I bet you mean http://shakydraw.com, HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14606544

This is actually a pretty decent overview of what it's like to be on a well-functioning nonprofit board. In that case, instead of shareholder value you're focused on the nonprofit's mission and its long-term viability.

Anecdotally I have had some success getting judges to think of IP addresses mapping to individuals like they already think of post office boxes mapping to individuals.

For example, a post office box is a real address, but what goes in can be put there by anybody with access to the box, whether it's with the key from the customer side, or from the open back from the post office side. Similarly, what goes out can be removed by anyone with access to the open back of the box, or from the front with a key. No one checks to ensure that the holder of a key is the owner of the box.

Of course this is a very blunt metaphor, but with it one can see the light go on....

They are not crash-testing automobiles, so an accelerometer won't help. They are looking at dashcam footage from a library of that footage.

I’ve still got one of these (a dime from my Dad’s pocket, irradiated, then into the box with the rest of my kid treasures) from when my family and I visited Oak Ridge in the 60’s. I can’t speak to why they had the machine to do it there, but I still remember why I put the dime in.

I was 7 or 8. The future seemed closer then, like we were almost just right there. “Atomic energy,” the space program, television: I remember when WAND in Decatur started broadcasting in color. Everything was getting better right in front of our eyes. Cool Whip! One day it was THERE.

And so on a visit to Oak Ridge, TN, you felt as a kid that it was all happening, that you could learn about it, and when you grew up you could join the team and make it happen, too. The dime was proof.

I am sorry for your loss. My father died in 2011 and sometimes I still reach for my phone to call him. I offer you some advice that my mother, brothers and I found helpful:

Don't try to be stronger than you can be. Look to be strong together, where strength, at least in these early, grief-filled days, is simply that everyone is able to take care of today's business. Feed the pets, cook the food, meet the appointments, talk to each other. All you need to do today is what needs to be done today.

Silence does not equal strength. Each of you, feel what you feel, don't try to keep it in or hide it from each other. Together you can work through the pain of loss.

Be open to accepting help where it is offered. It can be a comfort to you and to your helpers.

I hope you and your family will find comfort with happy memories of your father. I don't know that grief actually ends, but it becomes bearable and finally part of your memories. Best wishes to you and yours.

Having been through this personally in the past two years, I cannot amplify this comment enough.

If you have earnout targets based on resources such as headcount, marketing spending, or anything else not under your control, you either have to negotiate that the payout is triggered if resources fall, or accept that you will likely be manipulated out of the money by future resource constraints.

When people say, "first find customers, then build it", they mean find people or businesses with problems that they will pay you to solve. With this in mind, your questions have sensible answers:

Customers will wait for your software because their problems are not being addressed in the marketplace.

The consequences of launch delay are that you erode your credibility and allow opportunities for competitors.

You will want customers to start that will work with you closely so that as you continuously deploy your always-working solution, they see benefit with every release. The second highest compliment you can get is "Your product just gets better and better". The highest complement you can get is payment.

For me, I'd have you start where I started, with "Rock and Roll Animal." It's performed live by Reed backed by what was basically Alice Cooper's band, and that particular album's selections are the ones that sound most conventionally like 70's guitar-driven rock and roll. Very accessible: Intro/Sweet Jane, Heroin, and Rock and Roll are the three songs I'd pick for you if you were in a hurry.

It's interesting from there to listen to other versions of Sweet Jane, maybe other recordings of Reed's as a solo artist, or with VU, or covers. In a lot of ways, when I was a kid, listening to the newest Lou Reed record was searching for another song as good as Sweet Jane.

I guess from there, assuming you see something in Sweet Jane in any of its forms, I'd go back to him with the Velvet Underground, maybe listen to Loaded with an eye toward how adaptable and influential those songs are.

Hope this helps. In a lot of ways the value of Lou Reed and the VU is not what they did but what they inspired in others.

Without rewriting the article, the point is that there's an exploitable gap between the output of modern prediction systems and athlete performance that is explainable by information not accounted for in prediction systems.

