Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman covered some science behind exposure to white noise during development/using white noise machines with babies in his episode "The Science of Hearing, Balance & Accelerated Learning". Its nuanced, but he says there is some evidence it can be detrimental to a baby's brain/auditory system if used for long periods of time. https://youtu.be/JVRyzYB9JSY?t=3351
> Btw if somebody knows this kind of thinking from a different source I would appreciate some pointers, because I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with this but I haven't stumbled upon it yet and I would much prefer to point people to that direction.
I just finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals. Similar thinking in that a lot of suffering and procrastination is caused by not accepting the reality of our finite time on earth, that we can never do it all, and we have to make tough choices and most people try avoid the anxiety of facing those by distracting themselves. I loved the book, and your comment, as refreshing take on “productivity” but I recognize it’s also extremely difficult for many people to practice.
Same concept as belon.gs but your site is more clear and better designed. I have several of their tags from a startup event a few years ago but haven't lost anything yet. http://belon.gs/
Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the product ready to go. Certainly they didn't push it as hard as Dropbox did; I didn't notice it existed until I started seeing it activated by default in Win8.
It's not negative commentary. It is a legitimate user interface issue that several people experienced. It is also super easy for them to fix. Sometimes(always) when you launch a new product or design, you want feedback on the silly little things you wouldn't have thought of that could potentially turn people away. The attention span of cold clicks is measured in seconds. Any silly issue can push someone to click off. I have used a computer extensively for many years and thought it was a live demo for a few seconds. As they say in web usability, don't make people think.
The dramatic hyperbole drives it from being "surfacing an issue" to negative bashing.
"Did anybody else spend half a minute trying to interact with the "app", then give up and close the tab, thinking it was broken before coming back here to discover that it was just a full-page screenshot of a desktop app?"
xauronx, and the majority of the other folks explaining the issue, took a much more reasonable approach—"it was a .5 second instinct to interact with it and then I figured it out. Not sure if that constitutes a negative UI experience or not, but it IS an issue. "
It's just unbelievable to think that anyone familiar with a web interface would get so confused by the screenshot that their only recourse would be to abandon ship.
Here are a couple ways that common stock can become worthless:
- The most obvious and common, the company fails / does not exit
- The company raises money and the investors have liquidation preferences. This means that the investor is guaranteed to make 3 times what they put in when the company is acquired. So, for example, if you raise 10 million dollars and your investors have 3x liquidation preferences, you have to sell the company for over 30 million before common shareholders see any money at all. So in this situation (and it is common), the common stock is essentially worthless.
Even with a 1X multiplier, that preferred stock still has a good chance to give the 1% employee getting the shaft.
Let's say that there are 5 board members, and 3 of them are VC reps. Those VC companies have 50% of the company, with dibs on the first $50 million. Now, it's time to sell the company.
Pretend the company could be worth between $0 million and $100 million. Figure out what the VCs are likely to sell the company for, remembering that they get 100% of the first $50 million and 0% of the next $50 million.
Respectfully, I cannot recall seeing a single YC company which has given up 3X LP at any stage short of an out and out crisis - and I've seen a few (work on the investor side). Hell, short of short-term debt which is clearly a bridge to an acquisition of sorts, you never see those terms. The high level point is valid (LP is there for a reason), but not to the scale you talk about it.
