Mahn

> Acton said he tried to push Facebook towards an alternative, less privacy hostile business model for WhatsApp — suggesting a metered-user model such as by charging a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up.

> But that “very simple business” idea was rejected outright by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who he said told him “it won’t scale”.

> “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as…,’

This doesn't scale because people would ditch WhatsApp in favour of a messaging app that didn't restrict the amount of messages you can send behind a paywall.

I know that hating Facebook is in vogue, but frankly with that line of thinking he sounds like would have made poor business/product decisions.

Comments on blog posts are usually close to useless, because the community cannot moderate/curate itself pretty effectively. HN and Reddit are far better tools for feedback.

> "It's not the technology that matters, it's the strategy". I don't think that's right. A big talking point that comes up over and over with Instagram was how well-built the app was.

Yet that wouldn't have mattered if they hadn't pivoted from a location based app to photo sharing. Technology/product matters to get your foot in the door, but it's strategy/execution what ultimately makes it or breaks it.

Yep, to put it in perspective this kind of money in Europe is pretty much a VP/CEO level of salary for a medium size company. Or just about enough to cover ramen and rent in Silicon Valley I imagine.

I think at its core this is basically it. We can argue all day about the differences in culture and mindset, but the most significant advantage the USA has that the EU cannot effectively replicate (yet) is the access to a large, homogeneous single language single currency market from the get go.

The more interesting question would be why are Google and Facebook American and not Chinese or Indian.

You are getting downvoted, but it's true, as an European it's appalling to see Europe constantly sabotaging itself when it comes to tech.

Any sort of legislation is problematic if the people responsible for legislating do not understand that which is being legislated.

I think you are severely underestimating the current state of VR. It's still an enthusiasts market, to be sure, but it's well past the gimmick point, there are real applications, real content, and real consumer grade hardware out there. VR after the hype is real, just not selling like gangbusters.

> To help you take your first step into spatial computing, we’re going to hand deliver the device to your doorstep and personally get you set up.

Someone has read Paul Graham's "Do things that don't scale" essay :)

So basically, it sounds like the main advantage of the Magic Leap compared to HoloLens or existing VR headsets is likely the perceived resolution.

It's worth noting that, while fascinating, CRISPR is not yet a solved problem, as the technique in its current iteration can apparently introduce random mutations and damage [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05736-3

The real answer is that you need to get your product noticed by having spectacular growth. If you have that, no one will care what your background or connections are.

> What I'm more upset about is people spending obscene fortunes on Farmville, World of Warcraft gold, Candy Crush EleventeenNinenty4 Now With Extra Bedazzle, Fortnight etc. Energy, agriculture, medical, space are often neglected in favor of the iPad fruit of the month app of the week. It is extremely frustrating.

I'd like to think that this is a transfer of wealth from idle hands to productive hands, since I have to assume that at least a portion of the business owners behind those cash machines you mention won't just sit on a montain of money, but rather reinvest it in something. But perhaps I'm too optimistic.

It'd better be.

> lots of teams working on lots of products, and if some of them don't pan out, that's OK

Basically the modern tech titan mantra. The only company out of the big 5 that isn't doing this is Apple.

Ok, but if you keep digging, eventually you are going to stumble into the concept of the dream itself, and then the question then becomes what properties and qualities of the process of dreaming gave birth to a red flower in the mind.

I will concede that how consciousness really arises may look nothing like what we can imagine or picture today, but we have yet to come across something that is both real and escapes scientific observation, and I don't think we should approach consciousness as such.

We can only speculate, but in my mind, to "be" the one that observes does not preclude from there being something in my brain that observes, which in turn, unconsciously, becomes part of what I call my identity and self. At the end of the day, to the best of our knowledge, living beings are made of the same atoms and chemical reactions as inanimate objects. So, yes, I would speculate that it's all a question of complexity.

> is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?

The big question is, is there a difference? We haven't really established whether a sufficiently complex input-processing-output algorithm could also be a self-aware thing inside the cat's brain doing the observing. To posit that both things are separate mechanisms is a dangerous assumption, I think, when we don't really know what that "thing inside the cat's brain that observes" is.

Consciousness must arise out of something, and that something ought to have qualities than can be studied.

There's no evidence that we cannot reduce self-awareness to an algorithm.

Since when has more regulation translated in more entrepreneurship?

What if my startup does not require tricky or infelicitous shit with your personal data, but due to strict regulation I now require to hire a full time lawyer just to redact the company terms and keep up with regulations, and since my company does not yet make any revenue and I have no investors that means a lot more risk on my side, which in turns leads me to not start or not go on with that company at all? And what if this decrease in garage startups leads to less competition and more concentration of power for the big companies, which then can happily lobby and influence laws to their own interests with no one to contest them? Is that the deal that we want in exchange for mildly inconveniencing Facebook and Google?

Anecdotal, but I personally don't block ads on Facebook because I want to see what other people are advertising. Perhaps he has the same philosophy.

I'm intrigued, but I think it could use some sort of a demo or something to get an idea of what to expect. As it stands I don't know if I really want an invite, because other than the ideology, which is great, I don't know what is there. (I get that it's a Reddit derivative, but still, I like to play with things before committing to them).

Your knowledge is wrong.

> what is attracting investors to these start ups in the first place

Growth, basically. As long as you can make a case that your 75 cent dollar store is rapidly accumulating customers, investors will be more than happy to overlook the economics of the business. Sometimes that works out, but I guess at that point it's more like gambling than investing for investors.

I guess we now have an answer to what comes after material design. Somebody tell the maintainers of Bootstrap so we can have the entire internet updated asap.

Also someone who is not excessively pedantic.

If you frame happiness like that, then yes, it'll be hard to be happy. But happiness, I think, is not an objective state that you get to when all your expectations, desires and wants are met. That's just the story our primitive animal brains tell us, but the reality is that happiness is an inner mental state, and the influence that external factors have on us is just our own imagination.

We choose to be unhappy. By fixating on our wants, our worries, our anxieties, or desires, by refusing to be happy unless everything is exactly what and how we want, we don't let our body and our mind be. I think it's only when we let go of our destructive thoughts, when we let go of what has been and what will be, and just live in the present, in the moment, that we can experience a real state of happiness.

It sounds esoteric and counter-intuitive, I know. But just consider the thought. I personally find this to be more and more true the older I get.

Maybe we could all just agree that AI and ML have their use cases, but they are not necesarily a good fit to any and all computing problems indiscriminately?