rkischuk

Forget about car seats - bring your own vests and don't worry about it: http://saferide4kids.com/product/ridesafer-travel-vest/

Disclaimer: I haven't tried them. But I'd be open to it, as someone with kids who would prefer not to own a car eventually.

Almost every time I encounter cyclists in traffic, they context switch between vehicle and pedestrian at their convenience.

If you want to be treated as a vehicle, be a vehicle. Don't block a lane between intersections and then ride the divider lines to advance ahead of cars at every intersection so they can wait and merge around you once the light turns.

As a former bike commuter, I really don't understand why bikes are required to ride the roads and behave like cars. They seem far more compatible to ride sidewalks and co-travel with pedestrians.

Startup Founder. Married. 2 kids. We live in Mableton, and our office is in midtown. I know both areas well.

Cost of "home" in Midtown, $500k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/847-Myrtle-St-NE-Atlanta-G...

Cost of "home" in Mableton, $200k: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4582-Somerset-Rd-SW-Smyrna...

Midtown, local elementary school is a 2/10 on GreatSchools. Mableton, 7/10. If you want to live anywhere near midtown and have a decent public school, tack on another $150k and you lose most of the touted walkability.

It's strange to build Mableton up as the straw man for Atlanta suburbs since it's only 10 miles from midtown and a ~25 minute commute to several of Atlanta's job centers, and is probably more diverse both racially and economically than midtown. A place like Kennesaw, 20 miles out, 45+ minute commute, and less diverse would be a smarter target.

So much of these discussions seem to be single people arguing against places they've never lived, trying to convince people whose lifestyles they don't understand.

That documents retirement of an API. Someone visiting "search.twitter.com" in a browser wants to see a web page. It would seem sensible to redirect them to a place where they can do that.

In case someone at Twitter actually fixes this tonight, here's a screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/117450/twitter-search.pn...

Embarrassing.

The Crunchbase numbers of only 21 startups started since 2008 are grossly misstated, even based on Crunchbase data.

I think I personally know 21 companies started AND funded since then in Atlanta. When I search for individual companies, they show up as "Atlanta, GA" and "Founded 8/2010" (for example), but they don't show up in a search.

I'd expect there are probably at least 100 Atlanta companies in Crunchbase founded since January 2008, and probably over 300 companies founded in that time. A possibly unexpected trait of Atlanta is that our companies aren't super-focused on Crunchbase, Angel List, etc, so we probably under-report on most research like this. (Our own fault - Atlanta companies - spend 10 minutes to add your startup to Crunchbase and Angel List).

I spent 3 years as a CTO and Executive Producer in social and children's games.

The world of gaming is surprisingly unreceptive to the premise of a "minimum viable product". It is EXTREMELY difficult to "pivot" a game. The level of polish and extent of gameplay required to meet consumer expectations for a game requires a commitment well beyond the bounds of any typical B2B or B2C product.

From my experience, the best approach to a gaming company is to build many, small games, taking on client projects to fund the company while building company projects with bench time. It's sustainable, but painful, and is an inferior path to success relative to most other startups.

The bar of quality in gaming has been set too high by companies willing to lose money on failures to make the occasional hit. You might as well start a movie production startup.

As a Flashpoint alum, I can certainly say that the resources that area limited are not those of the school. The most limited resources are those of appropriate mentors and advisors, and the time of the members of each team during group gatherings.

Much the same case here. The availability of suitable mentors and coaches is limited, and you don't want spend too much time in very large group gatherings.

So... MRSA Staph Infection... what is the cost to correctly diagnose? And what is the cost of the antibiotics?

I'm not a doctor, but most non-boutique antibiotics are dirt cheap.

I didn't intend to trivialize the illness. I more meant that this could happen to _anyone_. And if this is the cost for things that can happen to anyone, we have a real problem on our hands. Much like it's a problem that a basic, no-complications, baby delivery costs $15-20k.

Insurance is math, and the math gets scary quickly unless costs are controlled.

This is putting things exactly backwards. The argument is roughly "Treating a minor condition cost $24k, which could wipe people out financially, therefore PPACA is important."

Where is the outrage over this price? What part of PPACA does ANYTHING to reduce this cost? PPACA does essentially 2 things: 1) It makes insurance "affordable" for people who previously couldn't obtain it at all. 2) Drastically increases demand for health care, without adding to supply or controlling costs any other way.

Insurance is simply a distribution of cost over a risk pool. If relatively mundane life happenings cost $24k, and nothing is being done to fix that, we're in real trouble, and I think we are.

Nothing done to increase the pool of doctors. Nothing done to control medical lawsuit costs, which transfer money from the insurance pool to individuals. Nothing done to control the cost of drugs (and in some cases, aggravated by making more expensive drugs "free").

Bring the cost down to $2,400 and "wiping people out" isn't as big a concern.

