jayjay71

I was wondering when someone was going to mention Proto Labs.

I don't have nearly as much experience as you, but I think you make a great point. I tried Plethora about a year ago and was disappointed it couldn't make a single part I needed, and that it had such limited materials.

Although I wish Plethora the best, they do seem to have fallen into the mindset of thinking they're different when they appear to be reinventing the wheel (and making it worse). My guess is Animats has it right and they're hoping to get acquired by Autodesk. I'm surprised how many startups today are designed solely to be acquired (I doubt Plethora started with this mindset), and if they fail at that then they have zero chance of going public as they have no chance of sustaining profits.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong and they know something I don't. I always love to be proven wrong by someone succeeding.

hyperMILL is absolutely fantastic for complicated projects, but like you said it is usually overkill.

This was a while ago so I don't remember the specifics, but the reason the conversion was special is the lawyer was able to do it in a few days instead of several months. These issues are specific to Pennsylvania, which has really awful corporate law. Supposedly all of these things are trivial for other states, but I'm just speaking from personal experience (and of course I mostly listened to what the lawyers told me, but I have every reason to believe they were extremely good at what they do).

Yes, you can register an LLC or C Corp in any state, but the reason people do things a certain way is usually because of taxes. You don't want to get double taxed (the specifics are nuanced and vary from state to state).

If I were to do it all over again, I would just start out as a DE C Corp.

They insisted the previous corporation had to first be dissolved. I am not a lawyer, but I believe this is just standard practice. I suppose it's because there can be objections from investors in the original LLC if you take money in a new entity, and in very bad situations (which are probably very unlikely) that could lead to lawsuits. I think lawyers are just trying to do things properly to avoid these sorts of things.

I started my company as an LLC. Since it began in Pennsylvania, I registered as a PA LLC. Welp, I applied to Y Combinator and they accepted me, but it turns out they won't invest in LLC companies. I figure, no biggie, I'll just convert to a DE C Corp as I'd been planning to do eventually anyway. It turns out this isn't so simple for dissolving a PA LLC, and it is a several month process. I almost wasn't accepted into Y Combinator as a result because they aren't going to wait several months before making their investment, and was only able to attend because a very experienced lawyer found a loophole to convert my company into a PA C Corp.

I am still suffering headaches from this, even after my company shut down, because of all sorts of bizarre issues of being a PA C Corp. And since nobody knows anything about PA C Corporations, I can't use standard documents and legal advice is particularly expensive (and usually not the best).

Corporate law isn't always so cut and dry.

Apparently San Francisco disagrees.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/uber-ordered-to-stop-self-...

Interesting. My guess is Uber is just planning on paying the inevitable fines as is their modus operandi. I wonder how much an infraction like this costs? I doubt there's any precedent.

You are correct! I meant to say receptive. Too late to edit it now.

I'm curious what their first product will be and when it will be available. Chris Urmson stated the goal was to release a self-driving vehicle by 2020, after pushing it back from their original goal of 2017, and this was just before he left at the beginning of the year. Since then Google also lost its lead software engineer on the project who left to start a competing company and he also took another senior employee with him, and Google lost several more key members to Otto (which is now owned by Uber).

This space has become super competitive and it will be fun to watch what happens. I still think it will be many years before we see a fully self-driving car (where no driver is needed at all). I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars. Honestly though that might be something other countries such as China and Singapore are much more reticent to pursue.

There is absolutely no way Uber will have fully self-driving cars in a few years (a car that picks you up without a driver). If anything is going to save Uber, it's going to be Otto. Self-driving trucks are a much easier technical problem and the market is the better part of a trillion dollars just in the US.

The YC Fellowship got axed. From what I understand, they're replacing it with an online course (similar to their startup videos/lectures) and it does not include any funding.

Obviously this is a complex issue, but in general I've found introspective people are the saddest. People that live in the moment are often the happiest.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3501

Shred Video (http://shredvideo.com/) is trying to solve the editing problem.

There is at least 1 other death in China where autopilot is cited as the cause, and there are many other accidents in China which are not widely reported in the United States (it's easy to find several on Google though, many of which are even posted on YouTube with video proof).

Statistically speaking, Tesla's autopilot is more dangerous than regular driving. They spun bad statistics to claim otherwise. They ignored the difference between highway driving (which is safer) and all driving, and ignored demographics (most Tesla drivers are older and affluent).

