timdierks

Just to compare various sources:

* exhaled air is about 5% CO2

* auto exhaust is about 14% CO2

* airplane (turbofan) exhaust is about 2% CO2

* atmospheric CO2 is about .04% CO2

Not sure where the B2B constraint came from. That's a little more challenging, because B2B companies are more likely to have revenue and enterprise sales channels, etc., worth preserving, and it's not particularly relevant to your thesis (that products from VC-backed companies are less likely to get shut down).

Still, here's a few that came to mind where the product has been shut down or changed sufficiently to be the equivalent for many customers: dMARC FeedBurner AuthenTEC Face.com TellMe Wildfire

I'm sure I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer. I'm pretty sure these are all >= 100M.

Vendor reliability is a problem at all levels. If you don't have a multi-year maintenance contract, all the more so.

It's pretty easy to name any number of >$100M acquisitions that have been shut down. Regardless, that's only a goal of VCs: there's no shortage of VC-funded companies that have been sold for far less than $100M when they couldn't raise the next round at a palatable price.

No startup company can make a defensible claim that their product will be around for the long haul.

Related/unrelated, but reminds me of “Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning” https://www.flickr.com/photos/jayfine/14019165410/ and http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/arts/design/spencer-finch-...

Unfortunately, on past history, if the bank hadn't been so cooperative, they'd probably be charged with a crime. Demonstrating security vulnerabilities is risky business these days.

Doing well in an English major at a good school is hard work, requires strong critical thinking skills, etc. But it doesn't reflect the level of analytical precision and rigorous correctness that doing well as a CS major does.

The humanities as a course of study are primarily interpretive and creative, and most schools of thought will support the idea that many different interpretations have value.

By comparison, while there are many different approaches and creative and engineering opportunities in CS, in the end the computer Does Exactly What It Is Told To Do And Nothing Else. And the level of precision, exactness and rigor necessary to support that environment is alien to most humanities curricula.

Can anyone explain a rational and practical way to achieve the worldview the European courts are looking to impose? Regardless of whether one thinks one should have the right to be forgotten (or whatever one thinks that means), I don't see any path here which actually accomplishes anything other than constraining businesses large enough to care about EU regulators and allowing all other players to do whatever.

Depending on the exact year, going to standards meetings, probably. (If I recall, she spent some time on leave after being active in security standards but before she left Microsoft.)

Now, she's apparently making chocolate: http://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/news/profiles/after-appl... and http://www.chocolatefox.com/

That was seen as politically too close to Netscape's position. If you weren't there, you have no idea: Microsoft/Netscape was a trench war.

There's "famous", below that, maybe "wonk famous" and then there's "nerd famous". At the time, Bruce was only the latter, at best; in fact, probably only at the lower, entry-level, "crypto nerd famous". Now, he's arguably wonk famous (that is, within epsilon, everyone on HN has heard of him, a reasonable fraction of readers of the NYT op-ed page will recognize his name, but less than 5% of the US population).

Yes, I think Paul is probably the mass-market father of side channel attacks; I believe he has the first published research on power use attacks and he's also done good work on timing attacks.

And, yes, SSL 2 is a mess: it was only not-broken enough (with the info we had at the time) to not be an SSL 1 or heartbleed-like "patch ALL the software" crisis.

They're not so bad when they're not broken; a lot of the time, you can't even tell that an ad is using them, because it's natural and appropriate.

Here's the (best) use case: let's say I sell garden equipment: hoses, sprinklers, garden gnomes, etc., so I advertise on those terms as keywords. I could have one ad that says "Best Garden Equipment", but tests show that ads work better if they specifically name the product that the user is looking for. So I can use keyword expansion to have the ad say "Best Garden Hoses", "Best Garden Sprinklers", "Best Garden Gnomes", etc., and not have to manage a lot of different ads.

This can be used in much broader cases, too, such as if I have hotels in 500 US cities: load up the keyword expansion with the names of all 500 cities and run an ad with title "{CITY_NAME} Hotel Rooms".

The problem is when people load it up with a jillion keywords in the hope that, if they get a click, they'll look for matches in their product database afterwards, and sometimes they fail.

So, yes: frequently lame. But when it's not misused, pretty useful.

eBay should have shut down these affiliates years ago; they're not adding marginal value and they hurt the brand, because it lets any moron associate a crappy ad message with eBay's name.

This article began with John McPhee, who begins many great things. Somers' article is the most practical single bit of writing advice I've seen in a long time (it even includes software you can install).