The writer suggests that it wouldn't be too hard or expensive for someone to gather this "extra" information, and with enough of it and enough study of it, it's likely they could come up with a winning system over automated prediction systems.

From my own experience around MLB and MiLB teams I know that teams do this themselves all the time. They look for pitch patterns, pitch tips, changes in mechanics, changes in vision, changes in performance within games and within seasons due to tiring or wear-and-tear. A bettor with some resources could collect this same information and gain a meaningful advantage.

For a famous example to build on the other examples in the article, in 2006 everyone in baseball except Brad Lidge knew he was tipping his slider [0]. This kind of thing, if your net is spread wide enough, gets discovered all the time. A savvy bettor or syndicate or bettors could come to know this. Teams certainly did.

Anyway, my $.02 cents.

[0] http://www.chron.com/sports/justice/article/Lidge-was-telegr...

Similarly IANAL, have owned, operated, and sold a smallish software business. I agree 100% with the above advice, but would like to highlight and amplify the previous comment's last sentence, 'cause that's the hinge:

Make sure your business's corporate paperwork is in order so the "corporate veil" cannot be "pierced" and continue on with life.

Don't sign any contract with an indemnity clause if you're not structured so that the corporation takes the risk.

Your attorney will need to know more about your specific plans, but in general as long as you don't use material from the movies (title, major plot elements, character names, images, sounds, etc) you can be inspired all you want. So "Tiny Thief Thwarter--The Game" is more likely to fly than "Home Alone--The Game", and if TTT weren't named Kevin and was defending a meth lab or a palace instead of a house in Evanston you'd give the Home Alone guys less and less to be quarrelsome about.

Now, you specifically mention "parody" and "fair use," do you intend to quote parts of the movies, or actually parody part of it? Based on your short question I don't really get the sense that's your angle. I more get the sense that you're looking for a new scenario inspired by those movies, and I'd encourage you to use the inspiration to drive toward the new idea rather than attempt a parody of the old.

And good on you for not having it be zombies!

I'm not saying no, but when you start talking pets, you start talking policies. For office pets, there's what to do when somebody's allergic (which will happen day n where n is small). If it's really the "office's" cat, instead of, say, "your" cat, there's who changes the cat box, manages trips to the vet, keeps the cat over the weekend; the list is not endless but if you don't get down to "who cleans up cat piss in the server room" your list is too short.

Full disclosure: I am technical co-founder of a small lifestyle business, and my dog has been coming to the office with me since day 1, for 10 years. We allow anybody else's dogs to come in, also. Our rules are: Dogs only, on the "dog-side" of the office. Dog-side has a door that keeps dog-side dog-side. Dogs have to get along with each other. Dog messes are the responsibility of the dog owner. You can leave your dog unattended for a couple of hours if you get somebody to be responsible for walks & stuff.

A couple of folkways have arisen. No chicken bones in any dog-side garbage can is an example. If you get the dogs barking by kicking a tennis ball around, you have to calm them back down.

I can't tell if you need the money from the first customer, or just the credibility of having that first big customer in your portfolio. I also can't tell if you're looking for product improvement suggestions from this customer. If you don't need the money and you don't need the input, why half-ass a solution nobody will be happy with?

In my own experience we needed that first big customer for two reasons: the money, and the feedback from a real-world customer. Our approach was to deliver early and often, with a product that in hindsight was more "minimum" than "minimum viable", but we got good feedback and were very responsive to our customer's input. We ended up with a much better product with that deliver-early-and-iterate approach. Plus that sweet, sweet money.... But we had a customer who was cool with that, and we were cool with that, so it worked out.

Clearly you can't leave your product feeling sluggish and slow to respond, but one way you could go is to use the new iOS "prototype" to get buy-in and feedback from your new customer, with speed and responsiveness improvements as part of the improvement plan. I assume you're not married to phonegap, as your new implementation sounds like a quick-ish hack. So get your customer, get paid, get feedback, and get to work making it all better.