barleyworth

Right, but one wonders why the parent commenter is not gleefully commenting about "fake news" on all of these articles: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+buys

This seems to be a notable story and doesn't need nakedly partisan hair-splitting.

I doubt you'd call it "fake news" if a corporate acquisition was announced, just because the deal hadn't yet passed regulatory approval.

But then again, you clearly seem to have a dog in this fight.

Not everyone wants to go to a baseball game where 1% of the fans are constantly getting into screaming matches about the other team sucking. Similarly, I will politely nope out of an online community that won't stop clobbering me with Team Red vs Team Blue debates. Free speech is not the same as "I should be listened to in proportion to how much I talk".

Fair point; I will try and avoid using "females" in the future.

FWIW, the main reason I used this phrasing was that I had already used the word "guys", but wanted to steer clear of the analogous word "girls". Using the word "women" seemed like I would be suggesting some sort of age/maturity dichotomy between "guys" and "women", and it seemed to me that "females" didn't have such a connotation.

> There was literally nothing wrong with the email

There were at least two things wrong with the email, from my perspective as a guy who's been around plenty of benign bro culture.

1. Explicitly mentioning "sex" as opposed to "relationship" or "dating", and talking about it so casually, sets a very aggressive tone. 20-something guys with lots of hormones will definitely hear that tone and push hard for sex during the trip (the implication is that there will be lots of it, and nobody wants to be left out). Females reading this surely know that they'll receive lots of attention and advances during the trip, whether they want it or not – even if you assume that the guys will be asking for consent, it's still uncomfortable for those who want to be professional and avoid work relationships.

2. "Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML." Implication there is that there are many people on the team that the Travis wants to sleep with. If you're a female subordinate of the CEO whom he speaks with somewhat flirtily, you can infer that he's thinking "FML, I wish I could sleep with her".

The next sentence in the article does a better job at illustrating his point: "Conversely, the vast majority of startup option packages end up being worth little to nothing, but nearly none of the employees whose options end up being worthless were instrumental in causing their options to become worthless."

I interpret the point as being: the monetary outcome of a startup for the employee is a function of their individual contribution (which is what I think the author means by being "instrumental"), plus the contribution of the founders and other employees, plus luck. The magnitude of the individual contribution is small relative to the other factors, so it's difficult to say that a successful startup employee "deserves" a windfall and an unsuccessful one doesn't. The lower the correlation between individual contribution and monetary outcome, the less options should matter for motivating early employees.

Well, both Obama and Trump inherited a pretty broken TSA. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to whether the organization is improving or getting worse.

Generally I doubt that a president deserves credit, positive or negative, for changes in random agencies like the TSA. Like, does Obama really deserve bonus points for us being able to use cell phones during takeoff+landing? But you have to admit that a country-specific ban has Trump written all over it. People are rightly pointing out why it's a misguided policy.

Yeah, that subreddit is terrifying. I'm more afraid of the people in there than any other terrorist group. E.g. another comment on the same thread says very matter-of-factly: "Let's just say by now you should have already bought multiple guns."

Box has a negative P/E, so I'll assume you're talking about P/S here.

You seem to be suggesting that companies within an industry should all have the same price-to-sales multiple. (Or at least they'd "better have" the same multiple. Or else?) This is because, while all the companies have different quantitative and qualitative aspects, the mutual competition "effectively cancels out" those differences when it comes to valuation.

Snark aside, here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:

* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)

* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer

* subscriber growth

* margins (i.e. storage costs)

Perhaps your conclusion about the relative values of these companies is correct, but the fact that you're not mentioning any of the points above means that it's very difficult to give any credibility to your argument.