leelin

Best airport mental hack for last-minute types: Get lounge access beyond Priorty Pass

Even though most domestric lounges are hit-or-miss, it's a way to trick myself into getting to the airport 30 to 45 minutes earlier than I would. That way, if I'm running late, worst case I miss the lounge or cut short the time.

For those complaining that lounges are overcrowded with mediocre food, it's true and getting worse. However, it's buffet style - select a healthy salad option with a reasonable protein. Non Priority Pass options are somewhat worthwhile -- United Clubs have gone through a massive upgrade post Covid and so far haven't been too crowded. They also allow access upon arrival, if you really need to fire off some emails and hydrate upon landing.

As for in-flight, for former gaming geeks, try classic emulators. They won't require internet and drain very minimal battery life on your latop.

The adjacent hack is to bring an empty water bottle in your carry-on, which you fill once you clear security. Then, you have a full bottle of water and can decline everything from the "beverage cart" on your flight, meaning you never need to worry about managing a precarious open cup of liquid and ice sitting on your in-flight tray.

Years ago I asked my teacher what percent of street merchants or high school kids would know how to write some of the more complicated, uncommon characters from the advanced textbooks. She replied street merchants maybe 50%, but high school students 100% -- during high school every student will be at their lifetime peak literacy, because they will be cramming and memorizing how to write every possible character in preparation for the college entrance exams.

I tell locals I can "speak, read, and type", but only have 1st grade writing abilities in Mandarin. The key is typing -- you can chat on Line, WeChat, email, or any mobile apps to accomplish day-to-day tasks. But the typing is phoenetic either via Roman pinyin, zhuyin, romaji, etc.

So yes, this problem only comes up in languages where drawing the characters are mostly independent of the pronunciation. You don't need to type individual words, you can type phrases and the input tool presents choices sorted by most commonly used. Therefore, even sending communication is closer to a reading exercise rather than a writing exercise.

I saw "YOLK", as in, a weirdly drawn cracked egg with the yolk pouring out downward and to the left.

Of course, after reading through I'm convinced enough of the mainstream conclusion.

Totally playing devil's advocate, does this loophole work in Twitter's defense?

The WARN act requires large enough employers "provide at least 60 calendar days advance written notice of a plant closing and mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

Ok, so say everyone laid off clearly worked from home for the past 12 months. There was no single site of employment with 50 or more employees. It was just 1 or 2 employees cut from each of 3000 different sites of employment... their own homes?

Obviously, this logic has little chance of working, but I welcome more clarity around whether every w-2 employee needs to be tied to a company office address, and how labor laws might need to change for remote-work situations.

Chess.com has the "personality bots" that supposedly play with the style of various well-known players, streamers, and GMs.

But I remember watching Hikaru Nakamura stream once playing through each of these bots (and beating them fairly easily). He commented that several of the bots were doing things the real players would never do, both in style and even the opening move (1.e4 for a player that almost always opens 1.d4)

It was fairly early after the personality bots came out, so maybe they've fixed it by now.

Fair enough, but that implies there may come a day when mortgage rates are much higher and then housing for new buyers is not at all affordable.

Homeowners that locked in 30-year fixed rates might not be too concerned at first. But eventually, even they may need to move or sell someday. Wages or buying power will need to catch up to avoid some downward price pressure.

Reading the ending hits closer to home and made me more sad than expected!

Andrew Welch was uneasy about the idea of scaling up, especially when they could survive as they were just fine off their utility products

Way back in the day, YC always said not to worry about competitors raising tons of money (not sure if that's still the rec). The 2008 DHH boostrapping talk during Startup School is still one of the most influential videos on my career as a founder. But that path is increasingly less popular! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

Lastly, for all the bolo comments out there, I remember the huge transition from modems to school ethernet that made it playable - it was honestly one of the reasons I was looking forward to dorm life!

I always wondered whether the 7-day cruises were stocked only once at the beginning, or restocked mid-way at ports.

Does that mean they need to freeze lots of the seafood? Is the food less fresh by Day 6 and 7?

My undergrad was a super nerdy school grinding largely solo in the CS lab. Later I did an MBA program to take me completely out of my comfort zone.

I gravitated to those who were chill, and perplexed anyone who tried to play the Status Game by losing on purpose. If it was the chess equivalent, I fall into Fool's Mate on move 2.

Unfortunately, there ARE times when it helps to be able to quickly convey to new acquaintances that you are legitimate and worthwhile for further collaboration. But most of the time, best to turn it off.

Maybe a dumb question from a non-medical guy: are medical images considered "stationary" from a stats viewpoint?

That is, will medical images of diseases we diagnose in the next 20 years look a lot like the ones from the past 20 years, or is there a danger of over-fitting on an evolving data set? Could either the technology or the biology of the disease evolve?

