jsun

We certainly might be heading into a bubble, but so far the effects have been limited.

WhatsApp isn't very indicative of a bubble, same with instagram, snapchat, etc. because it's the same company (FB) making single bidder offers. That hardly a bubble makes.

The rest of the market isn't necessarily in a bubble because for the most part companies going public are either making money or have demonstrated that they can be making money if they stopped growing.

Yeah I gotta say, this blog post is a really terrible idea. A "reasonable person", if this came up in a court of law, would probably conclude that despite your disclaimers to the contrary, you know or should've known that this blog post serves as a recommendation or even incitement to share copyrighted materials over your service.

What this really shows is an increase in the frequency of 1-time events such as IPOs or sales. There is no value, one way or the other, in using cross-sectional data (this article) to describe longitudinal shifts (the rich get richer). It's just irrelevant.

Yeah maybe its a market issue. I live in a major metropolitan market and local DJs who almost never produce makes more money than that.

Granted a specific market + genre combo can only support a handful of these "regionally famous" DJs, but that's probably just market self regulation.

Has anyone ever studied whether momentum is a good measure for eventual success (whatever that might mean)?

IANAL but I was in a similar situation (didn't end up going through with it) and did some research.

The technical answer is you are probably in the clear unless some part of the app's flow or design was "non-obvious", and obviously you can't re-use code.

The real answer is if your old company decides to sue you, you won't be able to pony up the money for lawyers to fight it. If you get huge before they figure out and sue you, then at best you have a crazy expensive settlement on your hands.

Don't do it. ideas are dime a dozen, why not pick one that doesn't have strings?

In my experience the data presented here shows the need to cut further or obtain additional data. There's some correlation, but the data appears to be a rough aggregate and the absolute magnitude of the movement is small. Also unclear if cyclical or macro effects were removed. Pretty much all the other comments here are anecdotal or attempted to draw conclusions from insufficient data.

This is why pop psychology is generally reviled by psychologists.

Applying this parable to a startup -> the first solution was superior because it required no specialized knowledge and got you 80% of the way there. sure line efficiency was 15% lower and you lost a cheap empty boxes but for the most part it was just as good. This goes in the "problems you can solve later" bucket

edit: by first solution I meant the fan... the alarm was just stupid

Parody - "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize[citation needed] an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation"

sounds like parody

haha its a parody blog, the guy writing it is a film student or something. Read the other posts, pretty funny

a doctor is just a biologist who works in hospitals

KBA (knowledge based authentication) is what that question-answer type of system is called. Typically companies don't implement it as the sole form of identification for the exact reasons that you mentioned.

I found it very surprising that Square doesn't provide an alternate method for identification, it's mind boggling even. Something like Instant Bank Verification (similar to what mint.com or venmo does) would be a good alternative and carries no additional overhead for Square.

that's kinda paranoid thinking given the EV of the "best" bracket is probably like $1 instead of 10 cents. A lot of work to make a dollar.

It's a pretty interesting idea haha. if only there was some way (without spending a lot of legal money) to ensure entrants into the pool all split the money.

Good list - Not too sure about this one

> How many people do you hire in a typical month?

1 per month? that seems low. Hiring is like everything else - subject to human cognitive biases. We all like to think that we can make the right decisions if we just put our minds to it, but the fact of the matter is a lot of it is just randomness. If I hired 4 people a month and I really fucked up on 3 of them I'd at least have 1 good employee left. That's a higher expected value than if I hired 1 person a month and screwed up just 5% of the time.

yeah that kid doesn't really give much of a damn whether you thought his experience was genuine:)

Why is this a free expression issue? Yale is simply saying you can use the data we collected, but in order to do so you must show ALL of it, including comments. If Yelp changed their open API rules and said you can display the star ratings for a restaurant, but you have to display the text of the reviews as well, would everyone be up in arms about it?

Not everyone acts as rational machines, professors' egos have to be stroked too. They'd like to think that they can't just be reduced to a number between 1 and 5.

Besides which, I think exposing rating systems for courses creates perverse incentives. It's been well studied that students who get better grades rate courses higher. Is that really what we want to be measuring professors against?

While I technically agree with the article, OP really takes some liberties with definitions. Yes, technically logic > math, but I have yet to meet someone who was "afraid of math" but awesome at logic.

The bottom line is you don't need to be a mathematician or even a B-average math student to program, but if you are afraid of the math content in most standard CS curricula (calc, linear algebra, discrete mathematics) you should probably not be a software programmer

Of course there is. We need to separate intent from action. There's myriads of different actions to achieve the same result.

