estreeper

I might add a #11 on to this: ensure that the financial incentives of your platform align with those of your creators.

I think that a lot of problems arise for creators when these are not aligned, for instance, in many advertising-driven models. YouTube, which has received a lot of creator backlash, will always be pressured financially to serve the needs of advertisers first, since they are the ones putting money into the system. YouTube doesn't want to do things that are bad for creators, but creators are not their primary customers.

Another example of misalignment is the case of Spotify, who sold significant stakes to the major record labels to bring them on board. CEO Daniel Ek says (probably sincerely) that they want to help one million artists live off of their art. Spotify renewed its deal with Universal Music Group in July, and Ek, in a podcast [1] last year, in spite of repeating the one million artists goal, went on to discuss their desire to provide additional services to the labels, which would seemingly run counter to this in favor of preserving existing power structures.

Some of this must also be a scale problem: once you reach a certain size and have made deals with big existing players to get there, you need to serve their interests because the risk of losing them is too great.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/

What a tremendous loss to the startup community and to the world.

Tony was an innovator not just in terms of product vision, as almost all successful founders have to be, but also in the very idea of what business should be.

It is striking to me that this happened the same day as pg's essay on thinking differently from your peers came out, as I can imagine no greater example. As founders we spend time thinking about how our product can change the way things are done, but the way that companies themselves are structured and run is largely formulaic and taken for granted. This makes Tony truly special, as someone who decided to rethink what a company should be and how it should impact people's lives.

Even before Zappos he was wildly successful: the first company he co-founded, LinkExchange, sold to Microsoft for $265MM in 1998. In spite of this, he lived in a trailer in Las Vegas. He just didn't think about things in the way most people do.

He is, and will continue to be, an example and inspiration to look to for any founder, especially those who have a nagging feeling that the way companies are run should be better. May he rest in peace.

> there are still limits to what can be done with a mobile web browser

This is true, but perhaps not as many as some may think! Progressive Web Applications can now do quite a lot on mobile and tablets, with a notable exception of push notifications on iOS.

They are an increasingly interesting option for those whose use case allows it.

https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-suppor...

Manure and synthetic fertilizer both have similarly severe, but somewhat different, environmental impacts. Synthetic fertilizer requires large amounts of energy to produce, but manure generally needs to be applied much more inefficiently to achieve the same effect because of its relatively low nitrogen content and the inability to control its release. It also has transportation issues [1].

However, these types of impacts are trivial in comparison to the 1.9% energy efficiency for beef. Regardless of the fertilizer used, we would use just under 1/50th of it if we consumed the plants directly, along with the same savings in land and water.

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/to-cut-nitrogen-polluti...

I know that this is an incredibly difficult time for you, but I want to congratulate you on your remarkable achievements.

You've put $670,000 into the pockets of your partners, because of an app that you built. But that's just a multiplier of course, because it supported those same partners contributing to projects that benefit all of us. That impact is massive.

Just as remarkable, you did all of this in a way that respected your core beliefs of preserving the privacy of the people seeing your ads.

There are few companies like yours. Well done.

Could you elaborate on what your experience was and the pushback you received? It would also be interesting to hear a bit more about what you built!

Receiving investment, or not, or making money, or not, has nothing to do with whether or not a company is a "startup" (at least in the YC sense).

Startup = Growth

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I would just point out there are very valid use cases for these things, i.e. push notifications are very useful to me (from certain apps). The problem is one of consent.

> First employees should get ~1% equity, more if it's an employee-owned co-op.

I would be interested if anyone knows more about how the co-op idea would work, also assuming you took investment. Would a corporation be formed as well as a co-op, and the co-op would be a shareholder in the corporation?

> their UI has sucked

Would you be willing to elaborate on what you find frustrating? We're doing work in a similar area.

> one time payment of $2,000 to $5,000

Wow, that is very expensive.

