bfe

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181.
by bfe 14y ago
Great essay, though I don't think it's precise in how it characterizes pg's status as a serial entrepreneur. There's no doubt YC is a second startup, but it's still sort of a unique case or meta-startup that serves pg's prior stated interes
182.
UltraVISTA: 216,268 galaxies in one image(ultravista.org)
2 points by bfe 14y ago|0 comments
183.
by bfe 14y ago
This essay is from 2002 (and most of the citations in the longer cited version were quite old even then), and a great deal has been learned through DNA studies since then. And some of his points of evidence such as the coloration on a piece
184.
by bfe 14y ago
"Humans have not walked on the Moon in my lifetime." I remember being really disappointed as a little kid when I first learned we hadn't yet gone anywhere farther away than the Moon. I want to go to other planets and explore them when I gro
185.
by bfe 14y ago
And I think it makes a big difference that they're meaningfully aiming to transcend the iPad, not just imitate it.
186.
by bfe 14y ago
Just for perspectives on "all the naysayers that are betting against the company", the percentage of stock on loan (e.g. for shorting) for Facebook was about 1% versus 5.3% for Zynga and 4.1% for LinkedIn as of May 23rd (the most recent I h
187.
by bfe 14y ago
A more or less big dip for a tech company when the lock-up expires was already an old cliche before the dot-com bust. I'm puzzled why the companies don't do more to prevent it.
188.
by bfe 14y ago
... which I had just discovered on your effective and well-designed alt-resume page: http://marcneuwirth.com/projects/ I love how you have thumbnail links to each project next to icons of the languages/frameworks/tools you used to build t
189.
by bfe 14y ago
Did this just get accepted to YC way after the deadline?
190.
by bfe 14y ago
When you need legal advice, talk to a lawyer.
191.
by bfe 14y ago
Google started as an umpteenth search company on cheap machines and offered to sell out for one million, and Amazon started just by selling books from a website with buggy tech and workers kneeling on the floor to package the books. They bo
192.
by bfe 14y ago
About 100,000 years ago, the entire subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens -- all of our ancestors -- consisted of about 2,000 to 5,000 individuals living around the Rift Valley in Kenya. What if they had built museums of their art, culture, an
193.
by bfe 14y ago
Even if we settle on a bunch of other planets, I imagine we will always remain interested in preserving Earth as well. It will always be our original home. And astrophysical engineering of the solar system should enable us to keep the Earth
194.
by bfe 14y ago
At its heart, this is straightforward mechanics using precision measurements of the tangential motion of a statistically large sample of bright stars in Andromeda, as opposed to trying to track every single star in Andromeda (impossible of
195.
The stars like sea froth: the end of our home galaxy(bfe242.com)
1 points by bfe 14y ago|0 comments
196.
by bfe 14y ago
Fascinating. "It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed." Pretty close, but not precisely zero danger -- and from a broader perspective, this is a
197.
by bfe 14y ago
Yep - Elon talked about this about an hour ago in the post-splashdown press conference and said the future dragon will be able to do precision soft landings where there is little atmosphere or no atmosphere, so we can deliver payloads to ot
198.
by bfe 14y ago
And it looks like they are planning for a future Dragon to do precision landings on a landing pad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m...
199.
Groupon flunks Peter Thiel's startup class(bfe242.com)
2 points by bfe 14y ago|1 comments
200.
by bfe 14y ago
Even if that were the limit, and assuming 20 startups per partner, the idea of launching 400 startups every six months of ever-increasing quality and with ever-increasing network effects feels like a phase change.
201.
by bfe 14y ago
Lots of the top hedge funds also have total crap or almost non-existent websites -- but this is venture capital for tech startups. Rather than looking at what some top VC firms' websites are like, a more telling question is, what does a web
202.
by bfe 14y ago
The Lightspeed Venture graphic is the best, looks like they were aiming for the Peter Jackson tricks of perspective to make the front row guys look like hobbits. Maybe looking to corner the hot Shire startup scene?
203.
by bfe 15y ago
I think his result might be wrong. It doesn't jump out at you from his map since it's on an edge of the area, but it also has big voids on the northeast corner of Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. If you examine carefully, you can
204.
by bfe 15y ago
Pretty much any offer to acquire a significant public company is going to be made at a significant premium to the share price at the time of the offer. Saying MS offered to acquire at a significant premium reduces to saying merely that MS m
205.
by bfe 15y ago
For a great reply to this, read the chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds" in Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". We can never do a good job guessing what eventual engineering applications will emerge from researching the frontiers of physics, wh
206.
by bfe 15y ago
One of my quantum physics professors liked to say it was fitting they were able to find beauty but almost despaired of finding truth.
207.
An Android devotee's first impressions with the Apple iPhone(bfe242.posterous.com)
4 points by bfe 15y ago|0 comments
208.
by bfe 15y ago
Ultimately, economic growth comes from growth in productivity, i.e. making stuff people want. We seem to be riding an ever-increasing complexity of arbitrary systems, including tax laws, financial regulations, healthcare regulations, etc. t
209.
by bfe 15y ago
There's a large body of solid research showing striking benefits from regular exercise in helping avoid and overcome mental illness, as well as physical illness. Even if you feel like you don't have the time or conditioning to do anything e
210.
by bfe 15y ago
It's not just hypothetical -- Robert Zubrin describes exactly that scenario when he was an engineer at Lockheed and had to watch his inventions shelved because they would have undercut the costs of the existing launch technology, which prom

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