HN user
hello
Hi HN: I've been around HN since 2011 and this is my first dive into gRPC. This tool is still in beta, but I'm happy to share it with everyone, it's been an amazing learning process. I'm happy to answer any questions or take any suggestions. Also, follow our progress on github!
"...governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years."
This is the issue.[0]
Governments are the middlemen between citizens that we the people decide to put in power through voting to represent us and our issues like climate change.
But democracy has been hijacked by putting additional middlemen between we the people. The second middleman is the capital election, specifically ~132 Americans who donated 60% of the SuperPAC money.
So our representatives spend a significant portion of their time in office calling these people to get funding for the next election cycle and when they vote on issues they think of these donors. Follow the money.
Yes we can fix data centers or cargo ships or deploy nuclear power or utility regulation, but at some point regulation for these as well will be dependent on the people we vote to put into power to represent us.
At the end of the day, corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and shareholder value. If leaders lead, companies will follow.
I have an idea!
Why don't we, the very large community of Hacker News with 3-3.5M+ monthly uniques[1] petition one of the most innovative and powerful institutions to fund more projects that will fix broken governments around the world? "Government" is only mentioned one time in the YC RFP[2], maybe it should have it's own category.
Send them an email: hn@ycombinator.com or http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ or contact your friends who are in the YC network.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 [2] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
"First, I would like to structure this so that all shareholders have a choice. Either they can stay investors in a private Tesla or they can be bought out at $420 per share, which is a 20% premium over the stock price following our Q2 earnings call (which had already increased by 16%). My hope is for all shareholders to remain, but if they prefer to be bought out, then this would enable that to happen at a nice premium." - https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/taking-tesla-private?redire...
If you ever need anyone to talk to text HOME to 741741 from anywhere in the United States, anytime for free.[0]
There may be many reasons why some employers don't hire you, but don't forget that there are many reasons why they will hire you. Rejection doesn't mean that you are not a great person, it means that you, the company and the role might not be a good fit for each other. And that is OK. It's more than OK because you don't want to work for a place that isn't a great fit anyway. You want to find a great fit and you might have to hear NO 100 times before you get to 1 Hell Yeah! Flip that "no" around and use it as a reward for working hard, collect them and don't be afraid of them.
I've worked with people with all types of backgrounds, including people who went to federal prison and people without degrees. It is not about IF it's about WHEN. My suggestion is to start by going for walks, investing in yourself and if you are having a bad day there is no shame in reaching out for support. Literally everyone needs support.
One of the better people giving quality free advice on the internet these days is Gary Vaynerchuk, born in Belarusian and basically gave his services away for free for 10 years. I know you have skills, but you might need to give them away to build up a network. If you are on HN then you must have internet superpowers that you don't know you have.
The way to overcome this is to write milestones into the smart contract that unlock additional funding after the milestone is hit in a given time period.
The issue with today's ICO is that the market demand is so high it would be silly for groups to leave money on the table. Just like bands leave money on the table because the value of their tickets > the price they sell them at.
Many people on the buy side who get in early to ICOs are essentially scalpers whereas the people who run the project usually have no business raising the funds they do in their first round.
Milestone funding would solve both of these issues.
Tesla isn't a car company, it's an energy company that is building the Model E on their energy platform. Reading their SEC 10-K[0] will show this.
Solar is 55% of all new installations in the USA and Tesla is the leader in solar installations with SolarCity. $/watt installed is only going down with scale.
Batteries are becoming the platform for transportation and Tesla owns 50% of the global manufacturing capacity. $/watt is also trending down with scale.
Charging stations will replace gas stations and Tesla owns a major percentage of the stock.
The question is over what timescale is Tesla over/undervalued? The genius is that there is always going to be friction between long and short term values. This shortsightedness is the weak link of Wall Street. But if it's overvalued then short the stock!
The Model E has already made Tesla an energy comany with a very successful product, "the Model 3 is selling more units in the U.S. than any comparably priced midsize sedan, including those offered by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi."[1]
I don't own a Tesla or Tesla stock.
[0] http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/0fbefe56-326c-412e-a33c-aa1... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-12/how-tesla...
This is all about price to value.
