glennon

A geyser gazer friend of mine shared the following image pair: a "before" Google Earth image and a USGS overhead image captured today after the event. The debris field surrounding the spring is evident -- including the damaged boardwalk. (links to a png) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dcd55YX7oF8KPrHsog75vPS_Mc9...

Over 60 observations of this hot spring erupting in some fashion over the last 18 years. https://geysertimes.org/geyser.php?id=Black+Diamond Many of the reports mention black water and rocks and "big" -- so not particularly rare. This eruption appears to be larger though -- typically the rocks and debris do not make it to the boardwalk.

This is a reasonable YC link for Series A milestones: [3] Series A Milestones: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/1k-benchmarks

Tangential--I used to work with a lot of caves as a hydrogeologist:

Seven favorite cave names: Abisso "Queen Mama", Big Cave with Bats, Cave of the Swords, Eisriesenwelt (world of the ice giants), Hell Below, Lemon Drop, Mad As A Wet Hen Pit

Nice caves, but seven names that could use some help: Carroll Cave, Ellison's Cave, Fitton Cave, Kartchner Caverns, Lehman Cave, Lilburn Cave, Russell Cave

YC's Demo Day attendee portal has had an online component at least since Winter 2018--the first I attended. The pitch videos were made available a few minutes delayed from real-time live.

This is a water gap, a feature which is commonly formed from a river older than the mountain range. In combination with that older river, in this case, the specific location was caused by "subrosion (a general expression applied to karst processes influencing the course of a river) and..meltwater channels at low altitudes" (Rohde 1994, Martini et al 2002-page 285).

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gap

-- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443042...

-- Rohde P, 1994. Weser und Leine am Berglandrand zur Ober- und Mittelterrassen-Zeit E&G Quaternary Science Journal 44(1): 106–133, DOI 10.3285/eg.44.1.10.

A quick answer. I will expand later if I have time.

(1) Finding VCs: Research online. Nowadays most VCs want to be known, and they have websites and blogs and Twitter accounts. Find the appropriate VCs and send them a short email with a link to your deck. Join founder communities such as YC's https://startupschool.org or https://openland.com.

(2) What to prepare: A pitch deck. https://blog.ycombinator.com/intro-to-the-yc-seed-deck/

(3) What to avoid: Inexperienced startup investors. Also, in the United States, unaccredited investors. Before taking money from an investor, you might talk to a founder of one of their other portfolio companies. Also avoid complex financial agreements: learn about SAFEs and convertible notes beforehand. Overall, you should just review all of YC's latest Startup School materials. https://www.startupschool.org/latest If that's not the way you like to learn, get a copy of Feld and Mendelson's Venture Deals book -- they also run a free online course twice a year.

(4) Common mistakes: Contacting VCs who were not appropriate for the business, location, and stage.

(5) The number one way to increase your chances for getting a VC investment is to not need the VC's money in the first place. A business that is growing exponentially creates its own gravity. Barring that, each investor will have their own priorities. For me, it is the speed of the founder's iterations and progress. That often means I meet the founders long before any serious consideration of investing (e.g., https://bothsidesofthetable.com/invest-in-lines-not-dots-611... )

For visiting Yellowstone in the "off season", the main consideration is road closures.

Most Yellowstone park roads are closed from November 4 through December 14. During that time, almost all park facilities are closed. The road from the north entrance to the Mammoth Hot Springs Visitor Center remains open all year.

From mid-December through February park travel is only possible via snowmobile and snowcoach (again, except for the north entrance / Mammoth area). Then all roads close again in March.

Roads open to normal cars again starting at the end of April and into May. Snow accumulation and animal activity can keep some roads and trails closed into June.

More info from the Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/parkroads.htm

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When to visit:

Best wildlife watching: spring. Fewer people and lots of wildlife out with their young.

