JangoSteve

Well written. I did a very similar deep-dive Websockets presentation at a local JavaScript user group [1]. The presentation culminated in a live demo [2] I hosted on my laptop over the local wi-fi, allowing everyone in the audience connected to the wi-fi to connect with each other in the app. Of course, it only took the audience about 2 minutes to discover some cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in my not-meant-for-production demo app, which allowed them to start showing videos and playing embedded videos on each others' computers.

[1] https://os.alfajango.com/websockets-slides/#/

[2] https://os.alfajango.com/websockets-demo/

Or genomic information, or a unique combination of drug interactions which could be combined into a sort of health fingerprint, or phenotype information, race or age, which are often necessary to provide medical context for diagnoses, or timestamps on test results that match up with events in your calendar or destinations in your navigation or security camera footage, and I'm sure the list goes on.

The word "anonymity" is a little ambigious. It can mean "unable to be identified" or it can mean "namelessness". There's not much information about anyone that is truly unable to be identified, especially when combined with additional pieces of data readily available from external sources.

It all depends on who they're sharing the anonymous data with and to what external data do those partners have access.

I'm also not sure a fake name does anything. They can basically tell who you are from the DNA data itself.

Alfa Jango | Ann Arbor, MI | Full-time | Onsite | Senior Developer | https://www.alfajango.com/hiring/

We're a CTO and development team for hire for startups. We’ve built startups that have gone on to receive venture funding and federal grants, and even be acquired!

As a Developer, you will work closely with startups to quickly grow and transition them to viable companies with minimal investment. You will accomplish this by developing and building a successful Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and then quickly iterating thereafter. You will be in a position to work closely with the startup team providing technical and project leadership.

Imagine coming to work in one of the coolest office spaces in Ann Arbor. We are housed in the original cellar for the Northern Brewery. With 20 foot ceilings and fieldstone walls and a meeting rooms with a red-brick arched ceiling, the atmosphere is second to none in Ann Arbor.

Technologies primarily include: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (Angular, React, and vanilla), Postgres, and ElasticSearch, but it depends on the project.

We've built and exited our own startups, and we also do a lot of open-source work, including having been on the Ruby on Rails core team, and built our own popular Dynatable.js.

Fill out the form at the URL above, or email john@alfajango.com directly.

Can't speak for the OP, but as we do the same thing, figured I'd contribute our answer.

We're not great at "sales", so it's been completely organic growth and word-of-mouth. I went to a lot of events and meetups for startups, and talked to people about what they were doing and what we do. I've also done a lot of open source development, including working on the Rails core team and building our own projects like Dynatable.js.

This took a lot of time to cultivate a sales pipeline. The company was just me for the first 4 years, occasionally sub-contracting as needed. Then over the next 6 years, we grew to 6 people, and are currently in the process of finding a developer-consultant to join as our 7th.

We've been doing the exact same thing for the past 10 years out of the midwest US, and I agree with everything you've said.

We view technical startups as hybrid companies in terms of market and industry. They're half web and software, and half whatever it is that startup does. We team up with non-technical founders who are trying to solve a problem in an industry they know, and we bring the web and software [and startup] expertise.

I usually tell founders that, as a best-case scenario, most developers and consultancies will build exactly what you ask for. The problem is how often you're going to ask for the wrong thing. One of the biggest values we provide is what we help you avoid building.

Consistent with your experience, this has been working well for us.

The other thing I kept thinking while reading the post, was that the clients who are likely to value non-coding software consulting enough to explicitly pay for it as a completely separate line item from the software development itself, are probably the same clients that do value and listen to the feedback from the opinion+coding consultants. So, it seems the author has found a way to identify those clients up-front, but at the cost of making the client find someone else to fulfill the coding role.

The other commenters gave good answers, but to simplify (in case it helps), the math of what they're saying about issuing new stock, changes the arithmetic from 2 / 7.4 = 27%, to 2 / (7.4 + 2) = 21%.