In a prior life I was a quant trader, and financial market data is notorious for having the non-stationary problem. On top of market rules and structures changing all the time, once someone discovers a profitable trading idea, their own actions change what the data looks like for everyone else from that point forward.

Oh yes, I was also there! But I remember many people came out of that event hearing very different things from PG (there were also small presentations from YC alums hiring).

I remember PG saying NYC had clearly overtaken Boston as #2 startup up in the US, partly because Boston investors were more risk averse and focused on the late stages. Then he asked whether NYC could rival the Bay Area for #1.

I don't think he made a definitive conclusion one way or another. I even remember him saying the unstoppable force of the startup revolution would hit the immovable object - that NYC is already known as many other hubs (finance in particular).

The one concept that stood out was his argument that "chance encounters" with people who can help your startup are crucial. Good luck sometimes hits when you least expect it, but NYC at the time didn't have all the ingredients in place the way the Bay Area had. A month later he wrote this down more formally in "Why Startup Hubs Work"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hubs.html

One point in defense of the airlines that people often forget. There are certain taxes and fees the airlines must pay when a passenger flies from A to B. However, the government of location B waives fees for connections flying from A to B to C. That makes sense; the passenger never actually visited B.

Passengers can find a cheaper ticket flying JFK->TPE->HKG and ditching the final leg (carry-on only). However, if an airline "knows" a passenger will skip the final leg, then they are helping the individual evade a legitimate tax.

Interesting point on why increased correlation hurts traditional stock pickers and market timers. Does this make a case for quantitative hedge funds doing better?

Quant funds are in a good position to put on a large basket of long and short positions (with leverage), and therefore can separate individual stocks from their confounding market factors. Of course, it presumes the fund has a strategy giving them enough conviction to bet on individual stocks / securities.

Officially, founders typically only hold common shares (often with further restrictions). Common shareholders should get $0 when selling for less than money raised because of liquidation preferences.

However, the acquiring company usually wants to retain some of the team. The founders often receive an employment offer, and that offer can contain anything negotiated, including signing or performance bonuses.

There can be some conflict of interest and negotiation ugliness if the investors view the employment offers as too generous at the expense of shareholders. In practice, most decent investors would prefer to spend their energy on their big winners rather than optimize a small loss into break-even.

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html#f12n

Interesting, so if the case hinges on the YC application as evidence of the equity split, then we also know that YC requires all founders to sign an employment agreement with their company and restricted stock purchase agreement, following a very standardized YC template, that would include a vesting schedule. Other requirements include an employee incentive pool and of course enough common shares for YC to purchase their portion.

I believe you mean a list of reasons why participating in YC is not good for your startup prospects?

When we applied, most of our business was in NYC (and it still is today), but we had to move Mountain View for the 3 months of the program. As it turns out, moving was hugely beneficial because it also forced us to free ourselves from many random obligations from our daily lives. I would fly back to NYC regularly, but for specific and determined purposes, which minimized time for distraction.

Some say the equity deal is bad, and in summer 2009 it was an order of magnitude worse (6% for $15K). However, 94% of a success is much better than 100% of a failure, and I am absolutely sure YC saved us from failing multiple times.

If there is ANY true negative consequence of participating in YC, I would say you are placed into a peer group of overachievers that values fundraising for high growth. While there is a LOT of upside to close interaction with dozens of other founders, the negative is that we naturally tend to compare ourselves to our cohort. I never felt any outright competitive pressures from my batch, but at the end of the day, the universal yardstick seemed to be how much funding you could raise from the most prestigious investors.

To be fair, the YC partners stressed that fundraising is a silly measure of success and that getting ramen profitable and default-alive is more important, but it's still demoralizing when (seemingly) all your friends raise money and you are grinding along at a bootstrap pace. For RentHop it was absolutely the right play - our revenue hockeystick didn't begin until 3 years later.

I used to wonder why Midtown Manhattan had so many bank branches, especially the redundant branches a mere block or two away. How could that be the highest and best use of prime commercial store frontage in a competitive market?

I figured out in 2009, when I was working at a hedge fund trying to bid on the assets of bankrupt banks post financial crisis.

Basically, every branch loses money to gain depositors. All the fees on monthly accounts, safety deposit boxes, ATMs, cashiers checks, etc. do not offset the cost of the office and employees. However, if the loss is small compared to the volume of deposit money the branch attracts, then the bank headquarters has "borrowed" money at a very low cost.

I think a typical suburban Countrywide or Washington Mutual branch was losing about $100K/yr but had deposits of $20M; not bad at all considering Fed Funds had been around 5.25% until fall of 2007, and that having the capital was the life blood necessary to do all the profitable operations (originating mortgages, credit cards, student loans, EDIT: meet regulatory capital requirements, etc). In Midtown, those numbers might be multiplied many fold, so very few retail stores can compete and stay profitable.

