thisisfmu

Why let the exception case (removing an external drive quickly) ruin the main use case?

going forward it seems reasonable to assume ubiquitous network connectivity, so you can simply treat external drives as a cache and show a non-modal alert "please reconnect for sync, expected to finish within X minutes" iff the amount of data synced is large enough to matter via a 3G connection.

It's basically search engine spam generated from SEC docs. Adds needless verbosity to when people want the info in a concise format. When looking for actionable financial info I hate having to read through sentences when a table or graph will do. Consider why audio podcasts never really caught on for non-entertainment.

i do not think it is as clear-cut that brand advertisers will pay higher rates or even accept the format as they may think. sure, conversion/recall etc might be higher but company X making me do some annoying work is not exactly endearing them to me and tarnishes their brand. people are lazy.

making me type advertiser-specified words on a mobile device to visit some site? terrible and easily worse than an interstitial.

Double Recall looks like one of the very few startups that would make the world a worse place if they succeed :(

Congrats to all!

Among the revealed ones I am most excited about (and would invest in) Parse -- solves a real problem, it is easy to see how it can be commercially viable, and there is very little technology risk. Kind of wish I had thought of it. An obvious target to be acqhired by one of the PaaS vendors.

this was also pg's argument when i asked him to remove some postings made with another account that accidentally revealed confidential info about a friend's company, so i considered this would be fair game.

EDIT: post deleted -> put the info on twitter for those interested.

i did go to law school and am thus reasonably well aware of how laws work ;)

having no specific knowledge about sweepstakes regulations, i does not appear completely unreasonable to me that a random drawing in each territory completely changing the outcome might satisfy the requirements.

as a practical matter, when $1m in extra payouts are at stake it could be reasonable to accept a fine from regulators while at the same time avoiding civil liability to participants.

Good story. Wouldn't a better hack have been to draw input values in both countries, then communicate this input to the other location and XOR the results to determine the final outcome, so the drawing will actually have happened in both territories? This would also scale to n>2 countries.

It works even with a US delivery address in your account that is separate from a possibly non-US billing address. You can simply switch back and forth the country in your profile to optimize for catalog availability and pricing.

Thank you for sharing your observations.

Out of curiosity: might the fact that - as revealed in this story - there has been an outstanding warrant for the guest at the time of booking have any bearing on airbnb's liability? Can a host reasonably expect that some basic verification on guests is performed against criminal background databases?

Same here. Laid out the estimated added cost of enforcing payment via the court system besides interest to them, received payment soon after. Somehow the psychology of getting a "discount" from avoiding litigation seems to work.

What explains the proliferation of UK incubators, given the rather modest success achieved here with similar programs?

Is the consensus that charging equity for introductions is okay when you call yourself an incubator but abusive when an individual does it?

As a founder I disagree. The decision for or against a VC is not made by employees and if anything a16z protected the interests of major shareholders over job hopping opportunists and non-performing executives. I would expect savvy employees to negotiate their compensation related agreements more carefully when these firms are involved in the future, however.

Not to draw this out further but I do think variations of these make for good interview questions for entry-level people. Here is why:

First, it is trivial to communicate the problem and any moderately competent person will find a solution within a short time frame. Second, it tests how precisely someone takes a problem definition. (In my experience, the kind of person who glances over such details will also tend to make trivial programming mistakes like off-by-ones.) Third, by varying a well-known question slightly you can easily filter out those who have simply learned the "correct" solution from the internet rather than thinking it through.

I would not be surprised if the subset of allowed characters was motivated by ensuring easy input cross a variety of gaming devices and console UIs. Of course, I also would not be surprised if this was due to sheer stupidity.

downvoter dumb. no hire.

consider the following example where the condition "one ball is heavier than the others" holds true but your method yields the wrong solution: {1,10} vs {6,6}

when it is further specified that all remaining balls are of equal weight then your solution cannot be optimal since comparing two thirds yields the required information about the remaining third.

this is incorrect. the sum of n>1 balls each of some non-maximum weight needs not be less than another set including the max-weight one.

It does lower the bar for people afraid of torrents. Think analog loophole, playing back a music video on Youtube and recording speaker output into a file.

It's good to have observed it in the wild, at some distance, but becoming part of such a tribe alters your perception of what is acceptable and qualifies as good enough. Like a reverse Heisenberg effect.

Could this be due to short demand from insiders to protect the IPO value of their stock until the lock-up period expires?

Legal agreements between companies for material contracts look nothing like an EULA.

afaik the Rapportive back end is built in scala.

"upgraded for free" is the new "fixed the most egregious shortcomings"

returning from a recent trip to continental Europe I was shocked at how dilapidated most of the UK looks compared to Germany and Austria. I wonder to what extent this is a matter of cultural priorities and taste rather than an indicator of economic well-being however.

"order of magnitude" usually refers to the base 10 exponent, e.g. two orders of magnitude more means approximately 100x

skype alternatives do have a (small) chance despite strong network effects.

1/ policy makers do not like running a third-party closed-source obfuscated binary with undefined behavior aggressively evading firewalls inside their business or country (in the case of China).

2/ the network effects are not nearly as strong as, for instance, ebay's. i do not care about being able to call random strangers on skype, only about my contacts. the scope of the network effect is to some extent that of a social group, not an entire market.

what this could mean for Square is that since there is no security in practice one could argue they should pay the higher fees applicable to card-not-present transactions or where the number has been entered manually rather than the typically lower rates with verified card presence.

in practice it will boil down to how much VISA/MC like Square. i cannot imagine they see this expansion of CC billing to a new kind of merchants as a bad thing.