Alfa Jango | Ann Arbor, MI | Full-time | Onsite | Senior Developer | https://www.alfajango.com/hiring/

We’ve built startups that have gone on to receive venture funding and federal grants, and even be acquired!

As a Developer, you will work closely with startups to quickly grow and transition them to viable companies with minimal investment. You will accomplish this by developing and building a successful Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and then quickly iterating thereafter. You will be in a position to work closely with the startup team providing technical and project leadership.

Imagine coming to work in one of the coolest office spaces in Ann Arbor. We are housed in the original cellar for the Northern Brewery. With 20 foot ceilings and fieldstone walls and a meeting rooms with a red-brick arched ceiling, the atmosphere is second to none in Ann Arbor.

Technologies primarily include: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (Angular, React, and vanilla), Postgres, and ElasticSearch, but it depends on the project.

We've built and exited our own startups, and we also do a lot of open-source work, including having been on the Ruby on Rails core team, and built our own popular Dynatable.js.

Fill out the form at the URL above, or email john@alfajango.com directly.

At Genomenon, we're building tools that help discover, diagnose, and treat cancer and other inheritable disease. To do this, we've built the Mastermind Genomic Search Engine [1], powered by the world's most comprehensive source of genomic evidence.

You've probably seen a lot in the media lately about the possibilities of precision medicine powered by personal genomic sequencing. With the advent of the $1000 whole genome sequencing [2], we now have an immense amount of data at our fingertips. The problem we have now is known as the "bioinformatics bottleneck" [3], in which our sequence data reveals thousands of variants in our DNA, and we need to figure out which ones are clinically relevant, by figuring out which ones have been observed and studied. We seek to make that task easy; to minimize the time it takes to perform an exhaustive search, and reduce the chance of missing important information in a patient's sequenced genome [4].

Most people have been or know someone who has been affected by cancer or inheritable disease. As far as missions go, this was an easy one to get behind when I met my co-founder almost five years ago. When my startup at the time got acquired shortly after meeting him, I knew immediately what I wanted to do next.

[1] https://www.genomenon.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome

[3] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6184/653.3

[4] https://scipol.duke.edu/content/questathena-wrongful-death-s...

I don't understand what the worrying part is. The original poster of the SO question was asking a question. They didn't know if it was a bug or them misunderstanding the intended functionality. The subject literally ends with, "is bug or feature?"

The people who answered it explain that it's a bug, thereby answering the question, and expand as to why they think it's a bug. One person figured out a patch. The bug was already filed and fixed nearly a month ago but doesn't seem to have been released yet to the current versions of Safari.

If there's already a bug filed and marked fixed but you can see that it isn't fixed yet for the people using Safari, and it matters to you, why would sharing it be worrisome?

You could argue that the person who answered with a patch didn't know the bug was already filed with Apple, and so they should have sought out how to file it before sharing it. But I think it ignores how intimidating it can be for someone to file an official bug report with a hugely popular piece of software maintained by one of the largest companies in the world. It's even more intimidating if you've done it before and the report you filed ended up being wrong (many maintainers are not very considerate when responding to mistaken bug reports, which can wreak havoc on a developer's self esteem).

Meanwhile you have platforms like StackOverflow and Hacker News which vastly lower the bar in terms of needing to be right, since they operate more as conversation facilitators than official registers of legitimate bugs. It's much easier to share what you think you've found with a group of your peers, than it is to go on record telling a group of experts that they've made a mistake in the thing that they're experts on.

I don't know if the outcome is worrisome or not, but it definitely seems expected to me... even inevitable.

It's the same reason you talk with your friends about how annoyed you are with potholes not being filled before you take your concerns to a town hall meeting. It's a way to refine your thoughts in a low-stakes settings with peers before formalizing an issue to run up the ladder.

Agreed, but I don't think we're arguing that small businesses, like restaurants, want VC money and don't get it. I also don't think we're necessarily talking about the fact that small businesses don't get media attention. Instead, we're just talking about the fact that the media focuses on the companies taking VC money, while the growth-oriented, profitable startups (i.e. not restaurants) build companies with much less attention from the media.

