earl

Another stupid post about fb and their business without mentioning the fb ad exchange? I'm having trouble understanding how Dalton isn't misinforming his audience.

Read this for why I think fb has a great future in ads.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4279900

You can go far in life by following a very successful boss. And there may well be more promotion opportunities / more responsibility available at yahoo under Marissa than staying at Google. Or perhaps they've already made a million or so and own a home; why not take a flyer and see where it goes? I think you massively underestimate personal loyalty to someone who it sounds like went way out of her way to look out for these folks' careers. Because if someone did that for me I'd be loyal.

He could pay a pound extra to see if his algorithm is correct...

I bet your prediction is wrong. I've expanded on it elsewhere, but fb is sitting on a couple enormous businesses.

1 - they can launch the first serious adsense ($10B/year pre tac) competitor because they see most people move about the internet on fb connect;

2 - the ad exchange (fbx) is brilliant: you can bring your 3rd party data in and run ads on fb properties. This allows everyone to reuse their retargeting / behavioral targeting data and target in a guaranteed brand safe environment. But no data leaves: fb is a data sink.

3 - adding to the above, they have real demographics for brand advertisers, so they can diversify from the dr people.

4 - adding to #2, they're even better positioned for 2nd screen. Tons of people want to connect desktop/laptop display with mobile, but fb doesn't have to do any guessing or prediction: fb knows all the data because of the shared login. Thus they'll monetize mobile better not just because they know dems, but because they can extend online 3rd party data to mobile via fbx. If nothing else, buckets of dirt cheap impressions for your targeting/bt lists.

edit: 5 - how could I forget gambling? Zynga moves into real money gambling / poker (some relevant court cases have apparently been recently decided) and fb continues to collect a 20-30% tax.

.02 from someone who does data analysis / ML and has an undergrad in math:

A math undergrad is a nearly total waste of time. If you want to do data analysis, learn to do data analysis. Real analysis and proofs and abstract algebra and diffeq are fascinating yet utter wastes of time.

If you want to learn useful stuff, take: applied calc, applied linear algebra, applied probability, applied stats, applied ML. And nothing else. All the skills you build proving stuff are, at best, tangential. And you don't need a bit of it to do things like derive gibbs samplers or EM samplers.

If you can take an activity such as someone interacting with ads, model that as a graphical model, derive a gibbs sampler and implement it, you'll be worlds ahead of even most grad students. Focus on getting there and it should be great for your career. But a math degree is just a shiny distraction.

Oh, and one more thing: if you want to work in a particular area, then a degree in that area may be useful. Eg bio, genetics, chemistry, fluids, optics, etc.

edit2: Please don't think I'm arguing against you getting a math degree. If you want one, get one. Just understand it's probably at least 80% intellectual masturbation instead of job skills. For example, as far as I can see in production machine learning, there is virtually no integration. Oh there are integrals all over the place but none of them are feasible and they'll all have to be numerically evaluated or worked around. So all those integration skills people spend endless hours learning are basically useless because the real world has virtually zero nice integrals. So understanding how to manipulate integrals and how to numerically evaluate them is very valuable, but not well covered in virtually all calc classes.

edit3: consider looking at the community colleges in your state. They often are stupid cheap and offer online courses.

Plus externally monetized by the hardware you have to buy.

It's worse than that; it's not just no recurring revenue. Sparrow is stupid cheap. Comparable software such as eudora cost $50 - $100 in the late 90s. Compare to $7 for the mac app or $2.10 for the ios app.

And they're pinched between a platform vendor who wants a good email client on the platform; Google who gives gmail away for free because it's strategically important / they monetize it with ads; and people who are nearly unwilling to spend developer-sustaining amounts of money barring a giant hit, particularly for software requiring ongoing development.

The app store for ios has exerted massive negative price pressure on apps, including creating a norm of free or $1 apps. I know it's basic psychology, but it still amazes me that tons of people using a $200 phone that costs on the order of $80/mo to use bitch endlessly in reviews and negatively rate apps for charging the ginormous price of $3. Or something equally out of line. This is exacerbated by shitty discovery in the app store. There's massive returns to being on the top app in category X list, and that's very difficult to do at higher prices. Plus you can't create paid upgrades without creating a new product in the app store, forcing you to start from zero with marketing and list rank. I predict the mac app store will likewise exert downward price pressure on app prices.

Sparrow is really really cheap. A generation ago I used eudora, which cost $50 to $100, for email. So between the mid to late 90s and 2012, the price fell something like 80 to 90 percent to $10 for the mac program. The above is worsened by the rise of decent free email clients since it diminishes the audience.

