bactrian

Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it.

This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards.

As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.

China is always “working on” whatever the US is. Issue comes down to timing.

It’s almost so bad (even for gov work) that one wonders if it wasn’t designed like this recently as an excuse to run this “false alarm” exercise.

This is the kind of thing we would want the gov to do and lie to us about because most people can’t handle the truth.

“Put the links really close to tether so we can use that as an excuse.”

“However, Aboulafia noted, such a capability could also be considered a destabilizing development if a U.S. adversary decided to react preemptively to such an aircraft’s existence.”

In other words China and Russia may contemplate fighting WW3 now rather than waiting to be leap frogged. Fun.

Oracle is downright evil in the most corporate way. No one with other options should be a customer or employee. Oracle needs to die with Comcast and the rest.

Good time to start a Soylent competitor if you’ve been thinking of it.

Microsoft hires thousands of H1B workers for generic roles like project manager and software developer.

Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles? Of course there are but it would cost more. A true shortage would not affect Microsoft at all. They have as much money as anyone.

This is a dirty secret of tech that you can’t discuss without being labeled racist or xenophobic no matter how untrue that is.

Connections matter mostly before. Once you have a rapidly growing business, everyone is your friend, and “connections” fly in.

Social metrics. Would make the Social Capital name genuinely meaningful :-)

The “social response” (HN, GitHub, reddit, ...) to a new project, product, or service is all you should need to predict success at a high enough rate to do extremely well.

It’s not a matter of difficulty so much as conviction and intelligence.

The flaw here is using the wrong metrics. Once a company has found a repeatable and growing business model, it’s trivial to raise money and there’s no reason to pick Social Capital over anyone else.

The big market opportunity is to fund startups at the very earliest signs of success. When all they have to show is some code and a few Hacker News upvotes or GitHub stars.

Someone is going to make YCs returns look weak by funding this early. And nothing would do more for diversity than a low barrier test that is 100% blind and meritocratic.

How about a super EMP that wipes out millions of Americans and brings it down to Russia's level?

Russia started helping North Korea with ICBM and super EMP technology after Bush pulled out of the anti ballistic missile treaty unilaterally.

Putin realized there was no way to catch up to US technology. The only solution is to damage the US enough that Russia can catch up.

Trump is the fool and Kim Jung Un is the patsy. Putin is the puppet master.

The US can probably see the position of every sub on the planet using magnetic imaging.

You blow a hole in the border with the first plane. Then fly the rest through. EMP attacks can also blow a hole.

Nothing to do with START. It's all about the NK war. Do you also believe the story that they recalled 1000 retired pilots due to shortages in recruiting?

And that this weeks evacuation "drill" was already scheduled?

This is war time preparation.

The reason for the 24/7 bombers is to counter any Russian or Chinese aggression during the US attack on North Korea.

We can't risk them thinking we're vulnerable to a preemptive strike for even a day or week.

It's precautionary measure to prevent an escalation to WW3. Hopefully it works out.

Design by committee vs design by vision. Takes guts to have strong opionions and stick to them.

At almost every company, the primary background motivation is not getting fired. Virtually no one even aspires to great work let alone takes the risk to have a vision.

This is pretty rational. There's just no incentive to risk your neck pushing for quality when you'll just end up working a lot harder for little reward.

Privilege is wealth. The idea that there are a number of privileges is a lie people who have wealth tell.

If you have money, you have privilege. If you don't, you don't. Everything else is but a symptom.

It's not related to crypto/tls or net/http. This has to do with sending mail via SMTP. It's totally worth fixing but probably had close to zero real world effect.

Go has an incredible security track record. Out of the box, net/http and crypto/TLS are safe to deploy in production. No reverse proxy shield required.

Bank robbery is not a capital crime either but cops shoot as soon as they see an armed gang. Isn't this a good comparison?

All the money spent on patent wars will be paid for by consumers. Abolish all patents. Let the free market sort things out.

You can tell they descriminate based on who they hire and fund.

It's the country club crowd sprinkled with safe seeming outsiders that act as token representatives. It's not merit based but class (aka "culture") based.

It's a market opportunity for a fund that doesn't think of rich people as being better than poor people.

A lot more geniuses among the poor than the rich.

What's worse is they're incredibly thin skinned and lacking in introspection or humility. Typical rich people.

The question is whether it's okay to shoot first at a gang of heavily armed criminals, or whether you have to attempt an arrest first.

Another founding principle of YC is that its for the upper crust of society.

Exceptions are made, but in general, the poor need not apply. YC actively excludes poor people through socioeconomic discrimination.

YC truly is "the Harvard of accelerators" as their homepage proudly quoted.

This is clearly a license enforcement measure.

They're going to search for commercial sites sending this header and then hit them up for money.

This is DRM.

This post was interesting in a morbid way but you can count the Linux nerds that want leave the open world of Linux for Microsoft very easily. They all work at Microsoft.

Microsoft is losing on mobile, desktop, servers, and IoT. Their entire ecosystem is a technological deadend.

If you're a Linux Nerd, you should probably keep using Linux if you care about having a good career going forward.

But you spark up one marijuana cigarette on the patio and everyone loses their shit...

Yes but it's corrupted at step one by an artificial selelection process. You want just the real world to be the filter.

Firefox kept the fire burning but Chrome is what stirred Microsoft into action.

Chrome is creepy privacy invading software designed to help maintain Googles search monopoly.

Like Search, Chrome's quality is the honey and we are the flies.

Funding startups others wouldn't is perhaps the most essential part of YC.

VCs didn't want Dropbox or Airbnb or Stripe without YCs stamp of approval.

YC could very plausible fund as many startups as there are ambitious and determined founders.

Let anyone participate in the programs and then let the startups filter themselves out by failing to keep up the progressively more challenging levels of effort.

Uber is his one investment that people other than himself consider successful.

He wrote a book about what a genius he is for investing in a hundred companies and having one of them be Uber.

He's going to have to revise the book to talk about his coffee machine startup.