disishhsha

Yeah, IMO that’s also a lot worse than what people are going after Google/Facebook for.

Does “sacrificing privacy” mean something other than “seeing personalized ads”? What’s the difference?

Good point. It’s almost as though the tendency of activists to punch up at The Man du jour results in their own priorities reconfiguring in opposition. Seems a little myopic to me. Maybe we should be celebrating these companies for finding a way to generate economic growth by increasing the efficiency of the economy, instead of putting more carbon in the atmosphere or enslaving people.

It really speaks to the great improvement of the human condition, that the big complaint about the top companies of today is that they are showing us personalized ads, rather than burning the earth or poisoning babies.

I wouldn’t worry about it. If you barely use it, what are the odds you’ll ever fill it up? And if you do fill it up, SSDs will be even cheaper then.

The polygraph test is an interrogation technique. The examiner uses the reading to guide the questioning. I think taking a human out of that loop would be as difficult as a Turing test.

Same here. These services charge $5 more for a family plan, which lets you use five or six accounts. So you can make an extra account for your home devices, and then you have extra memberships you can give away for free to your family/friends. It’s not a great user experience but works well as a solution.

Science is about doing it right, business is about doing just enough to get the job done.

If you think this stuff was on YouTube before it was in academia, you haven’t been paying attention to academia for very long.

Do they really do this more than other companies? Does the average successful company make a habit of keeping unsuccessful products around?

Seems to me Uber has led to a huge increase in the number of hired rides. So in most cases, the Uber driver isn’t replacing anything, except perhaps the passenger driving themselves for free.

If I were to speculate about the outlines of the “shell company” loophole you describe - I figure you would form a company to own the property, and then sell the company instead of the property directly? Is that right, and if so, any reason you can’t do that for a house?

I’ve considered buying an expensive car with advanced stop-and-go traffic self-driving mode, but it’s more effective to live next to the train station.

I use my phone a lot, and gladly spend a few $ a day for a marginal improvement in my quality of life.

Another question - why do people spend $30k on a car when a $10k car is nearly as good? Seems like a much bigger waste of money than the phone.

I worked for a unicorn startup. We got in trouble when our SDRs (entry-level salespeople who did cold calls all day) kept accidentally calling 911. Ultimately the solution was to reprogram the phone system to allow 7 as a prefix in addition to 9.

I’ve found that considering positive explanations for other people’s behavior helps me enjoy life.

If you have a GC and no static typing, is it better than other functional languages (many of which have benefits of both GC and static typing)? Not a rhetorical question, I have never used a GC with C.

Low single digit growth does not justify a high PE ratio.

The new Burberry logo would look right at home on a pack of hot dogs.

Option pricing has a time value component, and at a multi-year time horizon this component is prohibitively high.

Eg. suppose I want to bet Oracle will go under in 20 years, how do I do that?

> Half of the world's population still isn't online so there's plenty of room for growth in the future too.

The offline half doesn’t have that much money to spend, right? Making some assumptions and approximating, would it be wrong to say that potential gains from bringing new people online ≈ global GDP growth? Currently that’s in the low single digits.

Presumably the $3B already includes that revenue.

To be more specific about the value here:

Maintaining parity between two applications running on different GUI platforms is very expensive - much more than twice the effort of maintaining a single codebase.

It does speak to a pretty conservative mindset - when you just made $3B cash free and clear, selling some of that golden goose for $1.25B.

$3B profit doesn’t really seem consistent with $15B valuation. Tech companies these days seem valued at 20x revenue or more. Why would they bother raising $1.25B at that price?

I suppose Fortnite is a fad, so there is a pessimistic case to be made to cash in as much as possible.

Is it possible that management felt that most development work on the thing you loved was done, and your talents were wasted on maintenance? Did they move you to projects at an earlier stage of development?

Could you avoid using code blocks for text? They are very difficult to read on mobile.

I’d expand this a lot. When someone tells you something about his or herself, there’s a good chance they are trying to convince themselves of it.

I don’t mean that people are dishonest. It’s more that we mostly learn about one another’s internal mental lives by telling each other about them. And our ability to maintain a consistent theory of mind is limited. We walk around worrying about this or that, and then we expose our mental states to one another with a snippet of a stream of consciousness. So it’s only natural we are constantly exposing our personal fears to one another.

This is a BS statistic, describing people who pay thousands via payroll tax as paying nothing.

The rich usually have some other deductions exceeding the standard deduction, so it doesn’t help them at all.