Price < Value
This is very interesting and shows that there is an amazing amount of cheap cash available that is just piling up. Spending that cash on buybacks increases the value of the outstanding stock that existing shareholders have and then supply goes down, price goes up and the stock price goes up.
Dumb investors.
Original Boston College Paper that this article is based on: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3182169
Conclusion:
"We also show that there is a positive and convex relationship between (log) market cap and (log) number of Twitter users, that nearly all ICO capital is raised by crypto-companies that continue to be active (on Twitter) after 120 days, and that daily Twitter intensity is associated with positive returns that day but negative returns in the future, suggesting overreaction and reversals. "
"It suggests that scams, while plentiful in number, are not as important in terms of stolen capital because investors are shrewd enough to spot (and underfund) them."
The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful.
Looking at screens to get key information distracts me from my surroundings and seems archaic.
My wife is a sound designer who has opened my eyes to the importance of sounds both in film and in the world. It's not that I was unaware of sounds, but I didn't realize how important they are to centering me in this world and the made up worlds of films and games. Try watching a scary movie with the sound turned off, it turns into a comedy.
I think its unexplored territory that has huge potential to impact the way we interact with the real world, even more so then Glass or Hololens.
When I listen to music as I walk down the street I change, my mood, my posture and the way I look at the world. The music augments the reality around me in a way that visual UX never can because it's a lens between my eyes and the world.
1. This has been submitted before, 302 days ago in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nina4airbnb.com
2. This is actually a case study in how to market yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150714043548/http://media.wix....
3. From the case study:
These are the numbers:
• 445,000+ Visits to Nina4Airbnb
• Hundreds of thousands of Tweets and millions of impressions
• 30,000+ New visitors to my personal blog
• 14,000+ LinkedIn profile views
• 2,000+ Emails and messages of support from around the world
• Global media coverage
• An interview with Airbnb
• A pipeline of interviews with dozens of other high impact companies
4. This is her blog post about it: http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...
5. Fireside chat: https://youtu.be/tcjaqeXjKuc?t=7m14s
Healthcare startups are like Cleantech startups were.
There is large amounts of capital being deployed, there are going to be high profile failures like Theranos, but at the end of the day the world will be better because of the few that succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations.
This is how innovation works.
This is going back to YC's roots and I love it!
If you are scrappy, $20k can get you extremely far at a cost that is "basically" zero (1.5% stake that only converts upon a liquidity event of $100M+ or IPO).
Remember, PG "...started Viaweb with $10k..."[0] in 1995 and "Julian got 10% of Viaweb" for that investment. Viaweb sold to Yahoo! for $49M[1]. The whole reason why YC exists is because PG got a $10k investment!
Back in 2005, pre YC, PG started the Summer Founders Program and invested $20k in each group. "Another of our hypotheses was that you can start a startup on less money than most people think. Other investors were surprised to hear the most we gave any group was $20,000. But we knew it was possible to start on that little because we started Viaweb on $10,000."[2]
The first version of Viaweb.[3]
I keep finding examples of the seeds of YC and they get me really excited. You can see a photo from 2005 from the SFP and YC's roots here[4]
[0] http://old.ycombinator.com/start.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb
[2] http://paulgraham.com/sfp.html
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/19961120231442/http://www.viaweb....
Salt water isn't good for rockets. Once you solve this really hard problem of landing a rocket on a barge on a dynamic ocean you have a real competitive advantage.
This is correct.
Most employees have a stock strike price that is say $2.00 when the company is valued at $20.00.
So if each Foursquare stock was worth $20 and is now worth $10, the strike price of $2 still allows employees to make $8 per share now.
If you are granted 100,000 shares and wait it out and build the company back up to $20 you will make $18 per share times 100,000 shares for a nice little $1.8M bonus for putting in the hard work.
Maybe because you stuck it out you not only increased the price to $50 per share, but you were also granted 100,00 more stock because you didn't care what TechCrunch said. $9.6M isn't bad for 4 years of hard work...
A couple of mental hops and they've now incorrectly associated their peace with the success of their business.
This.
Personally, I find physical activity the best way to combat this. Last year I biked 4,000 miles commuting and on long weekend rides, lost 30lbs and feel super healthy physically and mentally. Now I attack situations in my business and personal life like a big hill climb. I know I am going to get through the pain, I try to embrace the pain because I know if I don't give up I will be stronger because of it.
