its_so_on

"he was telling you how to match colors and hold a brush"

You have no cause to complain here in this analogy. Either quit or happily let him tell you how to match colors and hold a brush, and if he tells you to paint like the sloppy kids across the street, that's now your job.

You're not painting for the City while having a superior, or for "shareholders" or to "build a good house" or "build a good company" (that this is a metaphor for) - you're painting for him. If you don't want to do it like he says, you would leave (or quote more money for putting up with his childishness.)

in other words: if you hire a personal cook you get to tell him what to cook, and he doesn't get to tell you what you should be eating instead.

You and the original poster are completely wrong and misunderstanding the situation.

"The CEO founded the 30 person company, and there are no other investors- it's all his money", if true, means that he's not CEO (in the startup sense) at all - he's the owner.

"Anyone have any advice on how to tell a CEO with no superiors to let everyone do their jobs?"

Their job is to do whatever he wants. If he wants you to hire three people to do interpretive dance in front of a web cam and put it up, go ahead.

As long as he's the whole owner, you should act like you're being paid to paint his house. Whatever he wants, as long as he's paying the checks. If you can't do what he asks or don't want to at that price, quote the price you'll do it for or leave. If you can do what he asks for the price he's paying, do whatever he says.

It's his house.

I'll give you a piece of advice (take it for whatever you want) that you're not likely to get elsewhere.

People aren't stupid.

The dominant model in many online ventures is that in some sense the "user is the product", which they're selling to companies. There will be a huge natural push on you to sell a part in your user's "decisions" - you need to resist this, and then you will be ahead of 99.97% of web sites in your sector.

The term "Your trusted advisor" is all but meaningless online. Make yours have meaning. Then, you are not competing with the rest of the Internet (well, maybe with 0.03% of your niche) but instead with real trusted people, like financial advisers.

There is a lot of money there, and the Internet isn't getting any of it, because whereas people (rightly) pay for people in real life that they trust, people (rightly) don't go online for the same thing.

I doubt very much that Groupon has that kind of moolah to be throwing around :) Let's just leave it at that.

(In my original comment, I considered including that the biggest risk to the business plan is Groupon, and that therefore the business plan should include hedging or insuring against non-payment for groupon reasons. But thought that was too mean-spirited and negative; I hope groupon does well sustainably and indefinitely - by helping small businesses, not at their expense.)

There's gotta be a business here to lend immediately successful groupon victims money at a high rate before they go bankrupt for cash-flow issues.

I know it often "seems too good to be true" if a business tells you that it just needs a little working capital - but in this case they even have the collateral of the groupon money that will be coming in, which they can send proof of.

cash flow problems are situations where potentially an annual 200% interest rate is something a business would jump on: in two months that's only 33% interest rate with the alternative of losing everything due to their "great" campaign, and in this case they already have the money in accounts receivable from groupon.

a good article push with "how to survive a successful groupon campaign" that promotes the service ought to get some traffic.

on 'our' side, I need to point out that the high interest rate is not fleecing - really - as there is incredibly high immediate risk here, which is why the businesses can't simply get a bank loan. The point is that these are all-or-nothing situations that depend on cash-flow, and businesses have demonstrably nothing they can do. This market is not being served - there are no 200% interest rate loans for businesses that desperately need working capital at pretty much any cost.

so, the niche here is that a bank wouldn't look at the collateral of imminent groupon checks, but we can, since we understand the extent of the problem.

why not? is this a real market? doable? thoughts?

Maybe you're right.

I will just say that if it were me in this situation, I would never in a million years go on an art appraiser's word that I 'can't' sell it, without even asking the appropriate agency.

I did miss it, because you made that last part up. You would be completely right if the article said "Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum and not sold." But I just added the last three words. They're not in the article.

So, a special dispensation from FWS was required for them to continue possessing it. Which is illegal. So, ask for a special dispensation from the FWS to sell it to the museum. Which is illegal.

They have every reason to believe they will get it. Read between the lines.

Where do you get the idea that museums wouldn't or couldn't purchase the work, assuming this purchase is OK'd by the government first - which given the history here and the work in question the family can easily count on?

Your comment doesn't make sense in light of the fact that the family was forced to put the work on display, which doesn't sound like they "can do the other trappings of ownership but No One Else Can".

The article says: "Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto 'Canyon', Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981. {P} Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed...before the 1940 law went into effect. Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum. The piece is on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Mr. Lerner said insures it, but the policy details are confidential."

This does not sound to me like it matches what you are saying at all. Quite to the contrary, it sounds like this work is quite special and important and for this reason was given these exemptions - this makes it quite likely for a sale to a museum to be approved, and the family has every reason to believe this.

