Sure, but it's talked about in the same context. I removed a word for correctness.
10,495 karma · joined October 30, 2007
In response to your post: it's not necessarily the case that more oxygen will lead to positive outcomes. Respiratory illnesses like asthma and sleep apnea can be caused by overbreathing/hyperventilation. The lungs need to maintain a certain level of CO2 in order for oxygen to be properly absorbed into the blood, and where this hyperventilation happens, the CO2 drops too low, blood oxygen drops, and the impulse to overbreathe is further exacerbated.
If you're looking at oxygen/CO2 levels as a potential means of improved weight loss, look into the Buteyko Breathing Method, which teaches you to breathe so that your oxygen and CO2 stays in optimal balance.
Another big thing to look at is metal toxicity; mercury, lead, aluminium, cadmium, as well as bio-unavailable forms of iron and copper are the most common.
It's worth investigating if these are present, and look at natural ways of removing them. I'd avoid chemical chelation, but moderate use of saunas, and natural detoxifiers like cilantro are worth considering - though seek professional advice before undertaking any such approach.
Other than that, I've lost about 5-6 kg in the past few months, just by ensuring I walk plenty each day (7000 steps works for me), and keeping my sugars/carbs down so that I'm just in very-mild ketosis in the morning and the evening. There's nothing extreme about it; I'm not avoiding anything altogether and not feeling at all deprived, just ensuring I'm burning off more than I'm storing each day. (Regular barbell/dumbbell sets through out the day can help with this too, especially if you're not able to walk that much.)
Shocking and terribly sad news. He'll be unknown to a lot of readers here, but to everyone in the cricket-following world, which is a huge portion of the world, he was a bona-fide superstar. (For context, to Australians and many others around the world, this will be felt as deeply as the passing of Steve Irwin was).
He was one of the biggest names in the game from the early 90s till the mid-00s, and has continued to be a well known figure through the media and on Twitter.
He made his mark with his first-ever delivery for Australia in England, which was dubbed "the ball of the century". It completely bamboozled one of the world's best batters, and was the first of many amazing feats through his career.
It's a particularly important metric for farmers/growers who use pesticide spray, as it influences the way the spray behaves when released from the applicator.
If the delta-t is too high, the spray droplets will evaporate too fast, before they land on the plant. Whereas if it's too low, it can remain in droplet form for too long, which can reduce plant uptake, and in combination with other factors (particularly thermal inversions and wind) can lead to spray drift onto other crops, which can be hugely damaging.
https://www.cropsmart.com.au/using-delta-t-for-assessing-spr...
https://twitter.com/aviationbrk/status/1496891999433404420?s...
But you can turn it off:
https://www.asurion.com/connect/tech-tips/conserve-phone-dat...
But again, his investment in Rescale isn't because he read their balance sheet and business plan; it's because he's been following their progress closely since YC invested in them in 2012. So he has at least 9 years of progress he's been following, via regular email updates and conversations with the founders. (You mention the $55M round as if it's evidence of the scale of investments he makes, but his share of that round was likely quite small. He really doesn't have a team to do due diligence on his personal investments. He just invests in people he personally believes in.)
As for being a director; he's explicitly avoided taking directorships in companies he's invested in, as he doesn't want to deal with the things that directors have to do, like read balance sheets. The only exception he made to that rule is Watsi, a non-profit - https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/19/paul-graham-watsi/
Please don't be patronising; I've been polite and respectful towards you and the others in this discussion, despite barbs being sent my way. I'm just trying to clarify misapprehensions as I have knowledge about the topic.
The types of companies PG has normally invested in were barely even companies yet. They were small teams with an idea. Maybe a prototype. Maybe a few users. Often they were not incorporated as companies when he agreed to invest, or if they were, they weren't old enough to have audited financial statements. He didn't do "due diligence" as there was nothing to do diligence on; pretty much everything to know about the company was sitting in front of him.
Did he have to have a good bullshit detector? Yes, absolutely. But that was a skill he and the YC partners learned from doing thousands of interviews over many years. But also, it didn't matter if a few dud companies slipped through; they were investing such small amounts it didn't matter. That's the whole point of YC.
In another comment you wrote "at the scale of PG's investments...". That's what says to me you're misunderstanding things. PG's investments have always been very small. He just did many of them.
What he does read (or did, when he was still working), is the YC application form response, which is designed to glean the important information in a very succinct format.
If he likes what he reads, then he'd have a 5-10 minute conversation with the founders, and decide whether or not to invest based on that.
So, yes he wants to know what the founders' general plans are. That's very different from reading or recommending lengthy business plan documents.
As someone who has frequently made the mistake of overcomplicating things, I don't see anything wrong with repeatedly telling early stage founders, in all kinds of different ways, to just focus on building a product that people want.
I'm really not. You and others are acting is if he said something far more grandiose and potentially influential than he did.
He's just saying he focuses on teams and products when investing in super early stage companies. Finances matter only to the extent that the company can survive long enough to become sustainable. It's only then that GAAP accounting matters.
It's really not that big a deal. Seriously, which competent startup founder is going to make a decision to "never" take care of balance sheets for their entire company-operating career based solely on this tweet?
If literally everyone knows that then I don't need to be commenting, as my replies in this subthread are to someone insisting that balance sheets matter even before a company has a working product. Clearly they don't.
