hermanmerman

What is your non-arbitrary take on that number then?

1. Gold had value 4000 years ago because it was rare enough that people could use it as a currency, not because it was a useful metal. Incidentally, it's not useful at all compared to steel, copper, aluminum, etc. hence its use in jewelry.

2. Gold has value today because some people are willing to buy it and some others are willing to sell it. I don't see how it couldn't be the same with Bitcoins (or anything for that matters). Can you explain to me why dollars have value? Euros? Drachmas?

3. You repeating that two successful investors said something at some point doesn't mean they are right, and you saying that they "agree with you" doesn't mean you are right. When trying to find the truth, blindly referring to authority is the last thing you should do.

What is the "jogging" of today? Gluten free diets? I could see it become mainstream once science has studied it more extensively, but today if you don't have coeliac disease and decide to go gluten-free, you're labeled as nuts right away.

The headlines look informative and neutral in tone, no click-baiting and BuzzFeed-like over-sensationalization. Correctly filtered and tailored to my tastes, I could use it to read the news!

I am completely out of the loop and hove no idea what the project is about, but apparently every one on the KS page is basically saying that they couldn't care less about this feature. I'm curious now at what really happened and why they shut it down, if their biggest hurdle is something so few people want.

So bullshit jobs are a tax paid by big corporations? Why are they willing to pay this tax? If most of their workforce is improductive, why not get rid of it altogether? Why do these jobs exist?

YC operates like a startup would: they have a bold hypothesis, something that must be challenged ("most science is a slog"). There is very little chance that they could be right, but in case they are, and they execute well, the benefits could be huge.

Speeding up life sciences development cycles the way development cycles in software engineering have been sped up is the goal, but the way to do it is hard and complex and uncertain. It requires funding, perseverance, trial and error, incremental improvements as much as breakthroughs. YC has proven they're good at all of this.

I don't really think it's 10/20/30/40, one year cliff means they get 25% after a year but then the schedule is monthly. See it as a salary: you get some every month, it stops when you get fired.

It's one of those situations where I would be very happy to be wrong :)

As cool as it is, the reality is that geography changes: cities evolve, roads are built, closed, etc. Maintaining an up-to-date database of those views can only be done to serve another, very lucrative purpose, the one of which only Google & al. can offer. I don't think a community-based approach can work when the scale of effort is this high.

Is it template-based like Clerky (with the same Delaware C-Corp limitation), or is there more to it (advice on which document to use based on the situation, clauses that change depending on context, etc.)?

Does it support self-hosting of the server part? If I could deploy it to one of my Digital Ocean servers easily, I could see it become my default (and last) password manager. I'm too small a fish for a hacker to actually hunt my own server, and even if they do... it's zero knowledge, so I think I'd be comfortable with that.

Side question: does it support sharing of secured notes and credentials? even to non-encryptr users?

The checks look simple/unambiguous enough for a bot to do the work. Maybe a dual machine/human approach is the right one: a bot scans /new every 15 min for those factors, and updates a list of suspicious links/accounts, and then humans review this list and take action. Valve does something similar to detect cheaters on CS:GO by the way.

you're right, but HN is so focused that there is only one /new page, so the competition is brutal.

There are 25 links on /new, the oldest being 27 min ago. So your post has 27 minutes to gather the attention of enough people (7-8 upvotes is OK) to actually surface to the frontpage. This is not a lot fo time, especially for IPython Notebooks which need time to be read/appreciated. Maybe reddit is the community you need :/

Hey Zac, I think you are spot on (except maybe the bullish part). Credit card processing was likely just a foot in the door, but allowed them to build relationships with a ton of (very) small businesses. As a technology company, I trust them more than banks to take advantage of these relationships (and the data that comes with it). At the end of the day, the banks are here to offer loans to their customers, and a loan is as good as the risk assessment of the borrower's situation, which leads to the associated interest rate. Who is in a better position to calculate that, other than the company who has a clear view of the cash that goes in the business every day? That's Square right there.

If you haven't seen it already (was posted yesterday I think), check out Standard Treasury's Series A deck: http://slideshare.net/linhir/standard-treasury-series-a-pitc...

They explain why they decided to start their bank in the UK instead of the US. For once, the USA seem to have no competitive advantage.

Why wait to find out, when there is money on the table right now?

Also, sometimes they have to take a lot of money, as later-stage investors want to control a sizable chunk of the company (in this case, 12.5%).

tablecloth math time: $2bn worth, assuming they're worth 10 times their revenue (let's be generous), that would require $200m in sales. they have 10m users, assuming 1% are paying, that means 100k users for $200m sales, meaning each user must spend 2000 dollars per year at Github. Sounds a little high considering the basic plan is $7/month, but with entreprise sales and growth rate, it sounds feasible.

Google naturally comes to mind. Facebook / Parse, also. Amazon Web Services. Actually any company in this space (that is worth more than $20bn).

Why do you say an IPO is unlikely? I don't see why the public markets would be wary: Github is IaaS done right, has clear ways to make money and grow on its current offering, and can very well come up with innovations adjacent to its core services.

Good thing he's saying it out loud, but for those who think actions speak louder than words, it was clear enough when he decided to buy Oculus VR for $2bn.

It makes sense after all: 75% of Facebook's money comes from a platform (smartphones) that was nonexistent 10 years ago. In 10 years it is possible that VR will represent 75% or more of the revenues of Facebook — they'd be fools not to invest in it early.

Well many companies are profitable (actually, it's the only prerequisite to stay alive). And arguably, Github isn't profitable enough to fuel its own growth, or they wouldn't need to take $250m from investors in exchange of shares. The question is: is it worth 2 billion dollars? As a developer my guts say yes, but I have no idea what their numbers look like...

Apparently it's Daily Users, so I'd be really surprised if the standalone app turned out to be a success. Messenger and Instagram get away with that because people open them several times a day. I don't use Events nearly enough to have it take some space on my home screen.

It must be so hard to be one of the friends or family of someone who was in MH370. Every now and then you get a new hope that you could get closure, but until now it's just been speculations... Let's hope this one is different.

The 25% less on seed valuation is actually a good news for solo founders. The seed round is just a bet on the team, so if a team of 2, 3 or 4 people are worth "only" 25% more than one guy/girl, then this one guy/girl is doing something very right (as well as optimizing his/her financials, because they have 25% less than people who diluted themselves at least 50% more).

Isn't it exactly the opportunity at hand? No matter how much you don't want them to, people will still use spreadsheets, and the reasons why don't even matter. Instead of getting in another lost battle (Hypercard), just give people what they want, and combine their love of spreadsheets with their need for data connectivity.

That is a very misleading title. At first I thought it was confirmed that the propulsion was impossible... After reading the article, turns out it _is_ possible, it's just that it should not be.

And you're still banking there? That sounds kind of serious...

Well contrast that with Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100m initiative to search for alien life[1], and I'd say that we're still pretty optimistic about that. We're basically searching for aliens who would've had the same idea as we had with Voyager :) almost naive now that I think of it...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-hawking-russian-billiona...