sebleon

This is awesome. As a Bear power user, I’ve been looking for a collaborative note-app that just works. Haven’t gotten a beta invite yet for mobile app (key imo), but this seems promising!

> The more sophisticated hires will realize this and you may then have to increase their compensation (in equity, cash or both) to make up the difference to avoid a morale issue.

What about the less sophisticated hires? Employees are trusting founders not to screw them over. I'd expect this piece to advise either: a) educating less-sophisticated employees, or b) increasing compensation for all employees that didn't get their equity grants before the term sheet.

Right, it's better to be healthy at 90 than in chemotherapy. However, I question the societal and individual benefits of enabling everyone to live to 100.

> We need to rethink the way we think about the elderly, because one day those elderly will be us.

I find this Western fear of death to be toxic. One day we'll grow old and die - and that's ok, that's how life works.

> better humans

Ah, sounds like you’re into eugenics. Do you believe humans are wise enough to determine what traits are favorable?

Increased longevity, for instance, seems short-sighted. We already have extreme population growth. While natural survival instincts strive to fight death, what’s the net benefit to society of helping more people make it through their 90s?

Phases like childhood and parenthood would become smaller fractions of life, does extending old age make your overall life experience better? Would society progress as quickly with more old people around?

Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M. What’s your definition of a business failure?

What makes it terrible?

> If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen

Exactly, that's why he moved away.

What country are you based in? I’ve only heard negative things about the taxi industry internationally, mostly around corruption. Surprised to hear there’s places where taxis have a good reputation.

> only thing the taxi industry needed to do to prevent this all from happening was develop a ride-hailing app

There's no way the taxi industry could have pulled this off. There's an incredibly complex dispatch system that keeps wait times and prices low, and hundreds of millions invested in incentives to create a new consumer behavior. The long term future hinges on the self-driving, hard to imagine the taxi industry being on the forefront of this tech.

> And today, by tapping the united strength of these and other interlocking fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest questions about intelligence — and to deliver transformative new gifts for humankind.

Ugh, this kind of corporate-speak is nauseating. Can anyone understand what this "quest" actually entails?

> public trust in the media at an all time low

Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.

Rio de Janeiro had an awesome bike system in 2012. You could use an app to unlock the bikes, find hubs, save your credit card info on the app, super easy to use the bikes. This was all setup and subsidized by a local bank, surprised more cities haven't been able to replicate this kind of system.

Ha, I've tried to use this product with 3 different teams, never caught on - ended up mostly syncing up via Slack+Email+Google Docs.

Anyone here been able to get a team to use Asana?

Bloomberg could not afford Twitter - their market caps are $22Bn and $17Bn, respectively.

> Outdoor Activities

Renting a car (via Getaround, Zipar) on weekends can be cost effective

Yes, Wikileaks has a spin (it’s run by people after all), but they’ve only posted factual documents. To give public full picture, we need more Wikileaks-copycats with a different spin.

Not relevant to Bitmain, but curious if Western perception is incorrect re: US IP law ignored in Asia

Got it, makes sense.

Whoa, thanks for calling out my biases O_O

> lax IP laws aren't actually that lax

I thought one of the big initiatives for the TPP was to enforce US IP in Asia?

I'm surprised to hear there aren't more manufacturers in China that reverse engineer Bitmain's circuits, replicate, and sell them in the local market where US IP law doesn't apply.

"We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like." - Fight Club

I'd venture to say that the majority of human effort today is spent on useless things. Consumerism is the base of our entire economic system, Bitcoin mining doesn't seem all that different to me.

Bitcoin/Monero/Zcash are already incredibly useful by making things like Wikileaks possible, which was previously shut out of the world financial system from US Govt pressure. This contribution to international politics alone has changed the world.

> fb dropped patent stuff

Ah, thanks for the update, glad they did that

> are not needed that often

Right - statistically most apps are probably throwaway code for hackathons or demos. However, I'd venture to say that >50% of serious apps will end up needing performance boosts from native code.

> Building is not needed most of the time

You need to rebuild every time you make a change in native code (obj-c or swift). Hot reloading is cool for JS changes, but bloat from RN becomes a nightmare when debugging obj-c or swift issues.

Could you elaborate?

My take is that RN is great for demo apps or simple UIs, but I would not choose it for a production app where performance matters (ie. using camera, audio, custom controls, platform-specific SDKs, multi-threading, etc). You're definitely going to do heavy lifting in native code, and a hybrid app quickly becomes a mess. Dealing with multiple environments and super slow build times in Xcode will seriously slow down development cycles.

IMO RN is no exception to the Simple vs Easy trade-off [1] Not to mention using RN gives FB a legal blank check from your company [2]

[1] http://chrisfrost.com/wp-content/uploads/SimpleVsEasy-478x51...

[2] https://medium.com/@raulk/if-youre-a-startup-you-should-not-...

The logic still applies.

1. Start with platform you're most comfortable with. 2. Iterate on product until you have a winning formula 3. Replicate on 2nd platform to double revenues

Building is a lot easier than identifying what to build, better to speedily experiment on one platform.

Very heart warming article, glad to hear about empirical evidence that basic income leads to fruitful, productive lives.

Personally, I believe that basic income would be a net good if 99% of basic income recipients wasted money on booze, as long as there’s a 1% doing interesting things with their lives.

Likely unions or insurance reasons.

I’ve heard similar things about airplane pilots.

What kind of energy consumer adjusts their electricity usage based on price?

Seems like this doesn't apply to households - people will just switch stuff on when they need something, they probably don't even monitor prices. I'm guessing this is good for energy-intensive industries that have large battery storage capacity?

*didn't read, paywall

Ha, so the idea is to keep nuclear arms around so that we can bluff aliens and prevent an invasion? I don’t think humanity would opt for mass suicide if aliens showed up.

> supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding

Surely we're due for one of these soon. Given our infantile understanding of quantum mechanics and physics, it's a matter of time before we observe something that defies modern science.