rkischuk

Forget about car seats - bring your own vests and don't worry about it: http://saferide4kids.com/product/ridesafer-travel-vest/

Disclaimer: I haven't tried them. But I'd be open to it, as someone with kids who would prefer not to own a car eventually.

Almost every time I encounter cyclists in traffic, they context switch between vehicle and pedestrian at their convenience.

If you want to be treated as a vehicle, be a vehicle. Don't block a lane between intersections and then ride the divider lines to advance ahead of cars at every intersection so they can wait and merge around you once the light turns.

As a former bike commuter, I really don't understand why bikes are required to ride the roads and behave like cars. They seem far more compatible to ride sidewalks and co-travel with pedestrians.

Startup Founder. Married. 2 kids. We live in Mableton, and our office is in midtown. I know both areas well.

Cost of "home" in Midtown, $500k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/847-Myrtle-St-NE-Atlanta-G...

Cost of "home" in Mableton, $200k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4582-Somerset-Rd-SW-Smyrna...

Midtown, local elementary school is a 2/10 on GreatSchools. Mableton, 7/10. If you want to live anywhere near midtown and have a decent public school, tack on another $150k and you lose most of the touted walkability.

It's strange to build Mableton up as the straw man for Atlanta suburbs since it's only 10 miles from midtown and a ~25 minute commute to several of Atlanta's job centers, and is probably more diverse both racially and economically than midtown. A place like Kennesaw, 20 miles out, 45+ minute commute, and less diverse would be a smarter target.

So much of these discussions seem to be single people arguing against places they've never lived, trying to convince people whose lifestyles they don't understand.

That documents retirement of an API. Someone visiting "search.twitter.com" in a browser wants to see a web page. It would seem sensible to redirect them to a place where they can do that.

In case someone at Twitter actually fixes this tonight, here's a screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/117450/twitter-search.pn...

Embarrassing.

The Crunchbase numbers of only 21 startups started since 2008 are grossly misstated, even based on Crunchbase data.

I think I personally know 21 companies started AND funded since then in Atlanta. When I search for individual companies, they show up as "Atlanta, GA" and "Founded 8/2010" (for example), but they don't show up in a search.

I'd expect there are probably at least 100 Atlanta companies in Crunchbase founded since January 2008, and probably over 300 companies founded in that time. A possibly unexpected trait of Atlanta is that our companies aren't super-focused on Crunchbase, Angel List, etc, so we probably under-report on most research like this. (Our own fault - Atlanta companies - spend 10 minutes to add your startup to Crunchbase and Angel List).

I spent 3 years as a CTO and Executive Producer in social and children's games.

The world of gaming is surprisingly unreceptive to the premise of a "minimum viable product". It is EXTREMELY difficult to "pivot" a game. The level of polish and extent of gameplay required to meet consumer expectations for a game requires a commitment well beyond the bounds of any typical B2B or B2C product.

From my experience, the best approach to a gaming company is to build many, small games, taking on client projects to fund the company while building company projects with bench time. It's sustainable, but painful, and is an inferior path to success relative to most other startups.

The bar of quality in gaming has been set too high by companies willing to lose money on failures to make the occasional hit. You might as well start a movie production startup.

As a Flashpoint alum, I can certainly say that the resources that area limited are not those of the school. The most limited resources are those of appropriate mentors and advisors, and the time of the members of each team during group gatherings.

Much the same case here. The availability of suitable mentors and coaches is limited, and you don't want spend too much time in very large group gatherings.

So... MRSA Staph Infection... what is the cost to correctly diagnose? And what is the cost of the antibiotics?

I'm not a doctor, but most non-boutique antibiotics are dirt cheap.

I didn't intend to trivialize the illness. I more meant that this could happen to _anyone_. And if this is the cost for things that can happen to anyone, we have a real problem on our hands. Much like it's a problem that a basic, no-complications, baby delivery costs $15-20k.

Insurance is math, and the math gets scary quickly unless costs are controlled.

This is putting things exactly backwards. The argument is roughly "Treating a minor condition cost $24k, which could wipe people out financially, therefore PPACA is important."

Where is the outrage over this price? What part of PPACA does ANYTHING to reduce this cost? PPACA does essentially 2 things: 1) It makes insurance "affordable" for people who previously couldn't obtain it at all. 2) Drastically increases demand for health care, without adding to supply or controlling costs any other way.

Insurance is simply a distribution of cost over a risk pool. If relatively mundane life happenings cost $24k, and nothing is being done to fix that, we're in real trouble, and I think we are.