I think you both are arguing two different things.

You seem to be saying that there are a lot of businesses, which will never be startups.

While that's true, they seem to be saying that being a startup is not an immutable trait of a company, but rather a phase, and that any side project or solo business could enter the startup phase at any time.

Sure, most people wouldn't consider a law office to be a startup. Most people also wouldn't consider a consultancy like 37Signals a startup. Most people wouldn't consider a novel URL-ranking algorithm like Google's a startup, or any number of other projects or businesses that didn't begin as startups.

That's not to say that a restaurant is likely to turn into a bootstrapped startup or anything. I think their main point was that not all startups started out with intentions of high growth. Your initial response was that "Solo entrepreneurs are not starting a startup, not as I (and most people) understand the term." To that, I think what they are saying is, "they could be."

You could then argue that startups which aren't yet startups are outside the scope of the OP's original statement that, "For every Startup raising $X million in funding there are probably a thousand solo entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way into profitability." Because, when they do become a startup, then they'll be raising money just like everyone else.

However, even that rebuttal would ignore all the startups that became startups aimed at high growth driven by profitability instead of raising millions at the outset. [1]

Honestly, I think the reason funded startups get more media coverage than bootstrapped startups comes down to simple numbers. There is a large but finite amount of demand for news on successful startups. There aren't enough successful acquisitions, IPOs, or openly successful companies to fill the demand, so we have to dip into indicators of future success, such as funding, to satisfy the demand for news on interesting new businesses. However, as many startups as there are getting funding, there are even more side projects and small businesses being started. Most aren't successful yet, and if they are, they're too busy being successful to proactively reach out to the media with an interesting story.

In other words, I think funding rounds are just an easy source/filter for journalists to publish on, and which require little effort editorializing to be considered interesting by the masses.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/01/invisible-unicorns-35-big-...

Are they though? Even looking at examples like Google and Facebook, it's not like the founders saw an opportunity where no one else was looking and went for it. In both cases, they built something that interested them with no eye toward opportunity (at least if the information we've been given about their early motivations is true), and then at some point down the road saw the same opportunity that everyone else already saw (in the sense that both search engines and social networks were already crowded spaces with companies that seemed to be the incumbent winners).

If anything, it was less that they saw opportunity where no one else was looking, and more that they saw opportunity where _everyone_ else was looking and went for it anyway. Everyone else thought the opportunities were so obvious as to have already been solved. Search engines were already solved by Yahoo!, social networking was already solved by MySpace, book-selling was already solved by Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Maybe younger people tend to do things that don't make rational sense from a business perspective, and those are usually the things that become outsize successes in the face of the status quo. Of course, they're also the things that fail way more often than they succeed. That could explain both phenomena, where younger people founded the giant success stories and older people founded more successful things on average.

I'm really curious what data it was trained on with snakes. Anything I write with "snakes" or "snake" in it produces something I could see in an impressionist art museum (but in no way resembles snakes). They also all tend to be monochromatic.

"snakes on a plane"

"snakes with a plan"

"yellow snakes"

My mind expanded it to "I feel discomfort and I feel uneasy," since both work. You can feel nouns and you can feel adjectives, just in a different sense. It sounds weird, because we like to construct our logic with parallelism [1], and in this case we're using different definitions of the word, "feel". This makes pulling "feel" out front in an associative manner less correct.

I feel[a] hunger, and I feel[b] sad. I feel[a or b, but not both] hunger and sad.

[a] transitive verb; a physical sensation, acting on the object (in this case, "hunger")

[b] intransitive verb [2]; an emotional state, described by the adjective (in this case, "uneasy")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(grammar)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intransitive_verb

EDIT: Clarity. Also, IANAL (I am not a linguist), and generally you don't want to take lingual advice from an engineer, like me.

I'm pretty sure that's not the way it was presented at all. Modifying original works is actually an allowance of copyright, not a restriction. It's called Fair Use, which states that "transformative" uses of copyrighted material, or "those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work," are "more likely to be considered fair." [1]

Extracting the user's data out of the page is what's _allowed_; since that is the part of the page that Facebook does not actually hold a copyright claim to, I'm pretty sure you could make the claim that extracting the user's own data out of the page into a structured format for the user's own use is transformative.

