ryana

Realizing that I can keep running notes has been a great productivity hack for me. I have long been a heavy note taker but struggled at how to best tie them all together.

Something like a spark file, or a single evernote file for interesting data points that come up in a project has made this a lot better. Sure it may take time to read through, but I know where everything is now and it doesn't require some complex tagging or filing strategy.

I’ve used podswap for my Gen 1 AirPods and it was fantastic. It took a couple cycles for everything to be back to normal (full charge, full volume) but they were up front that it takes a few recharges for everything to settle in.

Absolutely no complaints.

Honest question, would a 3 year time-to-failure be considered imminent?

We bought a Zinus mattress recently. $260 for a queen size and pretty great so far.

Those are probably books from Academic Library partners, since they tend to have the rarest and most valuable stock.

Every book that comes in gets scanned and assessed to one of a few possible streams: - List for sale across all markets - Donation (too many of that title in inventory, desired by one of the specific literacy partners) - Recycling (too many of that title in inventory, not desired by literacy partner, or condition too poor) - ARC Books

That last business line is the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectible group. These books are diverted to a team of people whose sole job is to manually price these books and work with rare book dealers as well as some of the more high-end marketplaces to move them. This went for more than books as well, as sometimes there were interesting related pieces that came in the door.

Also, fwiw, when I was there any book like this that sold for > $500 had a whole separate commission structure where at least half of the sale price would go to the group that sourced the book. So if an academic library sent a book from the early 1800's, and that sold for $15,000, they library would get $7,500 back.

As a prior BWB employee (with no equity or outcome from this sale) I'm happy to respond to some of these concerns.

"Very much enriched the owners" is quite a stretch. Especially considering pretty much every equity holder was wiped out ~5 years ago when they had to raise money to stay in business.

The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco. Before that he lived in a townhome in suburban Atlanta. This business is not and never has thrown off cash. At best they've made as much money in profit as they've donated, in cash, to literacy causes over the life of the business.

A "very small percentage" donated to charity is up for debate based on everyone's belief of what that means, but all charity payments were made as a percentage of net sales revenue, which was essentially the money that came in from any sale. The only cost that was subtracted out was marketplace fees when selling on Amazon, ebay, etc. Sales percentage back to the book sources (academic and public libraries) and non-profit partners (on all sales from all sources) were paid out before shipping costs were even accounted for.

"Their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity" is not true. Drop box books accounted for < 10% of all books sourced and even less than that of revenue since those books are typically the lowest quality stream (slightly better title mix than thrift purchases, but much higher logistics cost and risk of spoilage). The business is almost entirely dependent on public and academic library partnerships.

There were many, MANY monthly all hands meetings we sat in where the business lost money but wrote 6 or 7 figure checks to literacy partners. Donations were not a function of making money.

BWB was a great company full of people who truly cared about the mission. Some people did well, but nobody got rich off this business. If they didn't move most of the corporate activity out of Atlanta and up to Indiana I would still have been happy to keep working there.

I am always sad to see responses like this. Statistics is a very well-defined mathematical discipline, and any good research firm will use weighting techniques to adjust for demographic-based likelihood of response. The results they get from this are very accurate.

If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.

Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources.

Tesla has a larger market cap than Ford, GM, or Honda.

GitHub has something like 75 million repositories. GitLab seeing a spike of ~40k repos being imported so far would need to continue for 5 years to match GitHub's current scale.

Thanks for the honest reply. I think that helps some of us square the circle on why you felt so strongly about not cutting ties.

It does a lot to make sure this doesn't come off as "YC won't take a stand on political actors unless it directly affects almost all of our founders."

So does Sam denounce the previous actions of YC banning companies who supported SOPA from demo day?

Either YC is an organization that takes political stands or it's not.

That's awesome.

$200M per delivery seems a little tight to design and build 25 planes from scratch (the latest version 787 is ~$300M for comparison) but I'm sure they have smart people working on it.

The data would say otherwise.

See the graphic at the bottom of this page and feel free to peruse the linked dataset as well.

http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/2015

They were nice enough to provide some numbers, so I tried to figure out what's going on with Borderlands.

First thing, they say that a move from $10.74 to $15.00/hr will cost them $28,000 (from +$3k to -$25k), which implies they're paying over 6,000 hours worth of hourly labor.

Another option to make up that $28k would be to increase sales by 20%, which means their current annual gross margin is somewhere around $150k.

"[R]ent, payroll, and credit card processing represent 68% of all [their] expenses" and since they're basically breakeven let's say that merchandise costs are 30% with 2% miscellaneous costs (utility bills, etc).

So their gross margin is probably something around 65% as CC fees should never be more than 5% and merch is around 30%.

With $150k of gross margin at 65%, it looks like this store, employing 3 FTEs worth of part-time labor, is grossing about $225,000 per year.

If the average book in that store costs $15 (they say they're limited on what they can charge based on the sticker price, so this may even be low) they're staffing 3 people in the store at all times, all year round, to sell 42 books per day.

I think I found why you're having to pay yourselves out of the cafe money, sirs.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the non-profit and B-Corp space, I'm very interested to see how this plays out. It's an interesting idea and one that can definitely have a lot of value if it resonates with donors.

However, I do worry about that last point. One of the most important part of NPO fundraising is around building a relationship with the donor. Dollar a Day seems to take that piece out of the fundraising process, for better or worse.