So we must return to why you would say that a museum wouldn't or couldn't buy it (after saying earlier in your comment that museums were allowed to own such works, though the article does not make this blanket statement.)

I thought like you until the middle of the article, in the place I quoted. It's not that they have no way of making money off of it - they are only saying that. I would believe it if they got a letter from the wildlife agency saying, oh, no, we are only exempting your possession: we can't extend it to your selling to a museum. But that's clearly not the situation. They obviously have every ability to sell to, e.g. the museum currently displaying it, and it will be approved.

they're trying to use a technicality - that it's "technically" illegal. don't do that. if they were serious they wouldn't even possess it, since that's "illegal" too. read the article carefully to see what I mean.

another question. If the IRS values it at so far above its true price, can't they simply donate it and write off the inflated price - which come straight from the IRS - off of the taxes they owe on real-value, non-contraband works they also inherited? (they're not even allowed to "possess" this work under the law.)

Likewise if in an inheritance I got a stone that the IRS decided was an anti-tiger stone worth $100m, couldn't I just donate it to a non-profit tiger research institute, write it off of things I got with real non-baloney market value, and the IRS simply loses out due to their inflated price on the baloney good?

Doesn't the IRS acting like a joke with overvaluations cut both ways? (assuming there's real value somewhere that's worth keeping if you write off the taxes on it.)

i.e. if the irs's valuation on something happened to be inflated by vast multiples - as people in this thread are saying happens from time to time - then can't you donate that and write it off of things that they aren't inflating?

You miss that the article says it is a crime to possess or even transport the piece. This is like arguing that if you can't sell it without double parking, it's worth $0 and you don't owe taxes.

genuine question: if it's so great and the capital of a rich country, why is it so cheap? (e.g. what you mentioned about apartments in the city center.)

It's simply not true that it has no expectation of ever being able to be sold. The piece is already on loan to a museum and displayed there - the sale to a museum (perhaps the one displaying it) for its permanent collection is something they should fully expect to be approved. They are trying to skirt the law on a technicality.

A letter from the Fish & Wildlife Service stating they can't sell it to a museum - even though it's already on display in one - is what would show this; but if they asked, they would not get that letter - they would be told they could, for the same reason that they could keep it. (Because this is a famous, exceptional, well-known piece that is attested as being produced before the law that made it illegal.) The conditions would be the same - it would have to go in a museum.

You have to realize that under the law you're quoting it's illegal to POSSESS as well. This is what changed my opinion of the case.

So the family is saying "it's illegal to own or sell", so we'll just do the former since we already got approval but we'll say we can't do the latter, and won't even try to get approval.

Personally, I think they should put the price that a museum would pay (and not a recluse billionaire) and which they would expect the Fish & Wildlife Service to approve. Or they can ask for that approval, which the article doesn't show them doing. If they asked and the Fish & Wildlife Service said, weirdly, "you can keep it - as long as it is on display in a museum - but you can't sell it to that museum" then the article, and you, would have a case.

This article got a whole lot less interesting with the sentence: "In this instance, the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act make it a crime to possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, import or export any bald eagle — alive or dead. Indeed, the only reason Mrs. Sonnabend was able to hold onto “Canyon,” Mr. Lerner said, was due to an informal nod from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981."

This is a piece of artwork it's apparently "just as illegal" merely to own. (i.e. illegal under the same clause of federal law.)

Suddenly it sounds like they found some obscure law to value it at $0, and that they would not get in trouble for actually selling it. Rather than appraisers in on the heist, perhaps they should have written to the Fish and Wildlife Service to ask if they can sell the thing to pay the taxes on it. The reason they didn't do that is they didn't want to hear the answer, yes. They want their cake and to eat it, too. (Keep the work but not pay taxes).

I'm not sure I agree with the existence of this kind of tax, but the case isn't as clear as the title and first half of the article make it sound.

Even then, the government revisited the issue in 1998. Rauschenberg himself had to send a notarized statement attesting that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect. Mrs. Sonnabend was then able to retain ownership as long as the work continued to be exhibited at a public museum. The piece is on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Mr. Lerner said insures it, but the policy details are confidential.

this is respected art with a high market value. They should not have put $0 as its value.

take-home lesson: don't do that.

I wrote out "Every even integer >2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes" on a sheet of paper.

We'll see if staring produces a proof.

Edit: had some interesting thoughts but after 20 minutes the goldbach conjecture remains...unproven :)

Also this is Google, so it would be so out of character that it contradicts every single thing anyone has ever learned about Google first-hand, second-hand, or third-hand. This is not how you make a conspiracy theory.

just want to point out that the "entropy of 38 bits" comes from the researchers - the first character has entropy of 2.5 bits but not all 30-length 'passwords' are valid, only a very small number of them, according to the researchers.

