steven2012

Is this because of the leadership of Sundar Pichai? It seems as though he might have good plans on making more revenue, but it flies in the face of the expectations of his employees. Does this bode poorly for him as CEO if his employees are openly rebelling against these high-profile projects such as this and the drone AI project?

Have these planes ever been used in real combat?

Pancreatic cancer is scary as hell because there's no warning signs until it's too late. I wonder why we're not doing more to develop blood tests or other ways to detect this much earlier in the process when the results are so binary, and it's also increasing in terms of number of cases every year.

I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers.

As a buyer, however, it's great so unless you have enough margins to protect you from scammers, and if you just want to sell one-off things like eBay from the 2000s, then don't bother.

As a technology platform, eBay is an embarrassment. They released features like collections that didn't work on their production website and it looks like they got rid of it entirely now. They have a half-built API that has confusing documentation, and their APIs that do work aren't very useful. Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they're waiting to die, like Yahoo. I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet, since they're a stationary target that hasn't done anything meaningful in over a decade.

Organic doesn't mean they're not using pesticides at all, and no fertilizer and singing kumbaya to their crops every night. The problem with the term "organic" is that it means different things to different agencies.

I've had people bleed on my on the SF MUNI, it's thoroughly disgusting and scary.

I've traveled to a dozen cities with Uber and didn't have to change my account, even in China. So the answer is no.

As a side note, the OP's username "superchink" seems pretty offensive to Asians on Hacker News.

Lol $635k. Maybe including condos but definitely not SFHs

No I don't think so. It sounds like he was fired for at the very least strange behavior, and all of his potential employers picked up on it. If he were technically good, it wouldn't matter what Chrysler said. But it seems like he's not technically good.

Unfortunately I think this person seems mentally ill. I have a friend who in his 30s became a paranoid schizophrenic and although he was very articulate, he had major flaws in his logic and behaved erratically. He also filed many lawsuits and was litigious as well.

It sounds like this person was dismissed from his job (he mentioned it in one of his videos), and he hasn't been able to find employment because of his mental illness.

It's sad that we don't do enough to help those with mental illness. It would go a long way to making their lives better and the rest of our lives safer.

Yes that was a concern of mine as well. They stated that if they do go out of business they would open source everything so that we could build our own solution. That's basically what convinced me to go all in with their product.

The stuff from wirelesstags.net are generally very good. I have a bunch of sensors and their Reed sensors for detecting opening and closing of doors are very good. I hook it up with ifttt and turn on my Hue lights when I open and close my doors. Clearly not ground breaking stuff but useful.

The Hue lights are great but expensive. The Hue switch made things a lot more useful as well. I'm waiting for them to come out with a compatible light switch so I can control my recessed lights the same way as my light bulbs.

What they need to work on is a better outdoor camera with motion detection that doesn't get triggered by shadows or wind moving a tree branch. I've tried almost every solution and none is acceptable.

I worked at a PHP-based company and after a year of intense interviewing, we finally decided to switch core languages and tech stacks because we weren't attracting strong enough candidates.

What we found is that most good programmers didn't want to work in php and most php developers were designers that learned how to code php. But they didn't understand CS fundamentals or even a decent idea how to code. They could cobble together a web site that worked and even looked great, but they didn't know how to write maintainable, modular code.

It got to the point where I would ask the candidate to merge two sorted arrays and 70% couldn't do it properly.

In terms of language, I thought php itself was a surprisingly productive language. I just quit though because I didn't want to be known as a php developer because of the stigma and there poor quality of other php developers that I encountered.

The other side of that coin is that if you don't have a lot of money then you most likely won't get sued.

Yes it works with no internet connection, you connect to a hub on the local network.

Pulling a new wire is better but also much more expensive. Adding a new switch for me is~200 and I can't move it around like the Hue.

I use wirelesstags.net which is good enough for me. Pretty effective for my uses, batteries last about 1 year for updates every 10 mins, and you have access to all your data for all time.

What security liability? If you're talking about a random attack, then they would need to somehow piece together my various email addresses and break different passwords. The cameras (Dropcam, Smartcam, Ring) don't keep ports open on my firewall.