The part that wasn't allowed was literally making an ephemeral in-memory copy of the page as-is, which included Facebook's copyrighted HTML.

(I am also not a lawyer)

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html

Would extracting the data via a browser extension be in violation? It doesn't require making an in-memory copy of the HTML, since it's just navigating the HTML structure that has already been rendered by your browser, in the same way that your eyes (or a screen reader) must do to read the page.

Whatever you think of GDPR in total, this is one of the advantages. If you were an EU citizen, Uber would be required to let you know what data they have on you informing their banning algorithms, and they'd be required to let you fix the inaccurate data.

They may be talking about other corporate scandals, but you could even stay within the realm of diesel emissions cheating by automotive companies with examples like Fiat Chrysler [1], Ford [2], and GM [3]. I think the main thing that got VW execs in trouble was trying to cover it up once they were found out. Who knows though, maybe the only reason the others haven't tried as hard to cover it up is because they saw what happened to VW when they tried. I'm no expert though, and have already forgotten much of what I've read on the subject in the past several years.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/05/fiat-chrysler-facing-re...

[2] https://jalopnik.com/lawsuit-accuses-ford-of-cheating-diesel...

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/25/news/companies/gm-emissions-...

> So how is an Echo different from your smartphone? It feels like you've failed to quantify that. > It's much easier to turn off voice-command activation on the Echo than your smartphone. The Echo is not constantly recording.

The difference is that a smartphone has the ability to constantly listen, but an Echo's primary use-case is to constantly listen. So if you're going to turn off voice-command activation on an Echo, there's much less reason to own an Echo in the first place than there is to own a smartphone with voice-command activation disabled.

Furthermore, an Echo is constantly plugged into essentially limitless power, while a phone is not. People in general are much more likely to notice excessive power consumption on their smartphone from the fact that their battery would drain more quickly than usual. Whereas, not many people are directly monitoring the power usage of their plugged-in Echo on a daily basis, so they'd be much less likely to notice if their Echo is suddenly using more power than usual (for example, by being remotely activated to listen constantly).

> AHAHAHAHAHAHA, see for example: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline The vast majority of Android users I've met unknowingly had this enabled. It doesn't record your conversations, but it still records far more than an Echo.

Granted, but there is no built-in voice command to send your timeline to one of your contacts.

> Why would remotely enabling recording on your Android phone be more difficult than on an Echo?

It's not that one is more difficult than the other, but rather that your risk grows with the number of possible attack vectors. If I already own a smartphone, then I may already be at risk, but adding an Echo to the mix increases my risk.

Two channels for remote listening will always be more risky than one. I don't think anyone is suggesting that you can replace your smartphone with an Echo, so the discussion about the risk of an Echo will always be within the context of _adding_ to the risk of having a smartphone. I don't think it's surprising when someone draws the line between the thing they currently rely on and the additional thing they can live without.

For some reason, I can't reply to Max_aaa's question directly.

> How do you guaranty that nothing in the messages being handled by the server is "sensitive personal data".

You guarantee it by reading the rest of GDPR. It defines sensitive personal data separately than personal data. Sensitive personal data is defined by GDPR to be things that can be used to discriminate against the individual, such as race, ethnicity, religion, health information, credit information, age, etc.

EDIT: And what I mean to say is that if the messages aren't passing through the server or being stored on the servers, then the only info being handled by the server is the meta-data including IP address, which is not included in GDPR's definition of _sensitive_ personal data.

To be fair, that's also what they said for the other services before they changed their minds.

