kdsudac

The exit of the brands are directly due to the sanctions.

I'm sure the PR hit they'd take from continuing to do business is a factor, but I don't think this many large int'l companies would have reacted this quickly to just PR hits.

All international companies really, really, really, really like to get paid for the goods and services they provide. After sanctions that becomes difficult to impossible to do in Russia.

I think their thought process is:

Best case scenario they get paid in rubles which have gone down in value and are likely to go down further or at the very least be very volatile.

Worst case scenario they get $0 USD for their goods and services as they can't get the money out... and they are slapped with further sanctions.

Interesting read and makes some good points.

The reasoning about the "incredible run of ursurpurs" is a very flawed though. It's not like Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Ellison, Page, Brin, et al. made their fortunes collecting their paychecks and funding their 401k's to the max and paying the top-level income tax bracket.

Their fabulous rise in wealth was because of the equity of the companies they founded becoming publicly traded at very high valuations.

Remember Jobs was only taking $1 in annual salary.

I'm not blaming the wealthy founders, they did remarkable things and deserve to be fabulously well compensated (not that fair or deserved have anything to do with it).

If anything I think the author should distinguish between capital gains taxes and regular income.

Really cool tool with a lot of potential.

My feedback/nit: It's a little hard at first glance to understand what it's useful for. Users need to engage with the demos down below that are probably too far down the page.

The headline has changed to indicate Uber set price at $45 per share or $82 Billion.

Educate yourself: http://video.valleypbs.org/video/3000761059/

"Without agriculture there is no California drought." This type of rhetoric really undermines your credibility. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so ugly.

So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?

I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.

P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.

Might be good to replace "they" with "we" i.e. "we are pumping fossil water". (unless you don't live in California)

It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?

I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.

If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.

You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right?

Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.

Video of original talk from startup school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

Can't wait to hear all the bitcoin fanboys explain how this is in fact a good thing for bitcoin. :)

Every time I read an article about the death of the PC and the ascension of mobile, I wonder how much carrier subsidies distort the relative demand for PCs vs mobile devices.

I'm inclined to believe that mobile sales are "artificially" inflated by these subsidies to a large degree.

Of course, if this business model is sustainable over the long term I guess it doesn't matter for mobile h/w manufacturers.

But for s/w developers the fact that people upgrade h/w every 2 years because of subsidies doesn't mean that those h/w sales are translating into a greater user base.

The most frustrating thing about these kinds of systems is how they never seem to apply at the top. Was Balmer a top CEO? The market doesn't seem to think so.

Haha, well if Musk says so it must be true!

As other posters pointed out, there are obviously competitors in the space (as I'm sure you were already aware).

In my experience, buying SSL certs can be a little confusing since there are so many providers and different types of certs. I did the research to figure out what product I needed, but I can imagine a sizable niche of customers who just want someone to tell them what they need.

" The US government is increadably well run when compared to just about every government throughout history"

Do you have anything to back that claim up? I have quite a few friends who go on rants about government inefficiency and would be nice to have some hard data.

I always just resort to asking: what's a more laissez faire country that you'd actually want to live in? is their approach scalable and sustainable?

Troll much?

I'd assume it got on the front page because people thought it was good advice and/or interesting. I've been told that's how HN works (snark).

Anybody else notice the three tents they have one of the grass covered roofs?

Easter egg or nice place to catch a nap?

Classless and pointless.

At this point I think rapgenius is just using this as a way to get attention/traffic.

"Share economy" is getting a lot of buzz these days.

What percentage of people are actually willing to share? and what percent is needed for these business to be viable?

Using airbnb as an example, what percent of the population is actually willing to rent a room in their house?

"Thousands of newspaper are going to write an article everything that happens."

Thousands of newspapers writing about this is exactly what Musk shouldn't want! Thanks for making my argument for me. :)

Am I the only one annoyed by the whole A player, B player, C player mini-meme?

It's really, really hard to tell the difference between an A player and a B player unless you've worked with them or have known them a long-time. Even then, their contribution can be highly distorted by situation, perception, and personal bias (e.g. Moneyball).

So the advice only works in those few situations where you know someone is a B-player... in which case the advice really reduces down to the obvious: don't hire shitty people.

Hope there are some Boeing battery engineers out there getting a kick out of this!

Curious.

Is this logical: cruise control ==> less (speed up / slow down) ?

So: no cruise control ==> more (speed up / slow down) ?

Do you believe the Tesla advice was to turn off cruise control to conserve battery? or do you think the times reporter is making that up?

Disclaimer: don't know much about Tesla implementation of cruise control.

I get why Musk feels like he needs to defend his company but I think he may be doing more harm than good on the PR front.

Do you think the average Tesla customer is going to want to wade through a bunch of plots of battery charge vs distance, etc? I think the takeaway for the average Tesla customer might be along the lines of "hmm, this seems really complicated.... am I going to have to keep the heat down while I drive even when it's 10 degrees outside?"

To me, Musk comes across as an out-of-touch engineer who keeps trying to argue the technical case and insists it's the customer's fault--it couldn't possibly be a faulty design, confusing U.I., or marketing not realizing a common (mis)use case. If I dropped $60-$100k on a car and run into problems, this is the last thing I'd want to hear on the other end of the phone.

Went to see one of the Boeing leaders talk specifically about the dreamliner's development a few years ago at a Georgia Tech symposium.

He made a point to mention how many different international suppliers were involved and how that was a huge challenge. e.g. They had to custom modify several 747s to increase the cargo hold to fit some of the sub-assemblies.

He gave the impression that part of why there were so many different sub-contractors is to appease foreign governments--especially since many airlines are nationalized. The corporate equivalent of pork-barrel spending.

slashdot seems like it is exactly what OP is looking for.

Interesting read. Realistically, to "know all the cards in online poker games" wouldn't you also have to reverse engineer how they map the random number to a card?

You would get a jack of hearts, not an integer between 1 and 52, right? or does the exploit somehow work for arbitrary patterns as well?

that's a lot of significant digits :)

I haven't tried out Joyent, but I've tested out Linode and Storm-on-Demand and they easily beat Amazon EC2. My benchmark was running our production image processing algorithm that utilizes OpenCV via python on Ubuntu Server (definitely CPU-limited).

FWIW, here are my benchmarks, along with pricing for Northern California regions:

Linode 512: 15.2 seconds, 65 cents per day

Storm-on-demand 1 GB: 13.05 seconds, 5 cents per hour

EC2-micro: 168 seconds, 2.5 cents per hour

EC2-small: 63 seconds, 9 cents per hour

EC2-medium (high CPU): 12.13 seconds, 18.6 cents per hour

Examples like this makes me scratch wonder about the sky-high valuations for Dropbox and Airbnb.

Kudos to Dropbox and Airbnb for executing on great ideas and building awesome companies.

Kudos to YC and other early investors for finding a diamond in the rough.

They'll all make tons of money :)

But those lofty valuations come with lofty expectations. Groupon has over $1B in revenue and a $2B marketcap but is perceived as a failure.