Here is a list of NEO Earth Close Approaches:
1. Not a bad ROI to save a global economy with a GDP of $77.609 trillion and population of 7.095 billion.[1]
2. The side benefit is understanding how to mine NEOs worth billions.[2]
3. I would like to buy an insurance policy against an impact. I bet it would be super cheap as there is very low risk, but would get me to Mars or ISS.
This is the Uber/Lyft/Taxi killer.
Imagine paying $2-4 for a ride in a Tesla for what used to cost you $25-$30 in an Uber or cab.
97% of the cost of an Uber ride goes towards paying the driver, fuel and Uber fees, 3% (or less) goes towards the lease costs.
A Tesla lease is only ~$0.73/hour ($~12,000/yr), including recharging.
I find this discrepancy very interesting, only ~4% of the people shot and killed by police were female. Police departments are male dominate and maybe this factors into the difference[0]
Male - 952
Female - 41
Why such a discrepancy? I don't think males are 23x more dangerous than females.
Why do we fear technological advancement? "Fire will get to hot and burn our villages", "the wheel will crush our children", "guns kill people", etc.
Tools and technology are neither good or bad, it is what we humans do with these tools that create our reality.
Yes, we could fill children's heads with a false reality, but on the contrary we can also provide education that is 100x better to the entire planet.
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If you are interested in any of these roles or others on the website I can give you a good ol' warm HN intro: james.h@hioscar.com
how hard would it be in practice to find someone to front the money for a lawsuit?
What about paying into an troll insurance policy every month so that if a troll wanted to sue you they would see that you were protected and would fight the lawsuit with a giant pile of money. This might deter the troll from suing in the first place.
This is very cool, the integration of hardware, software, social and marketing is perfect. Many hours spent putting all the pieces together and testing and tweaking, but it makes me wonder if we are wasting talent?
I love what BREAKFAST does as much as the next person and they are an extremely talented team, but all of this amazing technology and innovation is going towards selling products for a brand that totally disregards factory workers wage rights so much so that F21 were "sued by the United States Department of Labor for ignoring a subpoena requesting information on how much the company’s suppliers pays the workers who make its clothes"[0]
This reminds me of the recent article posted on HN "Web Design: The First 100 Years"[1]. How many of these underpaid factory workers are the greatest minds of our time? "We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow's technology, we used today's technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?"[1]
We have banking laws for a reason: people need to trust that the money they entrust to others will be there when they want it back.
If we trust the system that pulls the wool over our eyes, should we really trust it?
Have a listen to TAL: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/t...
The problem with the creation of law in the USA is that it unequally favors those who can pay to finance elected officials campaigns and thus non-elected governing bodies.
A transparent financial blockchain is the core difference in philosophy between backroom decisions made on our behalf supposedly with our best intentions in mind by non-elected appointed people and a mathematical equation that we can all see and test. Math we can all trust because it is true at it's core, can we do the same for people?
Yes some payment processors can be shady, but so can some fed officials who are incharge with our entire financial system.
The value of a given collection of bits is whatever you and I agree the value of those collection of bits is. It's a one to one relationship.
The value of USD is not what you and I agree the value is, it's what the government tells us what the value should be. This is not a one to one relationship.
One is based on a transparent mathematical equation between you and I and the other is based on 7 non-elected and appointed board of governors between you and I. That's the difference.
Indefinitely is a very strong word and goes beyond the initial implications for the (small) population of Wyoming.
Under this interpretation of Bitcoin companies like Coinbase need to hold the equivalent value of their state holdings in a fiat currency (deriving it's value from government regulation), but fiat currency, aka USD, is no longer on the gold standard (a commodity currency) and thus only holds value because our government tells us it does and our collective agreement that it does hold value.
The interpretation of this law would be the equivalent of telling the native americans they need to hold USD reserves to trade in shell money regardless if all people collectively agree that shells hold value as a currency for trade. It's an attempt to continually establish USD being the standard for global currency value.
If more states follow suit set by this precedent than companies like Coinbase can't do business and the US Government crushes legitimate bitcoin uses.
