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jonnathansonon Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?

I don't think he coined the phrase, but his book is a strong read for sure.

jonnathansonon Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?

Well sure, but OP used the word "buy," and I felt the need to clarify that full ownership of a private jet is really not a great idea until you've got that precious third comma.

jonnathansonon Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?

"Even if you'd eventually make $50m, your life wouldn't change much from a net worth of $14m to $50m. You could buy a nicer jet?"

I know you're kidding around here, but all kidding aside, whether your net worth is $14M or $50M, you can't afford a jet. (I mean, nominally speaking, you can front the sticker price -- but you'll get eaten alive on fuel and maintenance over the jet's useful lifespan, and the jet as an asset is depreciating all the while.)

I say this almost as a reflex. I used to work in talent management many lifetimes ago, and I'd actually find myself having this talk with people in this specific situation. Explaining to someone who just made $10M on a single movie that s/he can't afford a jet is a surreal experience. Sorry for the tangent!

jonnathansonon Mystery of sonic weapon attacks in Cuba deepens

There's a difference between theory and praxis that we need to consider here. Most countries "believe" in espionage; the Russians have always invested in it as a sort of national discipline. Russia 'specializes' in spycraft, you might say.

jonnathansonon Mystery of sonic weapon attacks in Cuba deepens

The tradition of Russian espionage predates Stalin and, in fact, predates the USSR altogether.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana

During the Cold War, the USSR stepped up the size and sophistication of its covert operations and intel apparatus dramatically. But the Russians have always believed in espionage as an effective, asymmetrical advantage.

jonnathansonon Upload: Lurid Lawsuit’s Quiet End Leaves Startup Barely Dented

Team is basically code for what I will call the Three P's: pedigree, pattern, and proof.

* Pedigree: Do you have a track record in this domain? Have you been involved in success stories before? If nothing else, do you check the requisite Stanford/Google/Facebook/Apple boxes?

* Pattern: Does this team more or less resemble successful teams the VC has seen before?

* Proof: Who is vouching for this team? Who else is interested in this deal?

jonnathansonon Juicero Is Shutting Down

I hope the writers of "Silicon Valley" were paying attention to this saga. There's some juice left to be squeezed from it.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

I don't think anyone is saying that accepting the DPRK is a good option. I'm saying it may end up being the best worst option available to us at some unspecified point in the next decade or so.

Hopefully we can encourage or entice China into forcing systematic reform on a post-Kim DPRK. I don't think China will all too keen to foster democracy and open markets, so we shouldn't expect too much. But we can probably inveigh on China that an economically and socially stable DPRK is preferable to an unstable one, and that the global soft power China desperately craves will come when it is seen as having at least a shred of concern for human rights. Up to us and China to come to terms on exactly what the bargain would be. But my best guess is that it won't be something we'd currently find conscionable or acceptable.

My point is, from a realist perspective, our bargaining power is only going to incrementally diminish over time. Today we have the strongest hand of cards we are ever going to be delt, and it is a really shitty hand. Tomorrow our hand is going to be even shittier, and China's stronger. You dont need to stretch your imagination too far to see that we have no real way to win this game. Previous presidents have tried checking. Trump has tried bluffing. Sooner or later, someone at the table is going to call.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

China has been playing a dangerous game in nurturing the Kim regime and allowing it to obtain nuclear weapons. China has benefitted over the years from the presence of a hedge on its border against the US and South Korea, and from the frustrations the Kims have caused for the US, South Korea, and Japan. But it's been keeping a wild animal as a pet in its own backyard, and now that animal's got claws and rabies.

Interestingly enough, I see the emergence of common ground between Washington and Beijing on this issue. Sooner or later, China is going to calculate that Kim Jong-Un is more trouble than he's worth. When that happens, I can see the US and China arranging an unwritten agreement to take out Kim in exchange for the US's acceptance of the legitimacy of the North Korean state.

That would be a bitter pill for the US and its allies to swallow. But it seems preferable to the current course and speed of events, which basically have Kim developing usable ICBMs within a decade or less. To assume that a growing nuclear arsenal will somehow make Kim less of a threat, or endow him with a newfound sense of global stewardship and responsibility, is to place a particularly strange bet.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

Yes, and North Korea's continued existence is useful to China. If this pet bites the hand the feeds it, China can euthanize it and select a new pet. Plenty of generals ready to take Kim's place and consolidate power over NK with China's assistance.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

Indeed, it is hard to overstate the damage NK could wreak on Seoul, even in the opening hours of a full scale conflict. Roughly half of the population of SK lives in the greater Seoul metro area. Artillery barages could claim millions of lives, and wreak economic devastation, and we're not even talking about nukes yet. I don't relish the thought of Kim, backed into a corner, fearing total oblivion, his fingers fluttering inches away from the big red button.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

China doesn't want this mess getting any messier. At the end of the day, both Trump and Kim are wild cards, and a simple fuckup could blow nuclear fallout and/or waves of refugees over the Chinese border.

