sebleon

What ills do you speak of? The negative media narrative is not a full reflection of reality, rather what will attract the most eyeballs to monetize in this current media cycle.

Agreed - I was specifically responding to the concern of gaining experience to solve global problems.

It's not an unreasonable opinion, but I doubt a PhD can make up for lack of real-world experience. Likely, the best way to get better at solving global problems is by doing just that for years, preferably alongside others with more experience.

IMO learn to swim in the pool.

Optics of having a portfolio company "acquired by fb", non-zero returns (more relevant for angel, for VCs it's pretty much the same as nothing), frees up mental energy to focus on other companies.

a) It is a fun fact, and b) I think their point was gun laws do nothing without enforcement

First off, kudos on launching multiple successful restaurants in a tough city like SF!

> Our technology differentiation is taking advantage of the growth

What does this actually mean? Reading between the lines, sounds like you're going for a standard cloud kitchen model. Besides nicer packaging for delivery, seems like you'll be operating a regular kitchen that does take out. Some platforms like Uber supply restaurants with analytics and data for optimize the menu, I'm curious what you guys planned on doing in-house that was tech heavy.

Don't get me wrong - having a high-growth, low-tech company is amazing - but I'm sensing that the tech-side of this business is overstated by your comment.

My suspicion is that Uber could out-bribe the taxi lobby by 10x, without moving the needle on profitability. This cap signifies that Uber either a) doesn't bribe politicians, or b) bribed the wrong politicians.

What makes it dirty?

Non-academic here: why distribute electronic copies of a paper through a scientific journal? I can see why publishers existed pre-internet (printing and distributing paper journals costs money), but seems outdated at this point.

What's the incentive for a scientist to hand over copyrights to a journal?

Some argue that IPFS is a rip off of BitTorrent, and thus, the circle is complete: BT -> IPFS -> TRON -> BT

Why?

Vast majority of people had no safeguards in place, and saw their savings vaporize. This has led to widespread poverty, and reliance on government handouts for survival.

There's thousands of people everyday that illegally emigrate on foot to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, etc. Some people have been able to acquire foreign currency in the black market.

Venezuelan government wants to maintain control over money creation (and print as needed). They actually came out with their own cryptocurrency, the Petro, which is backed by national oil reserves.

Yes, incredibly difficult to get a Venezuelan passport now, these restrictions prevents nationals from leaving en masse. Thousands of Venezuelans have illegally walked out of their country, and making their way to my home country Ecuador on foot.

Right, less downside risk, but Berkshire Hathaway in particular hasn’t even kept up with the S&P500 for the past decade. Better off with an index fund for sure.

This article is more realistic than most ML posts, but it’s clear the author is not a practitioner.

> More handwriting data will make a hand-writing recognizer better, and more gas turbine data will also make a system that predicts failures in gas turbines better, but the one doesn't help with the other. Data isn’t fungible.

Transfer learning is one of the most interesting aress of machine learning. The focus is on taking learnings for one task, and applying them directly for another. More directly, Jeff Dean from Google had a fascinating talk about using these techniques to create a single super-model that combines learnings from thousands of tasks to accomplish new things quickly. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/HcStlHGpjN8

I'm pointing out a clear example that invalidates a major assertion from the BIS report.

> hard to identify a specific economic problem which they currently solve

Problem: a handful of private companies could exert monetary censorship.

World changing organizations like Wikileaks are possible because of cryptocurrencies, when Visa/Mastercard/etc began blocking donations. Cryptocurrencies enable anyone to take online payments. [1]

> Transactions are slow and costly, prone to congestion, and cannot scale with demand

Lightning Network has found a very promising solution to these issues. Off-chain transactions can be completed in under a second, without the scalability concerns of on-chain transactions. I highly recommend checking this out if you're unfamiliar [2]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/08/20/wikileaks...

[2] https://lightning.network

$100-$150/hr is very reasonable, $200-250/hr if the client is well funded and personally likes you.

It’s reasonable for admissions to take into account your access to resources. Growing up in a poor, single parent home is like going through life in “hard mode”, and getting decent grades is impressive.

Sadly race is a good proxy for socio-economic background, and people get treated differently depending on their skin color. Getting these different perspectives in the class is a positive.

> we know Bitcoin doesn’t scale to handle the volume of transactions needed

No longer true. I used to believe this as well, but I’ve been blown away by the work from Lightning Network [1]. Subsecond transactions that happen off the Bitcoin blockchain, scales beautifully.

[1] http://lightning.network

Getting rich is a quasi zero sum game. By definition, only 1-5% of the population can be in the “financial elite.” While this advice piece might be correct, it will be useless for >95% of its readers.

Interesting, you don’t think this is an odd punishment if this was about Russia?

This is likely a false accusation.

If Apple acquiesced to Russia’s demands, Apple would have: 1) removed Telegram from the App Store in Russia, and 2) prevented Telegram from using the Apple Push Notification Service to distribute non-blocked IP addresses to clients.

More likely, updates are being rejected for another infraction. Telegram should publish the App Store reviewer’s criticisms publicly, and provide more context before making public denouncements.

Sadly, this is true.

Ha, I actually thought the comment was relevant for an article on blocking EU users with Cloudflare.

This regulation calls for legal expertise, trusting google to save on fees seems risky for a business. In all seriousness, biz owners should shell out for expert advice for compliance, or stop doing business in the EU.

Google and Fb have already seen litigious groups claim $9.3B in fines on the first day[1]. There will certainly be a cottage industry of lawyers going after online businesses that have erred with GDPR.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/gdpr-google-and-facebook-face-up-t...

> surprisingly clear

This is an 88 page document with extremely dry language. Just confirming your assertion will be time consuming. No wonder many American services would rather shut out EU users than comply.

They spent $100M on the first phone, and $200M left over. They had capital for multiple throws, and even started working on them.

It was not popular, they had dismal number of orders when they launched.

I’m curious what suggested that suppliers caused problems - one of their investors was actually Foxconn.

Exactly, no clear differentiator. There's a number of online interviews where even the founders couldn't clearly articulate what was novel.