This requires Bitcoin to continually evolved into an increasingly decentralized currency where both individual humans and computers agree on it's value without the inefficiencies of marketplace or government middlemen.
Black markets exist because demand exists, whether we like it or not, whether we think it's good or bad. Black markets are self regulated and that is why you see so much violence in the illegal drug market. Restricting supply drives up prices and profit and increases incentives to increase supply. This is a vicious never ending cycle.
Ross was tempted by helping to increase supply. Maybe if we had a legal and regulated location where you could do any drugs but under the supervision of counselors we could help reduce demand and end the cycle.
I believe a church in the Netherlands did this in their basement. They provided discounted heroin that could only be used there and addicts reduced their consumption and had access to counselors.
I am not supporting what Ross did to give access to illegal drugs, I just believe because there is such demand trying to reduce supply is a losing battle where only law enforcement equipment supply companies win.
On the surface this is a story about trailer parks and the rich profiting from captive renters, but I think the bigger story is this:
"He quotes US government statistics showing that in 2013, 39% of Americans earned less than $20,000 – less than the government’s poverty threshold income of $20,090 for a three-person household."
39% means (Edit: 48,000,000 not 125,162,700, thanks @beachstartup) Americans are living below the poverty line! When you don't have options then you will be taken advantage of.
Our system is failing us, our government is failing us, our fellow Americans are failing us and we the community of Hacker News are failing us.
How do we disrupt poverty (in the USA and globally), disrupt failing governments and disrupt failing communities?
It seems as if our biggest downfall as humans is we don't see how what we do as individuals impacts everyone else and we are all dying deaths of 1b stings. "my carbon doesn't matter", "my investments don't matter", "my food doesn't matter", "my lifestyle doesn't matter", "my impact is so finite", "I'm just one person", etc.
The puzzle is this: Can you think of a strategy Alice and Bob can use that is guaranteed to win every time?
Raise campaign finance from the wealthy so that they can make it past the lesterland election[0].
Now that you have a war chest and are in the general election you just need to raise more capital from the 0.1%, buy more advertising, hire the best staff in Washington and bam!
I know this is not the coding question at hand, but a more important question on how unequal our political system is and I couldn't forgo the opportunity to ever so gently show the obvious reality - once you past the lesterland wealthy elite and get their backing, winning is only a matter of time.
I would extend this and say start doing more things alone without technology.
It's about building trust with yourself, believing in you to be able to not only survive any situation, but to thrive.
We use people and technology as a social crutch and it limits our understanding of ourselves.
I hitchhiked throughout New Zealand by myself when I was 18 for 6 months and although it was a little uncomfortable and even scary at first I learned to trust myself and I built a huge amount of confidence that I still carry with me today.
Put yourself in situation where you have to trust strangers and in those authentic interactions you will see that humans around the world are really beautiful and loving and learn that it applied to yourself too.
My recommendation even for a weekend is to pack a small carry on size backpack with no electronics (phone, laptop, etc.) and go somewhere that you have never been in a way that you have never traveled. Hitchhike to Yosemite and find a place to camp and a fire to share.
I imagine a single "blade" would be moved less by the same amount of wind, but there are probably plenty of factors I'm not considering.
Modern wind turbines have a cut in wind speed of maybe 3.5m/s and my guess is that these wind masts don't have a cut-in speed. So in low wind resource regions they may be effective at capturing market share because they can produce electricity with only a slight breeze.
I imagine scaling these up you have some pretty crazy engineering problems to overcome, like how to deal with the repeated strain at the base.
Modern turbines have plenty of vibrations that the tower and foundation have to deal with. I was in the nacelle of a wind turbine when a surprise small tornado came to town, we were full on rodeo mode with the tower swaying back and forth. That being said on a day to day basis most of the forces are countered with the rotating mass (someone else can explain this better than I) so the turbine doesn't transfer much horizontal load to the foundation.
With the wind mast there would be most horizontal load on the foundation as there is not another blade or two to counteract the motion and thus it would require a larger foundation.
If you want to buy a 4kw turbine you can find one used for under $7k which is much less than this new technology. As better 3 bladed tech comes online there will be a larger second market for used turbines and thus might be a better economic option then buying unproven new wind mast technology. Pairing used or new wind tech to batteries can really benefit the offtaker depending on the marketplace.