If you do the math, you have to sell a fuckton of $2.10 cent apps to afford salaries for good developers: say four people at $200k/year fully loaded (salary, health insurance, ss, medicare, office space, internet, diet coke, coffee, macbooks). That's 380k sales just to tread water. And we didn't deduct marketing expenses which are probably significant: you'll have someone fulltime doing seo / sem / banging on blogs and reviewers to get organic / etc. Plus, again, Apple has created a norm where apps get updated forever for free. So that $2.10 is close to being a lifetime value for a user. That means you probably can't use sem for user acquisition: a wildly optimistic 10 percent clickthrough and purchase rate (an order of magnitude high for most things) and 20 cents per click (also wildly cheap) puts you at $2.00.

I presume Apple does this because of classic economics: increase demand by decreasing the price of complements. But if developers can't get paid, users can't have nice things. And I'm not an ios or mac dev, but looking at the interactions in their apps, they seem super custom. That means you have to go to the bottom of frameworks, increasing development costs.

Worse yet, say someone looked at sparrow dying and wanted to clone it, because it looks like there's a business there. Now they'll be pinched by people being cheap as shit on the upside and google migrating some of the best features into their presumably free iphone client on the low side. So I think google has now poisoned the well for better gmail clients on mac/ios.

Remember that msft sold Avenue A/Razorfish [1] to Publicis for $530mm, plus IIRC something on the order of a billion dollars of guaranteed purchases of msft display inventory ([2] mentions but doesn't know the amount), though I could be way off on that. So msft probably got $1B back from the $6B purchase, so I don't understand how they can write down more than $5B. Anyway, it means the aQuantive purchase was 16% less shitty than everyone reports =P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_A/Razorfish

[2] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/microsoft-s...

Dude, whatever you think of Ballmer, he started as the first business manager at msft in 1980 and worked there in roles of increasing responsibility until he was made ceo in 2000. There's not many people with that track record of experience.

That must be part of the reason apple built iwork. And there would probably be antitrust issues if ms used their near monopoly in office productivity software to aid their declining near monopoly is OS software.

on-demand doesn't matter.

If lots of your infrastructure is in ec2, you may need a good db server inside ec2 that is used constantly. eg if you have a read heavy cassandra workload, you need ssds.

431 words without the word "probability" or "likelihood". And his examples of getting rich as an employee are ... ballmer and marissa mayer. I can't believe he forgot the employees at Instagram -- they're good examples too!

I'm stupider for having read that drivel.

yeah, unless the app is only useful in canada somehow, what about revenue from other countries?

I misunderstood. In that case, yes, I totally agree. I'd suggest whole disk encryption but users will hate it, since if they forget their password the data is really gone. For reals.

You can easily exclude folders or disks from spotlight indexing.

System Preferences -> Spotlight -> privacy tab

to overwrite then delete the spotlight indices, disable spotlight then overwrite and delete:

   $ sudo srm --simple -rf /.Spotlight-V100/

There's also whole disk encryption (unfortunately not particularly robust -- I don't understand the reason but something about how the login password is stored seems to make this somewhat weak to eg the government) built in, as well as encrypted disk images and truecrypt.

I tend to agree with you, but you can do things to change this. Take up snowboarding as a hobby; it seems to require a decent amount of income but you'll learn there's a leisure class on either end of the income spectrum. Go in on a ski house and don't do it with just coworkers. Or do something cheaper like surfing. You'll meet a ton of people that aren't in the same vc/startup world.

Their product is sandwiched between instapaper, readability, and evernote. Evernote premium is only $45/year which is a tough price ceiling for a service which seemed to do much less.

I wonder if this was due to criticism, or cities and companies that have epeat requirements for purchasing.

   San Francisco officials told the Journal this week that "they are moving to 
   block purchases of Apple desktops and laptops, by all municipal agencies" 
   due to a 2007 policy that requires all desktops, laptops, and monitors 
   procured with city funds be EPEAT-certified. [1]

and

   In 2007, President George W. Bush issued an executive order mandating that 
   all federal agencies procure EPEAT-registered electronic products "for at 
   least 95 percent of electronic product acquisitions, unless there is no 
   EPEAT standard for the product," as outlined by the EPA. [1]

A lack of epeat bugs me, but I don't spend millions or tens of millions of dollars a year on computers.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406948,00.asp

Apparently implicitly lying to your viewers and directing them to a site that benefits you without mentioning that is ethical to you. In contrast, I view it as unethical.

Ethical: check out this cool site I built.

Unethical: here's a cool site I found.

Admittedly, this is pretty small potatoes, but it's still sleazy.

Are you unaware that digg was a startup and that employees were given options / equity as compensation? It doesn't bother you that someone in particular got a return on that (supposedly equal) equity while regular employees didn't? Charactering expecting your employer to fairly pay out equity in the event of an acquisition as, "backing up a Brinks truck" is stupid. What part of expecting your employer to treat the boss' equity and the employees' equity equally, where one only earns if the other does, is "entitlement"?