From the entrepreneur's perspective, I found Pando Daily's writer to be very professional, and very intentional about building good context around our story.

Also enjoyed their interest in a story in Atlanta, which has a good startup culture rolling, outside of the usual "startup cities".

Interesting. I do think they have their PR team more engaged right now since it's prime application season.

I'm not sure this is much different from any other accelerator. I've heard that this experience is pretty similar for TechStars or YC rejections. That said, you could easily contend that as a less established accelerator, they should seem more hungry, but this also runs into the conundrum that as a less established accelerator, they have fewer resources to do this. Even during the program, communication could be a bit haphazard.

It's probably a good suggestion to challenge previous applicants to reapply if they believe they have made significant progress. TechStars did just do this.

Thanks! Hope to catch you around ATL.

Sure, you can micro-parse the language, and yes, I mean it's at the 50% co-pay or whatever.

If I were trying to explain the rationale in this case, I'd theorize it's because this is typically something that happens once in a lifetime (if at all). I'd expect once one wisdom tooth gets cranky, they'd yank the rest at the same time. So, in this case, the thought would be that people partially pay for it when it happens rather than making everyone in the insurance pool pay for that risk every month, especially people with no wisdom teeth.

But I am not an actuary or insurer, so I don't know for sure.

I said "not always". Although it seems possible that scheduled wisdom tooth extraction may have been possible with proper care, regular x-rays, etc, that's not really the point.

In my recollection, scheduled wisdom tooth extraction has usually been on the same 50% co-pay as emergency wisdom tooth extraction. And I don't think the "emergency" part has the cost implications in dental that it does in other medical realms.

Neither is pleasant, but the cost would probably be the same either way. I don't try to justify the tiering of the co-pay, but recognize that moving it down to the 20% co-pay range just means the actuaries factor that change into everyone's premium.

Individual dental plans typically aren't available. Even with insurance, the co-pay on wisdom tooth extraction is typically 50%, because such procedures are typically (not always) preventable by proper dental care.

So even with insurance, he'd be paying 50% (and probably could negotiate 20% off with a cash payment without insurance, so insurance only costs 30% less). Did he have 50%, or would he still have put it off due to the expense. Is asking him to pay for it a "failing" of society? If so, consider the cost of dental insurance that provides 100% coverage for procedures that are generally preventable.

Insurance is about math. Because truly catastrophic dental care is rare, dental self-insurance is generally a matter of cash management, and you usually can come out ahead, even with an issue like this during a year.

Context: I am an entrepreneur "still trying to make it". I have a wife and 2 kids. We don't have some magic source of easy income. Planning for the cost of insurance was part of planning to start a company. So was planning to self-insure dental. It is possible. I don't understand why any of this planning should be anyone's responsibility other than my own. I don't believe I should be asking someone else to pay for my insurance as some sort of societal debt, and I wish the feds would quit adding mandatory coverages and regulatory overhead that makes buying insurance more expensive.

If either party REALLY cared about small business, they would have taken the simple, obvious step of making individually purchased health insurance tax-deductible long ago. But that didn't fit their agenda.

Not necessarily. Last week, I opted out of backscatter, and the pat-down triggered an "explosives detected" alert. I was in a hurry, but otherwise would have wanted to be much more resistive of the private search I underwent after that.

Because it's absurd. Because I do not carry or interact with explosives.

This article is very ignorant. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act doesn't require a monopoly as a prerequisite. It specifically addresses tying products that materially reduce competition.

You can compare them to Microsoft's "tying" arguments, you can argue about whether this applies to "free" products, you can argue about whether they are substantially reducing competition. This "journalist" should actually learn the laws before deciding the laws clearly back up their world view.

Yes, this. App stores are like a new-fangled version of old-school Yahoo.

In the early internet, it made sense to sort web sites into categories and curate the best ones into lists. Eventually, the internet became too big for that, and search became necessary to cut through the mass of things people could find or wanted to find.

App stores are showing the strains of this today. Discoverability is through the floor. It's also important to note the power of a lightweight link. Web links can be shared with the assumption that a friend can open them with zero friction. This becomes much different when a user has to install an app, possibly even a paid app, to see what you sent.

It's a completely odd decision for someone to make. "I'm going to run this bleeding edge, open-source app framework, but I can't figure out EC2 and Windows makes me feel safe at night."

When you ask someone, "Why Node?", it seems like a complete mismatch with Azure.

Node is pretty bare-metal, and you can figure that out, but hosting on EC2 Linux is too hard for you? Node is bleeding edge, but you want an "enterprise-ready" server OS? Node is free to use, but you want the additional costs of paying Windows server licenses over time? You can get approval to run Node apps, but you're only approved to run on Windows in production? I'm not seeing what would make someone say "this Node app should run on Microsoft".