damoncali

10 ms·

31.
by damoncali 11y ago
It's not a indefensible position. But it is different , and makes direct comparisons more difficult.
32.
by damoncali 11y ago
Most car companies include R&D in COGS. So it's fair to point out that Tesla does not.
33.
by damoncali 11y ago
That's generally what people mean in finance - YOY growth. Otherwise you get seasonal data problems (pretty much every retailer's Q4 is huge relative to Q3 because of Christmas, for example). As always, dig deeper. Tesla isn'
34.
by damoncali 11y ago
Cool. The funny thing is I inserted a constraint of my own invention without even realizing it: "Use the fewest number of examples possible." Of course, this meant failing miserably, and was nowhere in the problem statement. Perha
35.
by damoncali 11y ago
Yeah, I worked there for 6 years, mostly at Goddard on the HST project. It was very relaxed - to the point of boredom at times (that's why I left, despite the insanely cool work). The guys in Virginia (where I worked about a year or so
36.
by damoncali 11y ago
For some context, that's roughly the cost of a single instrument for the Hubble (~$100M). There's no free lunch in the space business...
37.
by damoncali 11y ago
I used to work for Orbital as a NASA contractor. I never dealt with the business end of things, but the margins were small and very stable so long as there was work to be done (i.e. a giant (sub)contract on some huge NASA project). It wasn&
38.
by damoncali 11y ago
The cargo bays are laid out a little differently - If I recall correctly, it was mostly due to different styles of airlock between different orbiters. And since the loading on the cargo is highly dependent on where it sits in the bay, you c
39.
by damoncali 11y ago
It's part of the job. I was working on a mission scheduled to be launched on Columbia when it blew up. Loss of life aside, that our vehicle blew up wasn't the end of the world. We just used another (which required some adjustment-
40.
by damoncali 11y ago
Neither term is terribly precise. I mean "AR15/M16 platform". They're all basically the same from the perspective of organized crime.
41.
by damoncali 11y ago
How bizarre. Brand new M16 lowers are like $75 retail. I can't imagine the motive for making them, unless they're just hobbyists who happen to be drug lords.
42.
by damoncali 11y ago
I don't really have anything I can show you directly, but here's what I do: I recreate the view directory structure in the assets folder, but only for views where I need a complex (angular) UI. So I might have a file in assets&#x2
43.
by damoncali 11y ago
I've been using Rails since 1.1 or so. It was the first framework I picked up, and the learning curve was steep for me (I didn't even know what a GET was at the time). It is much more involved now. Before there was no bundler, no
44.
by damoncali 11y ago
Pro tip: whenever you read "$XX billion dollar market", replace it in your head with "It's big (obviously) but we basically made up a number to make it sound like we know what we're talking about". That and com
45.
by damoncali 11y ago
A pay raise would do it. But actual money is hard to come by in an unprofitable high growth company. What is really desirable is a way to distribute equity in a way that is not so complex from a legal and taxation stand point, is manageable
46.
by damoncali 11y ago
it's disappointing that the author didn't even seriously discuss the possibility of simply paying higher salaries in lieu of equity. Apparently that's simply taboo. I think most people would like that, but options can be cr
47.
by damoncali 11y ago
You're missing the point. A typical options agreement today is not able to be exercised after you quit, even if you're vested. You might have 30 days. IPO is likely a decade away or more, if there is one at all. Where is the liqui
48.
by damoncali 11y ago
I think it's more along the lines of "the old way we used to value and award options/equity isn't very compelling for employees these days. We need to think of better ways to give employees ownership." That's a
49.
by damoncali 11y ago
That's a different issue - that many options agreements require exercising within 30 days of leaving (or so). There's no reason it has to be done that way. There are very good reasons that restricted stock is, well, restricted.
50.
by damoncali 11y ago
This is nothing new. And it actually makes sense. You can't have people running around selling restricted shares willy nilly. It wold be a nightmare.
51.
by damoncali 11y ago
I get cable for four months a year to watch college football. Then I cancel it. Kind of a pain, but that's what it's come down to. Incidentally, it is WAY easier to cancel a Cox account in person at the local office than on the ph
52.
by damoncali 11y ago
You're supposed to put the year the material was copyrighted, not the current year.
53.
by damoncali 11y ago
Not exactly. It has legal purposes - IANAL (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), but I believe it has to do with proving willful misuse (which matters somehow) and establishing a date of copyright. I believe that the idea is to put th
54.
by damoncali 11y ago
Not so. The technology invested in razors is significant, and their pricing has been studied to hell and back. Gillette is selling a very sophisticated product, and they test it thoroughly. It's a pretty fascinating business, actually.
55.
by damoncali 11y ago
What sort of SaaS product has a 2% chargeback rate? That's huge.
56.
by damoncali 11y ago
It was a long time ago - maybe 2008 - so I don't really recall. We called what seemed most likely to be technical support, and they had no freakin' idea what we were talking about.
57.
by damoncali 11y ago
We once asked Auth.net support an API question. The response: "What's an API?"
58.
by damoncali 11y ago
You have to look at the terms before making that judgement. It seems very unlikely that it's a straight equity deal. You could imagine a preferred offering with a 1x liquidation preference and some modest return, for example. The detai
59.
by damoncali 11y ago
Don't be so afraid of being wrong. You'll never get anything done being right all the time.
60.
by damoncali 11y ago
When I worked on the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 90's I kept hearing the electrical guys talking about the new computer we were going to install. They called it simply, "the 486". I one day joked that I had had a 486 a

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