 5 articles. That's based on real-world user testing.
If Twitter recognizes repeat visits by people who don't (yet) have accounts, it should be able to try a similar approach. On the other hand it took a while for us to get it right.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-savior-elon-musk-1432938547
...Tesla likely might not even exist without a former State Department official whom Mr. Musk hired to explore “what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles,” which eventually would include a $465 million government-backed loan...
In 2017, he plans to introduce his Model 3, a $35,000 car for the middle class. He expects to sell hundreds of thousands a year. Somehow we doubt he intends to make it easy for politicians to whip away the $7,500 tax credit just when somebody besides the rich can benefit from it—in which case the annual gift from taxpayers will quickly mount to several billion dollars each year...
It seems to me that if the Feds were confident about their murder-for-hire claim, they would have charged Ulbricht accordingly. That they chose not to do so indicates they were less than confident, and we should draw our conclusions accordingly.
For all I know he may well have been involved in murder for hire; I haven't paid close enough attention to the case to have an opinion. But I've followed too many hacker cases to accept unrebutted DOJ allegations as gospel truth.
The government would not allow this to happen. The California Coastal Commission prohibits any such development. I've talked to a local architect who had his plans to remodel an existing single-family home in that area scuttled by the commission. That's why, when driving south after Half Moon Bay, you encounter essentially no coastal development until you hit Santa Cruz.
There are one or two shops scattered along the way but those are grandfathered in; as far as I can tell if it didn't exist 30-40 years ago, it never will. If Vinod Khosla proposed building a strip mall, anti-development activists from all of California would converge on Martin's Beach and chain themselves to the bulldozers while conducting a hunger strike while environmental groups would file at least three parallel lawsuits.
Put another way, SF bay area politics are non-intuitive.
(Note I'm not expressing a normative opinion about whether development should be allowed; I'm merely saying what is currently allowed.)
That's merely anecdotal, and my own anecdotes run in the opposite direction.
I'm building https://recent.io/ for Android and iOS and have a Nexus 5, iPhone 5, and iPhone 6 Plus on my desk as test devices as I write this. I use both OSes, though I do use iOS a bit more.
It's true that early versions of L were less than stable, though Apple has had the same problem. Another problem is slow adoption; only in the last few weeks, I think, has the Galaxy A3 been L-upgradable.
The saving grace for Android L is Material Design, which is finally a strong unifying design language at least as good as what Apple has to offer and IMHO better with at spanning different device sizes. It's well thought out and will make Android apps easier to use (and Android generally easier to use) by increasing UI/UX standard interactions. That's anything but a "disaster."
For general use, is there a compelling reason to wait until this fall or next year instead of buying the current IRIS now or the new one next month? The SPRITE looks nicely ruggedized and compact, but that's not a big a concern for me.
(I have no affiliation with any of the autonomous camera drone makers. But unless there's a compelling reason I prefer to avoid the risk of having a promised project fail to ship.)
Note the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this threat against the life of a sitting president was protected by the First Amendment:
"If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J."
Here's the text of the opinion; it's a famous 1A case: http://laws.findlaw.com/us/394/705.html
I pay something like $50 a month for trash collection services, or around $12 a week. That includes yard waste and recycling.
If I can fit my trash and recycling into two bags per week and find something else to do with my yard waste, I'll save money by using GoodAndTidy for weekly trash pickup.
I like their website and the idea, but it seems like a service that may have trouble becoming profitable based on their $5/bag fees.
First, the pro-seasteading folks are not "letting go" -- as far as I can tell, they're in it for the long haul and have said for the better part of a decade that they intend to take small steps to learn about the engineering requirements for a blue-water seastead. Here are articles I wrote on the topic when they were saying that back in 2009: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/next-frontier-seasteading-the-oc... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/seasteaders-take-first-step-towa...
