geoffschmidt

Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Reasonable people are sophisticated enough to understand that there is a difference between using a sentence as a password, and believing that sentence to be true.

On a related note, I once looked into changing my middle name to an executable implementation of RSA, so that my passport would be a non-exportable munition. (No go.)

How (I think) it works:

Basically it's a bunch of animations that play simultaneously. For example, there is no actual timer. Instead there is an animation of a bar filling up, and an animation of a "game over" screen doing nothing for a few seconds, and then sliding onto the screen. All of this is done with CSS keyframes.

Each of the alligators is actually a radio button styled to LOOK like an alligator, including an animation to move up and down in a fixed pattern. When you check the radio button, it changes the style (through CSS rules conditioned on the checked state), which changes the animation to take the alligator off the screen.

Now, the scoreboard: For each alligator radio button, there is a corresponding radio button in the scoreboard, paired up so that checking the alligator button unchecks the scoreboard button. The scoreboard buttons are stacked on top of each other, and unchecking them causes them to animate their height down to zero. This effectively computes the number of checked alligator-buttons and outputs it as the height of the element. At the bottom of the stack is a strip of images for scores 0, 1, 2, etc, so that as the buttons are unchecked, the right one moves up into the display area.

Finally, the "play again" link at the end just reloads the page.

Yeah, this is a non-issue. The safest way to do it is to make them contractors for the two-week period. Nothing looks bad about a two-week consulting contract.

Some trickier issues with trial periods are:

- If they currently have a job, they will typically need to quit the other job before they can do any work for you, even if it is on nights and weekends, and even if it is unpaid. Otherwise there are serious legal issues around IP. So it's no good for poaching.

- A good candidate will have several offers. Even for a two-week trial period, they will probably need to turn down those other offers. That sucks for the candidate because it will really muddy the water with those other companies if in two weeks they want a job again. They could always get offers from other companies, but if the candidate actually wanted to work at those other companies, why didn't she interview there the first time around?

Both of these are surmountable if you are a genuinely desirable employer. For one thing you have the flexibility to talk only to awesome candidates, and awesome candidates are less likely to have problems accepting offers that they previously rejected. (Perhaps even on better terms -- it's very powerful to walk away from a negotiation while you have the upper hand.)

Does malaria have a right to live? Are we wrong to try to eradicate it?

The goal is to raise awareness. For example, every cable news program in America would cover it as one of the day's top stories. You can't buy that with money.

The article suggests that Uber subsidize the price on NYE. Given that the price is set by demand, that doesn't make any sense. However much Uber or Amex subsidizes the price, there are still X people that want rides and Y < X rides available, and the amount you the rider have to pay to win the auction is the same.

The anger came because Uber didn't do a good job of setting expectations. Their customers expected that they could get a ride anytime, even NYE, if they were willing to pay a certain premium over what a cab would cost. But the premium on NYE was much larger than the customers (rightly or not) expected. If Uber had done a better job of managing expectations, they wouldn't have angry customers.

It's a rare doctor that really knows -- in many cases, nobody really knows.

For example: How do SSRIs work? Statistically, they do "work," for certain values of work. We know that they result in more serotonin in the synapse. But we also know that that's not the reason they work, because that happens immediately but it usually takes a few weeks for the drug to actually work. Evidently they work by inducing some kind of structural change, but nobody knows what.. Nor do we need to know what to know that they're good drugs to prescribe in certain circumstances.

Meanwhile, many people want "reassurance" to be part of the product that they receive when they go to the doctor. If your doctor said, "these pill seem to sort of go with your symptoms in the massive table I have painstakingly memorized, nobody really knows what they do, try eating them", she would be providing a strictly worse product in many people's eyes than if she said "You have condition X. It happened because of Y. Take these pills and you'll be all right."

Eliminated? For some kids, it's the one reliable meal they get a day.

When it comes to feeding hungry children, the invisible hand of the marketplace does not have a very good track record.

As for why Chrome has so many installs, certainly part of the answer is marketing. Google has been cross-promoting it from many Google properties.

The human cost here is enormous. Did drug users win the war on drugs? Well, half a million of them are in jail at the moment, and it's hard to call that victory. If you think the same thing can't happen with copyright infringement given the political will, you're wrong.

Counterpoint: it takes a little bit of delusion to seek some kind of "ultimate justification" to the naturally pleasuable and fulfilling experience that is life.

My point is only: you can't break the symmetry with logic alone. Ultimately your priors/axioms/experiences come into play.

Imagine those infomercials that run late at night on cable TV, except instead of selling dubious kitchen gadgets, they're selling equity in dubious social media startups to your grandmother.

googleserver.com is taken, but $7.95 will get you googleservers.com.

