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jeff18

5,085 karma · joined March 11, 2009

Co-founder of Humble Bundle: https://humble.com
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jeff18··on Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans
As a consumer, I use it for two things and it does it well and very simply across all platforms:

1) When traveling, you can use one of your home computers as an "exit node" so you can watch Netflix, etc. abroad very easily. Much more reliable than using VPNs which can be blocked.

2) Accessing your internal network from wherever you are for Plex, Homebridge, IP cameras, or whatever.

jeff18··on My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home
The PS5 only has a 1gig Ethernet port anyway.

AT&T fiber recently rolled out 5 gigs in San Francisco and as far as I can tell, Steam is the only service that can saturate it. That’s after buying a 10 gig $100 network card and a $200 router which only has 2 10 gig ports.

It’s going to be a few years before >1 gig internet is commonly supported.

jeff18··on Myths about cooking steak that need to go away (2013)
I will give it a shot! Always excited to up my steak game.
jeff18··on Myths about cooking steak that need to go away (2013)
How thick are your steaks and what temperature do they start at? My steaks take almost two hours following the Kenji method D:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ez9pz35wrn7j1o/steak.png?dl=0

jeff18··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
My understanding is that YC would get 7% ($350k) and would also receive $375k from this new SAFE. So YC would have put in $500k and gotten $675k back.
jeff18··on Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding
Not necessarily! Shares trade all the time without funding the company. The valuation depends on what people pay for those shares.
jeff18··on DoorDash from Application to IPO
You were able to get sushi, dim sum, boba, bagels, or even steaks promptly delivered in a few clicks before 2013? DoorDash is an easy example of a startup that has made my life better, especially during a pandemic.
jeff18··on YC S20 Remote Batch
"And you can submit after the deadline - though keep in mind that if you apply late, we can’t guarantee the exact date of when you’ll hear back from us with a decision."

https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

Do it!

jeff18··on Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/20/aws-ibm-launch-programs-to...
jeff18··on Should you self-host Google Fonts?
Shared cache is going away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429621
jeff18··on Eliud Kipchoge Breaks Two-Hour Marathon Barrier
According to the article, it was an electric car.
jeff18··on Startups that launched at Y Combinator’s W19 Demo Day 1
Yes, it worked!
jeff18··on Carbon Removal Technologies
This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".
jeff18··on Tencent's AI plays StarCraft II, and wins over 90 percent of the time
This comes up every time Starcraft AI is discussed. It's really frustrating. Why immediately discount the incredible work AI researchers are doing by instantly assuming they are using cheap tactics like shown in your video?

When a Starcraft AI is ready, it will be incredibly obvious if it's using brand new builds, strategies, and tactics (which pros will immediately copy for the next $500,000 tournament) or if it's "just" using 10,000 APM to perfectly dodge attacks in a way that a human never could.

I'm guessing Google and Tencent are going for the former instead of the latter.

jeff18··on Latin American delivery startup Rappi valued above $1B
Reminds me of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779751 about DoorDash which was false. Given some of the same investors are in Rappi, I would not immediately assume they have funky terms.
jeff18··on Electron 3.0.0-beta.1 – Chrome 66 and Node 10
Works for me out of the box! spellchekc too.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/348mh6wlmuayflp/Screenshot%202018-...

jeff18··on Electron 3.0.0-beta.1 – Chrome 66 and Node 10
FWIW, Electron actually supports all of those things, except the text rendering engine.
jeff18··on Tesla short sellers $2B in the red for June as shares soar
Common: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk/elon-musk-buys...
jeff18··on American Equity
YC is a competitive accelerator that gives you a small seed investment in exchange for a few things, but mostly for the expert advice. On this topic, the advice to companies is to be generous with equity. What else should be done?
jeff18··on American Equity
Not sure if you read this essay, but Sam advocates for startups to be significantly more generous on employee equity: https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity

(at least compared to other VCs, you may still disagree with his absolute numbers)

jeff18··on Some Instacart workers to strike over pay that can be as low as $1 per hour
That seems weird, since I would expect to have seen something about that in the NYT, WSJ, or at least TechCrunch. I did some quick Googling and according to the DoorDash Reddit, your tips are only shown to you at the end of the shift and they are grouped together so you can't tell how much each person tipped you: https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/6dkjjw/tip_questi...

