T_S_

The rockstars are really hurting these days, but don't be jealous of the ninjas. The rocket scientists, mavens and even the experts have all been there and faded. Some day maybe even the the worker bees who can block and tackle will be back on top.

Termination sucks but a they would never have called it a cliff unless you can get pushed over it. Your termination agreement sounds like the typical thin futon parked at the bottom of the cliff. If you can dig up receipts you could ask to get your expenses paid. Suggest you sign and move on unless you have a discrimination lawsuit in mind.

Hey! Can somebody translate this all to mobile for me?

It's the enfant terrible style. Signals that you are special, and are willing to back it up, so let's just end the conversation. Nice time saver when you actually are special and can back it up. Terrifically destructive for a "B" surrounded by timid people. A good way to drive a team right over the cliff. I've seen a lot of the latter so I tend to react negatively to it. Plus it's never really "nice".

The same reason uranium ore doesn't explode. Density. I lived in several other places filled with talented people--in other industries. They just weren't interested in what I was doing. Risking all my time and money on a tech startup seemed strange and maybe crazy. Here the vibe changes as soon as you step off the plane and buy a coffee.

Not only do I wear headphones, I pump a mix of cafe sounds through it. Amazingly effective at drowning out conversation at low volume levels. BTW has the OP ever heard of "flow"? You can have 2 hours of my full attention, just don't spread it throughout the day if you want me to crank stuff out.

Sure, just check their Facebook pages.

Why won't it accept my prior distribution? Sheesh.

Thanks for the leanlaunchlab link.

True, the competitors argument is the first thing people would cite against continuous meaningful disclosure. The counterargments are 1) Not as important if everyone is disclosing on a level playing field. 2) More information supports better functioning markets==better decisions by the private sector. This is a huge benfit IMO. 3) Often a red herring for hiding weak management, not competitive information. 4) Truly sensitive information can be scrubbed or aggregated. There, a real job for a regulator besides napping.

Bonus point. The startups built around disclosure and analytics could be more interesting than the capital raising jam job companies that are going to be spawned.

The act allows mom and pop to invest with little or no "burdensome" ongoing disclosure. I run a startup and would love to have their cash, but the sharks will get it instead.

Instead of doubling down on opacity, Congress should take a leaf from the non-profit industry. There, at least everybody's tax return (Form 990) is available for public inspection. Some of them are very illuminating. Even just that would be a better start than this.

The idea that continuous disclosure has to be burdensome is a relic from the past. You want to raise money from my mom? Let me monitor your Quickbooks online account.

Corrupt practices are only possible if they are hidden. Journalists like WSJ's Mossberg are able to maintain their credibility only because they keep it simple by not taking cash or freebies and restating that policy frequently.

If Blog X wants to take cash and freebies and then let me know about it in a nicely formatted web page, that's fine. I can keep reading and make a case by case judgement of their opinions. If not they are playing the game of monetizing their reputation and will one day be asking their hidden patrons for a job, or finding a new industry. Note the key driver in all this: transparency.

It's going to be harder and harder to operate businesses that rely on the ignorance of their customers to achieve their margin goals. The last time I was in BB, I was trying to pick up a Roku box. After upselling me by being out of stock on the heavily advertised cheaper model, the sales person tried to sell me a connector cable that cost more than the box itself. Nice!

There is no real news about BB's business model in this announcement. A more interesting question is what remaining verticals are relatively untouched by transparency and fact-based marketing?

You should think of this post as being aimed at Haskell library writers. The benefit to the application developer is that more and more optimizations are available through identical or nearly identical, familiar interfaces such as those for lists.

In my case (joe average haskell dev) that means I can just stick to normal constructs and switch out the underlying data structure to get the speed benefit. This article actually might lead to such a change in a computer vision package I work on.

You can expect to see this pattern over and over with Haskell, so that by the time you get to data structures that abstract away GPU-based calculations, nobody will be wishing people would just write the darn code in C.

Great. The idea is to reduce transparency and let mom and pop play the game. A missed opportunity to promote transparency.

For most of these little companies no advantage is lost by reporting cash flow, transactions and other relevant metrics. All easy to calculate. The new services around these little companies should be accounting support. Instead all we are going to get is "social proof" followed by an info blackout.

The correct answer is: "I am too kind to children and dogs."

Surprising conclusion at the end: "I’ll consider development in Lua in the future." Interesting.

Understanding what mathematical objects are can lead to insanity. Much better to focus on what you can do with them.

Or to quote John von Neumann, "In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them."

It turns out that treating infinity like it is a number is very convenient (e.g. in convex optimization).

I think these black and white statements are not a good way to explain things. Just start with the set of real numbers. Point out infinity is outside the set. Then introduce the extended reals (R + infinity), with special rules for arithmetic involving +/-infinity. This theoretical convenience extends to the computer when the rules for Inf are implemented correctly. Follow the rules and you might sensibly get an Inf result, break them and you should get a NaN. It's all implemented in IEEE 754. In fact Inf is in your computer but not all the reals are. So there.

I think the task rabbit price drops when the density of task rabbits is high enough in a locale to make the marginal cost drop. If I am right you should see this happen for certain tasks that don't make people deviate much from their ordinary course. Data gathering while shopping, for example, should be cheaper than delivering furniture.

Please explain your last sentence.

Stores are a marriage of a logistics business and a marketing business. The split is about 75%/25%. That marketing component is ripe for disruption that directly connects the original sellers (brand, manufacturers, authors) to their end users (consumers, readers).

Letting the stores control the decisions about how that connection gets made is not in the entrepreneur's best interest. Making that connection efficient by using your great idea is not in their best interest. That's disruption for you.

The winners will figure out how to separate the logistics of local availability from mobile/local marketing.

Several reasons. Managers want to believe that programming is like installing a kitchen. It should have a clear start, middle, end, and a reasonable estimate of time and cost that could almost be written in a contract. Devs don't want to admit they never installed a kitchen before and need to research the topic first, because if they do the job will be given to someone else who is willing to say they install kitchens all day long.

Oh yeah, managers also believe that changing the counter top from marble to granite in the middle of the project should be free, because, hey, it's software.

I forgot to mention the radioactive cesium tax. There, fixed that. Seriously though, the government will never be able to out-optimize individual choice in choosing technologies. Besides, the system needs to be tech-neutral or else we get a new generation of special interests.

They both help reduce climate change? Not sure. Without a carbon tax you could burn 100 tons of coal to make a "green device" and nobody would know the exact figure. With it, you don't even need to do the calculation. It's in the price.

No. The article is a coded call for subsidies of solar through "improved" financing. Subsidizing a specific activity means the government picks the technology. A carbon tax would bring all the same benefits and would not have the government deciding which technology to favor. For example there is a competing technology called "smaller houses". A carbon tax would promote that and leave the choice in private hands.

It's not financing. It's the fact that we don't have a carbon tax. Price carbon near the cost of sequestration and you will see plenty of money invested in alternative energy. Anything else keeps the decision making in the hands of the central planners. Ask Gorbachev how well that worked.

I agree. We need SOAP to stop the JSON loving bit thieves trying to steal our intellectual overhead (IO). Don't drop the SOAP!

The thing that stuck out for me is that SF is bigger than SV. My co-founders are divided on where we should be. Thoughts?

When I worked on Wall Street about 10 years ago, somebody tried to used it to make a daily report and got slapped by the IT dept. for using "unsupportable" software. There weren't as many freshly minted PhDs floating around then. Maybe the attitude would be different. The report looked great.

My favorite, from Steward Brand:

Confronting a difficult problem we might fruitfully ask, "What would a microbe do?"