Recent submissions

Comment · 10 years ago
Google doesn't have a say on what you can do with your phone.

Google does have a say on what you can do with their service.

These people were clearly trying to game the system. Google caught them red-handed and has now exercised their rights.

Comment · 10 years ago
Exactly. I detested both candidates, but it's ridiculous to frame this situation as one in which the "wrong" candidate won, and shows true bias.
Comment · 10 years ago
Facebook can't win here. When they have humans more in the loop of selecting news stories, they get blamed for bias. When they remove the humans, they are blamed for AI which isn't perfect. Yes, Facebook can improve how it selects news stories, and they are working to do that.
Comment · 10 years ago
Which bubble are you referring to? I'm not familiar with one in the retail clothing space.
Comment · 10 years ago
There's a lot of dismissive hate in this thread, but this was a genuinely successful company before things went sour. I've heard about it many times from my wife. Amoruso has a very scrappy tale about how she launched the company, and she created a brand that many people loved. The site was well designed, and the company had very rapid growth.

This wasn't an VC investment born out of the bubble. Retail requires more money than a startup that makes apps, and this one had a great growth trajectory. Obviously, things went south, but that does occasionally happen to a VC investment.

Similarly, I don't think it's fair to dismiss Amoruso out of hand just because the company has now failed. Many startup founders are great at launching companies, but not so good at running them once they reach a certain size. This seems to be what happened here. There definitely is something to be learned by how she built the company and brand.

Comment · 10 years ago
I'm sorry you find this boring, but it is of a lot of interest to many other people. The company had a good origin story, a charismatic founder, rapid growth, and great branding. It's interesting that such a rapidly growing company and brand could come to a screeching halt like this.
Comment · 10 years ago
You are alleging bias, not a conflict of interest.

YC accepted into their program as a founder someone who was a partner. Does that really sound like bias to you? If a former professor at a university applied to be a grad student, would you accuse the university of a conflict of interest?

Comment · 10 years ago
Would anyone downvoting me care to articulate why? I'm genuinely curious.
Comment · 10 years ago
Airbnb is a platform. They can take steps to try to limit and root out discrimination, but it is the hosts themselves who are being discriminatory. Furthermore, hosts have voluntarily signed up to act as a small business owner/landlord. Thus, it seems fair for them to take on much of the legal burden for their individual actions in that role.
Comment · 10 years ago
That's not a bad idea. A family member could offer to help the next transfer by personally delivering the cash, just to make sure that such a large transfer is safe.
Comment · 10 years ago
It's important to note that the negative impact documented in this study is in development time and whether the task is completed. It makes no claims about impacts on maintainability that show up later in the development process. It also does not measure the longer term impact on development time if a team starts using lambdas and gains experience over time.

I say this not to dismiss the study, which appears to be fairly well done and to provide interesting results. I'm simply saying that its results are not inconsistent with lambdas providing a net, long-term benefit if introduced to a development team at work.

Comment · 10 years ago
You don't see how it's better to be indifferent to the plight of minorities (which is just your characterization of Thiel, by the way) than it is to promote hatred of those groups?
Comment · 10 years ago
You made a very specific claim in your first sentence, that supporting Trump constitutes a breach of fiduciary duty. Considering how quickly shareholder lawsuits follow announcements of mergers, I would expect lawyers to be circling these CEOs already. Please cite a single example of a CEO under threat of breaching fiduciary duty for supporting Trump.
Comment · 10 years ago
Political views are one aspect of a person, but they do not define that person. Thiel himself understands this. When he was a law school classmate with Alex Karp (now CEO of Palantir), they constantly argued bitterly over politics, because Karp held an extremely liberal point of view. They were also very good friends and have clearly maintained a very good business relationship.

I personally despise Trump, but I agree with Sam -- other people's political views don't really matter to me. Hopefully after this election ends, everyone can calm down and keep things in context. Business and politics are separate.

Comment · 10 years ago

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