Second, the reporter talks about startups "benefit[ing]" from regulation. But it doesn't mention how government agencies have targeted drones, genetic tests (23andMe), 3D printing (DD), Uber and Lyft (in some states), Tesla (dealer sales), Airbnb (in some cities), Bitcoin (FinCEN), etc. The reporter mentions Spotify and Netflix as companies that benefit from regulation, which is false; they benefit from copyright law. The thing is you can have copyright law without FCC/SEC-style top-down rate-setting regulation (US copyright law predated the FCC/SEC by over a century).
Third, the reporter mentions Balaji Srinivasan of Andreessen Horowitz, but neglects to say whether he changed his mind and is "letting go." I heard Srinivasan speak three days ago in Palo Alto, and I suspect he hasn't. The reporter quotes YC's own Sam Altman as speaking dismissively about seasteading, but never said he's changed his mind (as far as I know Altman always held that opinion). You might as well quote Democrats talking about Hillary Clinton one day and Republicans the next and claim Americans are "letting go" of that presidential candidate.
Maybe seasteads will never happen, maybe the darknet will never be robust, maybe we'll never get to Mars, and maybe there's a case to be made that Silicon Valley is "letting go" of these dreams. But this article failed to make it.
Headline is: "A hacker site says it has discovered the apps Mark Cuban loves - and those he doesn't"
Link to discussion about that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9553236
Note this version of the story has a different headline: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-apps-mark-cubans-loves-an...
The discussion that sparked this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549236
Thanks for your explanation! Though in your hypothetical Carla uses Gmail, and Google supports SMTP TLS. So the email would be encrypted in transit to Google's servers.
The problem, which the previous poster may be alluding to, is when a lavaboom user emails a non-PGP user with an account at an email provider that fails to support SMTP TLS. When I wrote about this for CNET two years ago, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL did not support it: http://www.cnet.com/news/how-web-mail-providers-leave-door-o...
Now it looks like all three of those companies do, so the question is: Which providers still fail to, two years post-Snowden disclosures?
There are plenty of document-processing startups that help with what lawyers call e-discovery. There are also some startups that will help you do some standard legal tasks, like incorporate in Delaware and issue stock. I think one of those is Clerky, a YC-funded company. Avvo is a matchmaking/profile aggregation startup that comes to mind.
I worked with Fenwick and West to incorporate https://recent.io/, in part because I've had a relationship with them for a few years. But I see why people today use Clerky and pay ~15% as much.
A few other thoughts:
* Lawyers are some of the most conservative and risk-averse professionals you'll find. So it will take a while for any newfangled innovations to become adopted.
* Those "enormous fees" are already being whittled down as part of a multi-decade shift away from Big Law in its traditional form, including fixed fees rather than hourly rates.
* Bar associations act as a cartel and try to restrict competition. Nolo, which publishes self-help software and books, was actually sued for daring to compete with lawyers ("Unauthorized Practice of Law"): http://blog.nolo.com/blog/2011/04/11/the-brief-story-of-texa...
* When you want tailored advice, a website with a bunch of forms (even forms created by smart lawyers) is likely insufficient. I know one trust attorney in the SF bay area who told me she had to figure out how to handle cryopreservation after some Silicon Valley execs wanted it; that required original research. When you're in a situation where mistakes can cost you millions, hiring an attorney for tailored advice is cheap insurance.
If your threat model predicts a high probability of nuclear war, civilization-threatening pandemics, or other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, you should probably move to a defensible rural homestead with solar panels, a long growing season, and a fresh water supply -- that's an hour away from the nearest interstate. I hear the intermountain west is nice this time of year.
What's interesting is that few prepper/survivalist discussions -- that I've seen, maybe I'm missing them -- mention the opportunity costs of moving to the backwoods. I interviewed Y2K prepper/survivalists who quit their jobs and followed approximately the above advice. The problem arises when the collapse, well, doesn't happen. And you're two hours (in the summer) and six hours (in the winter) from the nearest emergency room.
Also once you sell that city condo or suburban house and move to your self-sufficient rural homestead, you then have a strong incentive to predict the collapse is coming. Maybe it's not going to be Y2K after all, but how about suitcase nukes in big cities? Or bioterror? Etc. There's also a subset of religious survivalists who seem to want an ungodly and immoral secular society to meet its doom; I wrote about this for Wired here: http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/1719...
