iamwithnail

Yep - I found lots of the grammar on the site jarring, and little things like 10$/month - the convention is $10/month, and it looks really odd. You should get a couple of hours of a copywriter's time to go over it, there's lots of little quirks.

Dunno, at least you still have a soul.

Will hopefully pick mine up this year (submitting in autumn), so 36...

Properly lol'd IRL at the Chuck palaniuk comment. Harsh but very funny.

There's no requirement to or expectation that they will be. Papers are not required to present any kind of balance, as long as what they say is broadly true (external pluralism), for a given value of true. The broadcast media (the free-to-air ones) are required to be demonstrably internally pluralistic, to show a variety of sources and viewpoints within their output - and that applies across BBC, ITV, Ch4 and Channel 5, but not Sky News; goes back to when Radio came on stream in the 1930s.

Hahaha I had one of those yesterday. My profile lists my company I started for side projects, then my role as a specialist at my actual employer. I got an email trying to find out if I was interested in more jobs like {{founded_company + specialist_role + employer_name}} all run together.

I agree- would definitely be interested in reading that!

I think that's kind of right - it's the explicit awareness of hierarchy or other structures that works. (I'd argue that actually you can have hierarchy-less (sp?) organisations, but they require particular consideration - but you'll still overlay other assemblages - social hierarchies or whatever, on top of it. I did a bit responding to the Tony Hsieh email from our perspective as a company that's trying to implement Holarchy right now: http://blog.granttree.co.uk/post/117079306181/zappos-two-poi...

This, a thousand times this. Wealth is not a skills set.

Ricardo Semler - Maverick is a good one for non heirarchal approaches. The AES case study of holarchy is v interesting. Swombat's blog (easily findable!) is a trove of material on startups and moving from corporate to startup, as are the Granttree and Escape The City blogs.

Hah, glad it's not just me. It's also the thing I hit if I'm trying to think of what I was doing/am idle for a moment... typing 'news.' just seems to flow from my fingers if they're unoccupied.

Definitely waiting till the tech is a tiny bit better before I request drones fly at my windows with hammers...

;)

This is the mechanic story all over: Guy takes his car to a garage because it keeps breaking down, and the mechanic leans in and listens to the engine for a minute. He goes and gets a hammer and listens to the engine again, and then raps sharply on the engine casing. The engine goes back into sync and stops breaking down.

The mechanic says "that'll be £500, please." The guy's outraged: "But all you did was tap it!"

Mechanic replies "it was a pound for the tap, and £499 for knowing where to tap."

Edit: Crap, beaten to it.

Really? I mean, that represents astonishingly bad value for a bunch of reasons. The first is that that's not SEIS covered, because it vastly reduces (by 70%) the risk exposure of the capital, and consequently the %. Especially if you'll include video games tax credits on thus back end that let you stretch that runway. Beyond that, you've also not used the full SEIS value -£150k, so again, shot yourself in there foot. This wouldn't be typical of valuations that I see working with startups, it's far more in the order of 10-17.5% for £150k (with SEIS coverage). Gaming is obviously it's own beast, but the same rules on making the investment tax efficient for the investor apply, and I'm surprised anyone gets any investment with ought SEIS any more.

With that in mind - advice is always to raise as high as you can on angel, because it's covered for the investor, and you can only do it once.

That's what I was going to ask. VC funding is absolutely not unusual, and there are dozens of seed firms and grants available.

There's so much that doesn't quite gel about this story. He was trading penny stocks when he was 9? He went off to read high finance books as a result, and then successfully and consistently applied them? What on earth (and who) was he tutoring at 9? And as you say, the returns to do that would be pretty phenomenal.

It's hard to say more without knowing what you're buying a white label of, but: Licensing/volume fees Support structures - what are they responsible for? Documentation - what have they got? System specification - details! Hosting - are they providing it, or are you installing it yourself! Whois responsible for the rebranding and design?

That's some of the stuff that bit us when we were white labelling a crowd funding platform.m

I'd probably go even further than that - you can have, by all accounts, a reasonably healthy lifestyle while still eating mcdonalds, the same isn't true of cigarettes. There's still SOME utilitarian benefit of fast food, even if marginal. Cigarettes are basically the only consumer product that, if used as intended, cause you intrinsic harm. (That I can think of)

Cheers, that's really interesting!

That wouldn't particularly change under the system that I'm proposing, idt. (on the back of a fag packet admittedly)- legal protection and the payments mechanism aren't intrinsically linked - most of the consumer protection with cc came long after the cards had been introduced. If you had an overall limit then the thief couldn't go over that, and a similar mechanism could/would exist - it'd probably be a product differentiation, in fact.

Direct debit is the UK name for what I think are generally called Automated Bank Drafts (edit: automated clearing house/ach) in the US. (Apols if different in canada, not at all familiar with that jurisdiction.) fundamental problem with DD for POS is that if set up on the same day it's not pulled for a while, and can take up to a week to arrive - it's typically used for paying utilities and the like, regular bills sort of thing, or subscriptions (although that's changing now).

