Dude, please, please get your drains fixed. It's bothering me now.
652 karma · joined July 23, 2018
I'm Scottish and I voted no the first time round. My arguement was always "I've more in common with people from Manchester, Liverpool or London than I do with Highlanders and 'nationalists'" (I'm in Glasgow, which is the third largest UK city and the largest in Scotland). But then we were taken out of the EU and since then the UK has become (been unmasked as?) very right wing, led by a deeply unpleasant right wing of the nominally centre-right Tory party. Centre-left politics (primarily social but also economic) have been ruined, as a result of various factors at play in the last 5 years or so. My kinship with other UK cities is no longer reason enough to support the union.
I manage a company registered in Scotland and it is now as difficult for us to do business with France or Spain as with India or Canada. Unlike those business owners who like the idea of a captive UK market, I want our company to compete and export globally, and we have been deprived of simple access to the world's largest trading bloc.
As for the prospect of an independent Scotland joining the EU, I see no hurdles to that. Now that the UK has left the EU, it is absolutely in the EU's interest to allow Scotland, having left the EU unwillingly, to rejoin.
For these reasons I'm inclined to vote yes if a second referendum is held, but I'm not 100% sure and could change my mind depending on the economic and social plans put forward.
It's obviously a bit of a 'spectrum', but I'd say a 'real' hardware startup would be one that develops new hardware, like Tesla, General Fusion, a robotics company, etc - really anything where the innovation is in the hardware, and if software is developed (usually will be) then it sits on top of that novel hardware. Let's call this case 'hardware-heavy'.
In the hardware-lite case, you're basically starting a software company that needs to set up a supply chain for a few parts, built by others, which provides the most cost-effective platform for your software to run on. You might then package that up, brand it, and sell it. This can be relatively capital nonintensive.
In the hardware-heavy case, you'll probably need quite a lot of capital. This will be needed for you to patent your invention(s), prototype your devices repeatedly until you've arrived at something commercially viable, set up a small batch manufacturing process to produce small volumes of prototypes. With hardware, when you ship something anyone can take it apart and reverse engineer it. Every time you replicate your product, it takes time and money - unlike software.
Tons of commenters here will be able to give you excellent advice about the hardware-lite model, because this is HN. I suspect there is less experience of hardware-heavy business models here.
Which fits your vision?
The premise of his video is that the energy goes across to the bulb at the speed of light without using the circuit.
The real answer is there is a very small response at the speed of light because the moment the battery is connected there is effectively an antenna or capacitor set up between the two wires.
The light will turn on after the time it takes the energy to pass around the entirety of the circuit.
As for the Poynting vector 'demonstrating' that the energy goes straight across rather than being confined to the wires, there is a tiny bit of truth in that, but he fails to say (or to understand) that in reality the field lines running from battery to bulb would be SO ABSOLUTELY MINUTE compared to the very strong field lines confined to the circuit path.
So in short, there is a TINY amount of current flow at the speed of light because there is an antenna set up between the wires. It doesn't even matter if the wires are connected at their ends or not - you've built an antenna.
But this will NOT turn the light on because the energy received will be extremely small.
The light turns on after the energy has travelled the entire length of the circuit, and not before.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." (Bertrand Russell nailing it.)
The other model/technique I've used successfully over the years (or, at least, I think it contributed to the successes, but it's difficult to say with certainty) is affirmations, as brought into common discourse probably most effectively and controversially by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.
For example, the investor director a VC appoints to a board does not generally get any stock options - just a fee for attending board meetings (generally paid to the VC firm, not the individual). It also feels unlikely that a VC today would appoint their own CEO - it does happen, but it is far more likely that they would either back the existing management team or not invest at all, such is their view of how critical the team's quality is to the company's prospects.
The author also describes the VC and its appointed CEO taking ~75% of the company. I've never seen anything like that happen - investors usually end up with about ~30% stake, regardless of what funding phase you are at.
The paragraph about the 'down round' scenario is bizarre. There would need to have been serious failures in the company's/founder's legal work to allow this type of retrospective revaluation to occur. I've never heard of anything like this.
I guess the reason for these oddities is because the landscape was very different in 2001, when we were just emerging from the dot com boom, but I'm not sure. Can anyone else comment?
Anyway, overall it's a really good article, and the final parts ('Fixing the problem') was pretty insightful, since things like this have actually happened since then.