bfwi

This is not truly a 0% loan.

Because of the fees, you will pay a minimum of 0,74%.

Also because these mortgage instruments are traded at a price less than 100, you have to take out a loan larger than the amount of money that will be payed out. For example, to loan $100 you might have to take out a loan where you start out owing $105, which further increases the actual interest.

I'm not convinced that selling some of his SpaceX stock on the secondary market is difficult, or that selling some of his Tesla stocks would cause a rout, especially when the immediate consequence would be paying back the debt, thereby saving the company.

But I hope some experts (e.g. stock analysts) would comment on this scenario, I think it's interesting.

Thanks for the facts.

You state that he can't buy out Tesla, which is true. But why does he need to buy out Tesla to cover their debt? On the contrary he would need to sell some of his Tesla (and perhaps SpaceX) stock and give the cash to Tesla to cover their debt.

Why is the Tesla stock illiquid? It's publicly traded.

I'm sure he could sell SpaceX stock on the secondary market quite easily. SpaceX has never lacked in interest from investors.

The CEO has shown willingness to fund Tesla Motors and SpaceX with almost all his personal funds. If I remember correctly, he is worth more than Tesla's debt, and unless he is somehow unable to liquidate enough assets to cover that debt, it won't be the end of Tesla.

How does secondary market transaction work, in these cases? Is it only when a round is raised that shareholders can take money off the table, or does it ever happen between rounds as well?

If you're a profitable private company, aren't you legit?

I don't imagine Sam Altman made enough money from the sale of Loopt to lead a $50m round (only guesswork though). Is he somehow leveraged by having raised a fund for "personal investments". The latter would be a really interesting.

Maybe @sama himself could answer this, if it's not too personal.

"never publicly demonstrated" still leaves the possibility that they privately demonstrated a prototype to investors.

The landing page is probably just for showing people that they're working on the product. Very few of the eventual consumers are going to visit the site in its current form.

As always, the people of HN have found the weaknesses in this product that the founders haven't thought of at all, and they will surely shut the whole thing down now.

So this guy invites people to interviews by saying: “You know what, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Is there any chance you have a couple hours in the next few days to come in and meet a few people on the team?”. Then, as stated under "PHASE 3", the process is not staying for a couple hours and meeting a few people on the team, but actually an interview lasting at least 50 minutes with hiring manager, a 90 minute session working on a problem, then a talk about culture, another technical interview and finally an interview about fit.

This might be an effective way to get people to accept the invitation, but it doesn't seem totally honest.

Look at Uber's job postings, and you can see what kind of employees are required for each new geography.

This seems to insinuate that financial firms are not as numerous or maybe not as big as before. Does anyone know whether the financial sector has significantly grown or diminished from 2001 to now?

This was a nice story about thorough debugging, but I can't see how the discovery method is anything different than what most people use.

Just looked at the Jasper project. The voice synthesizer sounds like crap compared to a product like Siri, and I suspect the voice recognition is worse too. I've coded on some the stuff using voice synthesis and recognition for fun, and it seems that the open source options haven't gotten any better for the past 15 years.

It doesn't look like applications from Google have been denied. Since the H1B visas are drawn in a lottery where there's three times as many applications as the quota, how are Google able to get all their application certified?

EDIT: Apparently 21/2436 have been denied. That's still nowhere close to 2/3 though

This talk might have been brilliant, but I wasn't really able to take away any concrete lessons or advice from it. In my opinion it was far too vague. I've really enjoyed the other talks though.

The "etiquette" of these companies sounds absolutely soul-crushing.

Did the author use one of his own tweets as source material?

What: A site/app that will tell you the most popular events in your city, and which event you should go to.

Why: I wanna be able to reach after my phone and quickly find out where I should go to have fun.

Come on, edit that.

I've been thinking about finding an app like this for a while. This is an ok implementation, but I think it's too rigid. Something like this should be messier and give the user some more freedom to arrange stuff the way he wants. More like an actual desk and less like a list of notes. Does anyone know of an app like that?

If that happened, people would just stop using the service since nothing got sold.

What about a jet turbine? Plenty of stuff is dangerous if it "fails" in the worst way.

Can't seem to find the videos of the Startup School Europe talks. Will they be put on youtube?

How much of Google's cloud stack are you required to use to apply for this program? If they require you to use GAE for your backend for example, I think it's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of startups.

For those of you who choose Pros over Airs; why does a Pro serve you better than an Air? Is it because it's your only machine, and you need the hardware to be beefy?