I agree with the other comments that the analogies kind of hide the ball on the real issues here. But in this case, I think it's more like Home Depot putting up security cameras that send all the footage of you to the camera manufacturer. In turn, that camera manufacturer runs facial recognition to automatically combine your Home Depot activity with your activity from all other business that use their cameras (which is 1/2 to 3/4 of the business you visit [1]), including the pharmacy, gas station, grocery store, bank, etc. Oh, and the information at the registers integrates with the cameras as well. And then the camera manufacturer sells your aggregate, combined data to advertisers who then set up shop at kiosks in the stores (the kiosks are owned by the camera manufacturer by the way), so that they can sell you stuff while you're there. And if the kiosk in Home Depot can't get you to buy something, they'll just get the kiosk at the bank to continue where they left off.

[1] https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics

I think you kind of gloss over the core issue that most people have with drug prices. I don't think most people have a problem with pharmaceutical companies pricing drugs such that they pay for the R&D costs (or more generally the overhead) of the company plus some reasonable profit margin.

The problem is that with the inelastic demand inherent in life-or-death treatments, there is no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to stop there. If pricing a pill at $200 could cover costs and provide 30% profit margin, why not double the cost and make a 50% profit margin? Or triple the cost and make a 60% profit margin? With inelastic demand that is governed only by a person's ability to pay, rather than their willingness to pay or competition, the demand drops far slower relative to the increase in price compared to normal supply-and-demand economics. It's the tendency (or at least perceived tendency) of taking advantage of someone's desire to live to extract as much money from them as possible in order to increase profit margins that people tend to have a problem with. This is called exploitation.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to spin outcry over how expensive a drug is (in a relative sense) as being a simplistic outcry over a drug just being expensive (in an absolute sense).

That said, it's possible that some of it comes from the fact that R&D is so expensive, and a pharmaceutical company never really knows how long their drug will be bought before some other company discovers something that outperforms it. I am by no means an expert on pharmaceutical company economics.

EDIT: And the above argument is just one possible argument to make if you assume that drug development should be a function of capitalism in the first place. There's another viewpoint that drug development shouldn't be a responsibility of capitalism at all, in part because perverse incentives often times unavoidable in capitalism are especially unethical when applied to people's health.

> I agree with what you're trying to say, but not with this statement in particular. I think it is possible to create a lovely game that unfortunately ropes in an addict as a side effect, but that isn't what the industry is about right now.

I don't think you're actually disagreeing. Taking advantage, as I put it, implies intent. To incidentally benefit from the consequences of an unfortunate side effect is not equivalent to taking advantage of the effect.

> Accordingly, I'd say it isn't justifiable to build intentionally exploitative addictive systems just because some people can moderate their designed negative effects.

This is the same statement in different words. "Exploit" is probably a more direct word to characterize the sentiment.

To build on that a bit, I think one of the main issues with comparing one's own experiences with others' is that each person's brain is wired differently, so how one perceives, internalizes, and reacts to an experience is not necessarily how someone else does. I think it's the same kind of thing that makes one person like a food that another person hates, or that causes one person to like thriller movies while another doesn't. In the same way, I think one person can spend a lot of time and money on an activity responsibly and positively, while another person has a higher chance of succumbing to deleterious interactions that become habit or addiction. However, the fact that some people can enjoy a game responsibly doesn't really excuse the game maker from taking advantage of those who can't.

Schadenfreude is when you take satisfaction in someone else's misfortune. I think what the parent comment is saying here is that many of those who are satisfied with the Theranos outcomes aren't satisfied because they take delight in the leaderships' misfortunes; they're satisfied because they take delight in finding out they were right, that they weren't crazy to think that the promises of Theranos didn't make sense, and that there are consequences to the kind of fraud that seems to get some people ahead.

"Oh, you're selling an old kitchen cabinet? Sounds like you're doing pretty well to be able to afford a kitchen remodel. Must be nice."

"Wait, you don't have time to come to my kid's birthday party, but you're out skiing so much that you had to upgrade your skiing gloves?"

I'm not saying it's right or makes sense, but there are a lot of contextual layers and subtle subtext inherent in other people's relationships that may not affect your own.

To be fair, Google has a little more than 200 users.

This and the other replies are all valid points, and further illustrate the larger picture of the process involved in getting self-driving cars to the market.