prickledpear

I'd love to see the numbers on this if you have them in a shareable format. How did your model account for value deflation and what assumptions did it make about storage tech?

It's great that YC provides feedback on why they don't accept (some) companies. However, it's a bit disappointing to see that not having MRR is a reason to reject a company. It seems like a lot of the successful YC companies were accepted way before they were anywhere to close to revenue -- and some were even working on a completely different product when accepted.

My hope is that MRR is sufficient, but not necessary for acceptance!

Their typescript compiler may not be targeting the correct ecmascript version so the typescript generated could be using polyfills instead of native features.

It's a little hard to tell if you're asking "are there laws against monopolies?" or "should there be laws against monopolies?".

The answer to the first is a certain yes. There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States. You can read up on the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts from the 1890s and 1910s to start with. There is also considerable case law stemming from this legislation.

The answer to "should there be laws against monopolies" is a little more open. One theoretical justification for breaking up monopolies, is that in some cases monopolies cause economic inefficiencies. Look up "deadweight loss from monopoly pricing".

It's very complicated to measure any efficiencies or inefficiencies from tech monopolies, so I don't think there's a clear answer.

It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government, so there is a lot of room for debate on that question.

Can anyone help me appreciate non representational art like that of Mr. Johns?

One specific question I have is: do his individual works stand alone or do you have to understand his life and/or complete body of work and the context in which it was created to appreciate it?

If you saw one or two of his paintings without ever having heard of Jasper Johns would you recognize them as masterpieces?

This comment explains some of the technical details: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/arer0k/i_took_nearly...

This is only true to the extent that YC is a monopoly.

If other accelerators compete with YC, entrepreneurs may choose to do business with an accelerator that selects smaller classes.

These mutual funds and ETFs actively participate in corporate governance, and the overlapping ownership of most stocks in the market is a very underrated problem.

Economists have found evidence that as ownership concentration increases, firms act more like a monopoly.

See this paper for one example in the airline industry: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12698

Yes, that is the problem I mentioned in the original comment that I'm not sure how to solve :)

This scheme has the advantage of it not mattering if something is active. Instead you pay fees based on what it's worth to you.

If someone is squatting on a high-value domain, they will have to pay high fees or sell the domain to someone who can make better use of it.

This prevents someone else from squatting on google-search.com and allows it to go to the highest value use -- protecting Google's brand.

The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the domain.

Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain for $100,000, and revalue the domain at $500,000 -- out of my price range.

One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1]

Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees).

Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at that price.

While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain?

[1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494

I'm trying to understand exactly what is changing.

From the article are they just switching the order of the two lotteries? They aren't actually raising the number of visas offered, right?

This just has the effect of allocating more of the 85,000 visas granted to those with a Master's degree or PhD, right?

I'm sure the universities that heavily recruit international students to their graduate programs will love this.

This is a good introduction to the terminology and symbology used to describe queues, and the KPIs that it highlights are useful.

I'm left wishing that the writeup included some more applications of queuing theory. Are there any unexpected or counterintuitive results that all the terminology makes it easier to understand or express? Otherwise, I'm not too motivated to learn all these Greek letters :)

Another way Chrome could address the problem of extensions having too much access and power over users' browsing data would be to make it easier for extensions and users to specify a list of domains that the extension should be active on.

For example I use an extension called Library Extension[1] that will load matching results from my library when I"m looking at a book from Amazon.

Library Extension requests permission to read and change data on all sites that I visit. Their FAQ explains that they request data on all sites because it would be too difficult for them to add more sites in the future [2].

I'd be a lot happier if I could tell Chrome to only run this extension's scripts on Amazon domains.

[1] https://www.libraryextension.com [2] https://www.libraryextension.com/frequently-asked-questions

As the article points out, very few websites and applications have keyboard shortcuts.

If anyone else is interested in reducing mouse usage and has some familiarity with vim keybindings, I'd recommend the Vimium extension[1]. It's natural to use, and replaces most mouse use cases.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...