oroup

Agreed

The problem is we don't even know what it means to deal with waste for 10,000 years. If the Romans had used nuclear power, we'd still be guarding their waste. And they likely would have put it somewhere really out of the way - like London. If some of the technologies that can transmute waste intro shorter lived stuff come to fruition, fantastic. But until then nuclear power is just the worst kind of deficit spending, kicking the unknown and huge costs way into the future.

Shave your head. It's a small thing and won't solve the underlying issues but its totally in your control and it projects confidence. If you're going to lose your hair then why not on your terms?

The Concord Naval Weapons Station where they plan to test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord_Naval_Weapons_Station

On Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/uOCwX

From the article: > Homejoy was able to raise funding, but not enough to grow > the company as big as its founders and backers had hoped. > “We declined those investments because it wasn’t enough, and > we wanted to stay true to our vision,” Cheung said.

I'm sorry but shutting the company down because the round you could raise wasn't as big as you hoped feels like wimping out. Alive beats true to your vision and dead. In "The Hard Thing About Hard Things", Ben Horowitz coins the term WFIO (pronounced wiff-e-o) for that "We're Fucked, It's Over" feeling that entrepreneurs get on a regular basis. Lawsuits spooking investors is certainly bad but hardly even qualifies.

Given how big an issue the worker classification issue is for the whole economy, I could see the regulatory issues getting sorted out over the next few years. Quitting seems like a premature move to me. How do the investors who put $40m into the company feel? Who's going to invest in this team again? Who's going to go work there?

Willing buyer, willing seller.

If you get there, I'll be interested to see your org get to 20+ people and if you can keep all your rules. No more than 2 mandatory meetings a year seems tough to me. The limits on flex time seem tough as well, especially for leaders. Sometimes your team is going to want to actually talk to you.

I'm a huge fan of Musk, but this was an intemperate thing to say. Inevitably at some point someone is going to get killed by one of his autonomous cars and at the wrongful death suit the plaintiffs lawyer will bring up video of him calling the problem not that hard and "solved" and he will have a much worse problem on his hands.

The truth is, it is hard to make any system as flawless as we're going to want these systems to be.

The snatching of the computer before you have a chance to lock it issue seems like something that could be solved with software. I'm imagining a "swatd" service that listens for loud noises (gunfire, flashbangs, shouting, etc) or observes the camera for sudden motion and locks the machine. I'm sure there'd be some false positives from movies and the like, but for guys like this, better safe than sorry.

The interesting question is if you obtained insurance this way (almost certainly fraud IMO) and got in a big expensive wreck, would the insurance company really be on the hook to pay your costs? (And would they figure it out?) Not a bet I'd like to take...

SpaceX does not file patents. [1] The assumption is that the protection offered by the patent is outweighed by the downside of giving your competitor a roadmap of how you did it. My guess is that just knowing it can be done will be a huge part of enabling someone else to develop similar technology.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11

Especially as a board member of Facebook.

When I was at Microsoft there was a phenomenon known as "schedule chicken" whereby each team in an interdependent group would report up "no problem totally on schedule" despite being way off in the hopes that some other (perhaps even more off-target) group would admit they needed to slip the date. Then all the other groups could breathe a sigh of relief and say, "We totally could have made it but given that those guys slipped the schedule, we'll use the time just to be extra awesome." Of course the problem is that if everyone plays this game, you end up right before the deadline with lots of groups simultaneously admitting they're nowhere near ready and you have a huge mess on your hands.

Wild ass guess here: keep funds at all the major banks and do intra-bank transfers which are instant. We've considered something similar. You need enough cash to keep a pool at every bank large enough to cover transfers and you need a big enough customer base that the net flow into or out of your account at a particular bank is small enough that you can rebalance periodically.

Even Andreessen is unlikely to be structured such that spending millions of dollars at a time on things that don't make returns is a sensible thing to do.

