eleusive
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
68
Submissions
30
Member since
Nov 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Folks who found this article interesting will also appreciate Nathan Altice's book "I AM ERROR" which looks at how the NES's various technical decisions and limitations influenced the NES's lasting cultural legacy. The book contains a surprising amount of technical depth combined with history, business, and sociology. It's really excellent.
Comment · 5 years ago
Given the current state of the world, perhaps it's not a good thing that philosophical thinking has taken a backseat.
Comment · 5 years ago
For something more accessible, also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8TlTaTHgzo
Comment · 8 years ago
So how do you hire effectively as a CEO? There are too many areas for you to be knowledgeable, yet you need to be able to hire top talent across a variety of areas.
Comment · 8 years ago
Indeed - you can even extend this idea to only identify factors less than or equal to the square root - all factors greater than this have a matching factor less than the square root.
Comment · 10 years ago
It's particularly interesting that Slack's CEO upvoted that answer - I wonder if that's because the answer was accurate or he was just amused.
Comment · 11 years ago
Like others have mentioned, I'm very interested in how the author arrived at the ratio of '3'. At the very least this ratio doesn't take into account how capital intensive a company is, since fixed costs seem to be what's left (my understanding could be wrong here depending on which definition of 'margin' is being implied here).
Wouldn't this imply that a company with a lower ratio that is not very capital intensive would have a higher "corrected ratio" than a company which is much more capital intensive (or even simply has a higher cost of capital)?
Comment · 11 years ago
The person leading this effort is literally the second Justin.tv hire from many years ago.
Comment · 11 years ago
I know of one interesting story here. Early on in (what would eventually become a very successful) tech company's life, they acquired some collocated space for free thanks to a friend (call him Brad) of an early employee.
Eventually Brad left that particular DC operator, leaving the startup with no inside contact - but the servers stayed up for years to come (and the company was never charged for the resources).
These machines were eventually "replaced" with newer hardware in a nearby facility, but the DC operator has no idea where these old machines are physically located within the facility (thus cannot remove them), so they remain active to this very day, sitting idly by...
Comment · 11 years ago
This is an existing team who has already shown they can work and accomplish things together. Buying the best individual labor on the free market may not create as strong a whole as just hiring a team outright - this seems like a pretty good economic decision, considering risk/reward.
Comment · 11 years ago
That's NOT what adverse selection is.
It's absolutely an adverse selection problem - insurance companies, as you say, can't necessarily price based on your existing health condition (not only because of regulations, but also because of asymmetrical information which is too costly, if not impossible to obtain).
As a result, healthy people will choose not to purchase health insurance, since due to the adverse selection problem, there doesn't exist a mutually beneficial transaction for both parties (insurance policies have to price for the average due to the lack of health data, which is economically disadvantageous for the healthy to take). And thus begins the adverse selection death spiral[1]
Comment · 11 years ago
For one, it reduces the effects of adverse selection[1]. The idea is that everyone reaps economic benefits through such programs, as an average company will have a pool of workers, some who are "healthy" although others may have medical problems.
Compare this to a individuals wanting health insurance - if they're young and healthy they're less likely to want to pay much for insurance, which leaves older and sicker people to pay higher and higher premiums. Of course this is really only an issue with privatized insurance and is a great argument for having a single-payer solution.
Comment · 11 years ago
How am I supposed to know, before I click on a link, if the ads supporting the site I'm about to visit are "bad" or not?
A possible solution would be to develop an adblock product which whitelisted "good" ad networks by default (I think adblock plus has this feature for google ads at least). Getting that list populated and maintaining it would be tricky but feasible.