Nothing done to increase the pool of doctors. Nothing done to control medical lawsuit costs, which transfer money from the insurance pool to individuals. Nothing done to control the cost of drugs (and in some cases, aggravated by making more expensive drugs "free").

Bring the cost down to $2,400 and "wiping people out" isn't as big a concern.

From the entrepreneur's perspective, I found Pando Daily's writer to be very professional, and very intentional about building good context around our story.

Also enjoyed their interest in a story in Atlanta, which has a good startup culture rolling, outside of the usual "startup cities".

Interesting. I do think they have their PR team more engaged right now since it's prime application season.

I'm not sure this is much different from any other accelerator. I've heard that this experience is pretty similar for TechStars or YC rejections. That said, you could easily contend that as a less established accelerator, they should seem more hungry, but this also runs into the conundrum that as a less established accelerator, they have fewer resources to do this. Even during the program, communication could be a bit haphazard.

It's probably a good suggestion to challenge previous applicants to reapply if they believe they have made significant progress. TechStars did just do this.

Thanks! Hope to catch you around ATL.

Sure, you can micro-parse the language, and yes, I mean it's at the 50% co-pay or whatever.

If I were trying to explain the rationale in this case, I'd theorize it's because this is typically something that happens once in a lifetime (if at all). I'd expect once one wisdom tooth gets cranky, they'd yank the rest at the same time. So, in this case, the thought would be that people partially pay for it when it happens rather than making everyone in the insurance pool pay for that risk every month, especially people with no wisdom teeth.

But I am not an actuary or insurer, so I don't know for sure.

I said "not always". Although it seems possible that scheduled wisdom tooth extraction may have been possible with proper care, regular x-rays, etc, that's not really the point.

In my recollection, scheduled wisdom tooth extraction has usually been on the same 50% co-pay as emergency wisdom tooth extraction. And I don't think the "emergency" part has the cost implications in dental that it does in other medical realms.

Neither is pleasant, but the cost would probably be the same either way. I don't try to justify the tiering of the co-pay, but recognize that moving it down to the 20% co-pay range just means the actuaries factor that change into everyone's premium.

Individual dental plans typically aren't available. Even with insurance, the co-pay on wisdom tooth extraction is typically 50%, because such procedures are typically (not always) preventable by proper dental care.

So even with insurance, he'd be paying 50% (and probably could negotiate 20% off with a cash payment without insurance, so insurance only costs 30% less). Did he have 50%, or would he still have put it off due to the expense. Is asking him to pay for it a "failing" of society? If so, consider the cost of dental insurance that provides 100% coverage for procedures that are generally preventable.

Insurance is about math. Because truly catastrophic dental care is rare, dental self-insurance is generally a matter of cash management, and you usually can come out ahead, even with an issue like this during a year.

Context: I am an entrepreneur "still trying to make it". I have a wife and 2 kids. We don't have some magic source of easy income. Planning for the cost of insurance was part of planning to start a company. So was planning to self-insure dental. It is possible. I don't understand why any of this planning should be anyone's responsibility other than my own. I don't believe I should be asking someone else to pay for my insurance as some sort of societal debt, and I wish the feds would quit adding mandatory coverages and regulatory overhead that makes buying insurance more expensive.

If either party REALLY cared about small business, they would have taken the simple, obvious step of making individually purchased health insurance tax-deductible long ago. But that didn't fit their agenda.

Not necessarily. Last week, I opted out of backscatter, and the pat-down triggered an "explosives detected" alert. I was in a hurry, but otherwise would have wanted to be much more resistive of the private search I underwent after that.

Because it's absurd. Because I do not carry or interact with explosives.

This article is very ignorant. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act doesn't require a monopoly as a prerequisite. It specifically addresses tying products that materially reduce competition.

You can compare them to Microsoft's "tying" arguments, you can argue about whether this applies to "free" products, you can argue about whether they are substantially reducing competition. This "journalist" should actually learn the laws before deciding the laws clearly back up their world view.

Yes, this. App stores are like a new-fangled version of old-school Yahoo.

In the early internet, it made sense to sort web sites into categories and curate the best ones into lists. Eventually, the internet became too big for that, and search became necessary to cut through the mass of things people could find or wanted to find.

App stores are showing the strains of this today. Discoverability is through the floor. It's also important to note the power of a lightweight link. Web links can be shared with the assumption that a friend can open them with zero friction. This becomes much different when a user has to install an app, possibly even a paid app, to see what you sent.

