HN user
ffillette[at]gmail.com
Funny to see that France is only 134th while French refer to their country as "The Exagon" (metropolitan France) - 3 ground borders and 3 sea borders. The expression was coined in the 1860s by school reformists and got popular after the Franco-German War in 1870 when Alsace was lost. To my knowledge French are the only ones to define their country with a geometrical form
It is weird to see Techcrunch faking the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg with GAAP, "Street" and earnings per share expressions. Really not what I expect from TC... I can't help but think that good old days when TC used to explore new ideas and technologies are gone. Today almost all their writers just post update about a funding round, a developer conference or a new product feature. I wish I could get more in-depth articles about major topics like open AI, future telco/messaging networks, etc.
Fascinating study. It really triggers questions around how animals' memory work - short term vs long-term, trauma vs joy, etc. I have a 2-year French shepherd (Beauceron) who, while being smart, has a very limited long-term memory. I am almost convinced that he cannot make the difference between waiting for me 5 minutes and 5 hours. At the same time, his trauma or joy memory works incredibly well: he perfectly remembers people he only saw 2/3 times when he was 2 months or objects that hurt him. I always feel like animals are trapped between an absolute lack of time and space consciousness and an incredibly sharp conscious of feeling
"The middle class has no savings" => France saving ratio is 15% vs 5% in the US, so that's definitely not the point.
When reading the article I was remembering the words of Dominique Vidal, former Yahoo MD Europe, quoted by Criteo's cofounder Rudelle in his book: "Yahoo had everything to be Google. But when we reached a peak of users, we stopped investing in R&D to focus on other expenses. That is the most terrible mistake we did". When you look at Google or Facebook and their R&D investments in non core-business projects, I am definitely thinking that someone got Yahoo's lessons right
Interesting timing: we have the same debate rising up in France with the acquisition of Medtech (Rosa medical robots) by Zimmer Biomet [1]. CEO and founder, Bertin Nahum, said he had to sell as he couldn't find the right funding in FR/EU. Real shame and also a sad day for France (med)tech
I am really amazed by the comments I read so I am voluntarily going to "defend" VW while I would not in other circumstances. To make sure this is understood: yes VW is guilty, it has violated customers' trust, they are a shame for the entire car industry and should receive strong punishment for that.
Yet, how can everybody forget about all other car manufacturers - especially US? They pretty much all lie about their gas emissions as proven by different experts and agencies [1] [2] [3].
Why? Because we have improved our gas emission limits to a level that most car manufacturers couldn't reach over the short run. Take the example of European car makers. The European Commission started to really regulate car emissions in 2010. At that time, car makers were faced with dropping sales (double crisis 2008 and 2010), stable/slightly increasing costs (wage inflation and poor labour market flexibility - German is an exception in Europe) and stable/slightly decreasing prices (due to competition and few new vehicles). In this context, how can you expect car makers to invest in "traditional cars" to reduce gas emissions and in electric and autonomous vehicles to fight against the competition of tech car companies like Tesla or Google. That is just not possible.
So who is responsible? Of course VW and other car makers are all responsible for that mess and the disastrous consequences on environment. But WE are also responsible: we want safer, cleaner, cheaper and stronger vehicles from traditional car makers but but you can't have everything all at once. Tesla can do it because that they start from a "blank page", with no turnaround costs. For VW, GM, Toyota, that's another story. Maybe we should just keep that in mind before charged them with a "corporate death penalty"...
[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/volkswagen-w... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/21/all-top-sel... [3]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/do-all-automakers-cheat-on-their...
I said Arabic OR Muslim because they are different. Maybe it would be useful for you to start reading properly what people write. I said Arabic people and not people speaking Arabic because that is completely different. Most of my friends in Tel-Aviv speak arabic or understand it because Arabs represent a significant proportion of Israel's population/residents. I said "only for Arabic OR Muslim tourists" because they are treated differently at the borders. Just go to Ben Gurion airport or the Wall and you will see that Israeli soldiers are asked to pay special attention to Arabic and Muslims. That has nothing to do with racism or anything like that: they just know that there has never been a terrorist attack conducted by a white Christian guy. What I said is based only on facts [1] and what my friends in the army told me. Because, yes, I lived in Tel-Aviv for 2 years so: yes I know a bit about Israel / no, I'm not really the guy who is going to discriminate Israel. Next time keep your mouth shut. Really.
Obviously they won't force the UK into staying in the EU but that's definitely not what's important here. They are just starting UK's internal discrepancies which could seriously damage the union and Westminster won't be able to do much about it. England is already a well developed country which can't accept to be under the EU's power, while Scotland and others know that they're path to economic prosperity leads to the EU and its package of regulations and standards. As they France, Germany and the EU Commission likely to be tough on the UK, they are doing everything they can to stop the future bleeding. All this in one brilliant graphics: http://i64.tinypic.com/1zdu79u.jpg
I find it really problematic: when you fill the US borders paperwork, you are supposed to give objective admin/personal details while on social media you are supposed to speak up your mind. Where do you place the limit between somebody that publicly criticizes the US foreign policy and somebody that can be a threat? How are they going to handle people who posted something like "The US knew about the 9/11 attacks"?
