Obviously you speak about the tech stack you use here, but your UX is absolutely perfect. I just used your product and got exactly what I wanted without even thinking. My brain didn't second-guess myself once. I didn't read anything superfluous - in fact I don't think I read anything at all. The search box and images of the phones did it all for me, and the autocomplete for search was perfect. I loved that only after I searched did it give me the option to refine (like size of model)
I usually use comparethemarket or something similar when shopping around, and it's a bit of a pain - though I only realised how much of a pain since using yours.
I don't know how much conscious thought and work you put into the UX - as you mainly talk about the tech - but it's great. Well done!
I come from a design background. I didn't like the UI/UX of similar comparison sites, so my aim was to improve upon what's already out there. Glad to see someone noticed!
I went and tried out the site due to this comment, and wow you're right! It's a very nice user experience. Nothing more or less than exactly what's needed for the purpose. All nice and snappy too. I wish webshops used UX like this.
If you're asking for financial advice based on the assumption that conventional finance may collapse, your hedge would be to invest in making yourself self-sustainable. Land, wood, gas, knowledge.
They found a bacteria with extra-genomic material that isn't in the shape of a plasmid (circular DNA that is a feature of bacterial transfection and gene transfer).
They believe it came from archean rather than bacterial sources. (Not really related, but many of our genes, and indeed one of our critical organelles, are also archea-derived, ie. the mitochondria.)
The genomic payload is large and comes with replication machinery (it might be a useful tool!)
Plasmids hold a much smaller payload than these units, and they're difficult to work with. Borgs are huge. If we can turn them into transfection toolkits, we can do larger scale genomic experiments much faster. That's extremely exciting.
Much of biochemistry research and understanding is done in bacteria. They're extremely useful little computers. We just discovered an extremely useful way to hack them.
In the wild, the gene payload codes for novel methane metabolic pathways. This also is of great interest. Not only for applicability to climate science, but also the natural ability to swap out or augment bacterial metabolism. Imagine all of the novel things you might swap in instead.
Who knows. These might wind up in eukaryotic cells too!
Plasmids are an absolute doddle to work with. Borgs are huge, which makes them a nightmare to work with.
I used to work with bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) that were ~100 kb in size, and those were already a pain. You have to be really delicate when preparing the DNA because it's so easy to shear. You can't separate it on a normal gel, you have to use PFGE. Borgs will be even worse.
Borgs being bigger means you can fit more interesting stuff into them. But i don't know to what extent that is a constraint at the moment. 100 kb is already a lot of space for bacteria!
Bacteria and eukaryotes are different enough that we won't find borgs themselves in eukaryotes, and if you put a borg into a eukaryote, it wouldn't replicate. However, they could be used as a vector for constructing human artificial chromosomes - you need something that replicates in working organism, like bacteria or yeast, so you can do the molecular biology, and you add the necessary human sequences to that:
At the moment, the biggest vectors we have are yeast artificial chromosomes, which i think top out at ~1 Mb.
But again, what are you going to do that needs that much space? A typical human gene is a few tens of kb; 40 kb is big (there are megabase freaks, but they are very rare). And that's for the gene, introns and all - often you can use a cDNA which is a fraction of the size.
Noncircular extragenomic dna in bacteria isn't a new thing, for example, the marine algae cyanothece has linear DNA, and iirc it is important in regulating day/night cycles for nitrogen fixation (which is oxygen sensitive)
I didn’t quite get the climate science impact. Is the suggestion that these borgs currently are “digesting” methane, and therefore helping reduce the amount of methane released to the atmosphere? Is there a suggestion that we might augment them to “digest” CO2 too?
You can often tell someone's age by whether or not they know analogies in this format. It used to be a staple of standardized testing on logical deduction.
A : B :: C : D
Is read as
A is to B as C is to D. The reader is meant to understand the relationship between A and B and how it's similar to the relationship between C and D.
An easy one might be,
basketball : hoop :: hockey puck : net
But they can get quite challenging. And with multiple choice answers present in standardized testing, you often have to understand the complex relationships between many abstract concepts, and evaluate that the abstractions are of a similar type or degree.
They're actually kind of fun.
Here's an example taken from [1] (the source also has excellent discussion as to why they were removed) :
PALTRY : SIGNIFICANCE ::
A. redundant : discussion
B. austere : landscape
C. opulent : wealth
D. oblique : familiarity
E. banal : originality
For what it's worth I'm a 25-year-old Australian who never encountered this specific syntax in schooling (it was always phrased "as <x> is to what?"), but am still very familiar with it from general interactions online.
