uranium

When I came back from paternity leave with my first child, I told my boss I really wanted to go part time, and he supported me. Google had a standard easy of doing it, so it was just a matter of getting approval up to VP level, which went pretty smoothly.

When I applied to transfer to Makani, we negotiated a bit, and decided that I'd go up to 80% because I really wanted the job and they apparently really wanted me.

With Elemeno, I was already advising the company when I left Makani. I got a layoff package and didn't need paying for a while, and they couldn't afford me anyway. So we decided I'd help them temporarily until they could afford a full time engineer, and they paid me in stock and minimum wage. After about 18 months our agreement expired just as my COBRA was running out. I helped them draft a requisition for my replacement, but it didn't really make sense. For a bit more than they were paying me for 2 days a week, they'd maybe have been able to hire someone with a year's experience who'd be getting less done in their 5 days a week. So I switched to salary+benefits (some of the salary going to pay the other 60% of the health insurance) and that's worked great ever since, even now that we've been able to afford more full time engineers.

Incidentally, we're hiring for a number of areas right now, including engineering. We're aiming for full time, but it is a very flexible, diverse, and family friendly workplace.

https://www.elemenohealth.com/careers/

This was discussed a bit last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497

I've worked part-time for the past 10+ years now, at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health [60%, 80%, and 40% duty cycle respectively]. It's awesome for work-life balance if you can swing it, and a lot more productive than many people would think.

Without marriage, you don't have a legal framework for breaking up. I know a couple who broke up after 25+ years, a mortgage, and a child together, who had never married. I think the lack of applicable legal precedent made it even messier to negotiate the split. It's been several years now, they're still negotiating details, and the lawyers aren't any cheaper.

The terms are set at the next equity round. The money comes in right away.

See the footnote:

"Simply put, we’re giving the company money now but at terms you’ll negotiate with future investors."

Agreed, and it'll be a gradual switch rather than a single point, smeared across industries. Likely some operations won't ever go over, but it'll be a while before we know.

Because the expected value of using AWS is greater than the expected value of self-hosting. It's not that nobody's ever heard of running on their own metal. Look back at what everyone did before AWS, and how fast they ran screaming away from it as soon as they could. Once you didn't have to do that any more, it's just so much better that the rare outages are worth it for the vast majority of startups.

Medical devices, banks, the military, etc. should generally run on their own hardware. The next photo-sharing app? It's just not worth it until they hit tremendous scale.

Making flying things lightweight is a means to an end, not the goal or a hard requirement. Makani experimented with a wide variety of solutions before settling on their final model. The initial work on soft kites had serious durability issues, IIRC. What they ended up with looks a lot like a very lightweight airplane, for good reason.

[Former Makani software engineer, here. I wasn't involved in the early stuff, or the design trades, but I heard a lot about it.]

While I haven't read this particular study, the standard way to do a trial like this is to compare against the current standard of care, not no treatment.

I don't see a quote as to how much he personally put in. $500M went in so far in total; the rest is milestone-based.

I recently saw an 8-figure round in which the lead put in $25K. But they did the legwork to arrange the round and get everyone else in, so they were the lead. Sam's the board chair, an early investor, and super connected, so he's certainly able to lead a round whether or not he puts in the majority of the cash.

Heat your house?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530072-800-the-comp...

Distillation is pretty expensive, energy-wise, and if you can't run continuously [e.g. if you're trying to use cheap intermittent renewables] you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles.

I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.

[Disclosure: I've invested in Prometheus Fuels, but don't speak for them.]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

Sure, but if you can reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 50% in general, why are you not just licensing that technology to Tesla and others for gigabucks? Or is your cost reduction quite specific to the batteries that eRickshaw drivers need for some reason?

What I was getting at was, if $70 is a lot less than a lithium-ion battery costs, do people just steal the batteries and give up the $70?

$70 < [cost of lead-acid battery] < [cost of lithium-ion battery], so how often does a customer trade the deposit for a battery?

Yeah, everything here sounds great except for "We also have a patent-pending technology that reduces the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 50%." That's a huge claim, which would immediately be many times more valuable than your swapping business. Is this cost reduction perhaps just vs. small-volume retail prices, in India, for specific battery formats, or some other reasonable limitation?

+1

Can you handle intermittency in your power, or do you need to run continuously? What capacity factor do you assume in your cost model?

Will you be able to complete on cost without carbon credits, at scale?

Living Carbon is doing something similar, working on quick-growing trees that take up enough metals from the soil to slow decomposition.

Salary at all of them. Alphabet has a standard mechanism to scale down your salary/bonus/vesting by your duty cycle, and you get full benefits if you're at at least 50%. For Elemeno it was a more custom arrangement.

It's worked for me for the past 10 years, part-time in engineering at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health. Not wanting or being able to work a lot of hours doesn't necessarily mean not being flexible on hours. I've known a number of other part-time people at e.g. Google, and they were generally people I'd trust to get stuff done. Often they're time-management masters, due to necessity.

Sure, there's more overhead per working hour. But there's also more mulling-things-over-in-the-shower time per working hour, so for creative work, one can be a lot more effective than you'd think. I also get more sleep and do all my appointments and errands in non-working hours, which improves my duty cycle and performance.

Humor piece about restaurants that make their own ketchup:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/we-do-our-own-li...

I sat by Steve when Writely joined Google. [Hi Steve!] I sat by the Google Page Creator team when they were a thing. Regardless of performance, it's a miracle that a WYSIWYG editor can be written on top of the DOM at all, let alone a performant one. They had to work multiple miracles a day just to get bulleted lists to work somewhat reliably.

I have no doubt whatsoever that a Canvas-based editor can be faster and easier to maintain. I don't know how well it'll handle accessibility issues, though. I expect they'll have to do a lot of tedious work to get screen readers and the like to be happy.

That's a very important point. My company has always had unlimited time. We just had an announcement from our HR head that managers are going to start making sure you take at least 2 weeks a year, ideally in a big block. I've never had trouble taking my vacation, but I'm really pleased that we're going to be enforcing a minimum, to help folks who are more hesitant to take theirs.

This. I haven't seen a good phone with a 5-row keyboard since my first android phone, a G-1. Having that fifth row means that all the punctuation goes where you expect it to be, and you don't have to learn another key layout. I've been making do with swiping text since about 4 phones ago, but it makes typing on a phone painful and about 10x slower. So far I've had to correct about 3 words per sentence. I can't wait to be able to order this phone!

Are those impurities an issue when reselling the CO2?

That makes a lot of sense.

Thanks, that's quite clear.

What about the tradeoff vs. large stationary units on power plants? I know other folks are working on that as well; would love to know about how the economics work out vs. truck-sized units.

I presume you're using a heat exchanger to cool the exhaust and heat the discharging pellets. How big a temperature differential are you getting from the exchanger? How much extra energy do you need to put in for cooling? At switchover, how do you cool the pellets that you've just finished heating? Is the heating-compression cycle a lot faster than the collection cycle?

Given the overhead and hassle of putting small units on a huge number of trucks, how does this compare to just putting a small number of larger units on power plants or furnaces?

--How important is the CO2 concentration in the exhaust? Is this something that could be done just from atmospheric CO2, not on a concentrated source?--[Edit: Already addressed below.]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking: swapping out a third stage is a much easier prospect; it's just a bulky payload for a 2-stage rocket. But they're saying second stage, so...