> But as for places that are solidly in the comcast network, no

There are a couple of things which, if they happened, I think could make SpaceX very competitive.

The first is if they could drastically cut the price to consumers. The cheapest Comcast plan in my area (New Mexico, USA) is $75/month. If they offered something like $15 for 15 Mbps I think a lot of people (including me!) would buy it. This would put pressure on Comcast to cut prices (and their margins).

The second would be making a much better product. Imagine being able to take your internet with you wherever you go. I could climb up a mountain, open my laptop, and start working. That sounds pretty appealing.

WISPs sound really interesting, and thanks for all this info!

Great points, but...

> This is by no means going to hurt Comcast.

Well, it could, couldn't it? Satellite internet does have the potential to make regional pseudo-monopolies go away, which means Comcast now has price competition. Even if speeds end up being much lower, it will still be plenty fast for lots of people, and the price will be the determining factor.

At the very least, I think this will force Comcast to lower their prices and/or be better.

I have a startup in a state which is very much a flyover: so much so that our license plates read "New Mexico, USA", to assure people that we are, in fact, part of the union.

I moved from LA to Santa Fe a year and a half ago and started a company. Was able to buy a 3 bedroom house, big yard, nice neighborhood, walking distance to restaurants, brewpubs, and a grocery store for ~$1500/month, and got a couple roommates which puts our monthly cost at $400. That's a lot of runway.

There is a lot of underutilized talent here since there aren't a lot of traditional jobs, and we have two national labs within an hour of us (Los Alamos and Sandia) that feed in a steady supply of engineers and scientists.

All of this has created a startup scene both here and in Albuquerque an hour away filled with companies doing really interesting things, none of which are trying to build the next great way to deliver more ads to people. And being able to get outside the city in 20 minutes to go hiking, skiing, etc. is pretty amazing after working through LA commutes.

There are things I miss about LA (the ocean!), but there are just so many advantages to having a startup here that now I couldn't see it any other way.

> I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.

Just like any social platform, I think the advantage of using Meetup is that you'll get to a different audience than Facebook. In my case I've found the audience for Meetup to be smaller (i.e. far fewer RSVPs) but much more engaged, perhaps as a byproduct of the sheer volume of things on Facebook making it harder for yours to stand out. The breakdown of where attendees come from is roughly 30/50/20 Meetup/FB/Email, and the incremental time for me to post in all these places is very small.

The pricing is, as you say, odd, and I too have run into the frustration of expanding a single group to a neighboring city without wanting to drastically increase costs.

As far as finding spaces, I've found that local bars/restaurants/coffee shops are usually quite happy to host events during off-times like Monday through Wednesday nights. I always ask nicely, thank them in the event description, during the event, and in an email after, and try to go out of my way to make things easier for them (checking in with estimated attendees a few days before, helping put chairs back in order afterward, etc.) It's nice because these places are inherently social so people feel more comfortable talking, you don't have to worry about food/drink, and it brings attention to community-minded businesses.

> Are there any examples of a full blown GraphQL server

Sure! But here's the thing to know: the meat of a GraphQL server is in the schema. Every server implementation you see will have you define a schema, and then will execute queries against it. I would do the setup for the implementation in the language of your choice (instructions for which is usually listed in the README of the git repo), and then take a look at example schema, the most famous of which is the Star Wars schema:

For JS: https://github.com/jahewson/graphql-starwars

For Python (Graphene): https://github.com/graphql-python/graphene/tree/master/examp...

> interpreting complex queries as SQL/NoSQL queries in a performant way

Something which is often confusing is that GraphQL is completely database agnostic. However you were fetching data from your database of choice before, you will continue to do. GraphQL has you define types (i.e. a user type, a blog post type, etc.), and then you tell it how to fetch that data. It could be a library for SQL, NoSQL, or even another API.