Are you sure you weren't just looking at the $6 delivery fee and your tip would be added later?

jeff18··on Cybersecurity Humble Book Bundle
Hey there, could you send me an email at jeff@humble.com? Sounds like there might be something weird going on.
jeff18··on PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
Humble Bundle co-founder here. This does not apply to us. The lawsuit refers to a feature PayPal Giving Fund launched a few months ago on their own website, to let people pay charities that are not yet registered.

On our side, for charities that are paid via PayPal Giving Fund, we require them to be fully onboarded. For our "choose your own charity" feature, which lets you customize which charity you are supporting, we only allow our customers to choose charities that are fully registered with PPGF. You can verify this by noting that we only support a fraction of the charities listed on PPGF.

Why use PPGF (or Tides.org, our backup) in the first place? There are regulations that require you and the charity to do a fair amount of paperwork and register with various states. When you are tiny, you can probably fly under the radar, but when you are approaching $100M raised for charity, it is a good idea to be fully compliant.

PPGF is an easy way to maintain sanity, because we can focus on fully complying with every state with the PayPal Giving Fund 501(c)3. PPGF then handles maintaining compliance with the states (+ UK) on their side.

However, for this to actually legally work, the PPGF needs to retain control over the funds, hence the scary disclaimer on the site. If they didn't actually pay a charity we work with, which has never happened, we would obviously let the customer know and make it right. We will be updating the disclaimer next week to be less opaque.

jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
Could you please email me at jeff@humble.com so I can debug this? I'm sorry that we failed you so badly.
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
Can you email me at jeff@humble.com? I would love to see what you are talking about. We do have an awesome engineering team that works on fraud and "trusting the processor" is actually the last step in our defense.
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
For what it's worth, we had an awesome 24/7 account manager with PayPal back when we were 100% bootstrapped. I think it's more about volume than Silicon Valley connections.
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
Good bitcoin purchases:

  $22 soandso@gmail.com
  [30 minutes later]
  $50 someone@real-company.com
  [30 minutes later]
  $15 person@real-company.com
  etc.
Bad bitcoin purchases:

  $1.00 asdfklasdklfm1@yahoo.com [1 second later]
  $1.00 asdfklasdklfm2@yahoo.com [1 second later]
  $1.00 asdfklasdklfm3@yahoo.com [1 second later]
  $1.00 asdfklasdklfm4@yahoo.com [1 second later]
  $1.00 asdfklasdklfm5@yahoo.com [1 second later]
  etc.
(queue removal of bitcoin)
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
In the past couple of years, the only times I can think of that developers have made vanity purchases, the average would have been affected by a few pennies at most. Calling that fraud feels incorrect.
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
It's probably because we need so much help. :)
jeff18··on How Humble Bundle stops online fraud
Humble founder here.

Bitcoin would be a great topic for another blog post, we have a really long love-hate relationship with it. Don't worry, Bitcoin support will hopefully return to our store and gaming bundles eventually. We know what we need to do to turn it back on (more or less, hook it into our SMS verification system) but we have many higher priority tasks work on. We are hiring if you know anyone: https://jobs.humblebundle.com/careers/ :)

While bitcoin is great for preventing chargebacks, it is inherently anonymous. That is good for certain use cases, but when you are trying to enforce a strict per customer limit, it is a nightmare. We invested a lot of resources into doing what we can to combat it, but eventually we figured that we had more important things to do and had to tap out. Almost 100% of the bitcoin traffic was bad actors, and even so it was such a tiny fraction of our sales, like under 0.05%.

There are a lot of diehard bitcoin users, like yourself, and I would love to support your preferred payment method again, but it is an incredible amount of work to do safely.

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