1,298 karma · joined May 1, 2014
My topcolor is #bada55
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...
Note: I deleted my original post because I mistakenly said Paul had voted for the bill. Paul voted with the establishment republicans (McConnell, etc) against (i.e. to keep the NSA as-is)
Edit: Also, Cruz bucks the Republican leadership all the time. That's his thing and they hate him for it. He was the main force behind the government shutdown.
I used to maintain a distributed system of TV recording servers with hundreds of analog TV tuner cards inside and understand this pain all too well. After years of frustration trying to get these cards and all the different revisions to work together on whatever version of Linux I'd adopted for the system (kernel upgrades were a huge risk), I swore off hardware altogether for future projects. Even though all the devices had the same chipset, I couldn't keep it all working at the same time and it sucked all the time and energy I should have been spending on my actual product.
God bless the rise of cloud computing. Seriously.
I can't even imagine what it must be like to maintain the amount of hardware they have at AWS or Google. Speaking of which, how the fk does a startup like Digital Ocean do it?
0. Windows. Everything else flows from the monopoly, including Office/Excel.
Remove #3, Xbox is not a big money maker for them, IIRC. Remove #5, Live/Bing are a joke, unless I'm misunderstanding what Live is.
Funny, neither one of us mentioned IE, which was dominant for a long time.
Then I tuned out for 12 years. (I came to believe the stock market was a rigged insider's game, but that's another story.) Given how badly they've been managed during that time and the explosion of mobile, I assumed Microsoft had dropped not only out of the top spot but out of the top ten, probably worse.
Nope. Never dropped below 6th worldwide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_...
That's just astounding to me. Google has done almost everything right since its founding, dominating the Internet wave (and a massive portion of online advertising), grabbing a huge chunk of the mobile revolution and getting its tentacles in almost every area of disruption... and yet for all of the success and raw brainpower, batting as close to 1000 as a company possibly can for 15 years, they still haven't eclipsed Microsoft, which bumbled its way through the 2000s in embarrassing fashion. Very hard to comprehend.
I'm really looking forward to the day when technology can more directly measure the effects of various substances on the body, rather than the inexact observation methods used today.
Take SSRIs, for example. Here's how it works. Patient tells doctor "I feel depressed". Doctor prescribes medicine. (A few weeks or months go by.) Doctor asks, "Well, how do you feel?"
We need to be able to say: "Over the course of your treatment, you ingested X milligrams of Zoloft, with an average concentration of Y in your bloodstream. Here's the 1-month graph. Your avg levels of serotonin were Z% higher than usual during this time. Your cortisol (stress hormone) level was C% lower. You slept an average of S hours per night, with E% improvement in deep sleep efficiency." etc.
At some point, the former is going to sound quaint and old-timey.
Therefore, although I don't want to dance on anyone's grave, I think it's important to recognize and mourn catastrophic failures like Aereo and understand that, no, success is not as easy to come by as they'd like us to believe. If it were, you'd see repeat entrepreneurs (not named Jobs or Musk, I guess) doing it flawlessly over and over.
To that end, here is Aereo's fundraising history, to the tune of $100M.
http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/aereo
It's interesting. I'm actually not sure there is a lesson to be learned here. Aereo innovated against legal boundaries, not really technological ones, and the gavel falling on the wrong side was always a distinct possibility. Should they have not tested that boundary?
I'd be interested why you think mine didn't work. Chrome extension link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/logdfcelflpgcbfebi...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn2go/logdfcelflpg... (shameless plug)
... I definitely wondered about this. All of a sudden, it turns HN into a popularity contest where the elite get all the attention and everyone else is completely ignored.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn2go/logdfcelflpg...
https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-backend
https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-chromex
The funny part is that @raquo and I posted our "follow" apps/extensions (separate projects) this week and got no love from HN. And then this thread took off for some reason. Timing? Titling? God I hate the randomness of marketing.
Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.
Re: the root comment of this thread, it's usually optimal to use your ISP's DNS resolvers as they're right there on your same ISP network which means your requests don't have to go out to the broader internet and are thus faster (99% of the time anyway if the hostname requested is cached on those resolvers). Using a more external resolver like Google or what-have-you means your requests have to leave your local network, leave the ISP network, and travel some distance across the internet to wherever that resolver resides.
Edit: IP anycast can allow for many resolvers to respond to one IP (such as 8.8.8.8) so it's not as if the request will have to travel the world to get an answer, but it's still generally faster to key off a resolver you know is within your same ISP.
Essentially, as part of the Master Settlement Agreement, the government just said, "You have to put X dollars into this independent anti-smoking group."
Edit: Ooh. "The Locust Generation" has a nice ring to it.
When I watched "Humans need not apply" the first time, it was a near-religious experience for me. It framed some of the observations and frustrations I see and feel every day and helped clarify the core trend: capitalism has worked really, really well during the labor-based phase of human civilization. Will it work well when human labor is no longer required? What happens then?
