pns

Revenue from domains in 2021: $199.99M XCD [1] = $7.40M USD [2]

Nominal 2021 GDP: $380M USD [3]

$7.40M/$380M = 1.94%

[1] page 64, http://www.gov.ai/documents/finance/2022%20Budget.pdf

[2] 1 XCD = 0.37 USD https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...

[3] https://data.un.org/en/iso/ai.html

The effort may outweigh the costs if there are higher value projects this would be prioritized against (including the on-going support burden)

For example, a project that made Chrome users 1% better off is probably worth far more to the overall 1pw user base.

While I find it interesting from a safety/convenience perspective, I also can't help but see WALL-E becoming more and more real

See cloudflare blog post conclusion - they're quite aware it's hopefully unnecessary and possibly just a flair factor (their pun :) but may help prevent an attack ever so slightly.

"Hopefully we’ll never need LavaRand. Hopefully, the primary entropy sources used by our production machines will remain secure, and LavaRand will serve little purpose beyond adding some flair to our office. But if it turns out that we’re wrong, and that our randomness sources in production are actually flawed, then hopefully LavaRand will be our hedge, making it just a little bit harder to hack Cloudflare."

Thanks!

While qualitative, the radiuses are more directional than precise. The key thing with the outer radius is that it's usually outside one's country or even continent.

It's a legal issue because courts have previously interpreted large differences (i.e. beyond recovery time) in _paid_ maternity vs paternity leave as a gender discrimination issue. See linked NYT article above

One example from the article: "Just last week, CNN and Turner Broadcasting quietly settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge with a former CNN correspondent, Josh Levs, who claimed that the company’s paid parental leave policy discriminated against biological fathers.

At the time Mr. Levs’s daughter was born, in October 2013, CNN offered 10 weeks of paid leave to biological mothers and the same amount to parents of either gender who adopted children or relied on surrogates. By contrast, the company offered two weeks of paid leave to biological fathers."

While some gap in paid maternity vs paternity leave is permissible as women uniquely have to recover from a childbirth (considered short-term disability), courts have found 6-weeks as the typical recovery time and thus the typical allowed difference in maternity/paternity leave duration [1]. Nvidia's clearly understands this issue - adoptive and foster parents parents receive the same leave as paternity (no disability for these groups of course).

How are they've overcoming the legal issues around offering a 10-week difference in maternity/paternity leave?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/business/attitudes-shift-o...

You'd think "next to Sal's general store" would work, especially given how prevalent that approach is. In fact, through our research, even for folks working the same delivery area day after day, they consistently fail with these sorts of landmarks. I used to say I lived "next to the vegetable stand on XYZ Rd, across from ABC Apartments" - very visible, clear landmarks which turns out most drivers could never use successfully because they usually called me being lost. You could try NLP on it to then lookup in a db like OkHi's, but these text-based directions definitely proved to be suboptimal when consumed by a human drivers such that companies were actively seeking a better way for their deliveries (and, importantly, were even willing to pay).

Fair feedback re: comms on website.

The OkHi approach is use your phone number as your universal key to share your address (with obvious privacy controls in place to control who can access it). The address itself is a GPS point + a photo - you can see an example at http://okhi.co/hq (best viewed on mobile - this is a vanity url, but you could very much imagine it eventually being something like okhi.co/+254/700111222).

The OkHi business model (similar to other companies in the space) is to allow consumers to share these addresses peer-to-peer free and charge per-use businesses who work in logistics or need address data (e.g. food delivery, ecommerce, emergency services, banks, postal services). They collect the base address data that users can choose where they live from through our own on-the-ground data collection or smartly crowdsourced data (surprisingly scalable).

Lots of promising progress, though obviously lots of work left to make it global. While it is easier to build a business controling the full stack, over time, the base addressing data could become open-sourced/ user address data stored in a public open db e.g. blockchain. I think the issues folks bring up of open-source benefits are very much in mind as this sort of system is built.

From having worked on addressing in Nairobi, Kenya for the past two years, I can tell you the precision problem is worse than you think actually. You're making the assumption

* someone knows how to use a map to a very high degree of precision (not true often)

* GPS is accurate enough, and this is a double whammy - on initial assignment of the GPS point (i.e. it's the GPS of their door/gate, not of their living room couch, and it was collected with enough precision) and on usage (i.e. the GPS antenna on a $30 smartphone)

* plenty of other issues

There are a couple startups trying to solve this beyond what3words mentioned in other comments - they'd suffer from many of the same issues I mention above. Some encourage people to put a placard outside their door/gate with the code to make last-mile arrival easier.

But a more successful approach from research I've done is what OkHi (http://okhi.com) is building - use a photo attached to GPS. From n>1000 tests, we found that the photo drastically decreases time over the alternative, even reducing average time to find the location by over 50% in the last 500m for some addresses.

(Full disclosure - I was worked on the addressing problem for the two years in Nairobi at OkHi, so I obviously believe in their solution or wouldn't have dedicated that much time there :)

It's interesting in these situations to see the outgoing manager's departure as much as a failure of that manager as of the organization itself. I think you're exactly right to be diagnosing why the manager didn't work out as an org issue itself.

Is that really any different than any company's IT department figuring out what needs to get done and then, afterwards, deciding whether to insource or outsource the work?

If the "conflict of interest" biases taxpayers - awesome. Government procurement is supposed to be 100% bias towards helping taxpayers.

If hard drive is encrypted (and like most companies like Google, almost certain they would be), then you wouldn't be able to get much unless you someone got them to disable screensavers/computer sleep and keep the machines on for awhile

It's an all-equity deal from the letter

I agree Seth doesn't make the strongest points for the broader message he's getting at.

That said, I find it a useful because there's still value in his words to be taken. As John Stuart Mill says in On Liberty: "Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty#Of_the_liberty_of_t...

Living as an American in Kenya give me a lot of perspective to what the logical endpoint is if certain government practices get put on steroids, such as this.

While in the United States it sounds alarmist to think of this all as a system of organized, police-mandated shakedowns, that's very common here. In 4 out of 5 times I hear folks get pulled over by cops, the driver had to pay a bribe. Police regularly go to businesses demanding regular payments else they shut down the companies.

I wouldn't have give this a second thought before, but after living here, I see what its like living under degraded institutions.

I think you're right, but it's more nuanced. Nontechnical people can be very helpful early in the recruiting funnel though, and that's a critical time suck/skillset that the technical folks don't have to invest in and can instead focus on their core role.

Thanks! Where were you thinking about doing the project and digitalizing for what purpose?

It's been quite an interesting ride - I used to live in SF and now am seeing see firsthand such an interesting contrast. There are so many emerging market-specific tech challenges, both as things a startup can address (like us) and as part of the design process in building tech that works for a radically different consumer.

OkHi | Full Stack Engineer | Nairobi, Kenya - Solve a problem affecting 4B people across the world

http://okhi.com

There are more people in the world without a physical address than with. 4 billion people in fact. It’s our mission to empower them with an address that works. We're doing this by building the next generation of a physical address system to increase commerce through better logistics, save lives through improved emergency services and grow access to finance through a better identity system.

We're looking a full-stack developer to join our small team of 7 in Nairobi. Experience in JS across front/backend is required, ideally with experience in Android, GIS, and in building other APIs. You will be responsible for launching OkHi to 100s of businesses and millions of consumers across emerging markets. Full job description at http://www.okhi.com/s/OkHi-Experienced-Software-Developer-Jo....

Full-time, onsite, and can arrange visa as needed.

If you are motivated about using your kickass development skills to solve a global problem and have a huge impact on the world, then we want to hear from you. Email us at joinus@okhi.com