not_that_noob

YouTube also leads you down radical rabbit holes as that keeps the algorithm happy. How many of the recent terror attacks (ISIS or New Zealand type incidents) were fostered by YouTube watching?

No mention of the purchase price - tho Looker was likely flying in unicorn heights.

There are investors out there who don’t insist on control. I know of at least two - IndieVC and Earnest Capital. Their investment can be paid back in cash over time from earnings.

I mean, mass immigration with no borders is exactly how humans spread out from Africa to populate the world. Seems it’s worked out great for humanity.

And speaking as a resident of the Bay Area, I greatly appreciate the diverse people I meet. Not to mention the wide food choices.

Real estate remains one of last few asset classes where ownership can be obfuscated reliably. This makes it ideal to park money of dubious provenance. If you bring transparency to the system - much like know-your-customer did to banking - this phenomenon will largely disappear. The local residents have reached a point I think for this to happen in Vancouver - and it could spread to other similar cities.

I wonder if the type of instrumental music makes a difference. I find that soft techno like dub techno helps me focus, while classical does not.

+1. I feel you. The only upside - it made me read everything more carefully. Significant deal points can be missing, or subtle giveaways that negate the actual deal term two paragraphs up. And the best part - they charge you by the hour for correcting their damn mistakes! Yeah I'm not buying what that partner's selling.

@justin - congrats! How do the fees compare vs a traditional law firm? I love the price-predictability part, but can you shed a bit more light?

Index funds have beaten most active management over the long run. If you think about it, YC is a huge index fund in startups. The problem is not data-based prediction - just that it is impossible to pick winners a priori, no matter how much data you have. Ergo the clearly viable long run strategy is to invest in as many as you can. This is why YC is maximizing volume, with the latest being the Startup School.

The other option of course is to invest large amounts into startups that are well on their way, but Sequoia and AH have a corner on that market. And now YC wants to play there as well, with their larger fund.

So there's no oxygen left for a lot of the VC firms in the valley. There's no shortage of money looking for VC funds, as returns are low in general asset classes. So you have this imbalanced situation, where dinky startups get incredible valuations, and there are too few genuine investment opportunities to go around. SC are one of the marquee victims, but other walking dead abound, though they dress snappy so it's hard to tell they're really dead.

This is one of the best articles I've seen on climate change. We are now looking to a 3 degree rise in surface temps by the middle of this century - well within our lifetimes. Miami is headed underwater. I wouldn't be buying real estate in any low-lying area if I can avoid it.

"Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...

Jobs was IMO a High-Functioning Sociopath - http://www.md-health.com/Sociopath-Traits.html

He turned his charm on when he need to accomplish something, but there is no real empathy for anyone who was not useful to him in some way. The sad reality of Lisa's situation was that he didn't need her. So he treated her very badly, and then as is typical with sociopaths, turn around and blame her for his behavior. I truly sympathize with her.

Some of this is of course the Chinese government placing its thumb on the scales in favor of local businesses. It does this for a lot of reasons, but it's clear it happens.

However, compare the situation to other more open countries (e.g. India, Japan, Indonesia ) There are culture, social and language specific nuances that local entrepreneurs understand far better than outsiders, and that accounts for a significant portion of these copycat business success.

I think American business generally have a tough time accounting for the latter into account when they go overseas. IOW, not all of Jack Ma's success stems from the government being on his side.

I wonder how much of the European decline was driven by GDPR rules, especially opt-in requirements. GDPR-like laws are being debated on and passed here in the US by individual states. Probably a tough environment to expand on MAU right now.

The parallel to the fall of the Soviet Union is interesting. The state slowly ran out of money, and couldn’t pay the military complex, including the army. The army’s loyalty to the leadership essentially disappeared, and then the empire fell.

Also note that the militaries of Burma or Venezuela are always well provided for, even when the people are repressed or starving. I feel successful dictators have an instinctual grasp of this relationship.

I don’t know man - the Internet is distributed and last I checked it was doing great.

This one I think has legs. Quite a few content creators are upset with YouTube policies, and can drive users to PeerTube using other social services. Once you have a core group of users, others see that it’s viable and adoption rises.

It's not a problem that can be fixed. The endpoints - encoding at the transmitter and decoding at the device - can be with the efforts underway made somewhat equivalent between both modes. However, the problem is the path between them - the Internet was never built for realtime delivery of media streams. The many layers and devices along the route add delay, and on top of that network congestion can add more. Unless the path is more or less dedicated (as happens in broadcast, satellite or cable TV), there is no way to ensure realtime delivery.

[PS Before anyone mentions RTP, this is a known problem with RTP - see: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html

"RTP does not ensure real-time delivery. So how come it is called a real-time protocol? No end-to-end protocol, including RTP, can ensure in-time delivery. This always requires the support of lower layers that actually have control over resources in switches and routers. RTP provides functionality suited for carrying real-time content, e.g., a timestamp and control mechanisms for synchronizing different streams with timing properties." ]

The number one thing that kills a startup is lack of market demand. His real genius is in determining market demand ahead of time, and in a low-cost way. This separates true entrepreneurs from the wannabes.

Excellent guide - rings true.

Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal.

He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari.

[Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.

What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons:

* he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view

* he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is

* he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.

* he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is

* he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions

What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success.

PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.

Not finding fault. The point of Webauthn is convenience - but the trade off is that if CTAP is compromised, it’s convenient for the attacker too.

See my reply to your other comment and review CTAP in the spec.

See CTAP in FIDO2 - something needs to determine you are the user before opening up the key set. The attack point will be at this step.

They might call in and say they lost their token, and a competent attacker will usually have all the necessary info. Happens all the time with credit card fraud. Sure, you can notify the target that a credential was reissued, but that happens with credit cards too, and most of the time people don’t pay attention.

About 15% of the user population really cares about security and will take the right precautions. It’s the other 85% that are soft targets that keep attackers in business.

This is the misunderstanding attackers can exploit. Credentials need to be reissued because people lose them ocassionally. So that process now becomes a pathway for exploits.

Credential reissue (lost token) would be a much easier path for an attacker. The weakest point is always the point of compromise. For the smart attacker therefore, they have been handed the whole set of accounts. So yes the original point stands - attackers will find it more lucrative to do account compromise in the Webauthn world.

I think you misunderstand how the CTAP portion of Webauthn works - once the root credential authenticates the user, they no longer have to use passwords for the user’s various accounts. The simple point is that if this credential became compromised for whatever reason, then all associated accounts are by definition compromised.

The flaw stems from the fact that an attacker can thru social engineeung acquire that root crendential (password or biometric or token). Once they have it, they can clean out all your banking, stock and home equity line accounts in one sweep. You as a user may not know that credential is compromised - maybe it was a key logger, maybe it was social engineering the cell phone provider to port your number and then qualify their phone with an sms token. You don’t know when that happened - you just see empty accounts.

With personal password managers, no third party is issuing tokens for access - just you. So it’s unlikley to be chosen for an attack - because it’s too hard for the attacker to acquire the credentials for access without detection.

That’s really the flaw of single sign-on and Webauthn - that one key now unlocks the kingdom.