If you're not familiar with McPhee, you're missing out. He's one of the greatest English-language essayists of the 20th century. My favorite is "Coming into the Country" (on Alaska), but the Hacker News set in general may prefer "The Control of Nature".

Note that this is an anonymous "guest post"—I thought for a while that it was an account by the blog author.

This is a very helpful post; makers should be very aware that there are a lot of costs to producing things, many of which you're unlikely to pencil out when dreaming something up (e.g. 1% of revenue going to storing shipping supplies). This is why so many companies appear to have high margins: money leaks out of businesses all over the place.

To the criticism that Kickstarter isn't about making money: part of enabling people to make things is compensating them enough that they can afford to put in the time.

Nitpick: I think your tax estimate is high, given that pretty much everything else is a business expense, and thus deductible, unless your income is high enough that you have to pay $3K in taxes on roughly $8K in net income (38%: 5% Utah + 33% Fed tax bracket).

Also, you're left with the asset of 800 posters which you're offering for $120/ea + shipping. Sure, you probably won't sell all of them at that price, at least not anytime soon, but you do have to attribute that revenue to the project, since you attributed the costs to produce them to the project, and selling just 10% of them will double your net revenue. (Assuming $130 in revenue each, $6 in transaction costs, $15 in shipping & packing costs, $4 in miscellaneous costs = $105 net per poster sold * 80 = $8400 net pre-tax.)

Experiment is the appropriate word. I found both understanding the speech synthesis for a single standalone out-of-context word to be impossible, and it was unable to understand clearly articulated single letters. Closed in frustration.

At which point they will no longer make these mistakes, and thus are more expert.

Everyone wins!

It makes a lot of sense to partner with local telcos to serve customers, but it makes it less likely that Google would be able to leverage providing this infrastructure into broader commercial advantage.

I wonder how much control Google can have over balloon routes? In the limiting case, if they had none, they would have little negotiating power, since they have the infrastructure over a country one way or another and have to deal with that country's carriers. If they have more control, they can choose how to route the balloons so they don't pay to launch balloons over countries they haven't done deals with.

The tweeter (probably a non-technical support person, so go gently on him or her as an individual) has revised the statement:

"@passy I'm mistaken about the website security certificate but avoiding pasting of passwords is good practice & protects our customers 1/2" https://twitter.com/BritishGasHelp/status/463679554306203648

"@passy especially when using public computers. Alpha numerical policy ensures your protection without making special characters necessary^S" https://twitter.com/BritishGasHelp/status/463681274092462080

While I don't know if they do, I can see why Google might prioritize review of accounts which are about to receive a payout over ones where that's far in the future: once the money is sent, it's generally not recoverable. That's when Google has the highest quotient of [data on the account] * [value at risk], so that's when it makes sense to review.

AdWords and AdSense policies tell advertisers and publishers that advertiser spending on evicted publishers are refunded for the preceding 60 days. Because this policy has to do with revenue recognition, it's presumably under SOX control, so it would be difficult and very risky to willfully violate it.

So Google faces a larger cash loss if they cancel a publisher just after a payout than if they do so before. And they have no incentive to cancel publishers just to keep the money: they refund the advertisers, so they lose not only their share of the advertising spend, but they have to pay the publisher share of any unrecoverable previous payout out of their own pockets.

Disclosure: I used to work for Google.

I have difficulty envisioning exactly how this market is going to develop. None of the products (AppleTV, Roku, Google, Amazon) are differentiated enough to imagine someone who's pretty happy with their box switching, particularly given various ways you'd get locked into particular features or media (e.g., if the average AppleTV user has bought a bunch of movies from iTunes, they're unlikely to switch to Amazon even if they like the games).

At the price point, you can imagine people owning more than one device to get access to different feature silos, but the huge duplication of features (e.g. every device having Netflix) makes this feel wasteful. Furthermore, I think people quickly run into a limitation on how many HDMI ports their TV has. If you're going to have a cable box and DVD/BluRay player connected, you need to have 3 ports to be able to connect one of these devices at all, and you can't plausibly have more than two. (I don't know how many HDMI ports TVs have in the market, but 2, 3, and 4 seems to cover the consumer space in a very small sampling of Amazon availability.)

If I were building one of these devices, I would include an HDMI switch with pass-through so I don't consume an HDMI port. In the absence of that, it's not clear at all to me what the shape of market adoption looks like.

Those invitations were all tied to the inviter; all Google had to do was identify any single invitation or an account created with one and that would lead them directly to the employee misusing their invites.

Where's the calculation for how much it costs to give the $20K/person to the employed? Unless unemployment is above 96%, it will be more than the 4.2% overhead you hypothesize here.