brianmcconnell

A modest proposal: if you are a Googler, lobby to have the clocks on Android phones display local time with UTC in small print below (or wherever makes sense in the UI). A political solution is a non-starter, but if this change can be quietly pushed out to millions of users, people will get used to the idea of UTC.

IMHO, UTC = "Business Time", so if people just got in the habit of using UTC for conference calls, travel, etc, that would be a win. Local time will probably never go away, we are too used to the idea of solar time.

This times 100. A bad tenant can cost you tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention peace of mind. I once had one who lied about owning my property to have a 60 year old tree cut down. It was a nightmare (it turned out he had sued his previous landlord in a bogus sexual harrassment and basically extorted a hundred grand from an elderly woman).

I would much rather have someone who pays less, but is financially and mentally stable. So yeah, rents will drop pretty fast once the market softens.

SF in particular is a unique market because you have one population that is hell bent on staying here, and another that is primarily here for work opportunities. The latter population will clear out pretty quick once the work starts to dry up.

Licensed pilot here (learned to fly in 1987). People need to look at self-driving cars in the way pilots use an auto-pilot.

Auto-pilot is most useful in two situations. 1) long cross country legs where there is not much flying to do (just maintain heading and altitude), so A/P frees the pilot up to manage other systems, enjoy the view, etc, and alleviates fatigue, 2) flying a precision instrument approach, reducing the risk that the pilot will succumb to spatial disorientation in the setup for (usually manual) landing.

With cars, auto-drive capability will be useful in reducing accidents in two modes: 1) long duration highway driving where fatigue is a big issue, 2) intervening to prevent a distracted driver from causing an accident (rear end collision etc).

I'd be perfectly happy with a car that can drive itself in cruise mode on the interstate, but requires an alert driver on local roads (with the added bonus that if I am about to slam into something, it will brake to avoid or lessen the impact).

Something for the liability crowd to consider, self driving cars won't be able to avoid every potential mishap, but they will be able to reduce their severity. A car that can automatically brake to reduce its speed by 25% just before impact, will reduce its kinetic energy by roughly half, and the potential for injury by more still.

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She never has to work another day in her life. She'll do just fine. The older workers who are being shitcanned and forced into involuntary early retirement, however, do not have that luxury.

21 year SF resident here. I was here for the dot com bubble, and the smaller "multimedia" boom in the early/mid 90s.

I think what is unfolding is a shift away from consumer businesses and back to boring business to business services. The latter tend to have more predictable cash flow (which ironically is a handicap when VC money is flowing to "viral" consumer businesses that can paper up their growth).

B2B services whose customers are not linked to the local tech economy should do just fine. It might be harder to raise money for a while, but that's good too, it'll weed out the weaker companies. OTOH, consumer companies that already have ten years of rapid growth priced into their valuation are pretty screwed. Hard to see where they avoid some really painful and damaging adjustments.

And a word of advice for workers. If you are at all unhappy with your job, or suspect that your company is vulnerable to a downturn, now is a good time to start looking around for something you'll be ok with for a couple years. Once companies start laying people off in larger numbers, it will get ugly (maybe not 2000 ugly, but it won't be fun).

Agree 100%. Avoid.

Good/Visto alum here. I am just thankful that some omniscient hedge fund people offered to buy my shares at a little over a buck a share five years ago (hoping to cash in on their forthcoming IPO no doubt). This company was not a unicorn. It was a tapeworm! Not at all surprised at the outcome, except that it wasn't an outright courthouse auction of office supplies.

Cold Fusion is _real_. It powered my website back in the 1990s. Where have all of you been since then?

While we are exploring hypothetical scenarios, here's one.

A schoolbus full of young children has lost its brakes and is careening down a hill toward an almost certainly lethal high speed impact with a building at the bottom of the hill.

Two Google cars are idling at an intersection halfway down the hill. Both determine that if one of them pulls in front of the bus just so, it will result in a survivable crash (for the kids on the school bus). But which car should go?

Both cars run a PANN (psychometric artificial neural network) analysis of their owner's email. Car A determines that its owner is an abusive sociopath. Car B determines that its owner is a nice person, newly wed and possibly pregnant. The each compare their owner's PANN scores.

Car A signals "CARMA program activated. Taking one for the team!"

The schoolbus plows into Car A, which absorbs most of the impact. The kids are fine, minor injuries only, but the owner of Car A expires before the fire department can extract him with the jaws of life.

I am kind of surprised they are still in business, having missed the point that most people actually enjoy actual food and beverages, versus chugging a flavorless Ensure 2.0 slurry while staring at a monitor.

