jsun

What would be the point? grocery stores are dying already. Buy buttons are cool but surely it won't take 20-30 years for grocery stores to go away?

Between Instacart (which in it's "final form" is basically amazon for groceries) and Amazon (don't forget the Echo, which was basically built for the same usecase) grocery stores don't really have long left. Certainly less than 10-15 years?

I think the key difference is that Sony and Android both approached the watch as a smaller phone. You can play angry birds on it, and you can play music, and shop online and do everything that a phone can. In that sense they haven't built a new device, they built a miniature phone with a wristband.

So whatever Apple is building, it's definitely not an "also-ran" because the category doesn't exist yet. Whatever wins this category will look and feel markedly different from a smartphone, just like how the first real smartphones looked and felt different from their predecessor "smart"phones like the razr and blackberry.

Whether Apple can bring a viable product to the market remains to be seen.

Yeah I love Uber but the one thing that's really annoyed me the past couple of years is whenever it goes above 2x surge every UberX driver immediately "forgets" how to navigate the city. Even a couple of blocks out of the way means a couple of bucks extra on your fare at surge pricing levels. Uber definitely has this data, I would love to see them release it given their commitment to data transparency. Even some really simple metric like average distance traveled vs. average GPS route distance during surge vs. normal should give a fairly unbiased view of how often this is happening.

I'm not sure the math works out. It mentions a weekly lease price of $780 per medallion in Chicago. Assuming 15% tax and 15% cost of insurance that comes out to $600 to the leasing company. Assuming the car costs $25,000 and has a depreciated value of $10,000 after 3 years as a fleet car, that means the weekly "cost" of the car is $113.21 (assuming a 5% financing rate), which prices the medallion at $486.79. A perpetuity of $486.79 per week at an expected 20% gross return only costs $126,566.15, less than a third of the selling price of a medallion in Chicago today. Even at a expected 10% gross return still only comes out to $253,132.20. Am I off on my math somewhere?

Unsourced wikipedia articles seem to suggest that Wheeler believed the exact opposite on retrocausality. Since both pieces seem to cite no academic sources I will leave it to you to determine which is true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27s_delayed_choice_expe...

Wow. this is misleading. Convertible notes are the best things to happen to startup founders in the history of fundraising.

Take a modern convertible note to an angel investor from the pre-bubble 90's and they'd laugh you out of whatever coffee shop you happen to be sitting in.

All of the "examples" shown in the blog post make irrational arguments. Show me one scenario (in numbers) where using a convertible note for a seed round was suboptimal compared to an obtainable equity deal.

If I didn't know better I'd think this was an example of a VC trying to smear an awesome instrument so hopefully they won't have to compete with investors willing to write them.

This is wrong. The reason pay and job security are no longer powerful motivators is because of the way society evolved in the past few decades. It used to be common to work for the same company your entire life, forced separation from that social structure causes a lot more pain back then than now.

In addition, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a generalized framework, it's not a guide on how to day to day manage your employees. Saying it's "outdated" because its previous misinterpretations no longer apply to today's world is irresponsible.

hey we've been looking for this EXACT solution for ages and had no idea you guys existed...

Is Streem going to continue to live on as a separate product?

The writer was even money overall, but 2 for 10 in the top 10... not great

If you are running a startup I don't know of a better way to convince yourself not to listen to the haters

Well... I'm pragmatically there's things I'm going to agree with and things I'm going to disagree with for every. single. administration. So the choices are either working within the context of the system that exists today, or anarchy. Working within the context of the system includes reinforcing the things that can positively affect people's lives (healthcare) and fighting things that can negative affect them (spying). Fighting "the system" as a whole is paramount to advocating anarchy.

what's your thoughts on chemicals like nicotine, which could be a powerful nootropic?

With absolute neutrality towards the topic of the article, here are some warning flags for the data presented.

"Employed Americans" isn't a typical survey category, and the author makes no attempt at explaining why "Employed Americans" was a more relevant demographic to survey than all americans, all adults, all adults between ages of x and y, etc. Nor does the author present equivalent statistics for the more commonly surveyed demographics.

"Nearly one in two employed Americans" really just means almost 50%, and could be misleading on quick glance.

Well he said if you kept giving the AI exponentially more computing resources it would get linear growth.

I think it's fairly obvious that providing 1 computer exponentially more resources isn't much different from creating exponentially more brain simulations...

Seems like you guys kinda just threw in the towel and said "fuck it, its for philanthropy"

Here's a better answer - Lending Club and Prosper both lost their shirts when they first entered the market, and now they are both making their investors money. It just takes time and, more importantly, data.

yeah but all of those things are oh so unsexy to talk about given what's going on in SF right now

YC's purpose is to advance the goals of the startups that it represents and make its investors money. Secondarily it tries to help develop the startup ecosystem regardless of whether the companies are in YC.

I don't understand why politics can't be a tool to achieving those ends. Especially when the DNC is aligned with the startup community on many of the key political issues, like founder immigration reform, that can affect all of us.

A lot of advice on lawyering up and fighting this tooth and nail, and gotta say, this is extremely childish and a terrible idea.

