phjohnst

I think that's less the issue here than CBS likely holding the commercial rights to Kaley Cuoco and Melissa Rauch being used together in anything that would look like an ad.

Presumably it will be in violation of Instagram's TOS to post the kind of pic that he talks about. (See Rights 4.(ii) )

But as he alludes to, it should make it interesting when someone does.

Don't forget the up-front fee of $275, so max savings are more like $300. Break-even is $10k per month.

It's a nice idea, though I don't know how many companies are in the $10k-$21k/month revenue bucket that would see a benefit. All companies processing over $250k per year can save a max of $300 per month by signing up to the fixed rate plan and then paying the normal fee thereafter.

The new fee band gives savings to those processing more than ~$10k/month, but provides no savings for smaller users.

Yeah, I can't believe that more people above aren't asking this question.

From my experience in the Canadian system, if you're really sick (ie badly injured, have cancer, whatever) you actually get pretty quick service. Sure, if you walk into the ER with your kid that has a flu, you might have to wait a couple hours while they deal with the people that just got in a car accident, but I can live with that. And really, if you're chronically sick enough to still be sick in 6 days (and could wait that long, ie you didnt need to go to the ER) then the 6 day wait to see a GP is likely not going to make a big difference. (Must be noted, I've never had to wait 6 days to see my doctor when I was sick, more like 1-2, and could always just walk in if I needed to)

It really comes down to this: If you need help now you'll get help, free, right now. No questions.

Risk/reward.

If you got into China 15 years ago, you had no idea how things were going to pan out (and you deserve compensation for holding that risk). If you get in now, there's a more likely chance (I'd argue) that you'll do well, so the risk, and therefore the compensation you deserve, is lower. And holding currency is a lot less risky than equities, anyway.

The people that would be interested in a Yuan bank account up to $20000 aren't really sophisticated investors anyway.

Try stews, chilis, etc.

Also, homemade chicken stock is one of my favourite things (boil a chicken carcass from the butcher with a halved onion, roughly chopped carrot, celery, some herbs, a little salt and pepper, bit of garlic, for a bit over an hour) and is super easy to do, freeze and then use as a base in a ton of recipes, or even just add some pasta and you've got a rough and ready chicken soup.

Cooking need not be difficult. By focusing on good, fresh ingredients you only need a couple to put together a great meal.

Also, great tip: Cook with spice (heat) and lots of flavour. You'll get full faster and feel satisfied longer.

Yes, K2 is is much more technically demanding climb (See the Black Pyramid, and basically any of the other less popular routes) and more unpredictable (falling seracs above the Bottleneck killed several climbers in 2008). It's usually only attempted by very skilled mountaineers. You won't find the same sort of climbing tour groups like operate on Everest - which is part of the reason why Everest, though the tallest, doesn't seem to be the pinnacle of mountaineering.

You raise an interesting point.

PG: Do you find that you're encountering 'stage' creep in YC applications? Are the groups that you're funding (or even just interviewing) steadily becoming more fully developed businesses, or are lots (most?) still in the early/conceptual stages?

I totally agree. I'm sure that it would screw with their pricing, but I really just dont need 50GB, and can get by with the 3GB that I have now. Sure I'd like a little more (and frankly, would happily pay $5/mo for what I have now), but I just dont have enough stuff that I'd like to sync to fill up that $10/mo bucket. They did used to have some smaller plans, so they must have got rid of them for a good reason.

I was certainly expecting that the workload would be high going in, and I have no issues with working that much (and in fact, I work less than I was expecting to when I signed up). The bait and switch would suck and probably happens to a lot of people.

I completely agree that there are times that someone would want to waive those rights (I did). And if you don't waive them for somewhere like a startup (probably more applicable early than late stage), what does that say about commitment/expectations?

Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

In the UK your employer cannot force you to work more than 48 hours a week, but written into my contract was a clause waiving that maximum. I dont think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. The weeks where you work 80+ hours, you just try not to think about the hourly rate...

I think you're absolutely right: if you take it to mean anything, then it has no meaning.

However, as mechanical_fish touches on below, the definition of what a 'hacker' is (I think) is pretty misunderstood. Hacking is a creative process; are we trying to define creative people/roles/cultures merely by the tools that they use? That sort of limited scope feels extremely hubristic.

