nabraham

What can I spend the coins on?

This all started in the US with Judge Easterbrook in ProCD. https://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/procd.html

The basic gist of Easterbrook's argument is that in everyday life it is common to buy now and find out the terms later, and under the law and the UCC the sequence of money and accepting terms don't matter.

While the case has been stretched to the limit, and lots of research shows that users aren't reading the terms of service, the practice and the law in the US has only strengthened.

Sometimes not and yes. Online ticket purchases are routed through a protocol which has an earlier cut off time after which the ticket is in “airport control” and purchased or changes happen in-person. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/111197/what-does-...

We’ve gone from customer pays for shipping, to free shipping, to 25% of the US prepays for shipping.

After free and faster free shipping, the next best thing feels like predicting what you want and sending it to you.

"You" would be the company, and the submitter would assign all the rights to it. Interestingly, I looked and couldn't find any terms of service or company name.

Eric, the author, says he won't accept any puzzle submissions because of attribution and legal issues. This seems like the wrong outcome for people who want to make the site better but don't want credit, compensation, or attribution.

Has anyone seen a site using an IP assignment agreement which is the equivalent of "take my work, I don't want credit, and it's just for your site"?

The Creative Commons CC0 license comes closest, but one could scrape those puzzles and create a competing site, which I'd guess Eric wants to avoid.

So far CA DMV publishes autonomous miles driven without incident etc. It would be interesting to see commercial numbers driven - ie someone paid for a ride.

A friend of mine was laid off (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/disqus-lays-off-11-as-it-p...). He spent time interviewing for a new job and found that it sucked. Companies move super slowly because recruiting/hr expects candidates to move slowly because of job and limited time. So he's finding candidates and companies willing to move fast.

It's a bigger deal than it appears. The indemnity means that if Anthony told Uber before the deal that he stole trade secrets from Google, then Uber indemnifies him - ie pays for lawyers and any penalties. But there's no protection for the criminal piece of this, and if Kalanick knew about the theft, then he just committed a crime too. Uber interviewed their employees and lawyers, and created a list of people who saw and knew about the stolen files. Uber wasn't able to interview Travis because he is still grieving over his family loss, but they are scheduled to speak in the next 5 days and will say whether Travis saw and knew about the stolen files.

It's not easy to be first on google, especially on brands where you don't own the brand. If you can do this consistently please immediately set up a company, charge, and go eventually go public.

Seems like a good way to track lab supplies - is there a buy button when I run out of stuff or do I have to buy from somewhere else?

I'm not sure openly publishing salaries is collusion, which usually is a (secret) attempt by a few players to set prices for everyone. Like in the law firm example, all this affects only the top companies. Also, different structures can create economics outcomes that vary by 2-3x, no market failure needed. Take a look at a small example like Hired.com - firms openly bidding on engineers has resulted in salaries that seem to be 50-100% higher than those achieved absent such a structure.

The story gets more interesting - the legal field is one of the few where salary information is totally transparent. If you know the law firm name and how long a person has worked there you can look up their salary. [1] Partner salary is also published, but only the average for all partners. In 1998 a group of lawyers started posting salaries in a Yahoo Group called Greedy Associates. [2] Many firms, upon seeing competitor salary information, felt the need to move in lock-step for fear of losing out top talent because of salary. This created a faster increase in lawyer salaries in the last 10 years then in any other time in history. In 1998 the firms that were paying $90K are now paying $165k. [3] Today, firms publish the data themselves so they can control the message.

Similar to lawyers, it would be interesting if instead of relying on Wealthfront and AngelList, engineers at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc started openly contributing their salary information to increase wages to 2-3x that of engineers at less selective employers and create this bi-modal distribution in tech.

[1] http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/ [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=IY4ieeVyer4C&pg=PA18&lpg=P... [3] http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1998/10/05/newsco...

Yes - you need the % that is reservation taking vs walk-in. That said, my 10% stat is from their 10Ks and relates only to the markets they are in.