If you sue your company, you increase its chance to fail by an order of magnitude. If you lose, you can laugh as your former founders and friends struggle to recover to pre-lawsuit levels but probably fail. If you win you would've won worthless shares in a company that's shortly going to fail.

Be pragmatic. You even admitted yourself that you are not a great coder - be the bigger person and do what it takes to help the company succeed.

Oh and when you exit, negotiate for an automatic vest for 25-50% of your remaining unvested shares.

Just make the selection process really difficult. Those who want it will get it.

Everyone shits on bankers but the reason there's so many successful ex-bankers outside of banking is because they're goal oriented people who don't take no for an answer. Very similar to startup founders.

Your point #2 doesn't really work. You can manipulate the market in the short-term but you can't control the inherent value of the currency. Fiat currencies issued by governments can do that because they can literally just print or destroy money through monetary policy.

And I'm talking purely about bitcoin. I'm a lot more bullish on the future of crypto-currencies in general, but bitcoin has a lot of flaws that are probably deal breakers at this point.

See point #2. Central monetary bodies specifically change monetary policy to prevent deflation, worse case they can just print more money to cause artificial inflating to combat deflation.

Bitcoin doesn't have this defense mechanism.

I'd like to hear a real economist's take on this but from my personal opinion Bitcoin will never take off as a transactional currency because of it's inherently limited nature, and here's the reasons contributing to it:

1. There's a finite amount of them that can ever be mined

2. There's no central governing body control the rate of inflation/deflation through monetary policy.

By definition this creates a deflationary currency. Meaning as a currency it gains value the more goods and services it can be redeemed for, and the more valuable it is the less likely it is that people will redeem it for goods or services.

Meaning if all of a sudden more merchants started accepting bitcoin then bitcoins will appreciate as it's underlying "value" grows, but people will stop spending bitcoin because that coffee you bought for 3 bucks today might be 30 bucks next year. In turn merchants will spend less money building infrastructure for bitcoins since no one uses it.

Does that make any sense?

I mean... no hate but this doesn't sound like a case of college is useless. If you tried your hardest and failed out, then maybe engineering isn't for you. I understand the engineering curriculum is much harder, but the fact of the matter is, to be a decent engineer you should be able to pass. It'd be a different story if you were failing because you were disinterested and had much better things to do with your time, but if you were failing because you can't get data structures or discrete mathematics then maybe it's time to change fields.

haha glad to see modelviewculture has finally embraced the destiny it was born for - as spammy link bait top 10 list blog with regurgitated content. I guess this was truly the one trick SEO consultants didn't want you to know.

By the way, as a male founder I've heard every single one of these multiple multiple times.

I don't think the author understands what the quantified self movement is about...

data-points gathered by most "quantified self" tools are completely useless in the hands of anyone except yourself (or someone who has weird fetishes about your insulin levels)

It reads more like a leveraged sellout (leveragedsellout.com) piece than commentary on quantified self...

A lot of times companies file trademarks that they know they won't get in order to get it declared a "generic term". Once it gets that designation the company can use it without worrying about a competitor coming in and trademarking the term later. You still can't defend it from competitive use like a trademark, but if you own the domain or have created other artificial barriers to its use, then it's really never a problem

Is this a real thing? if you guys are in Chicago you can come by today to take some pictures of my car:)

Was thinking about selling it for 3 months already but just takes so much time.

And Chicago! :)

Groupon, Grubhub, Braintree, Orbitz etc.

I don't think Sam meant anything derogatory by it, he's just stating his opinion. Frankly I agree Miami Beach isn't a startup capital, but that doesn't mean great companies can't come from it. It's just not popularly recognized as a startup capital.

This piece is entirely incomplete. It purports to examine the entire ecosystem from the angle of a single company, and writes an article not unlike painting eagles (or vultures as the case may be) as the villain conspiring against the innocent rabbits.

Let's go through this logic again. So a hedge fund comes in, buys a company, levers it up with a partner's money, leaving a pile of toxic debt on their neighbor's lawn.

With you so far.

The company issues more junk bonds in order to pay it's existing creditors, and that gets snapped up by other PE firms / Hedgefunds, who need it in order to fulfill a never-ending quest for returns.

Yup got it.

GC then goes bankrupt and the banks are evil.

Whoa, wait a minute. Where is this whole process did anyone get hurt? The author seems to think Guitar Center, and YOU, the average consumers. But in order to really understand that, let's look back in time.

Guitar center, if were any other company, were started by a few enterprising individuals with a passion for what they do. In turn, they were able to build a great business, and grow it to serve the entire country. After a while, wanting to cash in their success, they sell the company to a buyer, knowing very well what they planned to do with the company. The rest is history.

Not as clear anymore is it? Now lets look at what happens in the future.

GC goes bankrupt. Or it doesn't but becomes irrelevant. The 800-pound gorilla in the space dies, and there's room in the space now for another innovator, a new group of passionate individuals who can now bring their vision to life.

And the cycle starts anew.

I haven't done any programming since highschool (AP C++) and recently did a self-guided online RoR course.

Simply put, I was frightened by how much I was forced to rely on my 10 year old C++ programming abilities to understand the principals behind what this online course was teaching me.

Someone without any programming experience would get more out of learning principals of computer science with almost any language than a high level MVC framework like rails - there's just too much magic that you'll never understand.