So maybe I didnt clearly express my point, and used bad examples: I'll accept that. The article seems to believe that Hacking = coding, and thus Hacking Culture = coding culture, which I think is a pretty limited way to look at things. Hacker culture is all about rejecting restrictive and unnecessary bureaucracy and procedures, and instead focussing on giving people the freedom and tools necessary to perform better and in a more creative way. Which I dont think really applies to your examples. A lot of places that claim innovation and free thinking still do so within a pretty rigid set of rules.

I always took PG's Hacker-centric culture to mean one of hacking in a broader sense, and not strictly applied to coding.

I believe that a hacker-centric culture is one that promotes innovation and is purely meritocratic, with a constant drive to improve and better absolutely everything.

So from my (very much outsider) perspective, Apple would definitely have a hacker culture, but it's not just about the code.

I've always seen this policy as a way to lubricate the quitting process, rather than implicitly instil commitment from those that don't take it (like they're giving up something, so they must like what they're doing).

By paying people that arent committed to leave, you increase the proportion of good, loyal employees. Fewer half-assed people stick around.

Looking from an economic search cost perspective, if $3k > cost of searching for new job with payoff (both implicit and explicit) = working for Zappos, then you take the money and leave. Thus, the only people that stay are those that have higher search costs (and given a constant pay rate and 'hire-ability'[1], the only those with a higher implicit payoff, ie enjoyment) stay .

This only works as long as the pay to quit is less than the search cost for the threshold level of employee that you're trying to keep. It's also reliant on holding the 'hire-ability' of accepted applicants constant. But it means they can pretty much dictate the minimum level of 'enjoyment' that employees get from their jobs by adjusting the pay-to-quit figure.

Pretty cool.

With unemployment so high, search costs go up, which mean that they're probably getting a threshold level of enjoyment that is lower now than it was when unemployment was less. I dont know when the $3000 came into effect, but it could make sense to raise it again.

[1] By this I mean checking the boxes, qualifications, etc. How easy would it be to just find a job without any extra factors. Ie, hiring a non-skilled worker vs highly-skilled worker. If quality of accepted applicants was very low, then it would be relatively harder to find a job, raising the search cost and screwing up the incentive.

I just tacked a list to my wall of varying levels of things to do to pick things up a little. Just that process feels good.

Can't help but think, too, that simply making a conscious effort to incorporate one/some of those things into every day would be a great preventative measure.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. It really picked up my day.

I always find a cognitive approach far more effective than trying to internalize some inspirational BS.

Thanks!

Totally agree with your security theatre point, even all of this does nothing.

However, to keep in mind with the police, they must have a reasonable suspicion in order to search your person. They cannot simply stop everyone walking down the street and frisk them. And pretty much anything that the police do to you can be challenged in a court (obv whether you win is another thing, but the recourse is there). I think drawing parallels to (traditional) law enforcement practices is misleading.

I would definitely have a problem with this.

I'd argue that they have no more right to do a gynecological exam on a patient under anesthesia than they do to do any other procedure completely unrelated to the primary one. Absurd: could you imagine if you were getting your tonsils out and the doctor just decided to do an unwarranted prostate exam? Or perform liposuction as an added bonus. Or amputate a limb? All we're talking about is degrees of the same thing (being subjected to procedures that you have no chance of declining)- where do we draw the line once we go there at all?

Arbitrary rules are clear, yet, but also blunt. If you were building a capital intensive product (see most of the alternative energy/biotech space - to get a prototype built costs millions and millions of dollars in most cases), 250k investment is really low, and probably would have no bearing on the success of a company. But for a small tech/software company whose only expenses are its 2-3 founders' accommodation and sustenance, 250k is a lot. So maybe some arbitrary rules are the right thing, but there needs to be some common sense and differentiation across different sectors. Not all startups are the same.

I completely agree; there should be a far less arbitrary and obtuse set of criteria.

