ryporter

Google doesn't have a say on what you can do with your phone.

Google does have a say on what you can do with their service.

These people were clearly trying to game the system. Google caught them red-handed and has now exercised their rights.

Exactly. I detested both candidates, but it's ridiculous to frame this situation as one in which the "wrong" candidate won, and shows true bias.

Facebook can't win here. When they have humans more in the loop of selecting news stories, they get blamed for bias. When they remove the humans, they are blamed for AI which isn't perfect. Yes, Facebook can improve how it selects news stories, and they are working to do that.

Which bubble are you referring to? I'm not familiar with one in the retail clothing space.

There's a lot of dismissive hate in this thread, but this was a genuinely successful company before things went sour. I've heard about it many times from my wife. Amoruso has a very scrappy tale about how she launched the company, and she created a brand that many people loved. The site was well designed, and the company had very rapid growth.

This wasn't an VC investment born out of the bubble. Retail requires more money than a startup that makes apps, and this one had a great growth trajectory. Obviously, things went south, but that does occasionally happen to a VC investment.

Similarly, I don't think it's fair to dismiss Amoruso out of hand just because the company has now failed. Many startup founders are great at launching companies, but not so good at running them once they reach a certain size. This seems to be what happened here. There definitely is something to be learned by how she built the company and brand.

I'm sorry you find this boring, but it is of a lot of interest to many other people. The company had a good origin story, a charismatic founder, rapid growth, and great branding. It's interesting that such a rapidly growing company and brand could come to a screeching halt like this.

You are alleging bias, not a conflict of interest.

YC accepted into their program as a founder someone who was a partner. Does that really sound like bias to you? If a former professor at a university applied to be a grad student, would you accuse the university of a conflict of interest?

Would anyone downvoting me care to articulate why? I'm genuinely curious.

Airbnb is a platform. They can take steps to try to limit and root out discrimination, but it is the hosts themselves who are being discriminatory. Furthermore, hosts have voluntarily signed up to act as a small business owner/landlord. Thus, it seems fair for them to take on much of the legal burden for their individual actions in that role.

That's not a bad idea. A family member could offer to help the next transfer by personally delivering the cash, just to make sure that such a large transfer is safe.

It's important to note that the negative impact documented in this study is in development time and whether the task is completed. It makes no claims about impacts on maintainability that show up later in the development process. It also does not measure the longer term impact on development time if a team starts using lambdas and gains experience over time.

I say this not to dismiss the study, which appears to be fairly well done and to provide interesting results. I'm simply saying that its results are not inconsistent with lambdas providing a net, long-term benefit if introduced to a development team at work.

You don't see how it's better to be indifferent to the plight of minorities (which is just your characterization of Thiel, by the way) than it is to promote hatred of those groups?

You made a very specific claim in your first sentence, that supporting Trump constitutes a breach of fiduciary duty. Considering how quickly shareholder lawsuits follow announcements of mergers, I would expect lawyers to be circling these CEOs already. Please cite a single example of a CEO under threat of breaching fiduciary duty for supporting Trump.

Political views are one aspect of a person, but they do not define that person. Thiel himself understands this. When he was a law school classmate with Alex Karp (now CEO of Palantir), they constantly argued bitterly over politics, because Karp held an extremely liberal point of view. They were also very good friends and have clearly maintained a very good business relationship.

I personally despise Trump, but I agree with Sam -- other people's political views don't really matter to me. Hopefully after this election ends, everyone can calm down and keep things in context. Business and politics are separate.

Really? There are CEOs who support Trump. [1] How many of them have sued (much less successfully sued) for breach of fiduciary duty?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Donald_Trump_president...

It's not tautological, because there is normally a good reason for the raise being hard. Obviously, there are exceptions, such as in this case. However, I'd be surprised if the returns are particular strong if you look at all VC funds that had a hard raise. In many of the cases that ended badly, one would look back and say, "Well, of course that was a hard raise. The thesis was flawed." But that's exactly what people were thinking who turned away USV, before they had the benefit of hindsight.