It's probably just a matter of how strongly your immediate social circle feels about formal logic.
As one data point, we never did these sort of analogy puzzles in school in Finland (but we don't have standardized multiple-choice testing either). I'm only familiar with the concept and format as a part of the general anglosphere meme complex that you naturally get exposed to if you spend time on the internet.
I don't think it is as big a discovery as CRISPR. These are very cool, but in a basic science sort of way. The unknown proteins may be massively useful for methane processing, but no one knows that at this point. There are similar, although much smaller, genetic elements such as plasmids and BACs which could fill a similar role anyway.
I don't see what could make this a really big deal outside microbiology yet. But maybe someone else will see what I am missing.
Slightly off topic but can anyone explain to me why a massive company like coinbase uses Medium as a blogging platform/software? Why are they not hosting the blog within their own ecosystem/site?
From a technical point of view yes, your own hosted static site is way more efficient, you have more control over the stack, scaling, better metrics, security etc, etc.
From a business point of view it's more like...who the f*ck cares what you use? Did they read it? Yes? Good, move on.
Usually companies use blogs as marketing tools to drive traffic to their websites. I might be wrong, but in the case of Coinbase I have never really seen anything they wrote that was precisely intended at selling a product. It's usually more informative, and shows they are trying to be more of a positive force in the industry compared to a dominant one. Kudos on them if it is the intent, and I guess it would explain the choice of platform instead of investing time and assets in developing their own.
Sure. Because if you're a startup hiring SWEs, which are a scarce resource, why would you want them implementing something that exists and isn't part of your core business?
Also, the customer is the PR/marketing department, not the engineering department. The marketing people already know how to use these platforms well, so just let them use those.
Its distracting to have extra things that engineers have to look at every once in a while. Its cheaper when accounting for employee time to just outsource random non business critical things.
Look at the dns entries for lots of big company's blogs. Many of them are just CNAMEs for wpengine or some other third party host.
I could imagine coinbase have critical cookies containing user sessions attached to coinbase.com.
If they have a wordpress blog at blog.coinbase.com, then any xss attack in wordpress can steal customer accounts.
Sure, it's a fixable problem (by moving high security cookies into login.coinbase.com or something similar), but that's a big migration, and probably nowhere near the top of the engineering priority list.
So instead they point the domain at Medium and any XSS attack on Medium can steal their customer accounts.
I highly doubt either WordPress or Medium are susceptible to an XSS attack, but if I had to bet on one being safer I would bet on the open source software already used to power thousands of high profile websites.
The vast majority of the population is not at all like HN readers and doesn't even know what Coinbase is. Blogging on Medium gives them much better exposure and reach to non-crypto people who might become interested in them because it popped up on their Medium feed vs. on the Coinbase blog.
I kinda wonder about that. I've been INUNDATED by Coinbase advertisements on mobile apps and etc talking about incentives for learning what they do and etc.
They seem to really be pushing to get the general public on board.
Perhaps true, but conversely you could also argue that the sheer number of scams and frauds in the Cryptocurrency space that had medium blogs might also put people off!
Because blogging platforms are not their core competency, so it's worth outsourcing however big you are, and medium offers a better service than any alternative?
It’s okay, I’ve tried to explain what Palantir does on a few threads and always get a decent amount of pushback. So it goes with politicized issues.
So I get a lot of downvotes and lose some imaginary internet points; that’s fine. I’m not attacking anyone, and for the most part nobody is attacking me, so I’d still call this healthy if contentious debate.
Upvoted this because even though I think Palantir is dangerous and that you have argued for an ethical compass I greatly disagree with, I respect that you are willing to share an unpopular view to facilitate discussion of a complex issue.
You are a person I would gladly grab a beer with when such things are a thing again.
Great point. The problem doesn’t go away if you avoid discussion and downvote the messenger. Insider knowledge and perspectives, even (especially) when it comes to the ethically gray area companies, is one of the reasons this site is great!
This makes a lot of sense. An issue I have with this is that one reason my co-founder wants to split is that they don't really want the pressure of running a startup, and so are unlikely to go on to raise additional money.
Could a situation where I get a cash payout, say $20k from the company to sell a certain %, and then the convertible debt to sell more in the future work?
If the co-founder doesn't think there will be a need for any new funding, then that would imply that he expects the company to be cash-flow positive in the near-term.
I'd sit down and work out what are the cash flow forecasts and milestones. Contextualize what's a reasonable rate of return for implicitly funding the company by foregoing an immediate cash buyout. If/when the company achieves certain profitability milestones, then the note will pay back in installments.