The obvious extension of 'Humans need not apply' is that the financial rewards of the march of technology have been concentrated in the hands of the few. The 100+ workers it used to take to work a farm aren't now chilling on a beach somewhere. The founders and stockholders of John Deere are (or their grandkids are). The workers are struggling to find work driving cabs or what-have-you, only to be crossed-out by Google in a few years. There's nowhere to hide. I applaud the entrepreneurs at John Deere and Google and they deserve every penny they made, but the concentration of liquid wealth (excluding homes and cars) into the hands of just a few is fostering profound opportunity inequality. While some folks are becoming wealthy on a scale that's hard to even wrap your brain around, what chance does an Appalachian or inner-city kid have to make it in today's world? Almost none, especially when computers can do things like drive cars.
As the video states, the trend is everywhere. Take Canva, for instance. For some portion of small companies and startups, guess what? They don't need a full time graphic designer anymore. Web frameworks and cloud services have lead to the rise of the "full stack" engineer when there used to be a dedicated database person, app tier person, frontend person, etc. Everywhere
A major, major inflection point of human history is coming in the next couple of decades, and there is no clear solution yet. European-style socialism doesn't work very well and obviously Russian-style oligarchy sucks. So what will we do?
Ironically, I have a problem with geeks using the word "silly" and "it's" when they mean "its", as OP did.
As a software developer, I've always coded alone. As an employee, I've always been a sales engineer. So the original post was actually very informative for me as I'm not familiar with the inner workings of a code development team nor the frustrations of its members.
... or at least something similar. In other words, they do it themselves. That's the only way I can explain their uncanny ability to find a dozen clips containing a certain word or phrase across very long time frames.
Nowadays, it's harder because you can't get many of the necessary channels via analog. You need the decryption of a digital box (imagine several cable boxes stacked on top of each other) to grab the video and even then, it's difficult to get the closed captioning. This makes the colocation complexity more expensive and many facilities would just say "um, no thanks, we're not running a cable line in here for that."
IMO, you should never attempt to compete on price alone.
As we grew, I knew we needed to expand nationwide (which would require raising VC). My saying was "We need Johnson and Johnson, not Congressman Johnson's office." but this question of legality loomed very large. Legal or illegal? If illegal, no investor in his right mind would give us money. Unfortunately, the evidence I had at the time pointed towards "illegal" rather than "legal":
1. There were lots of lawsuits. This Fox vs. TVEyes is not the first. We definitely tiptoed around TV groups so as not to draw attention.
2. The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM, a group of regional services and some single-market self-employed folks) spent several hundred thousand dollars to try to get the law rewritten so that royalties would be set in stone, much like jukeboxes. Why would they do this if they didn't all also believe it was illegal? In any case, the effort failed.
With this evidence in hand, I tried to grow the company organically, but it became untenable. We weren't getting enough money from the single-market (or few-market) customers to fund the expansion. By contrast, Critical Mention was self-funded by a dot-commer, and completely ate our lunch. Even if we'd attempted to raise money, the fundraising sidetrack would have set us back by a few more miles and I had zero additional bandwidth. There really wasn't a good answer to the question.
Ultimately, despite finding product-market fit almost immediately with this freshman business effort, I decided to pivot into a more "legitimate" business. I altered the tech to provide archiving systems for TV stations... and it went over like a lead balloon, cratering the businesses and leaving me with a pile of personal debt which took a couple of years of "real world" work to pay off.
Since then I've tried to start 2 more companies (huzon.tv and words4chrome.com) and while my execution and engineering skills have become vastly better, neither found product-market fit like the first. Beginner's luck, I guess.
I'm going to guess your resume has a Google/Amazon/Facebook name brand on it somewhere.
Otherwise, I'd think twice about it, not really because of the trouble, risk (there shouldn't be any) or the hassle, but because I'd question this person's entrepreneurial maturity or, um, view of reality? Everybody has an idea... execution is everything.
In my early entrepreneurship, I tried to get people to sign some NDA-like stuff and I'm red-faced about it to this day. It was unnecessary and made me look like an amateur.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070
...gets written up in WIRED. Nice PR work.
Could not agree more with this statement. When I get into a software project really deeply, my work ethic is insane. Obsessive. As I need new technologies, I learn and assimilate them quickly because I'm so motivated to get to the end point. There's never been a tech I've given up on when plowing through a project -- well, maybe OpenCV.
Anyway, I've tried, as the OP has, to teach myself Rails or Django or whatever on the side as a "resume builder" and have lost interest each time. I just don't care enough to learn the not-totally-necessary tech to a degree that would actually do me any good in a job interview if I'm not doing it as part of a passion project where it is required.
From the other angle, when I get an idea and want to build it really fast, I don't have the patience to force myself to learn a new language or tech when, fuck it, I can just do it in Java or whatever.
Catch 22.
And real investors know this. You can find all sorts of "made" folks writing about how an early local deal killed the ability of the startup to raise follow on rounds or of investors causing more trouble for founders than they're worth.
This is one reason accelerators have been so successful: transparency, consistency, and a matra of active help, not hindrance
To go further you'll need to learn a new skill that is in shorter supply and/or greater demand.
Or start selling a product not tied to your hourly labor input.