Meanwhile, China can come out a big winner by seizing this opportunity to play the adult in the room while simultaneously embarrassing the US. Trump has handed this win to Xi in a tidy little gift box.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

Because Kim's reign is predicated on maintaining credibility with his generals. He does that by rattling his saber and extracting economic concessions from the global community in general (and the US in particular).

Why he needs to go precisely this far is a good question. Possibly because Trump has consistently misplayed his hand and made a series of stupid bluffs that were quick and easy to call. Kim is probably testing the edges of his geopolitical box, figuring that it's a bit roomier than he'd previously calculated.

jonnathansonon North Korea fires missile over Japan

Where do we go from here? To the very brink, at least if Trump is left to his own (mobile) devices. My guess is he will reroute a CBG or two towards the Korean peninsula and make a lot of bluster about whatever new line he is prepared to draw.

Meanwhile, everyone else works frantically on a backchannel plan that allows both Kim and Trump to save some face. I don't see how this happens unless brokered by China, who emerges the big winner on the world stage.

jonnathansonon Neo – Desired Word Processor for Authors

Personally speaking, I find the lack of relationship between manuscript "pages" and published pages a more solvable problem than it ever has been historically. WYSIWYG visual editors for different ebook and print formats and page dimensions would at least give a working approximation for those who wish to self publish and exercise some degree of QC over the eventual reading experience.

My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium.

Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.

jonnathansonon US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons

They could be testing out a weapon, perhaps not for military applications per se, but for spycraft and special operations.

Sure would be convenient to storm a guarded compound if all the guards were suddenly deaf. Similarly, it would be nice to use something like this as a perimeter fence of sorts. Slow exposure over time would eventually deafen the spies you suspect are surveilling your place.

The theory that the Russians were behind this, and not necessarily the Cubans, seems plausible if indeed this was a weapons test. Russia conducts a lot more SpecOps missions around the globe than Cuba does.

jonnathansonon Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content

Disney is the one studio with the brand recognition, loyalty, wide customer base across a variety of demographics, worldwide range, wide variety of content (including sports), and essential franchises to have a shot at pulling this off.

jonnathansonon Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

Again, I'm not taking any issue with your assumptions, but assumptions are not direct or even circumstantial evidence. That's all I'm trying to say.

jonnathansonon Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

How does a study about affirmative action policies in college admissions offer any specific evidence about Google's policies?

jonnathansonon Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

There is no evidence that Google "lowers the bar," and this is a common misconception about diversity-focused hiring practices. The idea isn't to lower the bar to hire more candidates for the mere sake of their ethic or gender diversity. The idea is to ensure that the hiring manager at least looks at some qualified, diverse candidates in his or her process.

The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates.

I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.)

"Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.

jonnathansonon There Have Always Existed People Who’ve Simply Wanted to Be Alone

I'm a little skeptical. Isolated individuals cannot successfully reproduce a population. Furthermore, those who intentionally isolate themselves seem less likely to achieve reproductive success in the event that, say, they stumbled across a suitable mate, or a post-disaster survivor encampment.

jonnathansonon The war between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple

Right, but Amazon doesn't want to own businesses so much as own the business infrastructure.

jonnathansonon The war between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple

[Warning: semi-tangential deep dive on your point about Amazon not being a monopoly]

Amazon isn't in the retail business. Amazon isn't in the cloud computing business. Amazon isn't in the logistics business. Amazon is in the business business. It is no longer The Everything Store; it is now the Everything Everything. It wants to be the platform around which all of the world's businesses depend.

This is about as ambitious a mission as a company has ever launched, in my opinion -- and Amazon may be the first company with a justifiable claim to such ambition. Its only business constraints at this point are geopolitical, really. I believe it aims even higher in the long run: it is aiming to become the macroeconomic backbone of at least the Western world.

When viewed in that context, traditional definitions of monopoly -- especially the most widely known definition of the state, which is based on market share within a specific industry -- almost feel antiquated. Jeff Bezos isn't JP Morgan; he's freaking Cohaagen from Total Recall.