I'm not understanding the point you're trying to make. The article you posted states clearly that fossil fuels are the largest net contributor (4-5 gigatons/year) to atmospheric carbon:

"Before the industrial revolution, the main source of fluctuation in atmospheric carbon was from changes in biomass and soil organic carbon. Now, fossil fuel burning is the greatest factor in atmospheric carbon fluctuations."

Lots of carbon is absorbed into the soil and lots is released as part of the normal carbon cycle, with the net effect being:

"The soil organic matter pool is currently losing about 1 to 2 gigatons of carbon per year to the atmospheric pool."

> Erosion is not the result of global warming

If global warming causes more droughts, and droughts cause soil loss, then isn't global warming contributing to erosion?

> Still working hard on a searchable database

This would be very valuable for us, because as far as I know there is essentially no systematic way to locate these. We have a product which is meant to be of use to many niche audiences, making them difficult to find. We are very early stage, and are just now getting some initial partners to work with and looking for ways to market the service to initial customers (in the thousands).

I would most prefer a marketplace where I would know up front how much it would cost to sponsor a newsletter. Without that, my concern would be friction in dealing with lots of small organizations directly, though we would still be willing to do this at our stage. If payments are happening through the site perhaps you would just take a cut, but alternately if this worked reasonably well and had a fair amount of newsletters for us to find, I would probably pay $10-15/month to use it.

Actually no, in contrast to Spotify, they generally secure licenses for content for a flat fee and a 1-3 year time frame. It doesn't matter how much content is actually viewed, other than Netflix deciding whether it's worth trying to renew or not.

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062515/how-ne...

> I think you overestimate how willing someone is to sit in a small car with 3 other strangers

Why not just keep your partition up between you and the other passengers? Because no human driver needs visibility out all of the windows, you can split the car into private spaces. When no driver is needed, it opens up a lot of different configurations.

Half a dozen commands will get you 90% of the way there. After you've run tmux:

  ctrl+b followed by...
  % - split pane vertically
  " - split pane horizontally
  arrow keys - change pane you're typing in
  :new-window
  2 - switch to window 2
  x - kill pane
  d - detach

Command line arguments:

  tmux list-sessions
  tmux attach #will attach to last session by default
  tmux attach -t0 #will attach to session 0

> What if I don't love writing web apps in RoR and just want a friggin job? I shouldn't send you a resume at all?

Probably not. If someone is doing something they don't like, they tend to stop doing it so well as time goes on. While it may work out for a while, people usually need to care at some level about what they're doing to do a good job. Not everyone, sure, but I wouldn't take the chance.

There is also a lot more to working than just doing a job. Working around people who don't care about their work is demoralizing.

I can definitely see this happening today, but I wouldn't consider that anything malicious, just very different culturally. I'm from the US, and wouldn't even be considered blond, but at some of the monuments it was like being a celebrity, and tons of people would want to take pictures with me. This happened perhaps 100 times in our one month there, and it was really strange at first.

I did also have people touch my arms and look at me with big grins on their faces. If you're not from a place where touching a stranger is acceptable, this can understandably be quite shocking until you get used to it. There are so many people in India that you'll find people with a wide variety of different customs and social norms.

> It could be classism and segregation, or there could be a higher incidence of theft and you got lucky

I can only speak from my personal experience, but I would attribute it more to the former. The advice I generally heard was that you should stick to the heavily developed areas, near your hotel, etc. We were abroad for about 4 months, and I always felt safest outside of the touristy, "nice" areas. Especially in India, you'll find many scammers (sometimes entire organized teams of them!) in the areas where there are lots of tourists because that's where all of the money is. But, I found that by walking often just a few blocks away from these areas you would be alone as a foreigner, and there wouldn't be mysterious people with excellent English following you around and trying to "befriend" you. I was definitely noticed, but people would be smiling, or shouting "hello!", or waving. I never felt threatened.

