gitah

Here's the HN discussion to go with yesterday's article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391313

Also here is Holme's interview with Jim Cramer tonight regarding yesterday's article:

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/15/theranos-ceo-fires-back-at-ws...

Time spent make sense to rank social media apps powered by ads. However, this metric doesn't reflect the true value of commerce apps.

I doubt people spend much time on the Uber or Amazon app, but they generate a massive amount of revenue anyways.

If iOS marketshare keeps going up, Apple will get sued for anti-trust.

Imaging if Microsoft won't let other developers write web browsers for windows.

Well your parents inherited almost a million dollars of real estate so comparing your situation to theirs seems unfair.

Autonomous vehicles or high-speed subways that are cheap to build will destroy housing prices. Technology can reduce the cost of transportation increasing the usable land around a city.

Other advances include new construction techniques making it cheaper to build taller buildings. ie prefabs or 3D printing

Productivity statistics are lagging indicators. Looking at them to predict the future is incomplete and short sighted.

The concern about automation lately is due to the R&D roadmaps of up and coming technologies. This is a leading indicator. Whether or not these new technologies actually catch on should be the debate.

China being uninnovative is such a lame narrative pushed by insecure westerners.

China is behind South Korea in development by a generation and Japan by 100 years. Give China another 20 years and lets check back.

sales/employee ratios:

Amazon: 670k Walmart: 220k

Assuming the ratio stays the same, when Amazon gets to Walmart level sales, it will need about 700k employees which is still 1/3 of Walmart's current employee count.

Software R&D (especially for new initiatives) is typically not capitalized so if a lot of investment is in software than it would show up as operating expenses rather than capex.

Direct revenue comparison between Wal-mart and Amazon makes no sense. Amazon revenues are a lot more diversified than Walmart.

Portions like AWS, Digital and 3P/FBA service revenues will have much higher margins than first party retail revenues (which is the most like Wal-mart revenues, except the margins are completely different due to no having brick-and-mortar stores.). Additionally, Amazon is a lot more international than Wal-mart so comparison is even harder.

All of this completely ignore the growth rates of these two companies.

That's the difference between loaning money and buying equity in a company.

The reason is Wall street. If Tim Cook invests heavily in R&D, earnings will tank and then activist investors will replace him to boost dividends and buy backs.

Google can get away with this as the CEO has a lot of credibility and also class B voting shares.

Not sure about this. People have been saying this since 2012, but iPhones are now stronger than ever. There's a reason why Coca-cola can sell their products for more than generic store brand.

Yelp, Twitter, Grubhub, and now LinkedIn.

Social media companies are getting crushed this earnings season. Maybe it's FB sucking all the ad dollars in this space.

Fun fact: Macbook revenue is now higher than iPad revenue.

So much for the early hype of tablets killing the PC.

How do you know these new initiatives haven't worked out?

Keep in mind that it took >5 years for Prime and AWS to take off. When they first launched, they lacked many features and no one gave a second look at them.

This is exactly what was said in the article. The EU isn't a common market for internet companies so EU startups can't scale the same way as US ones.

People are talking about the EU as a blob because the EU as a blob is the one making the anti-trust accusations.

Every time someone draws historical parallels for tech businesses I think back to Apple. Remember how the iPhone was repeating Apple's mistake vs Windows in the 80s?

The author happens to find some factors that match Microsoft in the 2000s, but completely ignores the ones that don't.

The list didn't include Xiaomi (not in California) which is the biggest unicorn of them all at a 45M valuation.

But it also missed a lot of other Californian unicorns like Theranos.

Incredible how fast the term "unicorn" got popularized. Word of the year of 2015 for sure.

I'm also betting on the term "uberpreneur" to blow up soon, which refers to people making a living off the on-demand economy.

If only Apple will open up iOS a bit so Google can port this over...

By that logic why do people buy iPhones? They can wait another year and get the same model cheaper or get a much better one for the same price.

The iPhone 6 just had record sales so empirically there are other factors for consumer purchases that are stronger than the "waiting for items to be cheaper" factor.

This just seems like a stop-gap solution before the true solution which is wearables (or Amazon Echo/Glass).

Saying the name of what you want to buy into your smartwatch/glass/echo is going to be a lot more frictionless and scalable than putting these buttons all over your house.

$TSLA shot up 3% right after this tweet. It might be a good strategy to programmatically react to Elon tweets mentioning Tesla and buy $TSLA before anyone else can react.

I won't be surprised if an HFT firm on wall street was already doing this.

1) Do you really think Dropbox, with all the big co competition, can grow past its current valuation? Snapchat would have been a better choice in this list.

One aspect I haven't seen anyone mentioned is that Uber does not prompt you for tips where as Lyft does.

This is a pretty big deal and is why I always choose Uber over Lyft.

You're right about ad block. Ad block grew an insane amount (300%) in the past two years:

http://i.imgur.com/XIf0JRW.png

I am looking forward to the outrage when the Apple Watch gold edition is priced at $5-10k.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/caldwell-edition

This is actually good news for Google. Their current YouTube ad revenues are paying for all the fixed costs right now. Any additional ad revenues for YouTube from now on will go directly to the bottom line as profit without further operational expenses.

I think we'll be seeing expanding margins for Google this year. Maybe good time to load up on GOOG while analysts are disappointed at recent earnings.

In my PHP example, I was referring to programming frameworks in general. Not just front-end ones. Many apps have moved away from PHP as developers recognized its weak abstractions which lead to higher maintenance costs. For front-end, you can simply replace PHP with Java pagelets or jQuery soup.

You can write the same web app (from the user point of view) using Python, Ruby or PHP (frontend: jquery, backbone, angular). I do not disagree with this. However, the choice of frameworks is still very important and will determine your speed of development and any future maintenance.

Saying frameworks are irrelevant since they have the potential to all lead to the same outcomes seems a bit much. Any turing complete language can implement program as another turing complete language, but why do we have assembly vs Java vs C vs Python? Higher level programming languages and frameworks are for the human brain. It turns out the the human brain grasps some concepts better than other concepts: we call the more intuitive concepts abstraction.