newlyretired

Also relevant to this platform -- if your business is more successful when your customers are more successful, and they tell you that, and together you can measure that... you might be in a good place.

I second this. If a company is building their product off of other people's work, I believe they need to honor the spirit and intention of their predecessors.

From the comment below, it sounds like maybe an Apple-like strategy to build off open source but charge for the resulting product? Either way, I would not feel comfortable recommending this product.

I think you underestimate the lengths to which some people will go for fame.

Non-incremental advances require a lot of wasted-path R&D. If any of Intel's projects creates a generational leap, it will pay off handsomely. When the way forward isn't clear, I like to use the concepts from path finding algorithms to drive strategy. Assuming you can afford multiple parallel efforts.

It's not clear if doing this in-house, or closely monitoring the state of the art and then buying a company that develops a winner, is superior.

For the curious, Eris is the ancient Greek god of strife and discord. Is this an alternate spelling of Ares?

Check out beergraphs.com, it has lots of different normalization lenses that might get you what you want. Founded by some baseball stathead writers, so takes a lot of the same approaches to data.

If you're discussing the reality of the problem instead of the perception of it, the median household income would need to be adjusted for cost of living. I'd need nearly double a nice salary just to afford the same lifestyle in SV, one of many reasons I'm not going to move there.

Many people believe this is an overstep on the government's part. These people believe it's not the government's job to be paternalistic and nudge people into the "right direction".

This is based on the complete abhorrence of "scope creep" mixed with near total surveillance and control over the use of force. Those with that much power should not be able to enforce social mores, even if they reflect the will of the people at the time.

The actual number of eligible voters was about 250 million in the last presidential election, up from 235 million in the 2012 race.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

> Person gets into the driverless car way too intoxicated and passes out/overdoses/dies in the car -- need physical help?

> So now we have driverless cars effectively classified as emergency ambulances - so assuming the CARNOC is paying attention, they then drive the car to the hospital - and have to have a mechanism to contact said hospital

> Imagine the healthcare implications where if someone hasa seizure, ODs, cardiac, etc... what is the response time from the CARNOC, and getting them to a hospital ==> then what types of lawsuits will these companies see? what type of insurance will they require?

The comparison is useful because all of the above scenarios are possible in the Danish rail system.

I never really understood the significance of the Bombadil interaction, except to underline how ancient a world this was, and how much more power everyone had compared to hobbits.

Would you help me understand why the scene was so important for you?

What's a reasonable cost per word for specialized content? EG, something about a specific field (although doesn't require a college degree to write, some specialized knowledge would be good).

I've seen about 20 cents per word, making a 2k word longform around $400. Is that somewhat realistic?

200cal/day is about 20 lbs./year, not accounting for adaptation.

I doubt it was specific to the exact MRR number. More likely their growth stalled using the methods that were taking up all of their time (direct sales, word of mouth).

For some $N MRR (magic point where you look for scalable channels), N should be large enough that you have a product that your market wants and will pay for, and the market is large enough that you were able to manually scale it to N.

The heuristic is something like "if you can get big enough doing low-efficiency/manual marketing, you've likely gotten close enough to the important things* and can move on to testing scalability".

* things like product/market fit, market size, clear communication, well defined value prop, etc.

Rent prices in Chicago are half of SF, according to crowdsourced data from Numbeo's cost of living calculator.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Twilio has nearly a $3 billion market cap right now, and their signup/churn/usage rates give them a good idea on the growth potential for this market.

Nobody I know is a Twilio engineer, but nearly every backend developer I've worked with has, or wants to use, Twilio. There's something old school phreaking about using a computer to control phone systems.

They seem to believe that the market is very broad, occasionally deep (Uber was ~10% of their usage), and super cool. They haven't gotten so big to discard their focus yet playful roots (their hackathon outreach is a great example; that's where I first learned the API).

You don't think property coops are at a high risk of acting like current HOAs?

Yes, usage longevity is another factor to consider besides sound quality. However, I was replying to OP, who specifically was talking about the signal loss due to BT encoding. I countered with the fact that analog lines also experience loss, and only the latter has little chance of improving moving forward.

I've done a lot of scraping in my day, and I've found that lxml/requests is 2-3 OOM more resource efficient than a Selenium based browser. That JS/rendering engine is HEAVY!

Bureaucracies are inherently risk averse; that is what it sounds to me like you ran into. You have my sympathy for it. I think it's wrong and a net loss to society, but I also have no impetus to criticize a banking/finance company from staying away from anything that even smells possibly grey.

Even if they were selling, I would think it's a net loss for society that they cannot fully participate in banking.

My point was more about OP's presentation of why they could not participate. It's pretty clear they're an edge case in an edge case industry -- I cannot judge a large company being risk averse when there is no incentive for them to take on the risk.

(That said, if anyone solves cannabis banking, they are going to be a unicorn.)

Analog headphones are lossy, I trust compression algorithms to improve more than I believe manufacturers will use more expensive, higher quality materials and connections at the same price point.

According to your own site[0], it sounds like Stripe declined to continue to serve you because of an association with a cannabis business. (That's a sub-optimal reality, but I think it's disingenuous to state that it was because they didn't like the name.)

[0] http://edoceo.com/blog/2017/04/stripe-rubbing-salt-in-the-wo...

My point wasn't to deny your experience, only to comment that even for your specific experience it's impossible to be so confident as to state it was Vitamin C that prevented illnesses.

I'm happy you found something that works for you, but the certainty you ascribe to causes is not justified by the evidence.

Point 3 seems to be a case where correlation does not imply causation. Basing an advertising campaign with an oblique reference to the issues at Uber* doesn't mean the campaign is effective.

* most people I talk with are only vaguely aware there are issues at Uber, including many drivers, Uber users, and non-Uber users.

What makes you think it was the Vitamin C that prevented the cold? It could as easily have been your belief in the Vitamin C cure that prevented the colds.

I'm reading Haidt's "Happiness Hypothesis" right now, and in one section he identifies life circumstances which people never adjust to (i.e. excluded from the Hedonistic treadmill effect).

A long commute is something he identifies as always a negative. Humans don't seem to adjust to a long commute -- it will always negatively impact the typical person's outlook/affect/happiness.

I just finished all 3 of Taleb's major books, and I took a slightly different interpretation of his Black Swan concept. I am very interested in reading criticisms of his that focus on the material -- most that I've read thus far discuss his writing style, or lack of rigor. (The second is certainly a valid criticism, but I'm looking to engage with his ideas, not the man himself or the broad scientific validity.)

Taleb's Black Swan concept is that unpredictable events happen more frequently than people expect, and have an outsized impact on the outcomes of a model. Events that are not predictable are not included in the predictive model. Take the frequency of event and exclusion from the model, add in asymmetric results (small changes to input parameters can lead to huge changes in outcome), and that's his theory.

Is that accurate? What are the issues with that?