r0naa

>Remember that it's not just people in wheelchairs who benefit from accessibility though.

In addition to that, I wager there's value in extending the current infrastructure so as to not ostracize disabled people even further.

>3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected.

What kind of reasons? Direct me to some resources if there are too many to enumerate

Why are you primarily looking for >billion dollars startups?

I would wager that if you take a look at an accurate distribution of markets according to potential you would find a magnitude more small/average markets (that are untapped) than billion dollars ones. And similarly, I suspect that the success rate for those "boring" ventures is much higher than the exciting shiny rising stars.

Question: Why not optimize for companies that are certainly not going to become Airbnbs but will capture the full value of an averagely sized market (say between 50 and 300 millions)? And if my guess is correct and they end-up eating a lot less resources than the soon-to-be-unicorns, you could even optimise for volume.

Is the pay-off (wrt. to the energy spent and success rate) for unicorns really worth it?

w3m reddit.com

The current situation in France is making me very conflicted about privacy and public liberties.

I am a strong believer of the value of privacy for a modern society. I even want to dedicate my life to help building privacy enhancing technologies and censorship-resistant networks. Because I think that an "advanced" world can only thrive if information is unrestricted, or unstoppable.

But today I face a dilemma. The dilemma of choosing between freedom and privacy, and security.

I am French, and have a lot of family in Paris. My brother lives two streets from the Bataclan and lost one of his friends. Some of my friends lost 5, sometimes 10 people that night. Imagine loosing two thirds of your group of friends in a few hours. This is frightening.

When I look at France. I see a great country, with a lot of humanity and when I look at the French, I see a freedom loving people who share a love for good food, good music and generally speaking, the good things that life has to offer.

But I also see the failure of my country in the suburbs. With entire neighborhoods that have been left uncontrolled by the government at some point, and who never went back to that state despite lots of efforts. These neighborhoods are rigged with crime and violence, and have been a fertile environment for religious lunatics to grow stronger for the last twenty years.

And I have mixed feelings. The French National Assembly has extended the state of urgency to three months. Strengthening the regalian power of the state and weakening the counter-balancing power of the Judicial branch.

Hundreds of raids have been coordinated through France, most being in those "uncontrolled areas". And it seems to work.

Which prompt me to think that this might be for the better. For the most part of my "short" life, I have thought that a people should never "trade freedom for security". But I have come to the, perhaps wrong, conclusion that there can't be "freedom without security" either.

Maybe we should give up some freedom to let the "good guys" crackdown hard on the "bad guys".

But maybe it isn't. Maybe fear is clouding my judgement.

You seem to believe that the EU is one homogeneous, federal entity. It isn't, yet.

Having the EU parliament vote a motion in favour of welcoming Snowden as a political refugee is great. As the article highlight it isn't binding to the EU commission or EU countries. But this could help document Snowden's in front of the ECHR.

The European Court for Human Rights does have supranational power over EU states.

This is a small step in the good direction, no need to be cynical.

I think that can be true. But I think that an excellent virtual course is still inferior to an excellent physical one.

I mean, 90% of the interesting stuff I am learning during my classes comes from the discussions that start at the end of the course with the professor and a few others.

I do enjoy the ability to rewind, and choose my pace when taking an online course. Too bad the quality of the interactions I have mentioned has not yet been captured by MOOCs or OCs.

I think it's worth taking a look, once you factor out the desperate commit messages made in the middle of the night.

I have a midterm next monday, yet here I am... procrastinating by reading CIA's director emails.

What a time to be alive.