jdreyfuss

Sqreen (YC W18) is one counterexample, but they came into YC at a later stage of maturity than your average YC company.

As to why there aren't many others, that's a great question. It's a hard space to get started in, since security is mission critical for essentially everyone, so that likely doesn't help matters. There's a lot more that needs to go into a viable MVP in cybersecurity than in other areas as well, since there's much less room for error and jank.

Those reasons likely contribute, but none of them are hard blockers.

This article makes two assumptions that need more support. One, that having a particular "threshold brain structure" is a necessary condition for consciousness. And two, that consciousness is a binary, as opposed to a spectrum.

These kinds of sites are exactly that: niche Craigslists. Since they are marketplaces, they see their job as connecting two groups that want to engage with each other (in this case, camera owners and people who want to rent a camera), and anything beyond connecting people has nothing to do with them.

It's best to think of these kind of sites as digital telephone poles with flyers and act accordingly, but it's hard when, in an attempt to grow their user base, they exaggerate the value they offer and make people think they're safer or getting more out of them than they really offer. Those kind of tactics deserve to be called out

Definitely thought provoking. I hadn't thought much about how the effects of the fear of retribution reverberate in how people and companies interact with governments, employers, and suppliers.

I feel like this is usually discussed on the micro-level (e.g. an employee's fear of whistleblowing on her boss), but not so much on the macro-level.

Right. Outlier success is heavily driven by randomness, sometimes with a real differentiator edge thrown it. It doesn't last because randomness is never permanently positive over a sufficient sample size and whatever edge someone may have is studied and copied or counteracted once they start to outpace everyone else.

But to be fair, outlier success in many fields is rarely possible without some initial high level of skill and knowledge in the first place.

Joking that a reasonable leaving hour == too early isn't a good joke. It plants the idea that the reasonable hour maybe isn't reasonable in other peoples' minds.

That kind of thing only works as a joke when it's about an obviously late hour (i.e. well past the norms of the company). If someone stays until 9pm to put out some fire and then people joke about working a half day, its obvious that there's no underlying meaning to that, since the leaving hour is well past the established norms

Yes, this fits closer to reality. Most people want to spend as little as possible on rent for a situation that matches their needs. Just because fancier apartments become available at higher prices doesn't mean people will move into them from a cheaper place just because they can technically afford it. Plenty of people rent apartments below their "I can afford this" level in order to use that money elsewhere or save up for a future house.

Building luxury housing doesn't push prices lower on the bottom half of the housing spectrum, it just makes the top end higher. "Trickle down" housing takes way too long to be realized, while subsidized housing has a much stronger and immediate impact[0]

[0]https://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images...

I assumed this was going to be about avoiding flow while doing actual work, but this is only in the context of practice and training.

I can see the argument for avoiding flow and focusing on your weaknesses when your goal is self-improvement (and to take the jump from there that it's important to set aside some time to focus on self-improvement), but that doesn't apply when your goal is actual output, which is the majority of the time when it comes to most of our jobs

Yeah Bird's rollout in SF put them in a very negative light for a lot people (myself included). Perhaps there's more acceptance for scooters this time around, so it'll go better for them.

This specific law may not have a large effect in and of itself, but having something like this out there can set the stage for future change as well. Momentum is very much a thing in politics, so anything that takes steps in the right direction could ultimately contribute to getting that ball rolling

Right, this makes sense to me. If you can cut down on customers' needs to make a decision, you'll increase the likelihood that someone makes a purchase. Building consumer trust by recommending actually good products is in Amazon's interest here

In SF at least, Ubers and Lyfts often treat unprotected bike lanes as drop-off and pick-up zones as well, which adds another dangerous wrinkle for bikers

Definitely an intentional strategy on Medium's part. Guess they think the increase in revenue will outweigh the decline in the number of new articles and readership. They might be right, but the experience for both publishers and readers is much shittier as a result now.

Cool idea! I like the self-assessment angle.

We wrote this for CTOs since prior to hiring a dedicated security engineer, security responsibilities in a company often fall to the CTO. But really, any more technical person in a company with some ownership or interest in security can leverage this.

It's not something we hardcore enforce, since it's more about having a fun way to build good security habits with your devices. Being lightly called out in Slack has an impact in and of itself. The actual cookies are just a bonus. But people do like cookies, so there is some social pressure from your peers asking when the cookies are coming!

Checklist author here. Glad you liked the idea!

Figuring out a clean shorthand way to group these best practices was something we definitely thought about. The idea behind using funding rounds was to find something that can work as an easily digestible placeholder for company maturity and capabilities for most SaaS startups. Something closer to “just starting out,” “product-market fit,” and “starting to scale” rather than being specifically about actual funding levels.

Definitely open to feedback if that way of grouping things doesn't resonate!

Yes, it feels like it would be a fairly straightforward econ model actually. If the combined price for all the platforms gets too high and the user experience too terrible, then it's an easy flip to piracy. I get that all these publishing companies are trying to get as close to that line as possible, but as they're (naturally) all interested in maximizing their own profits rather than thinking about the collective industry profit, I don't doubt we'll cross that line before too long

Good food for thought. A lot to consider there.