Best case, outsourcing your donor outreach to Dollar a Day opens you up to thousands of new donors who get to learn more about you.

Worst case, it's Groupon for non-profit donations; taking away your ability to market your brand and spamming you into a few million inboxes who will likely unsubscribe after a 3-6 months of daily emails.

There are a lot of talented coders on HackerNews who could built any app currently on the market in a weekend.

I see comments to this effect every now and then on HN (ie. any skilled team could build out Facebook in 30 days)

It's great to shoot for the stars and have faith in yourself, folks, but shockingly lots of people who get paid to program also happen to be REALLY GOOD at what they do.

While I could focus on the benefits of a little bit of humility (and they are many) instead I'll say that there are people who come on to these sites and see ridiculous statements like this and will suddenly start to wonder what's the point of learning to code if they'll only be good once they can build any app in a weekend.

So no, there aren't people who can build any app on the market in a weekend. And that doesn't mean that any of those people are bad at what they do.

Groupon may not have lived up to the hype, but they're still putting millions of people in restaurants each year. And part of the reason they didn't live up to the hype is because their deals are a lot better for the merchant now (70% of revenue going to the merchant instead of 50%).

There is a definitely model and need for filling empty seats at a restaurant. It just has to be done profitably over the variable costs of food (significant) and additional labor (much less significant).

"Look.. look at Amazon. That company has never posted a profit. And yet every trader I know is falling over themselves throwing money at them. It's the belief in investing in something"sexy", and "new"."

This is a) a lazy narrative that simplifies the realities of Amazon's business models and b) flat out false.

The last 4 years Amazon has posted EBITDA of $1.497B, $934M, $544M and $506M (2010-2013, respectively). (1)

Over that same time period they've had Net Income of $1.152B, $631M, ($39M), and $274M

So yeah, I'd say unequivocally that $3.481B in EBITDA and $2.018B in Net Income over a four year time span is absolutely "posting a profit."

1) https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&fstype=ii&ei=...

Just wondering, how often in the past have you purchased some kind of meal replacement shake to solve the problem?

If never or not often, why will Soylent be different?

$1.5B for a company started, grown, and still based in Atlanta. Great outcome for a growing ecosystem and hopefully we'll see the early employees from there start to reinvest in the community similarly to what we've seen from other recent successes.

If this creates another 3 David Cummings, for instance, the next 10 years of growth and investment could be incredible for a region that has historically been underserved.

This post is 2 years old. Any reason to resurrect it? My first thought reading through was that treehouse had some recent layoffs or poor results and this was a "hah, look at you now" post. Thankfully I can't find news like that anywhere.

It's not any different from being able to do that to hardware. That's why cars have to meet certain standards in order to be legal for driving on public roads.

It seems likely to me that making certain changes to a Tesla through rooting would just mean the car would end up not being street legal.

"In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place"

I think his point is also that this type of thing is not just accepted, but encouraged within engineering circles when talking about business people.

But yes, it wasn't delivered very well and the confrontational nature of it will mean that a lot of people who would do well to heed its advice will immediately turn defensive and get nothing from it.

I noticed that there are no FOX Broadcast Company channels on their channel list. That's a shame because I'd really want to keep Fox Soccer Channel if I was switching.

I would guess that has something to do with Google and Rupert Murdoch's well publicized icy relationship. It'll be interesting to see who blinks first if this takes off.

Yeah, I mean there are some terrible players out there. But most of the losing players at the high end would be winners at the low end. They're playing high because either they have money to blow (Tony Parker and Guy Laliberte come to mind) or because they usually play lower stakes but are taking a shot to move up.

It's also worth pointing out that the highest stakes tables have starting stacks in the 10s of thousands of dollars and pots in the hundreds of thousands. Your ROI doesn't have to be super high to pull in 4-figure hourly rates at those levels.

But for fun sometime, do a search for "Isildur1" in late 2009, early 2010.

http://www.pokerlistings.com/online-high-stakes-the-isildur1...

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2009/12/pokernews-exclusive-is...

And the biggest pot in online poker history ($1.4M) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfn6FjF0tc8

Really how bad? "Bad" is relative obviously since you only have to be worse than the best 5-10% to not be making money once you start paying rake.

FWIW, the entire example is flawed. Erasmus was 15 years old and he found the diamond under a tree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Diamond

And all good ole' Erasmus would've had to do is figure out everything to do with the diamond industry on his own! Easy game, right?

But seriously, if you stumble into a diamond mind worth a couple billion that does all the work for itself maybe you can find a way to keep all that money to yourself. But I'm willing to bet you're talking about 1% cases here, not the standard type of story that is brought up on HN.

I have much more experience with this phenomenon in poker than I do in business, but here's my viewpoint.

I've seen a lot more people who think they have maximized their success and want to keep their "secrets" to themselves who end up crashing and burning because they don't realize what they're doing wrong. Meanwhile, people with 4-figure hourly rates keep talking strategy to root out mistakes and find new areas to exploit.

Now, if you think you alone are smarter than the collective then go for it I guess. If you think the community isn't trustworthy and you get less from it than you gain maybe you should find another group to work with.

But isolation isn't going to make you more successful.

Agreed. In a world where the average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day I find it hard to infer a broken system from an article by someone who doesn't even have basic over-the-air stations hooked up.

Now that's not to say that the cable industry has it all figured out, or that there isn't room for improvement. But they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves if you assume their job is "get people to watch more tv."