I don't work for employers to become a better person; maybe you do. I work for them for my salary plus the options we negotiated.

And frankly, it would appear that the leadership at digg was crippling, not the employees.

Yeah, but reddit appears to have been staffed with employees who worked all hours of the night and day for a salary; see blog posts from before reddit gold. That's not sustainable and unless you have a line on a set of really smart suckers who want to work way too much for the same money then can get elsewhere working half the hours or on call... you need more employees.

I understand what it is. I understand why investors do it.

I reiterate my point: it's unseemly when founders earn millions and everyone else, particularly the employees, goes home with nothing.

Don't worry, Kevin took plenty of money. It's just the regular employees that don't get shit.

edit: nobody knows the number for sure, but he had enough to do angel investments in foursquare and twitter. See also crunchbase [1]. There was a $28mm series C and the speculation seems to be a bunch went into his pockets.

edit2: after thinking for a couple minutes, there's something just really unseemly about founders getting millions and employees plus investors getting zilch, particularly in the context of a failed business. I think the idea of founders cashing out a bit to free the company to swing for the fences is probably good, but still. There's something about this result that just doesn't sit well.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose

I think this is yavo's second failed startup post quigo, the ad network. He did tracked first, then hashable. I'd bet he'll do well in mobile ads though given how well he understands the space. And never underestimate the power of the right rolodex.

They show the seller, kind of, but say the seller is rightguard. Is it the deodorant brand or is someone camping the name?

Also, amazon is kind of skeevy; I'm very leery of buying food, cosmetics, or toiletries from them because they make it really hard to tell from whom you're buying stuff. I'm happy to buy eg usb cables from the cheapest vendor, but I don't trust any of the chinese knockoff shit if it's going to regularly touch my skin or be eaten. Particularly since china appears to have no real food safety laws and poisoned 300k of their children [1] with the same well known techniques used to fake out protein readings on milk they used to kill thousands of american pets [2] the year before. China even went so far as to hurt more children by delaying a recall to avoid embarrassment during the summer olympics! If I'm going to buy food or cosmetics on amazon, they need to be much better about communicating from whom I'm purchasing and what was done to make sure it isn't a knockoff.

And knockoffs are everywhere on amazon's site. I've wanted one of these cool suck.uk bottle opener keychains that looks like an old school key for a while [3] but their shipping charges to the US are too expensive. So I found it on amazon [4]. If you read the reviews, it's full of complaints about knockoffs or the steel snapping. And I've seen it sold for as little as $2.99 with shipping while amazon sells it for $9. Adding to the skeeviness, the cheapest vendor of that item changes all the time, and for quite a while amazon didn't sell it directly. I finally bought it from amazon proper and I'm hoping they got the actual item and not some knockoff themselves, but who knows. Shit like this makes it hard to be willing to buy food on amazon.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

[3] http://www.suck.uk.com/products/keybottleopener/

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Suck-UK-Key-Bottle-Opener/dp/B0000B0DK...

tl;dr: In 2011, Netflix raised prices for their combined dvd + streaming service, then shortly thereafter decided to split dvd off as a company named qwikster. Subscribers didn't like the price hike or the inconvenience of split companies and separate movie lists, etc. The change was walked back, but netflix lost roughly 800k subscribers (of 23.6mm in the us in april '11 [1]) or 3% and 77% of their stock price. The reporter claims this mostly happened because four key executives who had been at netflix basically from the beginning and whom the ceo Reed trusted and listened to had left the company and there was nobody left that he trusted enough to seriously consider their opinions.

--------------------------

I think the reporting is interesting. I'd just assumed this whole thing was basically blunt negotiations between the studios and netflix over streaming rights, and that the studios had wanted to get paid per subscriber, whether that subscriber wanted dvds or streaming or both. Netflix can basically buy dvds and do whatever they want because of the doctrine of first sale, but if the studios don't license content they can't do a damn thing.

What's also interesting is I've heard a lot of grumping about netflix from an employees' perspectives. People seem to get randomly fired. This jibes with what happened with qwikster. Reed had already started staffing qwikster up so employees that agreed to switch or had been hired basically got dicked. This lost them one of the key executives that had built dvd fulfillment and customer service.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix

No, you're exactly wrong.

People who don't support health care for all need the outcome of their preferred policy position rubbed in their face as often as possible. And it's this: a man is begging over the internet for enough money to live his remaining years in what comfort he can, while hopefully destroying his family's future as little as possible. And what of the people who aren't drupal devs, or don't have an emotional connection with a community of people? They're just sol.