It's a completely odd decision for someone to make. "I'm going to run this bleeding edge, open-source app framework, but I can't figure out EC2 and Windows makes me feel safe at night."

When you ask someone, "Why Node?", it seems like a complete mismatch with Azure.

Node is pretty bare-metal, and you can figure that out, but hosting on EC2 Linux is too hard for you? Node is bleeding edge, but you want an "enterprise-ready" server OS? Node is free to use, but you want the additional costs of paying Windows server licenses over time? You can get approval to run Node apps, but you're only approved to run on Windows in production? I'm not seeing what would make someone say "this Node app should run on Microsoft".

Answering the burning question, "How can I run a commodity application platform on more expensive, less secure servers?"

I'm not sure how anyone reads these articles without reaching the obvious conclusion that we've achieved abject fiscal insanity.

"...the ECB. As the lender of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral." "And since conditions are tightest in the peripheral [failing] economies, the ECB will have to buy their bonds disproportionately."

Modern economics somehow deny every amount of basic common sense. The only way to fix irresponsibility is apparently to reward it and encourage more. Nobody ever thinks about how to compartmentalize risk and failure, how to reduce the size and influence of financial institutions that threaten economic stability. I'm sure someone from Europe can better fill in the gaps on who stands to profit here and who's pulling the strings.

It's true that it's not just the administrators. It's the budgets and programs that come with them.

I went to Georgia Tech. The last time I heard a report, Georgia Tech had 3 staff members dedicated to the fraternity system. 1 for fraternities, 1 for sororities, and one for minority organizations that don't want to be in the mainstream system. Schools should have zero staff dedicated to the "greek" system. Greek letter organizations are free associations of citizens that operate on the periphery of the school. But we need staff. And we need budget and fees to pay to educate this system, and monitor them.

Expand this to every corner of campus. You not only need many staff dedicated to diversity programs, you must take "fees" from students to pay for diversity days, weeks, and months. I served in Georgia Tech's student government, and watched every week as student organizations came through asking for money to pay for bands, t-shirts, refreshments, banners, etc, all from student funds. Many of the projects were nice ideas, few of them justified boosting the cost of education for a school's students.

At most schools, there are multiple staff members dedicated to purposes for which there should be zero staff. But some combination of social agendas and lawsuit avoidance builds up the headcount.

Students pay for access to sporting events, which used to be about actual students competing, but are now huge cash cows that serve as farm leagues for pro sports teams. Students now pay hundreds of dollars in fees for the _chance_ to see their school's sporting events, even though stadium capacities are often triple or more the student population.

For the case of Facebook app development, there are few great substitutes for an SSH tunnel routing traffic back to your local dev environment. All the local dev tools your used to, including TextMate if that's how you roll, with a little bit of extra latency.

You can roll your own, but I'm happy to use Tunnlr.

Sad can be fascinating. It is sad to seem so much cash thrown at failing/failed companies, where it does little to create jobs or encourage innovation.

I do expect Google to use these patents more as a defensive neutralizer than as a means of attack - that's just consistent with their track record.

I hope (but doubt) that our Congress will see the amount of economic value being wasted on IP chess, and reform the system. All it takes is leadership and intelligence, both of which seem to be sorely lacking in government. Thankfully, these companies don't have formal veto power over legislation.

We are in the midst of the intellectual property Cold War, and it's fascinating to watch. If Google can use Motorola's patents to balance the power in patent suits and avoid $20/device in licensing fees... well, they're activating 550k devices per day, so that's $11M/day in savings. Roughly 3 years to break-even on that basis alone.

Google can use Motorola to force the issues that have plagued Android for a while. Motorola devices will probably become "pure Android" devices like the Nexus series, pushing carriers to abandon the crapware and carrier-specific UIs they're infatuated with.

Most people I know with Motorola Android devices say the build quality is for crap. I hope Google can improve this, but if not, I hope they can at least get the carriers to quit layering garbage on HTC's nice hardware.

Going from 0-60 quickly in a flying vehicle isn't difficult until you hit the ground.

I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google.

He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees".

3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.

I'm hearing from Rackspace that the merged offering will preserve the easy provision/upgrade features. No promises on the pricing, however.

My first instinct is to plan a migration to Linode or Softlayer. I use SliceHost because I want to push a button and have a running server, and push another button to resize it in less than a minute. If I wanted more control, I'd be using EC2.

I'm hoping someone with Rackspace Cloud experience can pipe in, but at a glance, it looks like a more bare-metal offering, like EC2, where you have to worry about more of the low-level concerns. Thoughts?