It's called a lunch break for a reason. Lunch is part of it, but its mostly about the break.

Dealing with Unicode in Python 2.x is a _nightmare_. So if you need to go beyond ASCII, Python 3 is a huge improvement. On the downside, if you want to use tools like App Engine, you're still stuck with 2.7 for now, but hopefully that will change.

Whenever I hear the term "unicorn", I think of the Squatty Potty TV ads (they're funny!)

Let's see how the employees feel about sacrificing all that time when the founder has a rich exit, and the employees get crap while he retires in luxury.

I had never heard of them until now. I don't think this is going to have a happy ending.

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The biggest regrets I have in life stem from ignoring my "spider sense" about a situation. It's often difficult to articulate what's wrong, but if you have a vague feeling something's wrong, it most likely is.

I've had a rooftop solar system on my home for about ten years ago. I would have never considered an active tracking system, as the wind would have wrecked it long ago. The only maintenance I have to do is, at most, to hose the panels off about once a year.

If you're trying to build out solar in a location where space is at a premium, you're doing it wrong.

I am with the commenters who have a problem with this being a weekend project. How about assigning the problem on a Monday, and reviewing the results toward the end of the week?

If they are asking you to do your interview homework over the weekend, it seems likely they'll be "asking" you to work unpaid overtime, weekends, etc on a regular basis.

What's driving a lot of the idiotic investment is FOMO (fear of missing out). It is a powerful thing and can override a rational assessment of a businesses chances for success.

This combined with a lack of historical perspective is dangerous. Nearly _every_ smartphone app you see had a voice/phone counterpart a few years ago (remember 777-FILM or #TAXI?), most of them are long dead, and were killed off by the same market forces that will release their latest mimics from their mortal coil.

Very lazy, very poorly researched article with cherry picked sources.

The simpler explanation is that the author isn't seeing many house parties because he isn't being invited to them. Dunno, but may be the host is worried he's the sort to write a review about it.

Next time he should build a cuckoo clock that shouts Allahu Akbar.

Oooh, how I love it when out of shape tech industry people use professional sports metaphors without understanding the difference between 1) a professional sports tournament system and 2) employment in a growing industry.

In 1) there is an artificially limited number of slots (and money) in the "big leagues" that little leaguers are clamoring for. In 2) there is generally a shortage of people relative to the available jobs.

Applying the professional sports metaphor to category 2 merely demonstrates that as a manager you are a f---t--d, which is probably why they have ridiculously bad turnover (a HQ location that might as well be in Siberia being another).

Asking HN here: how many companies have thought about localizing their service/app/etc for the Spanish speaking market within the United States? Localization is typically thought of in terms of international expansion, curious to know who else is thinking about it as a way to reach new markets within a country.

The important thing in analyzing a competitor's behavior is to understand the incentives motivating that behavior.

A common example in startupland is a company whose senior management has short term incentives that reward a fast exit over long term growth. That company may very well behave in ways that appear dumb to competitors with a long term focus. But if the "seasoned" CEO and his cronies get their compensation even in a mediocre deal, why bother trying to build a company for the ages when they can cash out, rest a bit and land in a similar situation at the next gig?

I've never really understood the hype for Soylent. It does seem like a great idea for your earthquake kit, camping, etc, but as daily food? If I am rushed for time, I'll just grab an Odwalla smoothie or similar. Can someone educate me about what I am not getting from a decent smoothie that Soylent provides? (I am probably not the target demographic as I enjoy eating, and variety).

Among other things I am responsible for my employer's REST API. I don't really see where an API is inherently political. It could be, if you're trying to get lots of different organizations to buy into it as a quasi standard (OAuth?), but most APIs I encounter simply provide a decent separation of concerns so external users can do what they need to do without knowing what's happening on the other side.

There's also the time and money aspect to it. The API isn't usually the top priority for most companies, so the API usually ends up somewhere between a crude interface and a mirror image of what's in the packaged product.

In most cases, its definitely a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough" situation.

TL;DR Music technology startups suck.

A fair amount of work has already been done with algorithmic communication systems, as its a small step from a mathematical language to a general purpose programming language. Paul Fitzpatrick, then with the MIT AI lab, developed the most complete framework around the idea, CosmicOS.

One of the images that impressed me most in my life was flying down the east coast of China, equivalent distance from Cape Cod to Florida, and seeing nothing but a Venus-like hellscape of smog. Wasn't any better on the ground. It was as if they had combined the worst aspects of Las Vegas development with Charles Dickens era London.

I am not at all eager to go back. I know there's lot's o' money sloshing around there, but I also don't care to spend my time in an airport smokers cage, which is basically what that place is.