My argument is that there is natural scarcity not of copies of a piece of information, but of the value that can be extracted from it. Scarcity is relevant to movie tickets because only so many people want to see a particular movie this Friday night. Let's say that in San Francisco there are 1000 such people. If only 5 movie theaters can show the movie, they might sell 200 tickets each. If 50 movie theaters can show the movie, they're not going to sell 200 tickets each. Collectively they will still sell at most 1000 tickets. They have to divide a scarce resource -- the value of the information to moviegoers on that particular night in SF. Once the information is adequately distributed, no matter how many copies you make, you won't increase that value.

So, instead of tracking the physical copies -- which I think we'd both agree are an irrelevant artifact of an antiquated distribution system -- I think we should talk about the value that is created for humanity when someone comes up with a new piece of information. When I make a movie, I've added a certain amount of value to the world. When I establish that a molecule can safely be used to treat a disease, I've added a certain amount of value to the world. It is hard to find units to measure this value (revenue potential in USD is a distorted one), but it is undoubtedly finite, and different for each movie or drug. None of this changes with your sci-fi replicator.

The question is, should I as the creator of the information be able to capture all that value? Some of that value? None of that value?

If we thought of IP as a natural right, we'd say "all." Copyright would be perpetual and there'd be no fair use. In a post-scarcity world where everyone got food and housing and paint and movie cameras for free, we might say "none" and hope (correctly I think) that people would still create for the pleasure of creation.

Historically in the US we've said "some," nominally because we think it maximizes the rate of production of value for the commons, but in fact because of the natural vulnerability of our legislative system to capture by rent-seeking copyright aggregators. It is like a resonant frequency of democratic capitalism.

Thanks.

I'm curious about your comment about intellectual "property" being a red herring. I certainly don't mean to mean to defend the current regime, but I'd be really interested to learn more about your ideas.

From a historical perspective, why is the notion of intellectual property any less legitimate than the notion of real property? In both cases, we are granting to a private concern the exclusive right to exploit something that used to be in the commons. Land "ownership" seems obvious now, but once, it seemed absurd to many people that anyone could own the space on Earth that we all occupy.

In the case of both real and intellectual "property", there is a resource from which limited value can be extracted. There are a limited number of cows that can graze in a given number of acres, there is a limited amount of money that can be made by selling a particular molecule as a drug, and there is a limited number of tickets that can be sold during opening weekend of a film.

In both real and intellectual property, there are multiple possible uses of the resource, and they can conflict. If I chop down the forest and plant wheat, you can't hunt there. If you make Mickey Mouse porn and promote it in infomercials, it changes who Mickey Mouse is in our culture. (Maybe we think it's in the public interest to allow that to happen, but it could definitely conflict with what Walt Disney wants to have happen, and prevent them from starting creative projects that they otherwise would have started.)

So it seems to me that opposition to intellectual property can't come from "legitimacy," unless we also consider ownership of real estate to be illegitimate. That would be a sad state of affairs, because I think the human race would be worse off without the idea of land deeds.

Edit: RF spectrum is another example, I suppose -- there's a limited amount of value to extract (only so many channels), and there are conflicting uses that create different kinds of value (which applications to run on which frequencies with which propagation characteristics.) And the policy tradeoffs in spectrum "property" seem to be different again from those in real or intellectual property. For one thing, there's the rapid advance of technology, and the possibility of spread spectrum.

And they've dropped their valuation target from $20B to $7B.

OK, so you think it's worth less than $7B, but I suspect you also think it's worth more than $0. What do you think it's worth?

Thank you for this post. I think it is clear-headed: whatever rules we make about copyright, we have to justify them in terms of public benefit, not some intrinsic, inalienable right to intellectual property.

Practically, though, if you could make any law you wanted: what would you do? How would you manage the transition from the current regime to some more permissive regime? From the perspective of copyright owners, that will look like a legislative taking, like seizing a piece of real estate or canceling a pension.

Would you grandfather in the current IP holders, or give them some kind of grace period? (And perpetuate the old system?) Or just take their property? (Do you think that's generally a good public policy? Or is this case an exception for some reason?)

No it's not. Zynga has 200MM+ monthly active users and a revenue run rate of $900MM. It's nothing like 1999.

You may think Zynga is overvalued, but if so, I'd be curious to see you put that in the form of a quantitative argument.

It seems like it would be easy to redraft the law to close the loophole. I mean, I can't just walk in and donate $.10 and get a toy. They have gone from bundling a toy with the happy meal, to bundling an option to purchase a toy.

A friend used to work in security at Akamai, and in fact he would bring home stories about the secure enclosures he was designing for insecurely colocated machines. They were supposed to emphatically destroy the data on the box if it was opened.

This would have been in the early 2000s.. no idea what, if anything, made it into production.

You're not really offering significant benefits to the hackers. We're talking about a few thousand dollars cash value. Salaries in silicon valley for sharp engineers are easily six figures. And someone who is relocating to join a startup with no funding or traction is definitely "doing it for the love/risk". I mean, if you can get someone to take those terms, awesome, you rock. But most of your applicants are going to be people who can't get jobs elsewhere, or who just want vacations in Hawaii (what incentive do they have to work hard when they get there?) -- so buyer beware.

