My bet is on the Chinese with their enormous pig farms which feed every pig a constant cocktail of antibiotics to ensure they grow faster to be the ground zero for an antibiotic-resistant epidemic.
Edit Source: A Chinese government official in charge of a meat-producing SOE boasted about it during a presentation seeking foreign investment
The most amazing fact about John Conway is that he actually enjoys teaching (even to undergrads). Most profs of his calibre actively shy away from teaching to focus on research. Having his energy and passion made linear algebra fun. He was also always available for office hours and would happily explain anything you didn't get which is also a rarity.
Top notch guy and an evangelist for the mathematics community. Really happy he's getting the recognition he deserves.
Considering how hard it is to explain how Google Analytics works to the standard business owner, I imagine it wouldn't be hard to obscure all manners of data collection programs from oversight.
In times like this, the importance of civics education is highlighted. The very idea that people in law enforcement think it's acceptable to treat judges and the legal system with such contempt is scary. Even if you disagree with a certain law or system, you still need to respect it as a public servant.
I doubt anyone on HN would pay for a service like UFlix when the DIY alternative is much more efficient.
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
I don't know why, but no public cloud to my knowledge offered even the Maxwell GPUs.
As cool as these cards are, I really hope they become available on AWS soon. The current AWS GPU instances are so weak we're contemplating buying a physical desktop setup.
It's a tradeoff. If I had a lifestyle trading business, the corporate tax rate in HK is 0% (17% for revenue derived in HK, 0% for non-local revenue).
On the other hand, funding in this part of the world is pretty depressing. I have a collection of term sheets we keep to remind ourselves how bad it could've been. Personal liability, right to veto future investments, majority board control... you name it.
So we're trading higher taxes + crazy amounts of compliance, for a more managed and predictable funding process in the long run.
We have to file everything ourselves but we do have a few guides available from PWC and Orrickk? via Stripe Atlas that we're following as best as possible.
I have no idea what level of support Stripe Atlas will provide going forward, we have not heard anything in that regards, so we have enlisted friends in these professions to help us out.
If you do end up provided all these services in one place, let us know. It'll make my life a lot easier
March 5th - We signed up to the waitlist the instant we heard about it
April 8th - Received an invite. They gave up a form to fill out online where we had to upload some IDs and other details.
April 10th - The docusign (digital signature) email documents came along with a legal/tax guide. We filled that out on Apr 19th.
We ended up delaying for a while discussing the tax implications since we're moving from a low tax (Hong Kong) to much higher tax (Delaware C-Corp) area. Unlike Hong Kong, taxes in the US appear much much more complicated and intimidating. Ultimately for our startup, we weighed the benefits and decided to go ahead.
May 16th - Decided to go ahead with the incorporation and signed all the forms (via docusign)
May 17th - Get 15k AWS credits emails (super cool)
May 19th - Our Stripe payments account was opened "You can now accept payments via Stripe" Email
May 19th - "Welcome to SVB Bank" email with login details
May 25th - "Your Company is now incorporated" w Certificate of Incorp attached
June 4th - "Your Company now has an EIN", which a number ID to file taxes
June 21st - SVB Bank asked us to print out a few docs to sign. Basically to confirm we received the EIN.
And that's it. In most cases, it only takes a few days once you've signed the forms to be able to start taking payments via Stripe US (so you get the cheaper Stripe US fees rather than the more expensive international fees).
As an international, we ended taking a while to decide if a US incorporation was the way to go. There's 2 reasons we hesitated:
1) Stripe released a beta in Asia where you can accept payments in many Asian countries. No more Braintree/Paypal crap so you don't need to have US bank account to use Stripe and the Stripe API.
2) American taxes are pretty high (compared to HK), and there seems to a lot more rules and paperwork required.
For us, what pushed us to go ahead despite our reservations was that we spent 1 week in SF (for our YC interview). We didn't get in, but we scheduled a lot of meetings while we were there and we realised if we were to raise any sort of significant funding, a Delaware C-corp is a prerequisite.
This is how you do great content marketing and branding.
This entire video series is about inspiring people with a side benefit of illustrating what makes YC special.
Compare this to content by other accelerators (of which there are many). It's not a lecture nor a recital of advice. It's a series of relatable and personable stories with a consistent theme. Start with "Why" you do something, not how or what.
What you see in a 2 line press article is literally the simplest way to describe what their business is doing right now. The point of demo day is to get people interested in your idea for follow-ups.
Read: http://paulgraham.com/investors.html
There's a question on the app that asks (I'm paraphrasing) "what do you know about your market that others don't?".
Answer: What appears to be a lifestyle sized market to the casual onlooker is actually big business
Every time I check HN, there's a new crypto tool, encrypted databases, and tips on hardening your servers. No matter how secure your system is technically, there is always the requirement to make parts of it "insecure" (in the sense that people buy enterprise encryption, but expect the company that sells it to keep a spare copy of the keys to recover lost data just in case)
The reality in cyber security is that people provide the weakest and easiest point of entry to compromise any computer system. Until the business side and process side of things improve, shit like this will remain common.
Not exactly. If you use an standard VPN protocol right out of the box (read: OpenVPN), then yes it is automatically blocked. The OpenVPN SSL handshake is different to regular SSL.
There are certain ways you can disguise the traffic and the VPN companies that specialize in China do that- but the GFW is regularly updated so what works today probably won't work next month.
The other issue is that even if you do get a VPN working, they have a tendency to throttle your connection. VPN traffic is quite different to your regular http/https.
As someone with a startup that operates in both India and China, I completely agree that India will be the next big thing.
Both are messed up in their own ways. The difference is that in India, things are generally getting better. There are exceptions but the trend is moving towards a better internet ecosystem.
China on the other hand is a case of how to F* things up. They modernized their tech backbone so quicky hundreds of millions of people have access to fast (20 mbps+) internet. From there the government has made it virtually impossible to have a global tech focussed startup in China.
Just an example- npm repos are by default blocked in China. Apparently the automatic version control ended up with a number sequence that corresponds in some bamboozled way with a black date that's censored. Government had a hissy fit and therefore NPM is blocked. You have to reconfigure to use Chinese locally hosted repos which is a security risk (Read: IOS malware in Chinese versions of software)
We also got stung with a government request for data on users. Since the law in China changes with every government official you meet, some of the shit they ask for is beyond rediculous. To be fair, it's also happened in India, but the frequency is decreasing.
The price the manufacturer is looking to sell, this doesn't make sense. Sure it offers more hardware flexibility than a PI, but its ultimate form factor makes it at best a pi type substitute rather than opening up new possibilities like what the Arduino Nano does.
Edit Source: A Chinese government official in charge of a meat-producing SOE boasted about it during a presentation seeking foreign investment