Mergers in business are like dating. You can't just throw random people in a room and expect that they're going to like one another. It's about establishing shared context.
Mergers happen because there is a shared vision that is greater than the two separate companies. Smart entrepreneurs look at the mission and identify the roadblocks to that. Business is a collaborative endeavor.
There are very few times in business where there is no way out (and in those moments, it's simply that a thesis was incorrect). You can always run a new experiment.
I am reminded of this fine line from Sasha Shulgin "There are no casual experiments."
Too often startup folk seek the easy way out instead of the path of least resistance.
Comments on forums do not provide that data. And if you want to extrapolate self-reports, it's obviously fine (to varying degrees) for the vast majority of people, but that's not the "issue."
These kind of reports are the equivalent of saying "I have power" when you're hundreds of miles away from where a hurricane landed. It's uninteresting, it's likely you have power, and it does literally nothing for people that do not have power.
It doesn't advance the topic anywhere. There are other places to report these issues directly and in aggregate with other people -- HN (and many other forums) are not that place.
You butted into a conversation to tell someone their contribution added no value without adding anything constructive. A comment of “your comment is useless” is pure aggression and is ironically even less useful than the one it’s deriding.
> Tone however, matters in any context.
You are getting upset because someone used a swear word. You’ll find that is just deep seated classism and working on that will let you have much more fulfilling interactions.
Tone policing never works. It’s a waste of calories and everyone’s time.
For the same reason that pointing out the sun rose in the east today would be ridiculous but if it happened to rise in the west, or you perceived it to rise in the west, that would be worth sharing.
Being able to livestream a sporting event is the default now and has been for at least over a decade since HBO’s original effort to stream a Game of Thrones season opener failed because of the MSFT guy they hired, and they fixed it by handing it over to MLBAM.
Maybe that’s what Netflix should do. Buy Disney so they can get access to the MLBAM people (now Disney Streaming because they bought it from MLB).
Lots of great founders and engineers have even less pedigree.
Ultimately being a great founder requires humility to hire people smarter than yourself, drive to face adversity, and storytelling to build allies + capital.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a high school dropout or a PhD if you can’t rally a team to believe in a mission.
Once there is a payment, it's a business relationship. You don't want to enter a business relationship with an alumni who graduated many years ago that could be anywhere in the world doing anything, unless you can handle that. (Donations are different though, for whatever reason. It actually wouldn't be a bad idea to tie email storage with donations.)
Professors, staff and registered students etc, on the other hand, is easier to deal with.
> It actually wouldn't be a bad idea to tie email storage with donations.
This could be done in perhaps the opposite direction: individual alumni donors tying donations to maintenance of email accounts for all alumni.
These email addresses, in some cases, must date back to the 90s or earlier. Cancelling them is a major, negative change to people who (like me!) who have come to rely on them.
Billing is hard. University IT pays for X amount of storage across their Google Workspace tenant. For edus, you get a 100TB pool and can buy more storage in 10TB increments. It's not metered per user either.
The Chumby with its wiki and open hardware/software philosophy was so ahead of its time and so influential to me. I started my whole career with hacking the Chumby’s user space [1]. The Chumby inspired and took me from an IT worker in a regional public school, to being a professional software engineer, making software shipped to millions of very important machines.
The lesson that I learned from the journey was that working with hardware can be fun and— if you want your career to be long-lasting— better be fun. The Chumby was one of the first devices that showed me that and bunnie was the one who showed me that. I still follow that principle to this day. No day in my life has making firmware or fucking around with hardware devices not something I enjoyed.
My brown leathery boy is still on my desk - although with light leaking from its display, sadly. As its apps slowly start getting out of date, though, I can’t justify keeping it on.
Cap is different because cap is about network planning constraints and doesn’t take into account things like security per se.
I think parts of Vitalik’s points are kinda moot and break down when you examine them through the lens of “any sufficiently complicated system can and will break.”
In the case of bitcoin, the breaks are few now because it is basically static. I’m sure there’s some bugs in that codebase though… (and they’re worth a very pretty penny if you can find them!!).
Algorand’s solution as originally stated is predicated on a non-colluding majority. At IACR when this algorithm was proposed, Silvio famously said as a counterpoint to the very apt criticisms that a colluding majority could defraud the protocol “my proof is that society exists!”
In the end I believe Algorand changed their algorithms to a more centralized approach for the sake of performance as fully distributed validation did not perform adequately. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes, full relay nodes were few and very centralized historically. Source: we have been working with Algorand since the beginning. BTW: we publish updated information about the protocol that you cannot find in the original papers [1].
> Currently, Algorand blocks are produced in less than 3 seconds with instant finality. The network can process 10,000 transactions per second, and at a cost of a fraction of a cent per transaction.
My pops wouldn’t let us play on the internet at first so my brother played Warcraft and StarCraft using AppleTalk. I remember the only cable we had barely reached between the two computers so we had it hanging tight and if someone tripped over the cable we’d disconnect and have to start over.
Mergers happen because there is a shared vision that is greater than the two separate companies. Smart entrepreneurs look at the mission and identify the roadblocks to that. Business is a collaborative endeavor.
There are very few times in business where there is no way out (and in those moments, it's simply that a thesis was incorrect). You can always run a new experiment.
I am reminded of this fine line from Sasha Shulgin "There are no casual experiments."
Too often startup folk seek the easy way out instead of the path of least resistance.
Be like water.