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srinion Waymo Safety Impact

London cabbys can be hangry or have broken up with their partners that day. What makes you so sure they're fully attentive on any given day?

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

I think the other way to think about it is that Waymo is probably in the 99th percentile for not being distracted and 99th percentile for reaction time, always, just from a pure sensor and computation standpoint.

Even the best human can't say that, at all times?

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

I mean, if some subset of those 15% used Waymo, we'd be better off, no?

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

The argument was for _how_ people react to Waymos. The OP said folks are more careful. The respondent said, no it's the opposite.

Neither argued that people do not adapt their behavior in the presence of Waymos?

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

From a purely technical perspective, I would expect a Waymo to react to unexpected external stimuli much, much faster than a human. It gives the Waymo options that are unavailable to a human's slower reaction time.

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

Do you have a solution for preventing humans from driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs? Or even preventing humans from driving while texting?

srinion Waymo Safety Impact

Yes, but I don't actually trust most folks to be in a "good condition". Even the best drivers have their off days.

srinion San Francisco apartment rent prices are dropping fast

This is a state law and it still allows for stricter city level rent control. If the unit is bound under the stricter SF city rent control, the city rent control law may treat discounts differently?

srinion EpiPen Maker Quietly Steers Effort That Could Protect Its Price

Allowing differing reimbursement amounts seems pretty similar to charging different prices to different patients. Why not remove negotiation entirely and say price is X for all patients and you must reimburse 100%?

srinion Turn WiFi and Bluetooth signals into app actions

I use NFC Task Launcher to do exactly this.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jwsoft.nfc...

srinion Show HN: Incorporate your startup online with YC's forms (built by two lawyers)

One advantage I've noticed: our angel investors seem to like the standardization and quickness of Clerky. They know exactly what they're signing and there's less back and forth.

I could see clerky going far beyond corporate formation; this seems like just the first step. We used it at first to raise our first seed round, but we continue to add new investors and follow-ons through clerky, since the documents are the same. There are plenty of other flows they can help standardize.

srinion Ask HN: What are the use cases for NFC outside of payments

Phone automation: http://launcher.tagstand.com/

srinion Airbus reveals aircraft of the future

How can you list 7 things you want in a futuristic airplane and miss:

0) Get to my destination faster.

Where are all those hypersonic planes we were promised?

srinion The Luckiest Address in Silicon Valley

Hewlett-Packard: I'd give that one to Stanford way more than MIT. From Wikipedia:

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard."

If anyone's interested, here's a fuller list of SV companies founded by Stanford-affiliated people: http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html

srinion An open letter to thesixtyone.com

I'm all for new layouts and ideas - people will get over changes like this. Facebook redesigns have taught us many times.

From what I can tell though, Sam and James could've done a much better job of communicating and working through the changes with their current users, especially power users. A "what's changed" and why guide would've been useful; the one blog post they wrote is not sufficient.

srinion Analyzing Y Combinator

Thanks for your wishes! We're still lurking around news.YC.

We, WebShaka, went on to work on Project Wedding after YouOS; when that site was acquired, we and YC had an exit.

The four of us are all in startups of various maturities; as someone already mentioned: Sam went on to start thesixtyone.com, which was round #2 of YC for him!

srinion Analyzing Y Combinator

You're right - that should be clearer. I've updated youos.com to more accurately reflect our history:

WebShaka went on to work on Project Wedding; when that site was acquired, the founders and YC had an exit.

srinion Ask HN: Who's hiring (take 3)?

eHarmony is hiring Java Engineers.

Email me at spanguluri at that domain and I can forward to the appropriate person.

srinion Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead

Another huge plus for libraries: many of them have conference and meeting rooms that you can book for free.

If you're in the Bay Area, mid-Peninsula, the San Carlos library has rooms with whiteboards. Plus, it's only a ten minute drive to the likes of EA, Oracle, etc.

srinion How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data

I don't think executing long-running DDL with concurrent read/writes is that bad, especially if the DDL is additive and doesn't lock the whole table.

Concurrency - isn't that what a DB is supposed to do well?

srinion IE6 still kicking: New Gmail code base now for IE6 too

Probably the best demographic in terms of ad click through rate.

srinion YouOS (winter 07) shutting down?

Yes - Joe was engaged when we started it; he was having trouble finding good wedding vendors.

srinion YouOS (winter 07) shutting down?

Hi, I'm one of the founders of YouOS. Yeah, we're finally shutting it down. We haven't been working on YouOS actively since November 2006. Why it failed is a long blog post for another time (it centers around not finding a use for it ourselves).

Since then, Sam started thesixtyone.com, Jeff works at 23andme, and Joe and I recently sold our new startup, projectwedding.com to eHarmony.

It's this last item, logistically, why we're shutting it down at this time.

srinion Ask HN: Is credit necessary and how/where do you bank?

Another great benefit is that you get an itemized bill at the end of the month. It's a great way to track your spending.

srinion Disqus - After 5 Days on Disqus, I’m Turning Back to Wordpress Comments

This doesn't answer Ryan's key complaint though: that disqus sucks up all the SEO from blog comments on blogs that use it.

srinion Life Outside the Fast Lane

You are comparing apples to oranges.

Becoming partner at a large firm is like working up to VP at an established tech company.

Starting your own law firm that specializes in class action law suits - that's a lot more like a startup.

srinion Ask YC: Reliable data on JS/Flash availability?

Our site's user base is heavily female and tech level is a bit above-average. It's a wedding related site, so it's definitely not the "web 2.0" crowd.

According to google analytics, we see:

flash: 90% 9.0 or better

java: 99.9% have some java capability

javascript: not sure

Just for reference:

os split: 87% windows, 12% mac, 1% other

browsers: 68% ie, 24% firefox, 7% safari, 1% other

ie split: 55% ie 7, 45% ie 6

srinion It is scary how thin the startup layer really is

For $44 billion, Microsoft could buy every Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley venture-backed start-up in existence.

Yes, and that money would go right back in to new venture investments. There's an endless supply of two guys in garages and bored PhD students.

srinion ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown

Any idea how they compare when using rails caching? Is there an equivalent in ErlyWeb?

I'd be curious to see the numbers, as the gap could go either way. I'm not sure if rails is worse with threads or worse with rendering or both.

srinion ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown

EC2 instances are virtualized machines, right? What about differing CPU contention (i.e. steal times) based on the load of other virtual machines on the same box?

I don't think the results would change much, but to be safe, I think you should run this comparison on multiple random ec2 instances, to account for differing external loads.