As for advice, other posts in this thread have offered good suggestions. In general I would look for ways to expand your potential list of acquaintances who could potentially become romantic partners: you may have been used to coming into constant contact with new people your age in college, but in the real world, that's not the norm. So learn to salsa dance. Learn to sail. Go on group bike rides.
Our ability to help you beyond generic advice is limited because you didn't include key details, like where you live, how old you are, what nationality you are (you don't sound like a native English speaker), what you do for a living, or even what sex you are. If you want better advice, be more forthcoming.
We've known about the NSA's illegal domestic surveillance of Americans' phone records via leaks for almost a decade. USA Today disclosed it in May 2006, and there were congressional hearings, etc. (I wrote about it for CNET at the time as well): http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.h...
But it wasn't until Edward Snowden leaked the actual secret court orders -- which the executive branch was forced to acknowledge were legitimate -- that the lawsuits could be filed, which resulted in today's ruling that the domestic surveillance is illegal. (The court held that NSA's phone "metadata program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized and therefore violates §215.")
Three other thoughts:
* What's been made public about the Patriot Act 215 metadata program refers only to metadata collection of Americans' phone calls. There's no reason to think that 215 domestic surveillance is limited to phone calls -- phone companies including VZ, AT&T, etc. rolled over for the Feds on phone metadata. Why wouldn't they turn over email metadata as well? (DOJ previously confirmed that 215 "has been used to obtain driver's license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like.") http://www.justice.gov/nsd/justice-news-0
* DNI James Clapper lied to Congress about the existence of NSA's 215 phone metadata vacuum. I wonder how things would have turned out differently if he had told the truth? (On the other hand, he never got fired for it and still has his job.)
* Now that an appeals court has ruled that NSA illegally used Patriot Act 215 to vacuum up Americans' phone metadata, I guess we don't need to worry about renewing it?
I don't own a plane but have in the post thought idly about commuting to the SF bay area from the Sierras. I've heard of pilots doing it from Pine Mountain Lake in the foothills, for instance, and a faster plane would make living in Nevada doable.
Trade-A-Plane lists 145 Cessnas for sale under $30K, though most in that range are 152s. There are a few older 172s: http://www.trade-a-plane.com/detail/aircraft/Single+Engine+P...
It would be nice to have the additional capacity of a 172, especially if you want to (a) fly with two friends, for three people total or (b) you're a large or heavy person yourself, which might exceed the maximum payload of a 152 with a similarly large or heavy flight instructor or passenger. Also I don't think 152s can be IFR certified.
It is kinda funny that these older Cessnas are now cheaper than the average car! Anyway, good luck on your project!
But if you're willing to live that far from work and can find water and a nice lot, I'd give it a try. Also with a private pilot certificate you could fly an older ~$20K Cessna from South County or Hollister to KSQL pretty quickly on most days -- certainly a fraction of your effective groundspeed in 101 traffic -- and bike from there to work.
Google honors robots.txt but few site owners enable it because of the cost of delisting. By contrast, the cost of delisting from your specialized search engine is low, so you might see some of your content dry up.
In the U.S., at least, you do not have the legal right to connect to a site if the owner as requested that you stop -- see eBay v. Bidder's Edge. Fair use has nothing to do with that point (fair use deals with what use you can make of the information once you obtain it, not with any right to obtain it in the first place).
Talking to a lawyer is always good advice.
You can do this in the Bay Area itself, though in general the closer you want to be to a supermarket, bank, etc. the more you'll pay. If you're west of Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, Cupertino and cross the 280, you encounter rural areas very quickly. And if you head far enough into the hills, prices begin to fall rapidly relative to flatland prices.
Near Boulder Creek, for instance, you can get 2 acres for $52K that's three miles from a shopping area: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Lorenzo-Valley/0-HARMON-GULCH-...
That's 23 miles from Cupertino via route 17 and smaller roads. Of course it helps if you enjoy living in the middle of the woods!
I've posted about this concept on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437492