Yes, YC specifically posted about founder ethics a year and a half ago.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics

https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

  "To maintain our community, if a founder behaves 
  unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC  
  founder status. This includes access to all Y Combinator
  spaces, software, lists and events."

  "We will stand behind you no matter how much your company
  struggles, as long as you behave ethically."

You buy 50 shares, because in your proposed strategy you want to make money whether the stock goes up or down. Because the option strike price and underlying price are the same, the appropriate ratio of underlying stock to options is about 50% if you want to be neutral to the future direction of the stock movement (delta-neutral as they say).

If you bought 100 shares with 100 covered, then you are purely betting the stock is going up by more than the option price. You would break even at $107, but lose on anything lower.

Implied volatility is the amount the stock is expected to move as implied by the price the market is charging. Sometimes it is easier to think of an option price in terms of volatility rather than raw dollars, especially when you are making trades of the type you proposed.

In the Netflix case, the current price of the option "implies" that the stock will move plus or minus 3% per trading day; if it moves more, say 5% a day, you are likely to make money.

Of course, thinking of options in this way also means you are on board with a ton of assumptions in modern options pricing theory, and lots of smart people point out flaws and objections.

You can lose because the option price takes into account how much the market expects the stock to move (the implied volatility). Your proposed strategy is going long volatility and delta-hedging to maturity.

Others have already chimed in, but I'll use a real life example. At the close yesterday, NFLX was trading around $100, you could buy a put option to sell with strike price $100 expiring December 18th 2015 at a price of around $7.00 a share.

Using your strategy, you would buy one contract and simultaneously buy 50 shares. Each contract comes in multiples of 100, so your put option covers 100 shares and you own 50.

If you didn't manage the trade at all until December 18th, you'll make money if NFLX is below $86 or above $114. You'll have lost money if it is anywhere between the two numbers, because the actual realized volatility of the stock did not live up to the implied volatility price (and for many reasons that is usually the case).

Even if you did manage the trade throughout, there is no easy free lunch. You could set a rule to close the trade the moment NFLX crosses over $120 or under $80, but then you'd be giving up the upside that it hits $150 or $50.

That's already been release since the previous version via the traffic aware cruise control and emergency braking.

Specifically, the Model S locks onto the car in front of you and matches its speed, maintaining a certain number of car lengths behind it (which you can set). When the car changes lanes, your Model S speeds up a bit to fill the gap, and when a car cuts into the lane, the Model S slows down (although this one is a bit scary). If the car in front comes to a complete stop, the Model S also smoothly slows down into a complete stop.

Maybe Smule doesn't want their code and IP floating around anywhere outside the company? Even if they trust the company doing the audit, can they trust all the employees of that company, and any future acquirers?

I'm not taking sides (because I don't know anything), but after reading this and Geoff Ralston's post, that's at least one good reason Smule wouldn't agree to the 3rd party audit that no one else has brought up.

Of course, I say this with a background in the quant hedge fund world and I doubt any decent fund would agree to voluntarily submit their most proprietary code to be reviewed by anyone.

Great points -- once upon a time my co-founder came up with an interesting theory that the rental brokerage industry is a NET LOSS for the brokers, and the only reason it works is attrition.

More formally, if you assign a reasonable hourly wage for a real estate agent, say $25 an hour, then the sum of all agents working each year plus their business expenses exceeds the sum of all commissions collected each year! The lost time is wasted on unqualified tenants, competing over the few qualified tenants, negative ROI marketing (featuring on NYTimes.com or posting bad photos), etc.

If you believe in the net loss theory, then all the startups that always pitch "broker services a la carte" are doomed to fail. That is, brokers offer some bundle of services and a startup tries to unbundle and charge a fair price per line item. That thinking treats brokers as commodities when we can see clearly that great brokers earn 10x a mediocre broker, suggesting there is probably some skill.

I'm one of the guys who started RentHop and was pleasantly surprised to get a mention in the OP article, hehe.

When we started RentHop over 6 years ago, we had the same idea. Open table style scheduling for showings, and that brokers were worthless middlemen that should have gone extinct at least a decade ago.

One of the best pieces advice we got during Y Combinator was Paul Graham telling us to go out to NYC and be brokers for a few weeks, if only to confirm a broker adds no value and figure out the easiest parts to automate away. After personally showing apartments nonstop for a month (and losing a lot of weight), we quickly discovered the great brokers are adding lots of value and we completely pivoted the model (the short answer is great rental brokers earn 10x a mediocre broker, so there must be SOME skill involved... in sales the dispersion is 100x or higher).

