Sqreen (YC W18) is one counterexample, but they came into YC at a later stage of maturity than your average YC company.
As to why there aren't many others, that's a great question. It's a hard space to get started in, since security is mission critical for essentially everyone, so that likely doesn't help matters. There's a lot more that needs to go into a viable MVP in cybersecurity than in other areas as well, since there's much less room for error and jank.
Those reasons likely contribute, but none of them are hard blockers.
This article makes two assumptions that need more support. One, that having a particular "threshold brain structure" is a necessary condition for consciousness. And two, that consciousness is a binary, as opposed to a spectrum.
These kinds of sites are exactly that: niche Craigslists. Since they are marketplaces, they see their job as connecting two groups that want to engage with each other (in this case, camera owners and people who want to rent a camera), and anything beyond connecting people has nothing to do with them.
It's best to think of these kind of sites as digital telephone poles with flyers and act accordingly, but it's hard when, in an attempt to grow their user base, they exaggerate the value they offer and make people think they're safer or getting more out of them than they really offer. Those kind of tactics deserve to be called out
Definitely thought provoking. I hadn't thought much about how the effects of the fear of retribution reverberate in how people and companies interact with governments, employers, and suppliers.
I feel like this is usually discussed on the micro-level (e.g. an employee's fear of whistleblowing on her boss), but not so much on the macro-level.
Right. Outlier success is heavily driven by randomness, sometimes with a real differentiator edge thrown it. It doesn't last because randomness is never permanently positive over a sufficient sample size and whatever edge someone may have is studied and copied or counteracted once they start to outpace everyone else.
But to be fair, outlier success in many fields is rarely possible without some initial high level of skill and knowledge in the first place.
Joking that a reasonable leaving hour == too early isn't a good joke. It plants the idea that the reasonable hour maybe isn't reasonable in other peoples' minds.
That kind of thing only works as a joke when it's about an obviously late hour (i.e. well past the norms of the company). If someone stays until 9pm to put out some fire and then people joke about working a half day, its obvious that there's no underlying meaning to that, since the leaving hour is well past the established norms
Yes, this fits closer to reality. Most people want to spend as little as possible on rent for a situation that matches their needs. Just because fancier apartments become available at higher prices doesn't mean people will move into them from a cheaper place just because they can technically afford it. Plenty of people rent apartments below their "I can afford this" level in order to use that money elsewhere or save up for a future house.
Building luxury housing doesn't push prices lower on the bottom half of the housing spectrum, it just makes the top end higher. "Trickle down" housing takes way too long to be realized, while subsidized housing has a much stronger and immediate impact[0]
I assumed this was going to be about avoiding flow while doing actual work, but this is only in the context of practice and training.
I can see the argument for avoiding flow and focusing on your weaknesses when your goal is self-improvement (and to take the jump from there that it's important to set aside some time to focus on self-improvement), but that doesn't apply when your goal is actual output, which is the majority of the time when it comes to most of our jobs
Yeah Bird's rollout in SF put them in a very negative light for a lot people (myself included). Perhaps there's more acceptance for scooters this time around, so it'll go better for them.
This specific law may not have a large effect in and of itself, but having something like this out there can set the stage for future change as well. Momentum is very much a thing in politics, so anything that takes steps in the right direction could ultimately contribute to getting that ball rolling
Right, this makes sense to me. If you can cut down on customers' needs to make a decision, you'll increase the likelihood that someone makes a purchase. Building consumer trust by recommending actually good products is in Amazon's interest here
In SF at least, Ubers and Lyfts often treat unprotected bike lanes as drop-off and pick-up zones as well, which adds another dangerous wrinkle for bikers
Definitely an intentional strategy on Medium's part. Guess they think the increase in revenue will outweigh the decline in the number of new articles and readership. They might be right, but the experience for both publishers and readers is much shittier as a result now.
We wrote this for CTOs since prior to hiring a dedicated security engineer, security responsibilities in a company often fall to the CTO. But really, any more technical person in a company with some ownership or interest in security can leverage this.
It's not something we hardcore enforce, since it's more about having a fun way to build good security habits with your devices. Being lightly called out in Slack has an impact in and of itself. The actual cookies are just a bonus. But people do like cookies, so there is some social pressure from your peers asking when the cookies are coming!
Figuring out a clean shorthand way to group these best practices was something we definitely thought about. The idea behind using funding rounds was to find something that can work as an easily digestible placeholder for company maturity and capabilities for most SaaS startups. Something closer to “just starting out,” “product-market fit,” and “starting to scale” rather than being specifically about actual funding levels.
Definitely open to feedback if that way of grouping things doesn't resonate!
Yes, it feels like it would be a fairly straightforward econ model actually. If the combined price for all the platforms gets too high and the user experience too terrible, then it's an easy flip to piracy. I get that all these publishing companies are trying to get as close to that line as possible, but as they're (naturally) all interested in maximizing their own profits rather than thinking about the collective industry profit, I don't doubt we'll cross that line before too long
I think besides the dichotomy of finding your in-group necessitating more clearly defining the out-groups and the harm that can come with that, there's also an underlying question of whether or not being able to so easily "find your people" is a positive thing in sum. It certainly seems positive for marginalized people and for niche fandoms and geekeries and all the usual ways we think about it, but on the flip side of the coin, the same ease also exists for hate groups and those seeking to cause harm.
No, the article feels like it's not communicating the reason that this is potentially important very well. If I'm reading this right, the whole opening takeaway about the Atlantic ocean shrinking doesn't seem like the point here.
From what I gather in TFA, we haven't figured out how subduction zones start, and we're currently observing the beginning of one in progress, which is giving us the data to back up earlier theories for the first time. This fills an important gap in our understanding of plate tectonics.
I think this is an important point. The fact that some countries have started to impose regulation against some of the tactics these gaming companies use (like Belgium banning loot boxes[0]) suggests that this is starting to be recognized.
I'm a big fan of video games, but games that are essentially thinly-veiled attempts to get people addicted and extract money make me queasy.
As to why there aren't many others, that's a great question. It's a hard space to get started in, since security is mission critical for essentially everyone, so that likely doesn't help matters. There's a lot more that needs to go into a viable MVP in cybersecurity than in other areas as well, since there's much less room for error and jank.
Those reasons likely contribute, but none of them are hard blockers.