Future growth must come from international. OT is in 50% of all reservation taking restaurants in the US but in only 10% of reservation taking restaurants in international markets. That said, it's not easy to go international - they've tried a few times in Europe and had to retreat.

Tangential to the story but the most obvious question is what company fired Alex - it was Somawater ... drinksoma.com

Streeteasy has a terrific brand in nyc. Given that they have 1.2m monthly uniques and 7M in revenue, I'm surprised that the acquisition will not have an impact on zillow revenue projections. Guess if you do $200m in yearly revenue, an extra $7m is only a ~5% bump.

I should have been more clear: rent a secondary home for the sole purpose of generating revenue on Airbnb.

i) Write a scraper that compares electronic prices on Craigslist with what the fair value is on ebay/priceonomics. Auto send emails to craigslist sellers who are selling below market value, purchase, and then sell on ebay/craigslist. You can do similar live negotiations at moving sales.

ii) Airbnb your home, especially if you live in or near a big city. Or rent a home to Airbnb.

I remember when you first launched renthop was all about no-fee listings. Are you now including fee rentals? Can you say more about the current pivot?

I think this how Yipit started. They initially were looking to do bar deals in nyc. http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/03/26/how-getting-rejected-b...

Nailing the 5%-10% delta could be huge. The yield management software used by big property companies promises 2%-5% improvement and that is a billion dollar business.

Additionally, a more realistic choice facing the landlord would be picking between a "good tenant" on paper paying the rent, and a "bad tenant" on paper willing to pay an extra $250/month.

I agree that this isn't a copyright issue. If you're operating in California, the 9th Circuit is probably your best bet for holding that your scraping of their data doesn't damage or impair their computer system. But given your other comments, it is unlikely you want to raise the funds or spend the time to battle it out in court.

But there is an another way - let us (all of us) get the Craigslist data for you. You could create a browser plugin that would save craigslist posts a user views, and then upload only those posts to a central database that feeds padmapper. With just 1,000 users you would get most but not all the data you currently are scraping.

This is the same approach used by Recap (https://www.recapthelaw.org/) as a response to the federal government's paywall to access public court filings.

Congrats!

Add late night service from 2am - 4am!!

This post might be helpful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973060

Everything is a negotiated outcome, but good engineers are worth market salary in the absence of equity.

With equity, one rule of thumb I've heard is give 1% for every $10,000 cut the person takes. This implicitly values your company at $1m, but I guess most companies don't hire an employee unless the business is worth at least that.

Another rule of thumb I've heard is $50k for 2%-4%. Somewhat supporting this is Aaron Patzer (Mint.com founder) paid his early engineers $30k-$50k for 1% to 5% equity. See http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/08/startups-101-the-complete-m...

Awesome job Dr. J!

There is one minor difference in that many music performers may not make any money from the cd but use it as marketing so the tour rakes in the cash. In the VC instance, if the entrepreneur isn't going to make any money, the business usually dies, unless you're super committed like Westergren.

While I've 5-6 cs classes, I'm not currently a hardcore coder so I can empathize with you.

I think it depends on your time frame.

Short (1 month): use linkedin to find friends or friends of friends to network with. Emotional connections help because money alone isn't going to keep someone when things get rough.

Medium (2 months): you could try outsourcing and hiring a developer on Odesk/eLance etc. Map out your product milestones, and hire 3 developers to do the same thing to get to the first milestone. One will turn out great, one ok, and one will fail.

Long (3-6 months): attend a programming meetup in your city. Be warned though that these folks hate ppl that parachute in just looking to hire code monkeys who will work for bananas. They are there to code and learn from each other. You could try setting up an environment and coding, and slowly develop a relationship with someone by attending 3+ meetups.

I use a pc and have multiple chrome windows open, each with 20-30 tabs, which I leave open. After hibernating 5-6x it starts to get unstable. It used to be fine, but the flash upgrades have made things horrible.