I would love to move to the Valley (I'm Canadian) for everything that is there, but there is no outlet for founding a company and moving it south of the border without jumping through multiple legal hoops. I have no debt, I'm not going to go on benefits, I pay my taxes, I have a good degree from one of the world's best uni's, I'm driven, resourceful, etc. Why is there an arbitrary, xenophobic law preventing me from doing so? Canada (and now the UK) seem to provide a much more sensible set of regulations that promote entrepreneurship which have huge and wide-ranging impacts on the local economies.

I completely agree. I know from my experience that if I could have just put in my normal Google Apps email and pushed everything through Wave, I would never look back. The fact that it was a self-contained, closed system killed a lot of its usefulness.

I know 3 completely separate (and non-tech focused) groups of people (each 30+) that were/are running on Wave and are each pretty upset that its going away. I know that each of them came to swear by Wave for almost all intra-team communication.

It wouldnt be a stretch for active users to run into the high tens of thousands. Unfortunately, thats tiny compared to the usage of Google's high-profile projects, so it gets killed.

Sure. But then Facebook doesnt really have a reason to care about you, as a non-user of their service, and keeping data locked in is their best way of keeping you coming back.

There is a point that hasn't yet been mentioned here about the fundamental difference between an address book, and Facebook.

Facebook is okay to be a dead-end for contacts' emails, since the email upload is used once to find others on the service. After that, if you need to contact someone else on Facebook, you can do so with a wall post or an inbox message. The email address is irrelevant.

With an address book, you need it to be portable, since the medium is accessible from many different locations and services.

The fact is that you dont need to get your friends' contact details out of Facebook. You sign up for Facebook to make Friends on Facebook and communicate over Facebook. Not to communicate over email, etc. (And certainly not over a rival network.) When you add someone to your address book, you do so to communicate with them over email, or phone, or whatever, which are inherently completely open and interconnected systems. [Surely there is a debate to be had here about the ubiquity of Facebook as a platform and that it should be open - could you imagine Facebook Clients? But I dont believe that's a debate about exporting existing contact info.]

To that end, Google warning users about the terminal nature of their exported data is unnecessary and only confuses the process of finding friends for users (who, by the way, aren't thinking about data portability, or building up an address book/contacts list on Facebook, they're thinking about making Friends on Facebook, to communicate over Facebook)

TL;DR: This whole mess doesn't matter, and Google is only making things complicated for users.

Agreed. I know several young finance guys that would all like to get into VC one day, but they know that without a founder background they need to cut their teeth in banking/dealmaking before moving over. But there is definitely a desire.

See Twitter's inactive account policy here:

http://support.twitter.com/groups/33-report-a-violation/topi...

In general though it looks like they would like you to have a serious claim to the mark (ie US or Intl registered trademark) before they'll hand it over.

Yeah, but the point is that anyone with half a brain would put whatever they're carrying out of reach of the pat down (ie places you'd have to do a cavity search for, however it gets there), so all that we're accomplishing here is feeling people up for that same impression of security (and, to drive people to the scanners to be photographed naked, which still won't find whatever is hidden in your body).

I think there just needs to be a better way of communicating the reason for a downvote (or, in fact, asking for a reason for a downvote, like popup and select troll/OT/etc.) so that it costs you a little more in thought/time. It's currently just as easy to downvote as upvote, but the cost of a single downvote to the comment/user is greater than the benefit of a single upvote.

Additionally, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if threads were ranked a little differently, and not just on the points/time of the parent. Sometimes there are really, really great comments that are replies to low-ranked ones, and the resulting thread gets kicked to the bottom of the page. Something like Avg points/time or just accounting for the average points of next-level comments when determining rank of a reply at each level.

That's hilarious. (and sad)

But seriously, every time Facebook changes something we get a reminder of how disruptive it is to change the average users' usage flow. Everyone gets around it eventually, but adjusting isn't pretty.

Nice. This would definitely work today (at least at the airports that I usually fly through).

Also would be a pretty good hack to do some duty-free shopping in the international terminal - at security they usually only seem to glance at your boarding pass and wave you through. Who's to say you don't just go shopping and walk back out the arrivals exit?

I was just about to write this. I was too considering GAE to play around with a few ideas, but I would much rather deploy on AWS if it's free and without having to work around Google's specs. Great move Amazon.