I felt very fortunate that I learned this lesson; we also met many people in India who had barely left their hostels because they were so stressed and afraid of dealing with the scammers who waited at all hours of the day and night in those areas. When they made it out they didn't go far: they went to the tourist-friendly places that could be found on TripAdvisor, but these places were also teeming with scammers. I think a lot of people end up missing out on India because of this and not liking it.

We were very lucky and none of us dealt with crime the whole trip. Of the travelers we met who had had stuff stolen though, it was in touristed areas, especially on beaches while they weren't paying close attention to their stuff (and/or very drunk).

We visited India last summer. We had been warned by other travelers, blogs, and even the Indian Railways employees, that we should stay with the higher class cars. When getting tickets from Agra (where the Taj Mahal is) to go north, they were one short for our group, so I volunteered to stay by myself in the lower (sleeper) class.

We got on the train around midnight, and I stumbled around looking for my berth. Everyone was asleep. An IR employee, who was genuinely happy that I was there, helped me find the spot. I was paranoid and alone in a train car filled with strangers.

The next morning, I felt like a fool for feeling that way. I awoke to find my 5 other cabin-mates sitting around the small central table, quietly talking so as not to disturb me. Suddenly we were all talking, even though I spoke almost no Hindi and they spoke almost no English, and they were all feeding me delicious home-cooked food that was unlike anything I had ever had. That experience was a demonstration of the power of technology to connect people in unexpected ways as well - we were showing each other maps of our home towns, pictures of my family and city, and translating hindi words on a smartphone as we made our way through rural India. One of my favorite experiences of the trip only happened because I couldn't get the ticket I wanted.

I think it's easy today to live in our own walled gardens, and being so connected means we don't need to move outside of them often - we'll just see our friends' posts, watch the stuff in our Netflix queues, and read the articles that we agree with. But, I still believe that sense of camaraderie with strangers is still there, based if nothing else on the fact that so many people crave it. We just have to move outside of our comfort zones and find it.

447KB transferred.

Confusingly, compulsory licensing (which is specific to the US) actually only refers to a new recording of a song, i.e., a cover version. If you want to use an original version, you still have to negotiate a license with the owner of the sound recording (usually the record company), because sound recordings have their own separate copyright. There wouldn't be an equivalent concept of a "cover" for a film, of course.

To reduce this class of errors, perhaps RFID tags could be used? If the medication is prepared in a low-distraction area and tagged there, then the person administering the medicine would scan the tag to make sure it's correct before going through with it. The person tagging the medication could still make a mistake, but it would be harder for everyone else, and perhaps during the tagging process some kind of automatic flagging could be employed if the medication doesn't seem to match the patient's problems.

I grew up in northern New Mexico, in an area where piñon and juniper trees grew together, dotting the landscape as far as you could see.

About 15 years ago, after years of drought causing tree weakness, we had a bark beetle epidemic. It affected only the piñon, but losses were close to 100% in many areas. We had probably around 150 piñon trees: after the epidemic, 4 remained. It was heartbreaking to drive around and see huge swaths of brown, dead trees covering the land. The alteration was dramatic.

Only now, the progeny of those dead trees are beginning to come back. It will still probably be another 20 years before things start to look normal to me. The makeup of our forests in California will be altered for a long time, in the best case.

I was curious how much more efficient, and it seems that a good measure is "well-to-wheels" efficiency, which encompasses the full cycle of fuel production through consumption. It turns out it depends a lot on how dirty energy production is, and the article I found [0] (from 2012) argues that for greenhouse gas emissions for the U.S. population:

- 18% will have lower impact with an efficient gasoline car

- 37% will have about the same impact with EVs or efficient gasoline cars

- 45% will be better off with EVs

So, if you live in an area that uses a lot of coal for production, the benefit is not likely to be large on greenhouse gas emissions, but localized pollution becomes less of a problem, though in many countries (like China) large populations live near power plants anyways. However,

> power production can be slowly transitioned to cleaner

This is an important argument, since the impact of cleaner generation is further leveraged by the amount of EVs out there.

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/automobiles/how-green-are-...