Best geyser watching: the hottest, cloud-free day of summer. Hot water makes lots of steam, so eruptions are more difficult to see in cold weather. Similarly, geyser eruption plumes have low color contrast with respect to clouds. Also, see: https://geysertimes.org/

On balance, best time to visit: September and October. Fewer people. Roads and trails usually open. Days can possibly be warm. Plenty of wildlife.

In this batch, Juno College of Technology and Microverse both teach coding using income sharing agreements. Of course, from previous batches, Lambda School and Modern Labor are coding schools that charge via income sharing.

Tensil.ai and Vorticity.xyz. If they are not both on Golden's list (I'm on mobile right now so cannot easily check), they can be found on YC's companies page. Ycombinator.com/companies

Thanks, Jude! From a quick scan, it seems there are quite a few companies in direct competition--particularly in: 1) incoming sharing education, 2) bespoke computer processors, 3) medical billing, and 4) recruiting software.

Same config -- right inside a window. It took three layers of tiny tape squares to conceal the light on mine today. The cameras run pretty hot and the adhesive is going to make a gooey mess.

Of the 500 or so pitches I have heard in the last six months in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, about ten proposed a no cap note--a few of these with a discount and a few with no discount. These were almost entirely Stanford students at a single Stanford event, so I think that was more about targeting rich alums who might wish to help new entrepreneurs at the Alma mater.

I went to a YC angel investing workshop in March 2018. The lectures are all on YouTube. My takeaway was to try to independently consider deals, and not worry about herd mentality. Of course, there was a lot of material, ranging from YC partners, external angels, and VCs. There was conflicting information and advice about the decisionmaking process -- which is good, I think: the process is different for everyone.

Lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aiJlRS2i_w&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

My evaluation template for the recent YC batch: https://alanglennon.com/2019/03/15/yc-w19-template/

My loose coalition of angel friends did a blind survey among ourselves. Sixty responses received from 700 angels, conducted in March 2018. The median check size was $25K. I do not remember the exact distribution, but check sizes of less than $10K were rare, as were checks over $50K.

YC HQ2 exists. It is the China program. https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/

YC states their lead ethical underpinning in the first line of their Founding Principles: "Startups are on balance a good thing." They go further in describing their goal to support and advise founders; and include phrasing about their philosophy of being "benevolent" to founders. Their Principles also describe prioritizing mission-driven endeavors over money. You or I may not share their ethics, but they have theirs.

All good. Of course my descriptive headline was intended to emphasize the findings of the study. The journal article title simply offers that research has taken place -- and thus, is not nearly as useful. It would have been possible to link to a news article that interpreted the study (and had a 'catchy' title), but I thought HN readers would prefer a primary source. Regards!

example catchy title: 'Oral-B Glide floss tied to potentially toxic PFAS chemicals, study suggests' https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/09/oral-b...

For me, most dental floss shreds between one particularly irksome pair of teeth in my mouth. So Glide-style floss is the only type that works.

A dye trace would be in order, but this would be the most likely resurgence. https://zoom.earth/#52.514097,-120.011987,20z,sat

Well... not to guess about the unexpected... but as for what is likely...

Following the pattern for caves in the Canadian Rockies, the lowest cave levels will be highly technical (wrt exploration techniques) with a cold and fast-moving river. The typical passage in such a cave often is somewhat like a slot canyon, but with more angular walls. The distance to the resurgence appears to be a couple of kilometers with an elevation difference of 450 meters. The geometry of flow from this swallet entrance to the resurgence looks joint or fault controlled directing the flow northward from the 'dry' valley's outlet. That is, the cave flow's exit is north of the dry valley's confluence with the north-south surface stream. Thus, a large amount of the cave is likely to occur deep under the mountain. With respect to exploration, this increases the chances that higher, drier alternate passageways and alternate infeeder streams exist aside from the main stream course. It is unclear from aerial imagery, but there is also some chance that the mountainside to the north and west of the entrance is karstified. If so, higher entrances are possible -- which could increase the total system depth. The deepest cave in Canada is ~650m from highest to lowest point. While most satellite imagery of the resurgent stream run show a whitewater cascade, there is some variation in flow. The cave at the resurgent spring would be one of the first places to investigate at low flow.