You have to understand the way capital inside venture funds is usually allocated - it's not just one big checking account. A common way to describe the economics of a venture fund is "2 and 20" which means that the fund takes 2% management fees per year (across a 10 year fund lifetime) and takes 20% of the returns or upside.

So, in a hypothetical $300m fund with this arrangement, 80% of the money is reserved for making investments that provide returns. Every time an investment is made, a capital call takes place where the LPs are asked for the money.

The other 20% of the fund goes to management fees - 2% per year although it's not uncommon that these fees be non-linearly distributed, IE 3% in the early years and 1% in the out years when (presumably) new funds are also throwing off management fees.

So your $300m fund really generates $500k / month in management fees. (Probably paid annually or quarterly.) Enough for some very comfortable salaries, ample support staff, great office space and a travel budget but not enough to really start throwing dollars around millions at a time.

Now of course Andreessen has a reported ~$4B under management but I'd be surprised if they're really generating north of $6M in management fees per month. As fund size grows, management fees may come down (since it doesn't take 10x the effort to write checks 10x as large) or a fund as confident as Andreessen (and in as strong a position) might make a "1.5 and 30" deal where they take fewer dollars as management fees up front but get a larger percentage of the upside.

Note, I know absolutely nothing about what's really happening inside Andreessen, this is a purely hypothetical story against what is considered "typical" in the industry. (In the US.)

Idle question - what % of gold (or USD for that matter) do you think is owned through theft? I suppose we quickly get into the murky question of trying to define "theft" but even by the strictest definition I wouldn't be surprised if 6% of gold and USD are held off books and a direct result of illegal activity.

Google Voice silently drops all MMS. So any multi-recipient text or any text with an attached pic will just not get to you and the sender will think you just didn't reply.

I ported my Google Voice number out to my cell phone which is a huge pain but it did work eventually.

I'd go further. I think there needs to be a class action suit brought by customers who purchased a security solution and got snake oil. I'm sure the RSA license limits liability but I think there's a case to be made that this isn't just negligence but willful criminal acts and the limitations should be set aside. The case itself would probably be pretty damaging ("Tell us, what did you think the $10m was buying?"). I think RSA would go pretty far to avoid a trial.

This works the way secrets work in real life. You may want to keep something secret, but if your friend is indescreet, the secret is out. You can't force someone else to keep a secret on your behalf.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the responding agency would want to have control of the scene. Worse than crazy flooding would be crazy flooding combined w a plane crash. The light aircraft that the article mentions likely would not see a drone and could easily hit it. Perhaps FEMA should be incorporating this type if drone into their response plan and I'm sure they could be doing it faster but having civilians flying unannounced and practically invisible as high as 1500 ft seems like an opportunity for disaster.

Of course the path from Verilog to working hardware involves a number of steps along the way. You don't really know that your hardware design has made it into silicon intact and that nothing else has been added. [1]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/backdoor_foun...

"First rule of government spending: why buy one when you can have two for twice the price?"

I think OP skips over a whole class of attacks:

* References to his "Pole dancer girlfriend" will be used to suggest poor moral character. [1] [2]

* It will be suggested that he's gay. [3] (Interesting contrast to the previous point)

* His "inability" to finish high school will be cited as a character flaw. [4][5]

I'm sure there will be many others along the same lines.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/lindsay-mills-edwar...

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2339980/Jonathan-Mil...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-nsa-is-...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/brooks-the-solitar...

[5] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/10-things-to-know-abou...

I wonder if there's some economic equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics. If entropy is always increasing, perhaps the environmental costs of a system can never be non-positive. Entropy can only increase. I haven't fully thought it through but it's an intriguing idea.

Perhaps a coincidence, but this AdWeek report[1] flags a number of "ghost sites" that offer huge volume of impressions for sale on the exchanges and have real advertisers but don't seem to have any actual human beings present. One site in particular they mention usbuildingdigest.com has a very large number of DSP and other data integrations[2]. Suggestive to say the least. A number of other sites are mentioned in the AdWeek report.

