sbisker

Once it becomes straightforward to do ML with a pre-packaged library, you'll quickly start to see Amazon or a third-party offer effective MLaaS. That will suck quite a bit of oxygen out of the room.

This is just a long-tail SEO play, nothing particular to Google Fiber. See also http://www.xfinity.com/compare/comcast-xfinity-vs-att-u-vers..., http://www.xfinity.com/compare/, etc. I'm guessing people googling "xfinity vs <competition>" is a phrase they'd like to bring in more traffic for.

Theranos' reply: http://fortune.com/2015/12/20/letter-to-the-editor-theranos-...

It reads like it was written by a small team of lawyers who have had little sleep - not a good sign. :/

You bet they have! The reputational risk to a media outlet of writing a digital puff piece is now negligible; they can basically drive traffic to or away from it as they please. There are also real SEO benefits to mediocre pieces beyond ordinary daily readership.

We've seen a rash of these "bad news bears" articles lately. It's important to note that this stuff has always existed in some startups, and it isn't inherently bad - it's a natural consequence of taking so many risks on inexperienced founders and managers. Some will train a new management elite, some won't quite grow into their expectations and some will devolve into Lord of the Flies.

It's just that as the tech market becomes softer, people stop deciding "my stock will go up" is a good reason to put up with terrible management. The hard part for people in startups is having the courage to walk away when things are still growing without a care.

The fact Fidelity is being this transparent is great news for engineers in the startup scene considering or holding jobs at these companies.

No longer can managers keep selling a dream that was last pitched years ago at their last funding round; they'll have to compensate for underwater options with rising salaries or grants to keep talent around. Certain startups have a habit of delaying sharing bad news with their employees to the very brink of collapse; this behavior will now be in check somewhat.

It's not at all clear they had a solid support and sales setup. The company folded for a reason - why would you buy a company and run it the same way it was run before, if it was about to fold under those same processes?

Yeah, that's a trick drivers play on customers so they don't take a hit to their rating. If Uber catches a driver canceling too often, they'll boot them or freeze them from picking up more fares. (Conversely, if a customer is doing the same thing too often, a similar penalty of fees or the like will happen to them as well.)

So next time they try that, feel free to hold your ground by using Lyft instead or something. You don't have to cancel - they must, by their own rules, either cancel themselves, or pick you up.

I suspect the list is pretty long. But off the top of my head, Pandora had a pretty brutal layoff in the very beginning, to the tune of (from what I understand) basically asking their most dedicated employees to work for free. Somehow they pulled themselves out of that one, but, it wasn't pretty.

>I net enough to pay off the mortgage, so I’m doing that, which will leave the entire household debt-free and cut our expenses drastically

The lead seems buried here. This isn't someone quitting, this is someone in a position of incredible privilege, essentially retiring (or at least going on "funemployment" for a little while).

There are far darker ways to make far less money, that are far more worthy of dramatic storm cloud drawings. Maybe once they see past their burnout they'll realize how incredibly privileged they were to even accomplish what they were able to (working remotely no less!) in the first place. Burnout really is a sad and scary thing.

The article comments mention that you need to have the Bitcoin wallet address to use the tool to decrypt the files. Either they found some relationship between the wallet and the secret used for the encryption, or they actually compromised the servers and have a true mapping between every wallet address and the key subsequently used for that encryption.

In fairness, CNN was only started in 1980. In its beginning, it may very well have been much more intelligent and mature. Now that the TV news business model (and cable for that matter) is much more mature, it's a race to the bottom.

You're doing nothing wrong. At the same time, I wouldn't walk just because they aren't being candid. Usually what this tells you - especially for later-stage startups - is that your options have very little expected value (think a few thousand a year in the best case), and you should act accordingly. Sometimes it's not because HR is full of evil monsters - sometimes it's their way of telling you an unpleasant truth that they aren't allowed to say directly.

Assuming if you're truly ready to walk if they don't share, this could even carry over to your negotiation. At this point, it's just business - if this company is willing to give you $XXk more than a competing offer with more candid numbers, then the cash could be worth it to hedge that risk. Depending, of course, on how much you value the upside.

Seems like an unfair comparison - Oculus has little revenue and working prototypes of the best VR experience to date. Even disregarding the tech talent, Oculus proved their ability to deliver something interesting that people wanted, however unprofitable that something was.

For those not in the SF area, this is almost certainly in response to this (unless Uber has a mole within Lyft...): http://blog.uber.com/SFpoolparty

IIRC, the last two investors had some sort of deal where if the IPO was priced at under $20, Box paid them some sort of penalty. (Maybe someone here remembers the details better than me.) I'm sure they watched their backs on the paperwork and that any gain like the one the stock is currently seeing is a win for them.