If you're talking about a targeted attack, there's likely nothing I can do except sit in my house with a loaded gun.

It's fun as hell knowing what's going on in the house at all times and feeling that I'm protecting myself and my family. Whether or not that's true is to be determined.

The nest cost $250, insulation cost 10x that, and new furnace is 40x.

I agree that insulation and upgrading the home would produce the nest results but my point is that the data is useful, not useless.

I could shut my heating completely and save 100% but that misses the point. What I did was turn on the heating in the morning to a temperature that was comfortable and then shut it off so that by the time everyone left for work/school the temperature would still be acceptable but on the lower bounds. That saved about 45 mins of heating a day.

Overnight as well I could see how my furnace behaved and tweaked based on that, etc.

The key isn't just the nest but the other temp sensors so I have a complete idea of what my houses characteristics are.

I have the Hue dimmer switch which makes them infinitely more useful. I can now control my lights without having to pull wires etc.

Some IoT is a fad. But there are very useful things that you can do if you have many connected data devices and sensors at home.

I have ~15 temperature sensors and door sensors that alert me when doors get opened. I was able to use that data to definitively measure the positive impact insulating my house had. I can tell when people enter or exit my house, and I also have ~10 cameras for security. If I get a notification that someone is around my house while I'm gone, I can call my local police department a lot faster than any alarm company.

My Nest also tells me how long my furnace is on every day. Of course their data is useless so I constantly request and store this data in violation of their terms of services, because fuck Nest and their useless TOS. But with that I can make smarter decisions on how to save money in heating and I've halved my bill by manually adjusting my heating (not relying on their stupid algos).

Do I need a fridge that tells me I'm out of eggs? No. But having metrics and data lets me as a homeowner make smarter decisions that save money.

Basic income can succeed on a small level definitely but it can never succeed on a national or even city or state level. The reason is simple economics: inflation.

When money comes so easily it will drive up prices. If it's done on a spot level it won't make an impact but once you increase the size of the population that received this free money, it will just drive up prices.

For example look at there mortgage interest deduction. It's purpose was to make home ownership cheaper but what it ends up doing is causing house prices inflation, at least in areas like the bay area. The deduction gets factored into the financial engineering required to figure out how much you can afford to pay for a house, which causes there prices top rise.

The same thing will happen when people get free money every month. Just like how rent prices increased around face book when they offered a subsidy if they lived within 3 miles of HQ, the same type of increase will happen if a larger enough population gets this free money.

Wow. When I started 20+ years ago in Toronto I made $30k. I can't believe that starting salaries are that low today. Within 3 years I was making > 50k but that's because I didn't know how to negotiate salaries. And a year later, I moved to Silicon Valley and my salary tripled (but my rent quintupled).

Starting salaries today at most silicon valley companies are ~100k or more.

The culture of cheating and lying in China is so bad that even the government posted economic numbers aren't trusted. I have plenty of very close Chinese friends and they would be the first to admit that the mainland Chinese culture is messed up these days, and the instinct to lie and cheat is prevalent.

Most of the companies came from older tech companies like Yahoo, Intel, etc which had slow growth anyway so they probably aren't responsible for the vast increase of jobs over the last 5 years.

I'm curious what the layoff situation is like for start-ups though since they don't need to report for the WARN act.

Antivirus scans are one of those things added on IT checklists to cover their ass whenever something wrong happens.

But it rarely is useful. It only causes problems. We've seen so many issues related to virus scans throughout the years it's crazy.

What's better is to lock down the servers with only minimal access. I haven't used virus scan on my main desktop for over 10 years because I don't click on weird emails and I don't go to sketchy websites ever. Sure there's the risk of malware from ads I suppose, but I'm not that worried.

Do other companies have this clause in place?

Okay thanks for confirming you don't know what you're talking about. Black scholes is options valuation and never used in 409A valuation. You can't just make stuff up, you have to justify it to your auditors.

This is wrong information. 409A valuations are generally based on revenue models, profit models (not applicable for most startups) or comparatives. It's not done based on funding rounds because there's a lot of goodwill based in that.

Most companies push the 409A valuations as low as possible precisely because of income tax ramifications on exercise.