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jaksmit

137 karma · joined September 3, 2012

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jaksmit··on Eat Real Food
what gave you the idea that infant formula is "very healthy". definitely not the case for 99% of infant formula in the USA, it's full of canola oil and crap
jaksmit··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
dunno why the writer opted for this: "Our equity packages vest over 3 years instead of the industry standard 4-year period."

given it takes a long time to build companies; so on the contrary, many startups are instead opting for like 6 year windows.

"We allow employees to exercise options up to 10 years after they leave instead of 90 days." - the reason that 90 days is more standard is that it's more tax effective than having options exercisable for 10 years, though many companies are making a compromise on this recently

jaksmit··on Felt
i just tried to create a map and it didn’t even support searching by gps coordinates

how therefore am i supposed to find a place i’ve identified on google maps?

jaksmit··on Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research
thanks and thanks for the headsup!
jaksmit··on Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research
Here is a reply to this tweet thread, posted on behalf of an incarcerated person (christopherhavensmath.com):

"I don't quite agree with much of what is said, but it does also have some truth to it.

The fact is that many people publishing thesis papers are not publishing in major journals and so often have many errors. As well, one can publish a paper that is never refereed by experts in that field at all. Those are disreputable papers. It is our responsibility as mathematicians to pay attention of where the work that we build from comes from. When publishing work, there is a system which ranks the integrity of the academic journals, and my method involves beginning at the best quality journal that is relevant to your work.. the referees attack the paper and send you feedback, possibly rejecting your paper. Then you make adjustments according to their feedback and either resubmit to them, repeating the process, or you submit to the next best journal. After being rejected so many times, your article strengthens more and more until the best possible journal accepts your work.

This method assures that the quality of your work reflects the quality of the publishing journal. My first paper went down the list three notches and landed on a high level journal. But the process of submission was brutal and lasted over two years. There are no gaps in our work (Myself and my 3 coauthors). Rather there are gaps in the understanding of the concepts that immediately surround our work.

When we submit work, often we continue studying in that field and learn rather quickly that our submitted work could have been much better in the sense that you wish you would have included things that are obvious upon countless reviews of your own work. In this sense, good work can have gaps, but that does not necessarily mean that the submission contained errors.

But of course there are many papers out there published through websites or some other means that have zero academic value. The best thing to do is make sure that any research paper you use or reference comes from a reputable journal.

There is one thing to keep in mind... probably the most important part. We research for many reasons. Part of it for me is that research represents the pursuit of beauty. If you're doing math for the reason of adding another notch to your ladder towards academic elitism, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. We are the chasers of mathematical beauty. When we find such beauty the hard part is expressing it flawlessly in the form of human knowledge."

jaksmit··on Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research
If anyone is interested in number theory and would like to help some incarcerated people that are working on a number theory paper:

I'm a director of the Prison Math Project: http://prisonmathproject.org/

We have a few advanced mathematicians in jail who don't have access to computers. They need help with formatting their work in LaTeX and stuff like that to make it ready for publication (credit offered).

They have previously co-authored some papers from within jail eg

"Linear Fractional Transformations And Nonlinear Leaping Convergents Of Some Continued Fractions"

"Math And Art In Prison: A Collaborative Effort Across The Ocean"

please reach out if any interest in helping them.

jaksmit··on Just Be Rich
yes. look at France
jaksmit··on New online bookshop unites indies
check out discoverbooks.com - the cheapest used book site i’ve found. by far

sold books as cheap as like $2 and with free shipping

jaksmit··on Email to Former Board Member
the name has leaked. It's Craig Shapiro from Collaborative Fund and Craig has replied on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/cshapiro/status/1317212694529802242

jaksmit··on Rippling’s funding round gives founder second unicorn chance
that's the same with many startups, that you'd need to work longer and for less salary. but more potential upside on equity. they would have been telling you that the equity could be worth more in the future if they IPO etc. not that it'd be worth more in this round of funding.
jaksmit··on Rippling’s funding round gives founder second unicorn chance
I'd argue that it's almost certainly NOT valued on a multiple of revenue at this stage. still a lot about the founder, market size, story etc
jaksmit··on VCs Are Destructive Predators
Pretty useless, over-generalizing piece.