38-bit keys/passwords are not secure by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how they are chosen. (i.e. even the best random number generator on Earth doesn't help if you can just try every possibility in minutes.)

This is a sensationalist headline, and this is not a strong password length. Based on the information in the article, this is really equivalent to a "strong" 5-character password - not very secure.

It's not "30-character unbreakable cryptography", you can crack it in minutes on your phone or desktop.

Technical details:

The article actually says that each 'character' you learn is one of only 6 possibilties - for only 2.5 bits per character and total entropy of 38 bits.

To see how woefully little entropy this is, if you code, try writing a program that counts to 2^38 - or on a 32-bit system go through the 4.2bn possible values of an integer 64 times. That's how many possible keys there are in a 38-bit password. It really just takes minutes - certainly far less than the 45 minutes the article says it takes to learn this password!

This guy's problem is that he thinks pixel-fitting is an appropriate technique at any resolution: it's not.

Apparently the "subset of popular browsers" it works on is the null set - it doesn't work on any browser on any operating system on any architecture, C2D or otherwise.

I'm curious why the HN title hasn't been updated yet.

my entire comment is about the name Ryno, which I assume is a homonym for "Rhino". And you ride it, even though it obviously looks dangerous and unstable.

Do you have any specific examples like that from BMW and HD? This wuold be like, I don't know, calling a plane "freefall". Sure there's a danger mystique - but should that be in the name?

Hey, you found me.

It's terrible branding, because it helps give the wrong impression.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1YoCfm7nxU&t=4m0s

It's a great tagline - if you're 15-19. Who wouldn't want to show their daring trying to ride a Ryno!

Answer: any of the people that would be actual early adopter buyers for this expensive new product. (Middle aged rich people.) Segway did it a lot better here, and Ryno needs to do like them.

Our society is awash with capital, but would you invest $4000 in exchange for 2% of some kid's "company" (unincorporated) for him to lease more hardware to complete his mission with the project? Of course not. "I'd need to hear a lot more" is the response here. There isn't "a lot more" (powerpoints, prospectus, business plan, market research, social proof, etc) unless the kid starts producing it - instead of working on his project.

If he chooses coding his project versus producing bullshit for you, the same kid has to go work at a grocery store or something and do some coding in his spare time. If he were serious about raising money, on the other hand, he basically couldn't work on his project at all while he does. Which is the same as raising money with no idea.

It's awash with money, but not to the people who have any immediate use for it to generate return. You will invest in a kid's powerpoint, his "team", his business "plan", no code, no project, but you wouldn't invest in a project, no powerpoint.

So "our society is awash with capital" to whoever learns to say the right things to get it - which is pretty much the opposite skill of doing something that actually requires any.

Hence the importance of "super-angels", who go against this grain, who will invest in and mentor the kid while letting him actually code instead of making him refine bullshit instead!

Every day we hear of teams who have raised $50-$200k, where neither of the cofounders is capable of producing anything but bullshit. They literally can't make anything. When was the last time you heard of a kid who made a project and scaled it by continuing to work on it instead of learning to spew bullshit?

Honestly, there is almost no money for anyone who is working on something, unless they quadruple their investment of time and personal risk to bring the project failure rate up to 95% as they jeapordize working on it it in order to 'raise money' instead. Our society - and, specifically - you, reward people who say what you want to hear to get money, and finding out what you want to hear takes a lot of time and has nothing to do with working on anything else.

Not me, I think it's great. For once you can run firefox, as opposed to some specific version you downloaded eons ago - the 90's model of software.

This is some pretty risky naming. It makes me think, "Cause of death: thrown trying to ride a Ryno."

That would work if it were an energy drink - but this thing will be in traffic, which really is a major cause of death.

I mean it doesn't exactly say stability and easy of riding, does it? (Which are the main reasons that people who aren't being gimmicky don't choose unicycles over bicycles.)

With a name like this it would attract a suicidal/desperado crowd, which usually doesn't invest in its future long enough to have much money at any one time. (i.e. you can't target early adopters at a premium price with this naming/branding, which is usually the key to marketing something like this successfully and getting it adopted widely as you learn how to make it better and roll out on scale.)

I would change the name.

This is not flippant, but if you think about it, it's what separates us from animals.

In other words:

The problem with English is that most of the people speaking it, writing it, or teaching it - collectively what I shall call the 'fringe' - could not so much as pen a tolerable introduction to a Penguin Classics paperback.

This is 2012, people. Programming isn't just a profession, it's an everyday skill that everyone should learn, regardless of how badly. PHP is a great enabler for this - and I endorse this direction completely.

Do you intend to pay for access, or just go with whatever crap people send you for free?