Imagine this scenario: China postures for military action, the U.S does not intent to interfere. Rather than "abandon it's ally" the U.S puts on a show of strength, joint military exercises, recommitting to the defense of Taiwan, the whole 9 yards. Quietly however, the U.S. withdraws support for secessionist factions within Taiwan, shifting the fragile equilibrium. pro-china factions gain power quickly, the weakening direct U.S support combined with China's military posturing drives moderates and anti-war secessionists towards the pro-china faction. With the balance of power now in their favor, mainland + the pro-china factions ramp up propaganda efforts, strengthening ties, eventually setting the stage for reunification. The U.S of course, while "extremely disappointed", won't oppose the popular will of the Taiwanese people.

And that's how the U.S abandons its ally without abandoning its ally, and China takes Taiwan by force without ever firing a single shot.

Of course, that's just one possible scenario out of thousands. The question here is intent - if the U.S intends to fight China it will for its own purposes. if the U.S doesn't intent to fight China it won't for its own purposes. Countries aren't as beholden to their public image as people think, because there's a million ways to spin anything.

I mean let's put this in perspective on the whole snapchat issue - they lost a list of usernames.... which could theoretically be used to match to the person's other usernames from other sites.

It's just not crazy useful... you can do the same thing by scrapping facebook or linkedin without even having to "hack" them. There's companies that expose as much through open APIs.

AvantCredit :)

no, failing at a startup won't prevent you from getting hired however making us feel like you're just going to collect a paycheck while waiting for your next thing to take off probably will.

tread carefully on how much you want to rep your startup experience.

Bunch of YC companies in the U.K. maybe reach out to one of them. I know GoCardless from S11 is there. I think there was one more from my batch at a minimum.

How good are you? We might be open to doing the paperwork for you if you want to move to Chicago:)

They're basically selling the right to be a monopolistic utility vs. a consumer facing monopoly.

1. No one else is going to come in after you and lay more fiber, it's just not worth it

2. Your competitors are going to buy from you but you're still the one earning revenue from the network. In a competitive market your competitors will earn their value-add (marketing) and you'll earn yours (infrastructure + servicing)

3. You'll displace existing infrastructure competitors. Immediately. All that infrastructure Comcast built? useless, no one is going to be buying shitty internet from them anymore. If they want to continue to operate in the market they'll come just another marketing affiliate for you, which is a game that has much lower barriers to entry.

4. They say they won't give you any favorable treatment but they will. This is now a high priority issue that the city explicitly said they'll do. Which means you saving millions on just the legal costs of figuring out if its feasible in this jurisdiction. They won't contradict themselves (too much).

A lot of these conferences have the same underlying value prop. Finovate for instance does the same thing - it costs something like 9k or 10k to present! But Finovate is useful, because the content is better curated, they attract more influential players from the space.

It sounds like YSV does a much poorer job executing, which makes it a poor value, but not sure that makes it a scam

It's long been observed that once earning reaches a certain absolute number, quality of life and other intangibles quickly overtake monetary compensation as the primary driving force. Basically its saying if my options were 60k/year and great quality of life vs. 120k/year and shitty quality of life, I'm much more likely to take the 120k than if the situation was 120k/year vs. 240k/year.

The problem is very real, banks wouldn't be responding to it otherwise.

Also helps that tech companies are "winning" the PR war against traditional banks. Being a banker used to be fucking cool, now its lame.

Edit: okay, that last line was confusing, so let me try to explain what I mean: Most bankers aren't married to finance, it's not like they have this amazing passion for excel financial models. They are attracted to being at the very top of the talent ladder, in a position that offers the most challenge and potential reward. Nowdays technology is seen as an equivalent option for a lot of kids entering school

I think your friend was referring to business majors. a 3.5 at most finance programs is achievable with hard work and almost no innate intellectual gifts. Conversely a relatively smart person can get a 3.5 without attending lectures or doing much work.

If you are an engineer it's very difficult to explain in parallel terms. The running joke at my school was that failed engineers drop out and become straight-A accountants.

Sorry if I offended any business majors (I am one), but the truth is the truth:)

Banking is a relationship business. The hours aren't so much for productivity as for bonding. Think of it as a frat initiation ritual that lasts years. Some very small portion of IB analysts remain in IB, most move off and become successful somewhere else, building an incredibly strong network of captains of industry over time, all tied back to that particular investment bank.

Problem potentially even more dire than article makes it

"These jobs pay very well. According to the job search site Indeed.com, the average salary for an entry level software engineer in New York City is $71,000—just about the average for an entry level investment banker."

is a very misleading statistic. At a good school maybe the top 5% of a graduating finance class gets banking jobs. Pretty much every single CE or CS major gets a job in technology if they want one. The top 5% goes to work for a top tech firm who routinely pay 1st years 100-120k+, with amazing perks, work life balance, and tremendous growth potential.

That's not necessarily true. Divergent evolution of ideas means that there could be some truly primitive ideas that's still useful to us today simply because we never went down that particular tree in our development. It's hard for us to imagine, but that's the point. I mean just look at how many of our everyday gadgets hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Zippers for instance:)