It is not in his interest, in fact it is starkly antithetical to his interest, to monopolize any single industry. He wants to engineer a state wherein stronger competition within any given market makes Amazon better off, not worse off, because it is the seller to that market moreso than a competitor in that market. (Though it holds de facto monopolist power in at least the publishing business, and probably others, these positions were the stick that makes Amazon's pivot to being in the carrot business credible and effective.)

Concern about Amazon as potentially Too Big to Fail may be warranted, but not yet. I'd argue that the sudden failure of Amazon tomorrow would have a severe but ultimately noncatastrophic impact on the US economy, with competitors like Walmart and Google and Apple ready to absorb the fallout with net-minimal total economic loss.

It is not TBTF yet, though at some point it seems to be on trajectory to get there. Now the tricky part is in gauging what metric we should even be using to talk about Amazon in the next 5 years.

(To be very clear, I say all of this in admiration of Jeff Bezos, not in fear or criticism of him. His business acumen is mindblowing. Whether you think of him as Business Yoda or Business Palpatine is your choice to make. But either way, you have to admit that the force is strong with him)

jonnathansonon Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

In my experience at huge companies, getting a 4 or a 5 is largely a paper-trail formality that managers bestow on people they are grooming for promotion. It's a political gift and a retention mechanism. Everyone else always gets a 3, whether they've been kicking ass or competently coasting.

Systems like these create strong disincentives to focus on job performance above and beyond a certain baseline, and strong incentives to focus on self-promotion, politics, and lobbying for sexy projects and allocations. Especially true when there is a forced curve or stack ranking involved. (Spoiler alert: there is almost always a curve, whether formally mandated by process, or informally expected by leadership.)

jonnathansonon Theranos Reaches Settlement with Walgreens

They probably can't, or it would have happened by now.

jonnathansonon Ways a VC says no without saying no

Somewhat common in pitches from seasoned entrepreneurs. It shows they've thought things through, have identified specific individuals they believe they should attempt to onboard post-funding, and are operating as though they actually know what they're going to do right after they get the giant check.

jonnathansonon Why Cutting Carbs Is So Tough

You're missing the point of the low-carb theory. It's not claiming that you should eat above a deficit. It's arguing that a pure energy-deficit view of dieting is wildly impractical. Longitudinal evidence of dieters over 2-20+ year windows will routinely point out that people cannot stick to calorie-deficit diets, cannot estimate calories, etc.

Modern nutritional science is also showing that the way food is digested and metabolized in the body is strongly influenced by a complex hormonal interchange -- and whether organs like the liver or the gut are predominantly responsible for macronutrient metabolism has a significant effect on, for lack of a better word, "effective calorie counts" in foods. The macronutrient composition of what we eat clearly affects our hormonal reaction, which clearly affects feelings of hunger and satiety. To ignore these feedback loops in favor of strict energy-deficit reductionism is a bit like saying that anyone not programming in binary is wasting his or her time.

jonnathansonon Why Cutting Carbs Is So Tough

My mother simply does not understand what a "carbohydrate" is, let alone the relationship between starch and sugar, or why things like mashed potatoes are not low-carb. ("But I didn't use any butter in them, so they're low-carb!")

When left to her own devices, she will consistently confuse and/or conflate carbs and fats. I think this is because she's from a generation that totally bought into the war on fat, and raised us accordingly. Fat is so evil in her mind that there is a subconscious revulsion to it.

I'm not sure older generations' assembly-level worldviews can be reprogrammed at this point. Carbs will be ubiquitous until younger folks become the predominant consumer power in the economy -- or unless someone actually influences the Boomers somehow, e.g., convinces Dr. Phil or Ellen DeGeneres or Gwyneth Paltrow or Matt Lauer or whoever to come out strongly against carbs.

jonnathansonon Facebook in talks with publishers on supporting subscription models

It's a strange attributional convention used in headlines and links by some publications. I've never understood why, as it reads so confusingly, snd the reverse usage (source: topic) seems readily and intuitively available instead. But it's still common to see (topic: source) in certain house styles.

jonnathansonon Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience winning?

"Most humans are dumb..."

Most humans are desperate. I prefer to view things that way, as it casts less summary judgment on the victims of Paltrow's fraud. Because that's what this certainly smells like: fraud, perpetrated by Goop, and at the very least abetted by Gwyneth Paltrow, in willing exploitation of women's hopes and dreams.

We can all buy into bullshit under the right circumstances. Even the smart ones among us fall for scams, schemes, and snake oil. Whether we're down on our luck, insecure, or even just bored, we're all vulnerable from time to time. That's when bullshit smells its sweetest.

When a predatory person or entity preys on people in those circumstances, the law mostly blames the predator. So should we.