It is too early to really draw many conclusions about autopilot, because there is actually very little data. Comparing the number of miles driven by Tesla to the number of miles driven by all other cars in one year is a difference of several orders of magnitude. But they are under investigation, and as more time passes the more damning it seems for Tesla.

There's actually a great way to track that - look at the cost of a Chipotle burrito in different cities. The price for a burrito in San Francisco went up with perfect correlation when the wage increased in San Francisco. The reason it's particularly useful for Chipotle is because they are entirely corporate owned, which means there are no franchise owners distorting the data (or rather, franchises are independently owned and many are not well run, and restaurants with lower prices would be used as data points to justify the wage increase when that restaurant may in fact be failing).

Not too long ago it was part of my job to analyze the minimum wage hike and how it will effect fast food restaurants. Like most things in the real world, the nitty gritty details are complicated. The gist of it is that fast food restaurants in the United States are going to become even less profitable as the minimum wage increases. And in an industry where it's considered great if your margins are 5%, that can be pretty bad.

How does a lack of transparency help?

I like you.

Tesla spun bad statistics to make that claim. They're comparing highway driving to all driving, and highway driving is statistically safer. They're also ignoring demographics, as Tesla owners tend to be affluent and older. If you take this into consideration, it actually suggests that it's less safe, however with such a tiny sample size it's too early to draw any conclusions from the data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/0...

It's worth mentioning that Google lost most of their team working on self-driving cars this year. In fact, I think every person in charge (Thrun, Levandowski, Urmson, plus whoever else) has left.

That's a really cool paper. While I wouldn't say they're doing better than a human (I really think they're twisting semantics with that one), it is impressive and I hope to see a lot more progress in this area. Thank you for sharing!

What's the $100 chair? I'd love a nice chair that doesn't cost $1000.

I'll give you 10 to 1 odds on that if you want to bet.

I don't see how that solves the weather problem, unless you're limiting yourself to cities with nice weather. Even then - all cities have bad weather occasionally.

I'm not arguing against progress. I think it's great people are working on this and obviously you have to start somewhere. I'm just pointing out the fully autonomous vehicle is not a few years away.

That certainly seems like the idea for Tesla - collect all the data from the cars in real-world condition and use it for training. I think it's brilliant. Time will tell to see how well they can leverage that data. Having a better sensor suite would certainly make it easier though. It's a lot easier to interpret LIDAR (it basically makes a 3D map for you) than it is to interpret a camera (you have to figure out how to turn 2D into 3D).

My skepticism is in the leap towards a fully autonomous vehicle, safe for driving on real roads in harsh conditions. Very few people have attempted anything in bad weather yet, although Ford has actually done some work on it.

If we are talking about incremental improvements - sure that will happen constantly. What I'm saying is I don't believe you're going to get into a car without a driver anytime soon.

This is with the caveat that the weather is nice and you're in one of Google's specially mapped areas. As I understand it - and I never worked at Google and I keep waiting for someone who does to correct me on it - those maps are very difficult to scale and maintain.

Well I also used to work with the team that's now at Uber (I worked at the National Robotics Engineering Center which is where they got almost all of their initial 40 engineers), and some of the guys I used to work with went to Google as well as Tesla. Tesla has a retention problem - their top engineers regularly quit every few years. Google lost nearly their entire team working on self-driving cars because Sergey insisted on making a fully self-driving vehicle instead of rolling out incremental levels of autonomy.

If you're only reading article after article hyping the technology instead of talking to the people actually building it, of course you're going to believe the journalists instead of the engineers.

I don't know anybody actually writing the code that thinks we're close. Of course the PR teams and managers are going to hype everything up - that's their job.

In theory, sure. But you're effectively saying computers have to process vision as well as humans, which some experts think is comparable to solving AI. I'm not saying Tesla won't make a lot of progress, but considering how many decades of research has gone into this very problem (I worked on it at Carnegie Mellon as a graduate student, and they've been doing it since the 80's) it will likely take longer than most people like to admit.

I actually don't know a single expert who thinks we're anywhere close to having a stage 4 autonomous vehicle. Most of the people I respect are pegging it at decades instead of years.

Now that is an interesting parallel.

I think YC's criterion for getting admitted into the core program is still fitting - do they believe it can become a (ten) billion dollar company? They recently created the Fellowship program to fund more companies at an earlier stage but I don't know too much about that.

It's hard to give you more feedback without knowing more. If you don't want to focus on growth and realistically take VC money, YC might not be for you (these are generalizations, I'd argue Wufoo was a YC success story and they barely took any money at all).