Each successful milestone draws down the principal, each missed milestone increases the principal. If profitability isn't sustainably achieved, the note converts back into common equity. If/when there's a major funding event, the note converts to common equity or cash equivalent of the common equity valuation.
Essentially you're planning for three scenarios. 1) The business becomes profitable without further funding. You're paid off over time from the profits. 2) The business goes the fundraising route. You're paid off at the liquidity event. 3) The business succeeds at neither route. Your share of the equity reverts back to you, so you receive your fair share of the scraps.
"An issue I have with this is that one reason my co-founder wants to split is that they don't really want the pressure of running a startup"
Whereas it sounds like you have a solid plan to grow the business and generate revenue. As @jedberg says, this makes your interests aligned with the (neutral) investor, and the other founder at odds with the investor.
a) You and your cofounder can't work together
b) One must leave
The investor and one founder can push out the other founder. Who do you think the investor thinks should leave if you reread your quote above?
> An issue I have with this is that one reason my co-founder wants to split is that they don't really want the pressure of running a startup.
I’m confused. If they don’t want the pressure of running a startup, why isn’t the co-founder leaving, instead of trying to force you out and remain in charge?
This seems like the most realistic and likely answer. My co-founder hasn't really been budging so far and I feel like they don't fully understand the situation. They think that because it was their idea that they are entitled to a lot more than me.
One issue for me is that I don't have that much faith in them being able to execute on the company vision by themself, e.g. they don't want to monetize right now or do a revenue split for reasons I'm unclear about, which makes the practicality of monthly payments tricky.
Take it from me, a negotiated buy-out is the way to go. I had to buy out a former partner and negotiated a payment over 12 months. It worked out for everyone.
Current valuation should be valuation at the time of the investment multiplied by a small growth factor (1.5x perhaps).
Your stake is the amount you would have owned as of the first cliff (and not any sooner), which is 10% after the investment round.
if the company was valued at $1M at investment, then it would be worth maybe $1.5M at time of the 1yr cliff given the growth factor.
Your 10% of that is $150,000. The company should pay you $12,500 per month for 12 months to fully buy you out. And the company should time the payments to reduction in your equity. If they speed up payments, it speeds up the buy out. If they slow it down, it slows down the buy out.
They're not enjoying working on the company together. It's mainly that they don't like or want the stress of working on a startup, and want to run it more as a lifestyle business.
That is so bizarre and seems unbelievable. Feels like there is another reason they arent telling you. If you didnt want the stress, why boot the cofounder? If I didnt want the stress I'd try to maintain some ownership and have you step up more.
Something smells fishy, if they don't want the stress why would they want to do all the work alone? And there would still be investors bringing some pressure. They also didn't ask you if you agreed to run the business like a "lifestyle business", they directly ask you to leave. That sounds like a made up excuse.
You probably can't work together anymore now, but you both seem to think the business can be profitable, so if you decide to leave you should be compensated for what you built.
Don't rush the decision. You've worked for 11 months, you can take 2 weeks to talk about it and think things over.
We've spoken a fair bit and they don't have anything specific to say. It's mainly that they don't like or want the stress of working on a startup, and want to run it more as a lifestyle business.
They are trying to kick you out a month before you vest! These guys are not acting in good faith. Do not trust them. Wait a month and vest. Then quit.
You were the technical lead. More than anyone, you built it. Don't let these suits steal it from you or bluff you. So often business types take advantage of financially unsophisticated technical people.
If they want to run it as a lifestyle business, that might be some leverage with your investor. Lifestyle businesses are great, but they do not return the same as high-growth venture businesses.
That's tough. I think they will need to realise that the commitment to having seed funding and a co-founder are not the same as a lifestyle business - especially when they do not have funds of their own to fall back on and revenue is not presently hitting the numbers that would be needed.
Even a lifestyle business requires more than just 'coding'. That person at least is likely to have an unpleasant awakening. I just hope it doesn't hurt either of you too much
Obviously you speak about the tech stack you use here, but your UX is absolutely perfect. I just used your product and got exactly what I wanted without even thinking. My brain didn't second-guess myself once. I didn't read anything superfluous - in fact I don't think I read anything at all. The search box and images of the phones did it all for me, and the autocomplete for search was perfect. I loved that only after I searched did it give me the option to refine (like size of model)
I usually use comparethemarket or something similar when shopping around, and it's a bit of a pain - though I only realised how much of a pain since using yours.
I don't know how much conscious thought and work you put into the UX - as you mainly talk about the tech - but it's great. Well done!