Of course, that was 7 years back and maybe enough has changed: landlords do more of their own marketing now, smart phones and on-demand apps are even more pervasive, brokerage firms are in more turmoil than before, agents are more tech savvy, etc. Urban Compass tried to pull it off 2 years ago, but they decided to go for the bigger sales market.

I wish Oliver luck, they are technically competitors, but I've always wanted to see online scheduling work for real estate and to date no one has cracked it sufficiently well.

Does that mean YC will fight against the "Major Investor" clauses in funding rounds that only allow pro rata rights to investors who have X% ownership?

http://www.2-speed.com/2014/09/dreaded-major-investor-clause...

Of course, 7% might be enough to overcome the threshold in many cases, but as an angel investors in YC deals, I have lost my pro rata rights following a YC Note/SAFE conversion this way (despite the docs suggesting I am protected).

Hello HN! First off, there are already some things I know we need (or at least they are frequently requested):

1.) Ability to customize mortgage rate and possibly apply a haircut on the rental income to account for vacancy.

2.) Model the tax savings from mortgage interest, real estate taxes, and interest on co-op common charges.

3.) Filter specifically for condo vs co-op vs HDFC vs tenant-in-place

Also a question: we are struggling with how to allow power users to see all the data they need without overwhelming the first-time user. Is there a site you can recommend that does a great job with the power user vs first-time user experience, and is fairly data analysis heavy?

Funny, I was more thinking http://house-of-cards.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Stamper

sans the sketchiness, of course. :P

Fascinating! RentHop operates in an industry where almost everyone is an independent contractor on 1099: real estate agents.

1.) Agents are mandated to use their company logo and brokerage info in all ads, both by NYC law and by the company. Some companies have strict dress code requirements when meeting clients.

2.) The brokerage firm definitely controls the tools used, from internal databases to marketing syndication tools to in-house CRM systems.

3.) The brokerage firm has vicarious liability over the actions of their agents (also mandated by NYC law). For that reason the brokerage firm has a huge incentive to vet their employees.

4.) Agents generally have very little discretion if any on the commission charged. The brokerage firm sets commission policies and any deviations must be approved by the managing broker or associate broker.

5.) I highly disagree with the court ruling here [edit: administrative ruling?]; my understanding is Uber drivers are free to turn off the Uber app and operate without the source of leads generated, and that certainly impacts PNL (if that's not the case, agents still can't simply ignore leads forever without getting fired). Uber doesn't mandate when or where the work is done. Same with agents, the brokerages generally can't impact when or where the work is done, with the exception of some mandatory company wide meetings. Firms tend to provide desk space and equipment.

6.) An agent hired by a brokerage firm may not "subcontract" by having a friend show up in his place and conduct the work, even if the friend is a licensed real estate agent -- the brokerage, assuming vicarious liability for the actions of all their agents, would not allow it. This is different from an overworked agent asking a colleague to take over clients, both are still agents of the brokerage.

The financial aid site clarifies the definition of typical assets. Seems like families with under $300K qualify, excluding retirement accounts and primary residence home equity beyond 1.2 times annual income. As others have mentioned, it's designed to prevent families who have large savings from manufacturing an artificially low income (an extreme case is retiring early for a few years to show no income).

The takeaway is, maxing out retirement accounts like a 401k and dumping savings into paying off the primary residence mortgage are ways to accumulate net worth without accumulating "above-typical" assets.

http://financialaid.stanford.edu/site/faq/index.html#faq_20 ===========

What do you mean by "typical assets"?

For applicants who report total annual parent income up to $125,000, we generally consider "typical assets" to be an adjusted total net worth of less than $300,000. Adjusted total net worth usually reflects the sum of the following amounts:

Cash, savings, checking Investments Home equity, capped at 1.2 times annual income Equity in real estate other than the home Business net worth

We do not include formal retirement assets (401k, 403b, IRA, Keogh) in our analysis.

I interviewed almost exactly 6 years ago, right at the inflection point between the old style intimate and the modern structure. The impact from the atmosphere and community is enormous!

Startup morale can seemingly come and go for the most arbitrary reasons, but the Tuesday dinners somehow always re-energized me into wanting to get back to work asap. It's some combination of (1) relief knowing other great founders face similar stumbling blocks, (2) excitement to try many fresh ideas overheard at dinner, and (3) fear/embarrassment that I'm not working hard or fast enough.

Even today, we still get introductions and advice from YC and when I reach out, I've never waited more than 24 hours for a response.

As far as the interview goes, I had the original, single-track 4 YC founders. I remember a bunch of questions from Paul and Trevor, but I'm only now realizing Jessica was the one subtly keeping the conversation on track. Near the end of the 20 minutes, Jessica made her one and only comment related to our idea, but it was the most insightful and for good reason. In 2009 our startup was positioned as anti-Craigslist and Jessica had recently interviewed Craig for Founders at Work!