Indeed Israel does it, but only for Arabic or Muslim tourists that present certain characteristics - political engagement for instance. So it does exist but it's really not mainstream
It's not as simple as that: they would still need to make the case but you lying at the border just gives US authorities bigger evidence. Couple of years ago a French tourist answered "yes" to make fun of US borders and ended up in jail for a couple of days - not years as obviously he was more a dumb tourist than a real terrorist
Completely agree. When I was working for a French bank, I saw how the US treats money laundering and it's an absolute nightmare. Let's take the example of a transaction that is processed in EUR by a French bank, from a French company to a Chinese company, on goods manufactured in, let's say, Ivory Coast. If in the email discussion, somebody answers while he/she in the US for holidays, then the transaction will fall under Fatca while there is absolutely no US interests affected whatsoever. Bottom line: Fatca is not only about money laundering, it is largely about maintaining the US dominance of international banking.
I recently read that Slack has combined salting and hashing with 2FA after their data breach in March 2015. But if I remember well, whenever you want to connect, you can get a "magic link" with an automatically generated password right in your mailbox and then copy-paste it in the app. Has someone tested if it's bullet proof?
40% is a valid EBITDA margin for telcos. Twilio is indeed slightly negative in terms of adjusted EBITDA (around -5%) but market cap of tech companies is usually rather based on NTM EBITDA or industry average EBITDA - see prospectus of IPOs
Fact is Goldman Sachs - and maybe other banks - were allocated shares with a priviledged price during the FB's IPO as they were working on the IPO while buying stocks for their own clients. I know this was a special IPO, but my guess is that it is likely to happen for others
Based on IPO stock price ($15) and market cap ($1.23Bn) and Twilio's revenue run rate around $150M, so that's x8.2 for Revenue and x20.5 for EBITDA (40% margin seems reasonable in the telcos industry). Pretty strong figures - AT&T trades at 5xEBITDA - but not excessive. They might have chosen the bear/base case for the IPO pricing given i) the IPOs of tech companies that got delayed over the last months ii) their unique situation as a pure API player - they're the only one out there with that positioning
It happened for alleged terrorists no one knew about - apart from people working in security/intelligence/military services - and Sweden felt extremely shameful. Not sure they want to do that again with somebody almost every has heard of and who hasn't been a threat to Sweden
You're right, I just wrote too fast, I meant what you wrote!
"You state that Sweden can't extradite him to the US. Given the fact that most of the laws created in most Western countries (ranging from tax law to civil law) are often not extremely well defined, and can be interpreted in different ways by different judges, I can totally understand his point of view." => It is not a matter of justice system (common law vs civil law) or law definition, but a matter of independence. And when it comes to independence, Europe has shown a strong will not to extradite people to the US. Add the media pressure around Assange's case and you get a good assurance that he won't be extradited to the US
While reading the wikipedia article, I couldn't help thinking about two things: - the Big Lebowski scene when Walter jumps on the Dude's attempt to quote Lenin and mixes Lenin with Lennon - one thing I recently read about natural language processing [1]: "NLP began in the 1950s as the intersection of artificial intelligence and linguistics. (...) Early simplistic approaches, for example, word-for-word Russian-to-English machine translation,2 were defeated by homographs—identically spelled words with multiple meanings—and metaphor, leading to the apocryphal story of the Biblical, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ being translated to ‘the vodka is agreeable, but the meat is spoiled.’ [1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168328/
The article is quite superficial on many aspects: i) first, Uber is not in the sharing economy but in the on-demand: you don't share and monetize an asset (vs AirBnb), you offer a service activated by demand; ii) in my opinion, Uber keeps raising funds for multiple reasons and some of them are simply overlooked in the article: - from a global market point of view: money (especially in the form of debt) is historically cheap - from an investor point of view: investors are looking for proven business models as VC funding is slowing down - from an employee point of view: the multiple funding rounds maintain/increase the valuation, which preserves the stock-based incentive for employees (and we know that's a key reason why so many great programmers joined Uber) - from a competitor point of view: Uber opens the market and evangelizes (pays the legal cost, advertises in new markets, etc.) iii) it never really analyses the on-demand transport economics = is it a "winner takes all" market structure? The article keeps suggesting it is while it is clearly not
I agree with you, the "how it works" and the workflow are not crystal clear and gives room for suspicion about the validity of the legal advice given. That being said, if the service only gives transparent and actionable information about the visas, it is already huge. I recently had an appointment with an immigration layer for an investor visa. Like any lawyer, he enjoyed drowning me under complexity to justify his $200/hour fee. I ended up with all kind of insider details about 5 different visas... We start from so far when it comes to information transparency in the administration, SimpleCitizen gives an imperfect but still very useful answer.
Why do everyone mixes a decentralized system with a self-controlled system? Decentralization doesn't mean there is no power to regulate or no coordination between users/agents, it is just a model of architecture for a system where power belongs to local entities. That absolutely doesn't mean that there aren't rules and bodies to defend them [1]. [1] https://www.intgovforum.org/cms/wks2015/uploads/proposal_bac...
yep, exactly the same project
Oh yeah I forgot about that, you're right
The section about closed timelike curves is, I think, a good example of why computational complexity has metaphysical consequences but struggles to bridge the two - see what Aaronson writes about the "grandfather paradox".
Really interesting to realize that every day we see "on-demand" companies get funding but very little "on-demand" analytics tools to anticipate the workload. I had worked on a project for SNCF - French national railway company - to use Beacon to better track customers in railway stations and adapt the staff and services. We did the job but soon realized they absolute no clue about who does what, the time it takes, etc.
One very interesting example I know is Algolia. They first applied when they were very early stage, in 2013 if I'm correct. They got rejected mainly because of their poor ability to track user metrics. Then they re-applied in 2014 and got selected for the Winter batch. Last year they raised $18M after an epic roadshow with all key VCs sending termsheets. My opinion is that YC strongly values your ability to be focused, execute and track/analyze data instead of technology and product/market fit - especially in early stages.