I would focus on getting one engineer who is committed for the long term, and that you are 100% comfortable with -- someone that you could share good times and bad times with, for the next 3-5 years. I'd give this person a founder's stake with 4 year vesting (and I'd take impose the same vesting on myself.) I'd wait as long as necessary to find this person, and if I couldn't find them, I'd try to raise enough money to have competent consultants build a MVP at market rates (after vetting said consultants very, very carefully.)

Also FWIW, you are definitely breaking US law if you don't pay them minimum wage and possibly overtime, and the penalties for this are severe (personal liability of directors, treble damages, all kinds of nasty.) You will be in a precarious position if they sue you, because there will be a clear paper trail from your intellectual property assignments.

OK, you've got this thing off the ground, and it's bringing in a trivial amount of cash (compared to the salary you'd get at the "normal job" you could obviously get with your skills.) It sounds like you are committed to the product, and want press on and see how big you can build it -- while your cofounder would rather move on to something else, but doesn't want to pass up a share of the winnings if the project ultimately becomes successful. I've read between the lines a bit, but assuming that's right:

I think that life is too short to waste it in dysfunctional working situations. I would fix the team at all costs, and if I couldn't fix the team then I'd walk away ASAP and start something new. You're worth it -- your best is yet to come!

So I'd be bold: I'd tell my cofounder, "You have two options. Either you quit and give up most (but not all) of your stock, or I quit. If you quit, then I will focus entirely on this and work very hard to make it successful, and you might well make a significant amount of money from the small stake you keep. If I quit, then we both know that you're not going to work on the project all that seriously. Neither of us will make any money. It's your choice, but what you don't get to do is to keep your 50% while I bust my ass to make the company succeed, and you slack off."

I would also say, "As a 50% equity holder, I say that if you want to draw a salary, you need to be 100% focused on the product. I don't think you can do that and simultaneously travel around the continent. I won't let us pay dividends under the guise of paying salary, to either of us."

In the the scenario where your cofounder quits, I'd offer to let him keep, say, 7.5% of the company. You started in July and it's now November, so you've done 5 months of work. Assuming that he'd been on a 4-year founder vesting schedule (very common in founder agreements) with generous monthly vesting, he'd have vested 5/48 = 10.4% of his shares, or 5.2% of the company. So 7.5% is a generous offer by one commonly accepted standard.

You can also make an argument around your cofounder's fiduciary responsibility. In making management decisions, he is supposed to do what's best for the company, not what's best for himself as an individual shareholder/employee.

Summary: I think it's worth your time to work on this project if and only if your disinterested cofounder will get out of your way. That means resigning, fixing the cap table, and leaving you the cash in the bank for product development. If your cofounder won't cooperate, don't waste any more time fighting with him -- spend that time productively, on building something even more awesome.

One guy's opinion, HTH. Congratulations on your successes so far and good luck!

It is not offensive, as long as you offer meaningful amounts of equity (it sounds like you are at the idea stage and are basically looking for cofounders, and you should probably offer cofounder-size stakes and use the same care you would take in selecting a cofounder.)

Good people have an enormous number of opportunities right now. The risk you run is that you'll attract only people that aren't very good, and not realize it, since it doesn't sound like you have a strong enough tech background to put them through a solid tech interview. So my advice is to find a friend of a friend who has been through the full cycle of hiring engineers and shipping a successful project, and have them vet your choices.

Nice to see we have "juggalo" covered. Somewhere, Violent J is smiling.

No. So many people have signed so many petitions, and the people who organize the petition drivers are often tricky, so the average person isn't quite sure what they signed up for. And many people sign petitions because their friends (or a hot girl outside the grocery store, or..) asked them to.

I would only worry if I planned to run for public office, and didn't plan to stand by my current beliefs.

Organizing an effort like this, yes. But mostly because it shows that you are an activist and can make things happen when you don't like the status quo. And I think the benefits of developing that reputation outweigh the drawbacks.

If you're a campaign manager, the reason you run a "sign my petition" appeal like this is usually to build up a mailing list, not because you think anyone with power will actually care much about your petition. Petitions are cheap.

Then you execute step two, where you leverage that list to get people to do things that you think will actually affect the issue, like making phone calls (to legislators or to voters) or sending in money for media buys.

It is true that getting all that email is irritating. But if you're the average busy citizen, the best way to help is to find a group of organizers you trust, get on their list, and then do the little bite-sized things they ask you to do.

I'm getting:

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Represent, yo.

Startups are just so much work. You need some help.

For example, if you have two founders, then one can go out and do fundraising for a month while the other keeps the company running. If you had only one founder, you'd be dead in the water for that month. (Even if you have employees -- things are going to decay if all of the founders are distracted.)

Also, I've never known YC to play founders against each other.

What I don't understand is, how does it send the information it gathers back to its operators? I thought that these industrial facilities weren't usually connected to the internet, and that a worm had to get lucky with a thumb drive to get inside.

How do you run that backwards to get data out? Surely not thumb drives again?