I think besides the dichotomy of finding your in-group necessitating more clearly defining the out-groups and the harm that can come with that, there's also an underlying question of whether or not being able to so easily "find your people" is a positive thing in sum. It certainly seems positive for marginalized people and for niche fandoms and geekeries and all the usual ways we think about it, but on the flip side of the coin, the same ease also exists for hate groups and those seeking to cause harm.

No, the article feels like it's not communicating the reason that this is potentially important very well. If I'm reading this right, the whole opening takeaway about the Atlantic ocean shrinking doesn't seem like the point here.

From what I gather in TFA, we haven't figured out how subduction zones start, and we're currently observing the beginning of one in progress, which is giving us the data to back up earlier theories for the first time. This fills an important gap in our understanding of plate tectonics.

I think this is an important point. The fact that some countries have started to impose regulation against some of the tactics these gaming companies use (like Belgium banning loot boxes[0]) suggests that this is starting to be recognized.

I'm a big fan of video games, but games that are essentially thinly-veiled attempts to get people addicted and extract money make me queasy.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43906306

Yeah agreed. As I've gotten older, my tolerance for putting up with experiences and tactics I don't like has decreased. I dislike Epic attempting to strong-arm me into using their platform while still dealing with ongoing security concerns and adopting anti-consumer behavior, so I won't use them. Just fine to wait and play some of the many other games on my eventual to-play list

Vacant properties have a lot of negative externalities -- higher safety risks, reduction in the quality of a neighborhood and in foot traffic (harming other businesses), higher incidences of squatting/homeless encampments, etc.

A vacancy tax is an attempt to correct for those externalities and encourage better behavior from landlords. This is a situation where just having something is noticeably better than nothing at all.

San Francisco: on the verge of pricing everybody out since 1850

I think when a lot of people made their "maps provider" decision, there weren't a lot of these other options available. Many people use Google Maps because it was the best maps option at the time they were first figuring out their early smartphone apps.

And for newer people, bundling is hugely impactful. Doing nothing is almost always the most popular choice

I would imagine that it's a mix. A rise in reports (thanks to the availability of the 311 mobile app and such), as well as a rise in incidents. I don't have much to back up the rise in incidents (besides everyone's general feeling that things have gotten worse on the homeless front, and maybe something to do with the opioid crisis), but it certainly feels that way anecdotally

I like the idea of "slow news." I imagine my ideal state would be a combination of slow news and rapid fire updates. You get depth on the things that deserve depth, as well as a shallow horizontal understanding of the most current happenings across the board.

From the reader side, the challenge would come in making the time for the slow news part when the rapid fire updates never stop, and in resisting the urge to equate seeing the rapid fire updates with actually being informed on the issues (i.e. "I don't need to read this in-depth look at the border situation; I've already seen a bunch of small updates on that"). From the publisher side, monetization is the ever-present issue

Interesting article. I like the re-framing of questioning gaming (and other uses of technology) from the basis of what it adds rather than what it subtracts.

I believe there is value in gaming. There's value in storytelling, in mastering small skills, and in the positive feedback of progression. There's value in shared experiences and in the communities that spring up within and around games.

My own struggle is with the diminishing returns. The "danger" of games to me, such as they are, is not in the value-per-unit-of-time ratio, but rather in the total amount of time that they can suck up. It's not hard at all to spend hundreds of hours in games. For me, if I take any given hour of gaming and compare it to an hour of something else I could have been doing, I'm quite happy to have spent it gaming. But when I take the sum of that time over a year, or a lifetime, and compare it to other pursuits, that's when I start to question it in my own life.

tl;dr: the "danger" of gaming to me is not in the content of games, or in gaming not having anything to add to someone's life, but rather in the fact that, for many people, gaming seems uniquely able to suck up so much time -- much more so than what it ultimately adds.

And they do make money off of dongles[0]. It is obviously a small percentage of their overall revenue, but even a couple percentage points is sizable at Apple's size.

[0]https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/24/dongle-top-seller-apple-best-...

This is just another entry in the "Apple: a Dongle Company" narrative. Apple has long had a philosophy of designing things their way and making the consumer adapt to their whims, rather than accepting standards or designing for the way people like to use things.

If you're charitable, you can say that they design with the future in mind. If you're not, you can say they know they can squeeze out more revenue via dongles and be indifferent to consumer wants because they have the size and market loyalty to get away with it. Depends on how you feel about Apple, I suppose

I don't think the effect has been definitively proven one way or the other. While there are studies showing a decrease in congestion, there are also several showing a notable increase too[0][1].

I can say, anecdotally, in SF there are lots of Uber/Lyft drivers who drive in from outside of the city (and even Bay Area) because they can make more driving in the city. If they disappeared, would they be replaced by an equal or greater number of private cars? Given the parking situation in SF, I doubt it, but who can say.

[0]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/study-half-of-sfs-increase-i... [1]http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/automobility.pdf