It seems the people "reacting" are imagining some deeper intention or elaborate plot or some complicated character weakness behind it all.
I just see him repeating what he's said for years: for early stage companies, you should just focus on making something people want.
The point of this tweet is just that balance sheets don't determine outcomes for early stage startups; good products and excited users do. Balance sheets matter later. Many of the teams PG invested in were not even incorporated when he invested in them.
He said nothing of the sort.
He specifically didn’t want to see balance sheets or income statements as he knows they can be full of bullshit (FWIW my only university qualification is in accountancy, so I know what he means).
All he cared about the bank balance and whether it was going up or down, because that’s what indicates whether the company would survive or not.
He still cared most about users and how excited they were and how fast their number was growing.
Yes, companies need to mindful of their finances and cashflows. Everyone knows that, PG included, as I conveyed in another comment.
The real point that PG is making here is that an early stage company with perfect books but no exciting product or market opportunity is dead, whereas one with incomplete bookkeeping but an incredible product and market opportunity is much more likely to be a good investment.
To your point: when YC interviews companies, they are mostly very early stage and pre-revenue. What YC cares about is how much money they could make if everything goes right, and whether the team is capable of making everything go (close enough to) right over the long term. The current financial picture has minimal bearing on that. Obviously, to the extent that it does have a bearing, YC is smart/experienced enough to consider that. But again, you can glean this from a conversation better than an accounting document.
Then one time he replied, frustratedly, imploring us to just tell him how much money we were making, how much money we were spending, and how much we had in the bank.
He later put that concept into this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
He did care a lot about the fact that we had users who were excited and unique insights into what was overlooked in the market.
That said, this post seems to pertain to the Booking.com business (which is still a somewhat independent division, as are all the properties/brands in the group), rather than the entire Booking Holdings corporation.
Mainly I just have lights turn on before sunset, which works fine, but one of the programs I set up was for some indoor lights to turn on when it rains, as it usually gets quite gloomy here during rain.
It's quite common for that program to activate and turn the lights on when it's hot and sunny with no rain or clouds anywhere nearby.
I gather it must be because they're using this kind of weather forecast data and not doing any live/recent updating.
I gather they do estimates based on sampling, but no doubt the testing rates and accuracy vary a lot from country to country, and the figure is presented for rhetorical impact over precision.
[1] https://www.unicef.org/media/109361/file/The%20toxic%20truth...
I'm noticing this claim made a lot in various contexts these days, most notably relating to the pandemic (about both the virus and vaccines).
In those contexts as well as this one, I feel like it's used in a weaponised way to emphasise the seriousness of the harm caused, but by doing this there's some abandonment of those who have been harmed and consigns them to a future of having to carry on living with the harm, without being empowered or supported to heal and recover.
I have some experience with toxicities of lead and other metals, which I wrote about here several years ago. [1]
As this article suggests, diagnosis and treatment are not widely available in mainstream medicine, so in order to get help you find yourself in the world of fringe medicine, which of course is a minefield.
But there are absolutely treatments that work and that can enable many (most?) people to recover or improve a huge amount, as the linked article from that comment thread documents. [2]
This article is right that the problem is neglected by mainstream society, but not so right that harms are irreversible, and if we were more willing to believe in the potential for the human body to heal when given adequate treatment and support, far more people could be living much more full and empowered lives.
That's not to say more shouldn't be done to remove lead and other toxins from the environment; of course that should be done too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19573098
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/magazine/lead-poisoning-m...
Related: if you can't find anyone to fund you to work on what you think are the most important projects, just take the work that people will pay you to do but that allows you enough free time to work on the stuff you think is the most important.
I immediately found it exciting and grasped how transformative it would be, and quickly got to work learning web development and finding material and communities related to my interests (mostly obscure Australian rock bands). It's been the platform for my career ever since, and has also enabled me to go deep learning about some unusual health and emotional challenges that had afflicted me since early life, and enabled me to make profound changes to my health and wellbeing, leading to the place I'm at now, with a solid career, great relationship and a wonderful young son.
When I think about the person I was and the path I was on when I finished high school, it's hard to imagine how it would have turned out well had I come of age in a different era.
Which is not to say life has been easy or simple; quite the opposite, and the internet has no doubt made life more complicated and challenging in many ways, My life has had several major ups and downs that probably wouldn't have been as pronounced without the internet. But I still have no doubt at all I'm in a much better place than I'd have been without it.
- 200Mbps FTTH (Australia NBN via iiNet)
- ASUS RT-AC68U AC1900 WiFi router running Asuswrt-Merlin
- Internal Cat6 cabling from FTTH NTU to comms closet then to office desk and TV.
- Cisco SPA112 VoIP adapter
- Intel NUC7I7BNH running with external drives for media storage and Plex server (recently had to take it apart and apply new thermal paste due to overheating).
It all works very well.
My next enhancement would likely be some Raspberry Pi-based audio devices/speakers in different rooms and on the back deck, perhaps running balenaSound.
(I keep thinking I should get a proper NAS again; I had one for media and backups years ago but it died, and it's never been a huge urgency to get another one, I guess because there's not so much need for local storage now with the streaming platforms and cloud storage.)