jeremymims's comments

This was how the BMW i3 worked. It was a rather novel design that included an optional small electric scooter motor in the rear that had a 2.5 gallon gas tank. When the battery was low, it would be charged by running the small generator.

This was clearly a wonderful idea but it was hamstrung by a silly California rule requiring the gas range to be less than the electric range to qualify for rebates. With a 6 gallon tank, the car would have been able to do ~300 miles instead of 170 and would have been parked in everyone’s driveway.

An added benefit was that the car could use existing gas station infrastructure when you needed to travel long distances.

Not a board game… but highly recommend Magic Puzzle Company puzzles as gifts for family and friends who aren’t quite ready for intense games. A bonus is that Susan Kare (of Apple/Next fame) designed the logo and branding.

https://www.magicpuzzlecompany.com/

Congratulations, Garry! YC couldn't have picked a better leader.

Steve Jobs famously said that he saw the computer as a "bicycle of the mind." He saw technology as a tool to amplify humanity's abilities.

Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to build a "casino of the mind." Facebook and Instagram have been purpose-built to amplify and prey on humanity's weaknesses.

The fact that "Meta" is now trying to make their casino _even more_ addictive to compete with TikTok does not bode well for the world.

Congratulations, Zach! It's been very cool watching Codecademy go from electrifying prototype to media darling to quiet giant.

I know it's hard to imagine, but there are many sides to these stories. Things really aren't so black and white. You really have no idea just how hard these guys worked or the struggles they had to go through. I'd recommend you read Alexis's post from back in 2010: http://alexisohanian.com/keep-calm-carry-on-what-you-didnt-k....

Reddit was born out of the first Y Combinator batch in 2005. This batch turned out to be an exceptional group of people who helped make Y Combinator into Y Combinator. But it was far from a forgone conclusion that they would be successful or that Reddit would one day become a top five website on the internet.

My experience with Alexis and Steve is that they're extremely generous, helpful, and have set the tone for the "pay it forward" spirit of Y Combinator's alumni network. I'd encourage you to wish them the best of luck instead of hoping someone takes them down.

My e-mail is in my profile and I'd be happy to help you get in touch with them if you meet their parameters.

Most of them are looking to do just a few deals a year.

There are actually a number of VCs showing up right now to address this pain point.

They're tending to fund profitable B2B companies with $5-40m in annual revenue and explicitly state that they're content with the option of 3-5X returns (while still hoping for more).

At OwnLocal, we like people who understand the news business and have some programming skills.

I'd encourage you to look at our jobs page: http://ownlocal.com/jobs

When I was in high school (quite a long time ago now), I'd try to buy 2-4 albums a month. That was an average cost of $25-$50 to listen to 20-50 new songs... some of which I enjoyed, some of which I didn't.

$10 per month to listen to almost anything is such an astounding underpricing of the value I personally derive from the service. I can hardly believe my good fortune to be alive at a time when I can pay so little to listen to so much with so little effort.

Newspapers were largely ad driven since their "modern day" inception in the early 1700's.

I'm going to need to write a blog post about this since I'm seeing so much confusion about how we got where we are and why we've ended up with ad models we have. It may take me a month or two to get to, but I think this community would benefit greatly from it.

There absolutely is a reason why it's expensive. In fact, I could easily make a case that as a society we'd be better off if more money was invested in creating quality content.

Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.

Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.

While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.

Ok, education time.

You may not like ads but they heavily subsidize great content. In fact, the price of a New York Times subscription would be close to $1,500 per year if it weren't for advertisers keeping it closer to $300 (and that's if all their existing subscribers could even afford it).

Alexander Hamilton (newspaper owner, secretary of the treasury, founder of the Bank of New York) said:

"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic."

The fact is people dramatically underestimate what it costs to produce high quality content and that as a rule you'd need to spend much more than you'd expect to have access to it.

Advertising has essentially made information free or cheap for the user for a long time. Just because you think ads are ugly and annoying doesn't change this fundamental reality.

Today, Groupon's market cap is $6.88 billion. So, maybe it would have been smart to sell, but as of today, they're ahead.

I have a feeling that company wasn't quite the disaster you think it was.

YC already has the ability to accept more startups from the thousands of applications it gets. Most high-quality startups are applying to YC even if they apply to other incubator/accelerator programs and the number of high-quality startups that apply to incubator/accelerator programs but don't also apply to YC is going to be fairly small.

There is a ton of legitimate content being regularly sent through e-mail. Most of it isn't targeted it at you and much of it is local in nature.

If it's difficult for Google to ascertain who's promotional and who's not, create a system of evaluation for publishers to be certified and re-added to the primary list. Seems simple enough.

The biggest problem with these tabs is that there is a very clear tab missing: Content/Editorial/News/

These are newsletters I've subscribed to that aren't promotional. Some are educational, some are local news and stories, some are curated content lists. I read them for the content. I want them to show up in my primary inbox by default or at least in a "Content" tab.

It's pure and simple mislabeling to wholesale throw them in the promotions bucket and cover them up with additional paid ads.

This analysis is tragically incorrect. The Times legal department in no way represents the Times newsroom or the developers who made Snow Fall. Reporters and developers love tools that let them tell stories like Snow Fall more quickly and inexpensively. There is only one reason the NY Times hasn't made another story like Snow Fall in the last 5 months: It's too damn expensive and time-consuming to replicate in a one-off way.

I work with hundreds of newspapers and a dozen or so have contacted me to ask how they could use Scroll Kit's technology in the past few days. In fact, one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients signed up to use Scroll Kit this week. They won't be the only ones.

In case you haven't noticed, newspapers need to find new ways of making money. And they needed it yesterday. Folks trying to monetize newspapers aren't worried about someone copying their article to demonstrate a use case (hell, this event probably drove meaningful traffic to the original), they're worried that they're not going to be able to stay in business. If you were like any digital director around the country, you didn't give a shit about copyright infringement. You only salivated over all the cool things you could be making and monetizing. Since most newspapers have no way of creating a Snow Fall type of article themselves, they'll use Scroll Kit, they'll use it at scale, and they'll sell premium ad units to monetize these articles in a more effective way than normal content. From my viewpoint, that's a real positive for those of us trying to keep journalism alive. All the surrounding conversation about copyright infringement is just so completely missing the point that it might as well be arguing about the right way to polish the brass on the Titanic.

I know this phenomenon may sound like a bug, but it's probably a feature. It means that many smart kids go to schools close to home and are able to enrich their own communities by staying nearby. It means that those rural towns get great lawyers, doctors, and access to smart and talented people in dozens of other professions. If I'm from a rural state, I absolutely want my top state schools to compete with Harvard for talent. I don't want talented kids whisked away, never to return.

In my home state of Connecticut (home to one of those Ivy League bastions and a short drive from the others), many of the top students at my high school went to UCONN, got great educations, got great jobs in Connecticut (since locals know how good the education can be), and continue to contribute to the fabric of the state. Because so many people have gotten quality education at an affordable price, they encourage other top students to attend UCONN, donate money locally after they graduate, and create jobs for future students.

At first blush it feels unfair (certainly on an individual level). But it may actually result in a far better outcome for society. It certainly makes my home state a better place to live.

One bit missing from this story is that Foursquare and Gowalla didn't actually launch on the same day at SxSW. Foursquare had previously launched at the New York Tech Meetup a week or two earlier to an audience with a surprising amount of clout in the pre-celebrity Twittersphere of 2009.