I don't think tom is advocating for DD, in this instance. Particularly since direct debit isn't really suitable for POS transactions.

Credit cards are fundamentally a 1970s business model, based on tech that paid off their sunk costs decades ago, but the barriers to entry are so high they're impossible to overcome right now.

Given you can check balances and make payments in (near)real time, at least in Europe, there's no reason to continue to use Visa/MC, other than barriers to entry. You could check balance at POS over the internet and pay from your merchant account, recovering payment within an hour or so via faster payment. Frictionless credit isn't the same as unrestricted or unregulated credit - it's about removing the tether between one bank and one cRd - disintermediation of the bank. Why can't I have a credit card linked to zopa? Or someone else, or even, within an overall limit agreed by an umbrella provider, a number of different providers. That'd be cool, and would drive channel providers to compete on costs of service delivery (the 2-3% per transaction), as well as on cost of credit. Visa and MasterCard are an absolute racket, and one of my biggest grumps is that PayPal became just like them, if not more expensive.

I've mentioned mine on here a few times, and it's picked me up a few users, although i've never done a 'Show HN' type thing. Most startups, I'd hazard, are specific enough in implementation, market and niche that you need to find someone who cares enough about all of those same things and has the skills, time and wherewithal to land it. Lots of people have ideas, few land them - there are probably 50 teams working on the same idea as you, but most won't land them. (On my example - the site's in beta, it's a soccer stats site so probably barred in a lot of non-UK domains as gambling related, of niche interest in any case, etc. My site's a clone/improvement, in many respects, on others that I've used in the past - fixing my own problems.)

If you've got a world-changing, hugely scalable, easily copyable concept, then yeah, probably don't post it here. But otherwise, it's all in the implementation, and posting it on HN probably won't change that.

Valid concern, tbh - but I guess (at least in London), you've got three/four tiers of cabs now - Black Cabs, Uber, Kabbee/TaxiCabit registered minicabs, and tiny local firms that aren't on those systems - I suspect it might be the last ones that either get squashed out or forced onto the new tech.

(Also - try getting a blac cab to take you back to Peckham from the centre of London basically any time after 6pm, nightmare. /sarfovdarivva)

Let's be realistic here. I'm in the same boat, I'm Scottish and British (identity) and have a British passport (citizenship), and live in London. It's very unlikely to be an either or, and I believe the contingency right now is that in worst case, British passports will be honoured till expiry. But likeliest is dual passports. And what of my son, though, while we're on this? He's English, born here to a Scottish dad and English mum. Will he get a choice (or us on his behalf)? That exercises me more than my own passport.

On your initial question, it'll just be a straight up question of what's more important - a passport that reflects your heritage but that might have more visa requirements for a few years, or retain your existing one. If it came to it, I'd take the rUK one for now, it's not a big issue - it's like all the people I know who're from other countries and also have a UK passport.

Yeah, that's not being a slave. In fact, the argument can be made that by insisting on driving to avoid any real - or perceived - inconvenience, you're making everyone else's journey that little bit less slick (I.e. Asserting your "freedom" impinges negatively on everyone else's ability to effectively do the same).

Also,cars are an important part of most economies, but less so in bigger cities - and it points to the fact that a)they weren't always so and b) might not always need to be, maybe there's a better way, which is what some posters are suggesting. If you Remove the necessity of a car for some people, and make alternatives better, then there are probably a lot of benefits (pollution, construction costs, congestion, safety) to it. But no one (or very few, I guess, since this is HN and lots of opinions) is suggesting arbitrarily and unilaterally getting rid of cars.

There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK and beyond:

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (UK) http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (Norway, replicated in the UK a couple of years ago, but I can't find it offhand) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.V... (More meta piece on it)

CCTV hasn't exactly been the panacea that it was made out to be. In fact, councils and private companies have gone ahead with CCTV systems despite the fact that the cost/benefit is dubious at best, and a pretext for reducing staff numbers in a significant number of cases.

tl;dr - Not the end of the world, but not great either, and has paved the way for a number of subsequent surveillance modes.

Quite astonishing overreach by CoL Police, who're now acting as the copyright police for most of the UK for reasons that are, at best opaque to most people. (Partly a decision that several functions split between the Met and CoL would be reallocated, with City taking copyright and IP 'crime', all CounterTerrorism and intelligence going back to the Met in trade).

I'd agree with Stewbrew. SocSci is PACKED with people trying to jam new theory into already crammed areas, because it's the only way they'll get on; although I agree that the studies and experiments are based on sometimes fleeting assumptions or hypotheses, it isn't because of a lack of theory.

'Real science' - thanks for that. ;-)

I think the issue I'm trying to get at - I suspect there is less value in null proving a lot of social science hypotheses - the impacts are smaller than physical constants of the universe (or finding say, that the Higgs Boson didn't exist) - if I prove, because my empirical work says so, that discourse can be meaningfully (for a given value of meaningful...) analysed in a new way, that's great, and will advance some other work. But proving (even repeatedly) that it can't be won't really change anything, imo.

I guess though, the main issue is: I'm sure as hell not going to get published saying it, which ties back nicely to the point made in Nature, really.