gdudeman

Additionally, the Senate gives minority population states a vastly outsized vote. North Dakota and California get equal say. 50 Senators do not come close to representing 50% of the US population.

Assange may have said that, but Podesta was hacked by a sloppy organization that used Bitly to attempt a hack on thousands of other accounts worldwide.

Assange has no reason to implicate Russia. It would also be very, very easy to give a disgruntled insider the email trove or help them stumble upon it.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke...

An addendum to this: Many of the greatest unconventional thinkers of our time are similar to Newton in that they are right about one non-consensus thing and wrong about lots of others.

Some of those people become fantastically rich as a result of the one right thing.

Just because someone is wildly successful and right about one non-consensus bet, doesn't mean they aren't wrong about most of their other beliefs.

The occasional out-of-the-mainstream idea is a revolution, but the vast majority are just nutty and wrong.

I'd suggest we are evolving, but you are both mis-using "evolve." Evolution does not mean better, it just means change to fit the current environment. Humanity and intelligence is not the logical outcome of evolution.

This feels like a natural evolution. It's a outcome product of the environment.

Short positions are part of an efficient allocation of capital and efficient pricing. They also effectively bring down the price of this company - so you can buy more if you think it should be higher.

Some people think Tesla is a mess. Short sellers help keep bubblicious prices down and, if those people succeed, they'll invest in companies that have a better shot of actually succeeding.

Shorting is part of the spectrum: it goes from all of your money in a single stock to none to negative.

I think one could argue that by not buying more Tesla stock, you are also not merely passive. You also have a detrimental effect. ;)

Sources: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/12/financia... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/in-... http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2008/09/in_defense_of_shor...

I to have seen plenty of companies flail and get bogged down because of technical debt and a just get it done culture. It's really hard to begin with a "yes it's a mess, but it works" culture and transition to anything else.

Plenty of A rounds have been spent trying to make a sand castle taller.

This is not unique to php - I'm sure you can do it right - but it's more common to it.

This article mistakes how we talk about AI with potential outcomes.

It presupposes that AI will only do what we ask it, not that we'll program AI to, for instance, "protect us from enemy nations." It also seems to presuppose that we'll be able to understand why it does what it does.

> "However computers change, they won’t have innate desires. They will be programmed by people. It still won’t be in their nature to want things."

Regardless of the truthfulness of this (What is an innate desire beyond programming whether by evolution or people?), it doesn't matter if the desires are innate or programmed. We will definitely program them to want things and to do things like trade stocks and drive us places. If we get it wrong, it can go haywire.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence has a very good explanation of this: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...

I'd suggest the writer should spend more time trying to understand what many of the smartest people of our time are saying before declaring them wrong.

That's one way of looking at it, but you don't just happen to have those skills. You get them from experience and practice - or doing well at the 99% that doesn't feel important.

This arguement reminds me of people who focus on a key, heroic play in sports, rather than all the good and bad that led up to it.

I think you're right. Fines have to be higher than the direct cost to society and they have to be higher by the chance they're caught.

In this case, it was very hard to detect, it was fully intentional on the part of the company, and they fought for years to keep it hidden.

This sort of deception is maybe 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 to be caught? So it isn't like a parking ticket - it's hard to catch and was hard to prove.

Furthermore, this is a "deal with the mess you made" solution - or a "natural consequences" consequence if you are a parent. There are certainly much more efficient ways of spending the money to improve public health, but those are abstract, hard to explain to the public, and hard to explain to the car owners. So they are less efficient from the government, public and company's perspective. Make America hyper-rational and the owners would continue driving these cars and we'd spend the money on truck emissions or something.

Return can be two things: profit now or future profit.

A traditional business with $166m in revenue has few places to invest extra cash that turn $1 into $4 in < 24 months. Twilio has this.

What would be crazy is not investing in growth.

Twilio went from $33m to $59 Q1 '15 to Q1 '16. That's huge growth - and is a lot to like.

Virtually every company that is growing at 80% YoY runs unprofitably.

Here's why: compounding. They're growing 80% YoY because of that spend and it's absolutely worth it.

Say they could run break even at 50% YoY growth. Straight line that growth through 2019 and you have a company doing just shy of $800m in annual revenue. Invest $40m extra a year for 80% growth (admittedly very simplified!), and you have a company doing $1.4B per year.

Growth costs money up front: it's marketing, it's customer acquisition, it's hiring and scaling so you're ready to do nearly double the volume next year and it's opening new lines of business.

You'd be nuts not to spend some extra cash when a) unit economics are good and b) you can turn it into significantly more cash in 12-24 months.

Twilio could run profitably tomorrow at the cost of hundreds of millions in revenue and potential profit 3, 4 and 5 years out.

Disclaimer: Jeff Lawson is a CEO I greatly admire.

I fully agree that manufacturing is largely automated in Western nations, but I disagree with your assertion that hand crafted stuff will save us. $250 hand crafted goods are a tiny and shrinking part of our economy bought by wealthy individuals. This is not 5% of our labor force, nor is it 5% of our GDP.