I wouldn't have been able to build my startup to the size it became without venture capital support.

jaksmit··on VCs Are Destructive Predators
yeah and PE is not VC...
jaksmit··on AngelList lays off a number of staff and cuts executive salaries
Naval isn't CEO any more
jaksmit··on How I targeted the Reddit CEO with Facebook ads to get an interview at Reddit
Here’s how i did something similar a few years ago, using Linkedin ads:

https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000

jaksmit··on Slack refunds customers 100x amount paid during outage
100x the price paid "during the period Slack was down" probably doesn't amount to much money. E.g. if you're down for an hour, that would likely void the SLA, but refunding for 100 hours is not much money vs how much a company would pay each month.
jaksmit··on Chicago-based RXBar sells to Kellogg for $600M
QuestNutrition does multiples more revenue than RXBar. Hundreds of millions in revenue (over $400m): https://mixergy.com/interviews/quest-nutrition-with-tom-bily...
jaksmit··on Chicago-based RXBar sells to Kellogg for $600M
6x revenue has been a standard multiple for other exits in the health foods space. Including things like Epic Protein Bars, which was bought by General Mills.
jaksmit··on Dyslexia
this example is extremely over generalized. Dyslexia comes in different forms and can manifest through a varience in ability on a scale of things, including math ability, remembering a sequence of numbers backwards etc. not everyone who is dyslexic has impairments with regards to seeing symbols order reading. I'm diagnosed as dyslexic but don't experience any of what's described here.
jaksmit··on Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Decision Making, Habits [audio]
Naval is one of the top spiritual and investing thought-leaders in silicon valley
jaksmit··on The Great Suspender: Free up memory by suspending inactive Chrome tabs
The Great Suspender has been around for a long time; I posted it to Product Hunt ~2 years ago: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/the-great-suspender

it's pretty good. I don't really use the auto mode much, but I use it to manually kill tabs (can be faster than killing via the task manager)

jaksmit··on The House Fund, a new seed fund for UC Berkeley
Jeremy hustled really hard to raise this fund. I look forward to seeing the awesome investments that he makes
jaksmit··on Magic+
@cmikec it wasn't just split tests on the messaging. if you signed up last week you ONLY got texts telling you to sign up to a payment plan. If you sign up today then it offers you the paid version OR the free version
jaksmit··on Magic+
I tweeted about this last week and was surprised no one else noticed sooner: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2F_...

their roll out of this pivot has been a disaster:

1) Last week the homepage was saying it was free: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v7ctgeakcya1wi/1.png?dl=0 but when you signed up it asked you to pay $100/hr or $3000 a month

2) Then yesterday they updated the homepage to say it was a paid ONLY service: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t01zei3j9k6e99f/2.png?dl=0

3) Now today they've updated the homepage wording to say it's free OR paid: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5qlrt6vfzsigda0/3.png?dl=0

Venturebeat did a post on the pivot: http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/magic-to-start-charging-10...

jaksmit··on Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) Is Valued at $1B in New Funding Round
for one, you don't know how the environment and access to capital might change. So it might make sense to take some cash whilst it's available.
jaksmit··on Slack Platform Launch
Kind of funny for people to say that a new startup launching a fund means there's a bubble. That's exactly what Twilio have been doing even since 2010: https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-som...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-lau... http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-launches-50-million-deve...

jaksmit··on Ask HN: What visa do foreign YC founders use to stay in US beyond 3 months?
"RFE process ("request for evidence" – when USCIS asks you to provide more information) always occurs"

this is not true. I got my O-1 visa without any RFE.

jaksmit··on A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment
@woof : I'm pretty sure that running ads with the person's face who you want to target isn't how linkedin intended their ad-system to be used!
jaksmit··on A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment
@bmir-alum-007 : sure, you have some good points. Don't worry, I haven't bought a Ferrari.
jaksmit··on A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment
I'm not sure if it's 'legally' allowed. It's almost definitely against LinkedIn's terms of service I'd imagine though!

I'd think that with anything like this; if it were illegal, then likely the individual themselves would have to sue me. Hopefully they wouldn't want to take it that far once I explained to them that I was just targeting them and trying to get their attention etc. Certainly for Thomas, Vungle turned out to be quite a good investment thus far and a nice story, so I hope he wont sue me ;)

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