Yeah, I guess this means that their plans to build a data center in New York in 2016 fell through. [1] I love OVH, but I've been waiting for a while for a second data center in North America. I hope they build this one.

[1] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting...

That's very interesting, and it makes some sense now that you mention it. After all, SAC made it clear to investors that that would cover all of the legal expenses and fines, so they were just left with returns from the fund itself, and insider trading works.

I am serious, and I didn't say that. I would press them on what they knew and when, and I'd be willing to believe that they didn't know much more than readers of the WSJ did.

SAC Capital is a much bigger stain for former employees than the others, in my opinion. SAC allegedly had a deeply ingrained culture of finding and exploiting insider knowledge that permeated multiple levels. Basically, Cohen had employees do his dirty work, while he maintained plausible deniability.

At Theranos, by contrast, Holmes intentionally kept employees in the dark. If I were interviewing an ex-employee, especially one at a lab outside of California, I would certainly press the candidate on the issue, but I would be willing to believe that they were honestly trying to build and deploy a novel technology that never ended up working. It is not the case that the entire endeavor was a scam. They thought that they could develop this technology, and then the leadership covered it up as they were failing to do so.

Also, do you have any sources that document employment at Lehman Brothers as being a stain on the majority of their employees? Thousands of the employees immediately moved to Barclays and Nomura when they bought parts of Lehman Brothers. That doesn't sound like a horrible stain to me.

NITE may have abused the rules to maintain their short position, but this was definitely not some evil plot to drive down stock prices. The reason that these tickers end up on the "chill list" is because they are massively inflated shares that are literally not worth the paper that they are printed on. Shorting and holding is almost guaranteed to be very profitable strategy.

The difficult part is maintaining your short position, and this is where the real story is. Here, an alternate theory for NITE's behavior is that they were protecting their short position. Stock manipulation schemes are often a cat-and-mouse game where the manipulators are trying to trap shorts in large positions and then squeeze them out of it, forces them to buy back the stock at even more inflated prices. In this case, NITE would have been allegedly abusing the rules to win the game against a cheater.

In my opinion, the manipulators are likely far more at fault for Dilorio's loss than NITE is.

What are they protesting? This is an informational post.

If you need a sudden burst of capital, then you can't always wait a few months.

Also, some of the companies who take out these loans (and presumably the ones paying closer to 30%) are not profitable. Their only alternative is selling equity, which obviously comes at great cost.

In some sense, but there is a key difference.

"Companies can typically repay the loan as a percentage of cash flow so payments naturally adjust to revenue."

Obama has not put any corporate whistleblowers in jail. We can debate the merits of prosecuting those who leak government secrets, but that is a separate issue from this one.

The author seems to want to unearth some scandal about conflicts of interest, but there's not much here. The final quote of the article pretty much nails it.

“On the one hand, if you wanted really pristine independence, it means you are going to need people who don’t have commercial ties to the industry,” Mr. Gilson said. “On the other hand, if you have people without any commercial ties to the industry, they are not much use.”

If there were no conflicts of interest at all, then we'd be discussing an article about how horribly In-Q-Tel's investments performed, because they were made by bureaucrats in D.C. who had no idea how startups worked.

And now that "literally" has been coopted to also mean "figuratively", I don't even know what that clause means. I also got mentally stuck on that phrase, and my eyes literally popped out of my skull.

I agree that SRL is painfully verbose. I'm fairly experienced with regexes, and I found the new syntax to be far less readable. A better (and much simpler) way to make the regex more readable would be to split its construction into multiple lines (possibly using separate strings that are concatenated and given meaningful variable names). I already find myself often creating regex substrings that are then used in the construction of multiple, related regexes.

That's not clear to me. By that logic, any game in which players took one turn each, sequentially, would be gambling. The fact that you can no longer control the outcome does not make it gambling. You need to have a nondeterministic component that is exogenous to the players.

Not knowing what your opponent will do does not make it a game of chance. For the purpose of defining gambling, the component of chance must be exogenous to the participants.