Facebook and Google have entire training programs around the fact that a person is, indeed, worth 80k or more even without hitting the ground running. My understanding is that FB has a bootcamp of something on the order of 6 weeks for new engineering hires, with pair programming and all.

That's one of the perks of a big company over a startup for a young graduate - the company can afford the investment in their own potential talent, and can afford to take a loss on the few people who they were wrong about being worth the training.

A counterpoint: https://medium.com/designing-for-results/if-by-growth-hackin...

I have to disagree here. Folks with failed startups are as diverse as the startups they built (or just as often, struggled to build).

The simple reason why is because while a startup is the best place to learn how to start a startup, it isn't always the best place to learn how to be an engineer.

At least, not the sort of robust engineering (hopefully) done at established companies, where you have to understand existing best practices like code style, continuous deployment and testing, and non-technical conventions like proper code reviews and pager schedules. That sort of rigor isn't found in all startups, but some amount of it is a necessity when your primary job is shipping code, lots of it, and not just searching for product market fit.

I think it is far more likely that you'll get a strong offer for a large corp coming out of another large corp - where you'll speak the language and have found at least someone talented to mentor you - than as a typical acqui-hire or founder of an also-ran startup. In fact, many acqui-hire employees themselves have to go through interviews at the acquiring company, finding themselves on the bottom of the pecking order at their new companies - if they even have jobs at all.

That's not to say you shouldn't do a startup...just, don't do it expecting your Plan B to be a cushy job at Facebook. :)

Am I the only person who ever found the course list for an MBA genuinely interesting? Like, intellectually so.

I get the general usefulness of advising undergraduates that MBAs are, in general, a bad idea for them. They're certainly about as poor of a financial investment these days as a degree in English. But the hopeless idealist in me asks if it isn't possible to get an MBA to actually try to theorize about customer behavior, economic structure, supply chains, what have you and build part of ones academic foundation around it? Or is it truly impossible to walk into today's MBA programs wanting to study business as theoretical and societal constructs, without walking out a professional networker and middle manager?

All I know is, I never seem to get tired of reading HBS case studies. I'm always curious to learn how other people approached things and how the world worked then, in addition to how it works now. If anyone has a good community for embracing that sort of knowledge, I'm all ears.

Is this company ok with this being posted?

If so, they should say what company they are, because being associated with a clever puzzle like this is great for recruiting (even if it's not being used anymore). Unless they have their own reasons for remaining quiet (government? :)).

If not, they should probably take it down, as having the solutions posted would ruin the evaluative value of what must have taken a very long time to make.

What's to say they wouldn't if they were more uncommon?

You don't take public transportation in a big city, do you?

Cell phone theft is a HUGE problem. Huge.

People don't like carrying things of large, uncontrolled value on their person when they don't have to. The status quo is the equivalent of forcing people to carry a small brick of gold on them everywhere they go, just so they can hail an Uber or play Candy Crush.

People will literally feel safer for this every day - I know I do already.

At least anecdotally, having moved here from Boston, no question that you're correct. You definitely get more space for your dollar in SF than in Boston. The reason is simple - they simply didn't build things as small in SF. People from the East Coast would probably be willing to live in smaller units for less...if they existed - but they really don't, at least not as part of the traditional housing inventory. (Some fancy new apartment buildings are experimenting with them, but needless to say, they're pricey, and at that price/size combination many would prefer to commute from Oakland.)

Even the concept of "Boston" is much smaller than the concept of "San Francisco". If you walk across Boston from any of its edges for an hour, you'll wind up in another town entirely (Allston? Cambridge? Maybe even Somerville). If you walk from an edge of San Francisco for an hour, you'll be smack in the middle of San Francisco, with a lot more walking to go.

It's not very usable, but there's a drop down to specify whether you have one or two people in your party. Their website (and possible the product, I forget) suggests that if you have more than 2 people in your party, that you kindly request a normal Lyft.

Has anyone tried this yet? How was it?

Teespring at least is doing very, very well. Their affiliate program is incredibly successful, allowing people to procedurally design, test and sell t-shirts through various channels.

GoDaddy was entirely bootstrapped before a large chunk of it was sold to private equity firms in 2011. The founder self-funded it based on a $MM sale of a previous company, though - so they're awfully nice boots to be strapped up by. :)

As a result of being bootstrapped, the 2011 sale single-handedly put its founder, Bob Parsons, on the Forbes billionaires list: http://www.forbes.com/profile/bob-parsons/

The funny thing is that this lie would only work outside of Boston - in Boston proper, companies big and small see this all the time, and are very alert for it (in part because of the presence of successful Extension alumni at the firms).

Rent, sure, but many other personal responsibilities are not so kind - especially from vendors who can legally tack on cumulative late fees.

Try not paying your Comcast or Verizon bill on time for a month or two and see what happens. The envelope only starts coming in red after quite a few fees are tacked on.

[EDIT: Don't actually try that :) ]