Most the stuff we buy isn't stuff - it's services, lawyers, finance, insurance, health care. AI will dramatically reduce employment in every single one of those industries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...)

Agreed. Automation is also replacing service jobs.

The robotics and machine revolution has already hit the US.

Car manufacturing: We still build cars here, but we don't employ nearly as many people.

Logging: contrary to popular belief, the spotted owl didn't destroy logging jobs. Machines that let 1 person replace 20 did.

Manufacturing is the easiest, first place to replace workers, but AI will replace lots of people in America. It looks like trucking and taxis are on the short list - that's a few million workers - but fast food restaurants are up next (and those innovations will move up the chain to fancier restaurants).

Over the last 200 years, there was almost always a new role for people when their job was automated, but over the last 20 years a lot of those new roles were lower paying service jobs.

No way is our consumer culture actually based on small scale production and artisan touches - and not that many of those artisan touches are made by people or machines in China. That may be what you notice, but most of America's paycheck goes to the regular old normal stuff.

Interesting corollary: the upper floors sell for far more than lower floors. My understanding is that often upper floor tenants will subsidize the lower floor tenants - the lower floors exist in order for the upper floors to be high.

This is a perfect example of a positive externality.

We tend to try to make the producers of negative externalities pay for the problems they create for the rest of us, but we rarely pay the producers of positive externalities for the benefits we all get from them.

It's interesting that cities never put their money where their mouths are. If we really valued trees, we, the non-tree owners, would pay people based on the size and benefits of their trees.

I agree - this could be tricky.

One solution for restricting advertising would be to allow consumers to sue drug companies for false claims or for misinforming doctors.

This is good for Apple: It's a good incremental revenue opportunity. Facebook makes a lot of money helping app developers find their way to installs.

This could be good for developers: If Apple follows this to its logical extent, they will also let developers A/B test art and copy for their app, making it easier for app developers to find the parts of their app that really resonate with users and get installs.

This is a good analogy, but I think your takeaway is wrong.

In software development, we change the team structure if we find that multiple teams do the same thing for the same customers. So, in this case, redraw the state boundaries.

Spot on with the too large / too small argument.

I think the key point you allude to here is that there is nothing sacred about 50 states or their boundaries.

The article suggests exactly the parent's argument: decentralize power back to the states (and redraw the boundaries so the states make sense).

Sure, but there are areas where there really aren't many 2 bedroom houses or they aren't really representative of the local real estate.

Ha! That's the feedback that inspired the price per square foot for this map.

Agreed. It's an imperfect measure.

I lobbied to put both on here, but then you end up with an unreadable map.

It might seem that way, but it isn't.

I'm guessing you have one or two additional criteria on your search, but there are a bunch of homes currently for sale that match your stated criteria: http://www.estately.com/37.5981,-122.5977,37.7576,-122.3059?...

(edit: first link was borked)

Here's one for DC: http://www.estately.com/washington-dc-real-estate-by-transit...

We're using price per square foot. We are a member of the MLS, so we have every home and condo for sale.

You know what looks crazy? Not factoring in size. We did it and it looked really goofy.

(I'm the founder of Estately)

This is sort of a silly problem since Twitter started at 100% off-Twitter and has exceeded all predictions at bringing people into their own experience.

There are numerous, straightforward solutions to this. Twitter can require third party apps to show ads, for instance. Twitter can continue to copy functionality from third party apps and then squeeze them down. Or Twitter can worry about this once they are monetizing the bulk of their user base at 99% of the potential.

I think this is genuinely a challenge for Twitter to solve, but I suspect (hope!) internally they spend much more time worrying about getting more users, how to meaningfully innovate and how to make Twitter more essential for the majority of their "sometimes" users.

We let people search by specific school and we are considering adding school district ranking soon. We've had a bunch of users requesting it.

Hi mrfusion, we unfortunately have strict licensing restrictions on our data. Sorry!

This is awesome. I love analysis like this.

Funny enough, something very similar to this was the impetus for me starting Estately. Early on, we had a bunch of wild spatial queries that would let you even filter by distance to specific transit line stops: http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/near_tra...

When we ran stats on what searches people were actually doing, we found that very few consumers actually used these kinds of filters. We found we had a small and passionate audience for specific geo features and a much larger audience for "great site to search for and learn about homes." It took me way to long to come to terms with this. We still have walkscore search and distance from a neighborhood, school or address search even though they are very little used.

Why wasn't it popular? My guess is it's 80% because the market was small and 20% because we didn't present them right.

The thing about real estate - especially in the current market - is there just are few enough homes for sale that meet your price / proximity to work / school / bedrooms criteria that most people want to just glance at all of them and rule them in or out. Additionally, most people start with a bunch of "rules," then they bend one, change their mind on another and finally compromise on the last one.

The typical home search starts so clean, but dissolves over time as you tour houses, learn more about what you do and don't like and find something that works.