valhalla's comments

Could a D-Wave be used to perform Shor's algorithm? I remember reading a long time ago that In-Q-Tel and an unnamed 3-letter agency had invested in D-Wave

I agree. It wouldn't surprise me if Reddit's initial subreddits were narrow and reflected the interests of the founders and early employees – they created a proto-listserv for people like them and it grew from there

I think it's important to remember that none of these startups were as popular now as in the beginning. This is obvious, but it's hard too think back to the late-90s and put ourselves in the metapsychology of a user who was evangelizing Google when (basically) everyone uses Google now. Same with Reddit and Mint.

I first heard about Google from my 1st grade teacher. He bought us 1984 Macintoshs (with his own money) to use since our school didn't see the point of buying new computers to teach first graders computer skills in 1999 (the irony is not lost on me...). When he saw me using Alta Vista one day in our school's computer lab, he stopped me mid-search, logged onto Google and the rest is history.

My teacher was kind of a hippie and had spent time on an Indian Reservation as a photographer. He was obsessed with astronomy and took us on field trips to the Griffith Observatory at night where attendance was extra credit. I don't know if this is representative of Google's initial user base but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.

TL;DR: It's almost impossible to tell in hindsight who the few users were especially when a company is ubiquitous. Needless to say, it seems to be the best way to succeed

I disagree completely. Uber's inception/success was partly because of existing taxi services' "barriers to entry". Medallions were worth about $1 million each when Uber started in NYC (http://bloom.bg/2aCEeQA). That's a textbook case of an economic rent.

Taxi service was often discriminatory in NYC and other cities: taxi drivers often refuse to pick up black passengers assuming they won't pay once they reach their destination and I've had gay friends openly complain about how SF cab drivers used to throw them out on Pride or after a PDA with their significant other. This was the status quo for decades because of the barriers to entry of municipal taxi services' monopoly. They never had to anything about it since their was no competition and if you didn't like it, you probably shouldn't take a cab.

Besides Uber's barriers to entry are it's scale (low prices and reliable service) and brand than de facto monopoly status (which I assume is what you're talking about since you mostly talk about competition beside summing up your link). The fact that a co-op could potentially "disrupt Uber" is evidence of that.

That may be true. I'd imagine that a cheap median price and solid service will depend on the scale of Swift's supply side. Assuming there's plenty of demand (lots of Uber, Lyft customers switching over) then Uber's drivers would be more than willing to switch over to Swift. The co-op model would be a great incentive.

The issue is though how does one get drivers to switch from a reliable (though possibly imperfect, inefficient) source of regular income with a well-known brand to an upstart at a large enough scale to pose a direct threat to Uber, thereby forcing them to change their model or go out of business?

I'm living in LA right now and I typically wait 4 min for a car (longest has been 10 min). My last ride cost $4.44. That's less than a Big Mac! ($5.04 average price in the US). I can't imagine a new service being able to beat that from it's inception.

The other issue is that if drivers are allowed drive for Uber and Swift there could be a free rider dynamic: drivers get the benefit of belonging to Swifts' co-op but still get to be part of Uber's network. Sure Uber's service would suffer, but it would be a huge drain on Swift's resources and undercut their model (and reason of existing) from the driver's perspective.

Steven Pinker wrote about the distribution you mention in 2002 in the "Blank Slate". I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in neuroscience and assumptions about human nature that underly political discourse in this country.

It's remarkably relevant even though it's over a decade old

Does anyone live in a city (within the US) that takes a similar approach to GDS? I live in SF and developers usually create their own apps for services (Like MUNI/BART) but the city seems to have a mix of good and bad UX when it comes to municipal services (from my experience, at least)

According to the article, they ran simulations and it only provided a .2% increase in likelihood of a breach

November 29th 2013 (A week after the Xbox One release) 1 Bitcoin == $1216.73.

By December the same year the price "[had] crashed to $600, rebounded to $1,000, crashed again to the $500 range. Stabilized to the ~$650–$800 range."

Here's a graph showing the rate from July '13 to June '15:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#/media/File....

If the Microsoft was liquidating bit coin the way planetjones describes, it was probably too inconvenient since the exchange rate (Bitcoin to $) would fluctuate so unpredictably and wildy (at times) there was no way to reliably exchange bitcoins for the exact amount customers were charged.

If the exchange rate was too low, MSFT would lose money. If it was too high, they'd be breaking a number of very basic but important laws that are designed to protect consumers.

Here are some trending Yahoo! searches I texted to friends in July '15:

Buffalo Wild Wings| Janet Jackson | Mega Millions | Type 2 Diabetes |

I actually thought MM had the right idea at first re: Yahoo! being a low-brow web entertainment portal. At one time Gweneth Paltrow was going to have her own lifestyle blog/website on Yahoo!. Even though anybody reading this comment or anyone we're close with probably wouldn't be interested in that there's a large number of US consumers who would be.

Either because of a personal bias or something else (we'll probably never know) she pulled a 180 and did things like buying the rights to every season of SNL (which was a favorite of her's growing up) and poached Katie Couric to run their news desk.

Having said all that, I don't know if I would anything different myself: If I'm bringing a tech giant back from the grave, I want to make it "sexy" again. I want the glory that comes with that. I don't want my company to be a mouthpiece for celebrities' personal brands

That's more correlation than causation. I'd imagine it's because in 2016, it's socially acceptable to be a bit "kinky" so more people are willing to be open and honest about it. When researchers ask people about their sexual tastes, there's less incentive to lie since there's less of a stigma about it.

If anyone's curious about Network Science/Graph Theory in general here's a free online textbook used by a grad student friend of mine

http://barabasilab.neu.edu/networksciencebook/downlPDF.html

I've never used Slack before, but I'm surprised only 25% of people see it as a distraction. I understand its appeal versus email (Paul Graham wrote about reinventing email in his "Frighteningly Ambitious Startups" essay) but does it really increase productivity? What about for engineering teams?

Is that the reason they've been using the barges for landing? I'd always assumed they were just being extra cautious since it could endanger civilians or crew if the reusable stage was supposed to land on solid earth.

I'd imagine that the barge landings introduce a lot of uncertainty and complicating factors that are impossible to completely nullify. High waves and (comparatively) strong open-ocean winds seem (to me at least) to make consistently successful lands much harder.

I'm a young millennial and even though Google was more or less my first search engine/portal (I used Alta Vista until my 1st grade teacher showed me Google around '99) I also have fond memories of Yahoo!.

I won a Final Four bracket against high school classmates on the site's fantasy sports page and knowing nothing about college basketball. I made $150 from that.

Even though they clearly made strategic mistakes and Mayer's revival may have been too little too late it's still sad when an "old-school" tech firm goes under, especially one that touched so many lives.

pdf of the research paper for the curious

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02206v1.pdf

The New York Times talked about it too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark...

Definitely hard to believe 15 years later. Especially with the possibility (however distant) of the benefits that personal genome sequencing will give to patients: ability to live a lifestyle that can lessen the likelihood of chronic diseases and drugs that are more effective and have less side effects since they are more or less tailored to a patient's DNA. Plus, the patient will take the drug for a shorter duration and at the minimum effective dose based on their needs.