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gottagetmac

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Time pressure was the main reason.

We also couldn’t have been sure that a method that could recover $10 would be able to recover $12,000. Bots won’t bother to snipe opportunities that are too small (they have to put a little money at risk to even try).

Finally, there was a nagging worry that demonstrating this kind of transaction for the bots could “teach” them to look for this opportunity, which could lead them to this money even before we tried to pick it up (since they could scan the blockchain for it). I had heard that these bots sometimes used recent transactions as “hints” to look for new profit opportunities. It sounded like a wild idea, but all of this was pretty wild.

You're never going to have a useful legal system where the laws are simple enough for everyone to understand. Free speech is a complex idea.

To put it in HN terms, suppose I were to say "It's pretty sad that we can no longer look at assembly code to understand what our computer programs will do. Instead we need to pay software engineers to tell us how they work even when it's doing something simple, like running a search engine."

Well, because the 13th Amendment by its terms governs private conduct.

I agree, though, that there's a Shelly v. Kraemer type argument that could be made against the enforceability of contracts limiting freedom of speech in certain ways.

Of course it does, when you're talking about the government regulating non-governmental, private speech, such as this mythical law against employers saying truthfully that you were fired for cause.

Learning "a little about the 1st amendment" and pondering it "a little in a few minutes" is a dangerous thing. From just looking at this text, for example, you would think that it only applied to Congress, when actually it also applies to the executive branch, the judicial branch, and states and local government (since the Fourteenth Amendment and the incorporation cases).

I also think this narrow view has made you jump to a much stronger conclusion than is warranted. At least one scholar has considered whether the First Amendment could be interpreted to require that contracts of silence be unenforceable. http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-law-review...

In this case you happen to be mostly right, but don't assume you can understand the contours of First Amendment law just by looking at the text. There is a vast apparatus that has been built around the First Amendment, little of which is deducible from the constitutional text alone.

Myles in fact does have a small one-person low-intensity startup off which he claims to make 5 figures per month. And don't you notice how he makes his lifestyle sound really good, and the startup guy's judgments seem silly?

The funny part here is that you read this and actually agreed with Startup Guy for almost all of it. (From the rest of the comments it seems like a lot of HN did). That's part of his point, I guess.

What are you talking about? PIH is the Myles surrogate in that conversation. He's making fun of Startup Guy for thinking that anyone who does what he (Myles) is doing is "unethical or lazy."

That's not the definition of "disrupt" used by Christensen (or by Yglesias in this article). Yglesias is arguing that we should return to the useful definition of disrupt as developing a product that is worse in most respects compared to existing products, except on price (and possibly size/portability). The quality you're talking about is something like "revolutionary," not disruptive.

This is exactly what I was hoping for when reading this title... but of course it's just the tired "share this on Facebook" feature that Netflix had for a minute a few years ago and every non-VPPA-affected site has had for years. When will companies start getting more creative with social?

anatoli, I think flipper28 was responding to _delirium's statement that suicide would be a "rational decision" for him/her in this situation based on a calculation of utilities. This is, as we know, not the usual way that people determine to commit suicide.

Our Magic 14 years ago

I think the point of the image is more that starting small makes them less likely to fail SPECTACULARLY. There is zero chance that Instacart will lose $830 million before it sees traction, which is what happened to Webvan. If Webvan had just been a small grocery startup, nobody would have cared if it failed.

Also, "historically notable" is a pretty high bar you're setting.

Finally, I'm sure Instacart hopes to reach that kind of scale eventually. But they don't want to start there because again, that's how you fail spectacularly and lose tons of money without giving people something they want.

What is his evidence for the claim in the title, other than that they have been raising increasingly large amounts of money (typically, all other things equal, a sign of health)?