Congratulations to the team for a wonderful discovery!

(Just a quick impression. I have discovered quite a few sizable caves--not this one, of course)

With the modest pay, there's a joke among park rangers that "you get paid in sunsets". I was one for ten years.

In the United States, the National Park Service has some fine 'wild cave' tours. I have led several as a ranger at Mammoth Cave National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park (Spider Cave & Hall of the White Giant). The Wild Cave tour at Mammoth Cave can be fairly epic if the right guide leads it. These particular parks also each have lantern-type tours that follow rustic, packed-dirt paths on out-of-the way caves and trails. There are actually quite a few other unusual cave tours on federal land throughout the United States, but I have less experience with them (e.g., Round Spring Cave, Missouri; Lava Beds' Crystal Ice Cave, California; Blanchard Springs Caverns, Arkansas; El Capitan Cave, Alaska; Sequoia Nat'l Park's Crystal Cave, California).

Indeed, some of the most spectacular tourist cave experiences are international, such as black water rafting in New Zealand, several eco-adventure resorts in Belize, and 'adventure caving' in Malaysia http://mulupark.com/tours-activities/adventure-caving/

One of my favorite 'normal' tourist caves is Jenolan Caves in Australia. To get to the ticket office and parking lot, you drive through part of the tourist cave. https://goo.gl/maps/aeyabQ3qMEQ2

People get their water from where ever they can get it -- whether shallow or deep. Most people in the world (~75%) do not drink water from karst groundwater, but compared to karst aquifers' spatial extents, two times more people are affected than would be expected.

The study of karst groundwater should not be as esoteric as it is. About one quarter of the world's population is either completely or partially dependent on drinking water from karst (1). The United States is approximately 20% karst landscapes with about 40% of the population affected.

At the same time, there are perhaps a few dozen authoritative scientists of karst hydrology in the United States and Canada.

(1) Hartmann, Andreas & Goldscheider (2014). Karst water resources in a changing world: Review of hydrological modeling approaches. Reviews of Geophysics. 10.1002/2013rg000443

There is a FAQ at: https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday/faq/

Each startup gives a two to three minute pitch with slides, one pitch after another. No questions. They have 15 to 30 minute breaks every 20 pitches or so.

Investors can express interest via a web app, and meetings are set for later. It is also possible to talk to founders during the breaks and in the hallway.

Befriend other startup founders in your area. For non-technical issues, most new businesses share similar challenges. YC Startup School ( https://www.startupschool.org ) is a good opportunity to meet other founders and get advice from YC mentors. No equity required.

Restaurant website: http://www.creator.rest

As noted by @georgecmu, drones for mapping underwater caves have been used for many years--evolving to autonomy from hand-held & scooter-mounted LIDAR mapping arrays. Barbara am Ende wrote a 2001 article in Computer Graphics on such efforts (paywalled: https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/cg/2001/02/mcg2001020014.... ). I am aware of a variety of drones that have been deployed in air-filled caves too--from cameras on balloons (tall chambers with high leads) and standard copter drones to rubble-searching robots. Tethered cameras are occasionally used to evaluate obstructions (e.g. narrow cracks and breakdown). Overall, though, in-person exploration is satisfying and compelling. Robotic tech in air-filled caves mostly is used either for demonstration purposes or, in rarer cases, to determine the best locations to exert more human effort.

Another branch of study is the discovery of subsurface voids from the surface using ground-penetrating radar, microgravity, electrical resistivity, or other geophysical methods. A robot could be equipped with the sensors in dangerous or inaccessible locations, such as off-planet or war zones. DARPA had an interest in this in the early 2000s to locate hostiles in caves, though I do not know its current priority.

Perhaps- though the Mapzen name is trademarked by Samsung Electronics, Korea