[1] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/meet-most-suspect-publ... [2] http://imgur.com/WHxmmHo

They also have crazy union rules where a cab is only allowed to pick up in the (tiny) area it's chartered in. So if you catch a cab from Cambridge to Boston (across the river) the now empty Cambridge cab is not allowed to pick up anyone in Boston but is supposed to drive back to Cambridge empty to find a new fare. Same goes for Somerville, etc. Rules like this further reduce the availability of cabs and make getting around unpredictable and super frustrating.

> This is one reason why I will never take money from an external investor.

You could use the same logic to convince yourself never to convince anyone to quit their job and come work with you. Or to move their family across the country. Or to convince their boss that using your startup as a vendor rather than SAP is the right thing to do.

Making something work is going to require convincing others to bet on you - with money, with time and with credibility. Betting involves risk. It's unavoidable. But doing it "on your own" is largely a fiction.

This is Oliver Roup, CEO of VigLink. Merchants generally offer affiliate programs to encourage the creation of content discussing their products or the development of services where such content tends to develop.

Extensions like this one have neither of these characteristics and instead are seen as a "tax" by the merchants - they drive up costs without any benefit. This is of course not welcomed by the merchants and as a result, VigLink does not permit this type of use of our service.

The account this extension references was terminated quote some time ago, not long after we discovered it. Although the extension continues to insert our code (we cannot prevent it) we do not affiliate any clicks on the account and the extension owner is making no money through VigLink.

Oliver Roup Founder / CEO, VigLink oroup@viglink.com

I'm Oliver Roup, the CEO of VigLink and the guy interviewed in the article.

The interstate commerce clause of the constitution and subsequent case law establishes that one state may not tax the businesses of another unless it has a physical presence ("a nexus") in it's state.

California and a number of other states are attempting to redefine nexus more broadly in an attempt to be able to force eg Amazon to collect sales tax from it's residents. Amazon has established that they would rather stop doing business with CA affiliates than (effectively) raise prices.

This should matter to you because affiliates are just the tip of the iceberg. One of the California proposals already contemplates that having subsidiaries, servers or _vendors_ in CA would establish a nexus. So let's say you're the entrepreneurs behind CloudKick (to use an already exited example from Y Combinator.) If these proposals had been law when they were looking for customers, they would have found many customers concerned that using CloudKick would obligate them to collect sales tax from their customers in California. Collecting the taxes would of course only be part of the issue - computing when and how much to collect in accordance with the latest version of the law in every state would be a significant burden.

The states of course are perfectly entitled to seek new revenue, especially in times of economic distress. However we believe lawmakers should stick to strategies that work. Historically these laws have resulted in _reduced_ tax revenue and job flight. (the merchants cut ties with affiliates in those states and the affiliates either move or cease operation.) They also make investment in these kinds of business models more challenging. For a state as dependent as California on innovation, we think this is just bad public policy. (Also the Performance Marketing Association has filed suit against the state of Illinois arguing that it's affiliate tax law is unconstitutional.) The correct place for this to be taken up is at the federal level since the federal government actually does have the right to impose taxes on interstate commerce. Senator Durbin of Illinois has announced he intends to introduce legislation to address this federally in the fall.

If you're still reading and you're motivated to do something, check out http://25000businessesatrisk.com/ for California or http://performancemarketingassociation.com/nexus-tax for the rest of the country.

Oliver Roup Founder / CEO, VigLink

San Francisco, CA - VigLink, Product Manager, Senior Java Developer

VigLink is a content monetization company, assisting publishers to make more money from their site by capturing the value of outbound traffic from their site.

We use technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, Nutch and Lucene. We're looking for full-stack developers ready to jump in on a high-volume low-latency bidding engine. Experience with real-time auctions, NLP and data mining are all pluses.

Work is in SF, looking for both interns and full time.

More info: http://www.viglink.com

Job descriptions:

http://www.viglink.com/jobs#/product-manager http://www.viglink.com/jobs#/senior-java-dev

Email me directly (oroup@) and please put "HN Job Post" in the title.