Viewing profile — bokonist

I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, var…

I would love to read a blog post with further explanation of what you found out when trying to solve unemployment with your startup.

I switched to reading most non-fiction on my ipad, for exactly this reason.

The issue is that you need to find an idea for a product, wherein 1) the product has the potential to generate tens of millions of dollars of value 2) the first, valuable, version …

In the first cut of your analysis (without rebalancing) the portfolio actually goes negative (I'm looking at the first graph in the notebook). An equity portfolio cannot go negativ…

That is not the correct way to think about it. Say that the initial offering is for 10 million shares at $20 a share. Then the price pops to $30. That $30 share price is based on a…

The company and investment banker make you sign a contract saying that you will not buy or sell any derivatives or options or any security based on the stock. Now they probably cou…

Funny you mention this, I have just started building a site to help with this exact problem. Seems like there is so much good content out there, but it is hard to find the good eve…

"heck, it's Valentines day, do something sappy and tell them how I feel" I have never seen this actually work. I have failed doing it myself. Sappiness is what girls want from the …

1. From reading their post, it seems like they made their own REST API for the key server. So it would be nice if they open sourced the service behind it, to alleviate fears of loc…

Two things that would make this have more hope of becoming a standard: 1) open source the key server with the REST-API 2) allow domain owners to define their own key server via a D…

A 1% tax is a little bit steep. But what if the tax was only .1%? Or maybe you make it a 0% tax for the first ten years, .1% tax for the next twenty years, and 1% a year after that…

Why do you think that would improve outcomes? From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right tr…

Instead of focusing on reducing the inequality, we need to convince the rich people that paying more tax to educate the majority of the population is a good thing for themselves in…

The glass walls would be more tolerable if the mid-section was opaque/frosted glass, so you still get the light but you also get a degree of privacy.

It also depends on your definitions. If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigat…

You can cite academic articles, but only do so if you can personally vouch for them being good, rather than just relying on the echo chamber of citations. Because if I follow your …

The usage of words has shifted, but my point remains. The genetic/ethnic/racial difference between Irish and British was much, much less than that between the British and Black Afr…

The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from re…

The issue is that most Americans don't have high enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education. Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Ame…

You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and gross…

Question for Sam about the issue of high-skill immigration: Does YC have any sort of tracking of the number of engineers blocked from going to YC companies because they could not g…

I've added a sentence to make it clear I was talking about "immigration more generally" As for your point... Anyone who gets on a moral high horse about "discrimination" is going t…

" Aside from the obvious and well-documented economic benefits (for high-skilled workers especially, but for immigration more generally), it’s a matter of justice—I don’t think I d…

Sam says " It amazes me that I can become relatively proficient on any subject I want, for free, from a $50 smartphone nearly anywhere in the world. " but he also says, " I think i…