kirillzubovsky

At one point in the distant past, when a girlfriend broke up with me, I knew that she was still occasionally reading my blog. I made sure that all traffic from her ip and geolocation was getting Rickrolled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan Petersen came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing pages and some ads, and only when he saw interest from the biggest players did he go all in. It's a pretty darn good way to find out, even if it sounds too simple, or cheap, but if you listen to the rest of the interview, Ryan had semi-failed enough times beforehand to realize that simplicity was key. Maybe throw a bunch of landing pages up and see what works?

(original audio segment: https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/h...)

Crazy idea, but it might work. Sometimes podcast guests recommend good books, and I happen to have hundreds of transcripts stored to some of the best podcasts (https://smashnotes.com). I don't expose full transcripts to public, as I've learned that almost no one actually reads them, but I could scan for book recommendations and send them your way.

Oh interesting, I'll take a second look. Whatever Amazon API I checked was only returning pixelated thumbs. Good luck with the product. Next up is "How I made a million bucks reselling books" blog post ;)

Love the business idea. In theory, all the book scraping is automated through Twitter api and then compiled through Amazon API. The page basically self-assembles using Nextjs template and API data call. You get paid via referral purchases. It's genius.

Curious: where do you get high-resolution book images. I wanted to add those to my own book list (https://kirillzubovsky.com/bookshelf) and haven't found a source with high res.

Duplicate of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23898210

Does it? I am yet to update to the new iOS because too many things break with early releases, and I've gotten tired of broken releases. But right now I can swipe my phone to the left, and get a sub-second access to my camera. There's no way it's not pre-loaded for this to work so fast.

My question is whether developers, who are not Apple, would be able to load the camera with the same speed that Apple. Does iOS load Camera in the same way that Apps do, or does iOS have access to lower-level API?

I don't have the answer, but I'd be curious to know if someone's got the know-how.

You were probably downvoted for using the F word, but outside of that that, I tend to agree that camera init is slow AF.

In fact, by playing privacy-advocate games, Apple is inevitably punishing every app except their own because while they will show "This app is using your camera," I wonder if the same rules apply to their own camera usage.

We will know soon.

As someone who has done a little bit of iOS development for fun, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an actual bug. There used to be 10 different ways to do the same thing inside iOS, and neither one was "correct."

Being a photo app, they probably figured out that having instant access to Camera is their top priority, and because you are allowed to access camera in the background and keep it on, there was no harm in doing so.

Of course one could also go deep and assume that Facebook is running all video through an ML that picks out faces, location, items, and whatever else they can grab around your surrounding, and then covert that into ad-intent, but however sexy that sounds from technical point, they are after all a public company and need to play by the rules. Unlikely to take on such a massive intrusion of your privacy, knowing that eventually it would get discovered.

I am glad to have read this thread. A few of the issues mentioned in comments have happened to me in the last year, but I just wrote it off as one-off scamming, did not realize it's systemic and sophisticated.

Let’s be honest tho, what did they expect? In this case, Amazon gave them funding and a 4-year head start. The point of Alexa fund was to use Amazon money, and Alexa as a launch vehicle, to grow a product. Obviously Amazon had to gain something back.

It might be too little too late. Twitter made a lot of sense in 2010 when you only saw messages from the people you followed, and only discovered new people when those people specifically put their words into your stream. It was valuable, even if people were tweeting about their vacations and sandwiches.

App.net tried to launch a paid version of Twitter and it almost succeeded, but they weren't able to get a critical mass to convert all at once. Twitter was still more valuable as 8 out of 10 of your friends were still on Twitter, not App.

It has changed though. With more users and the new algorithmic timeline, If you are just starting out, you have no chance at getting good value out. Twitter decides what you see, whether you like it or not. It's like the TV from 1984 that is continuously bringing junk food into your living room. You don't get a remote, you only get a choice to have it, or not to have it in your house.

Twitter used to deliver unprecedented value 1:1, and now it extracts value from 100,000 and delivers it to 1. Unless you are the one, there is no sense in paying for it.

Potentially because it was spun 10 years ago while permissions were basic/different/even harder to track, and has since fallen off the wagon?

It seems this incident has reminded Twilio to audit all their access right, which is a net positive.

Actually, imagine you were an employee who wanted to get this done, but couldn't get management approval? This is one way to fix things ... :)

What a great example of a company that figured out a way to put a utility layer on top of existing tools and monetize it. Thanks for sharing.

I love AWS as any other developer, but this is their fault.

They've invested all their resources into building out the infrastructure, and have spent very little if any time on building the UX around it. You have to be fairly technical, never mind painstakingly detailed-oriented, in order to manage their services, a big chunk of which is hidden behind black screens and various control nobs.

Amazon's logic is probably to provide the piping, and leave the rest of the end user, but at this point it's not enough. In my opinion, they need to heavily invest into the customer-facing layer of their applications that shows all the status, gaps and holes, or these things keep happening.

Then again, they can continue as is, and the incidents will keep as is, and as long as nothing implodes and no big customer leaves, financially it makes sense to do nothing. Just thinking out loud.

Just as a point of information, that is not entirely true. Podcasts are tracking you too, but the technology is older and can't do it as well as Facebook.

When you listen to an episode of a podcast, an advertiser can get data from the file download, so at the very least they know your location and your phone profile. Say you download a podcast from a certain location Brooklyn, using iPhone X, an advertiser can profile you to be upper-middle-class and show you a Peloton ad, while same podcast download of an old Android phone is going to get an ad for a short-term loan.

The advertisers are hungry for ways to get more data because right now it's still a black box, you throw money in, and maybe someone buys. They would much rather target with precision, than with banner ads.

I am currently using Auth0 which has all the cool functionality of logging in with 3rd party services, user management, and so forth. I think I am paying them $25/m to use it, something fairly trivial but non-zero.

If I were getting started with logins again, I'd say I could pay you $250 one time just to download all the code, and roll it out on my own systems in minutes. This way I'd have user auth with easiest setup, and no need to reinvent it on my own. Probably.

But, are you just testing things, or is Login.land real? Since your own login system asks for password, instead of email-based auth like you are showing in the screenshots, I suspect that maybe this is just a test :)

Parker Thomson, aka StartupLJackson, had a great view on this. Would you rather see a ton of ads that are completely irrelevant to you, or see ads that you actually need?

Tracking that makes your life better is useful. If Opendoor knows you are looking for a new house in Arizona, and they can show you just the right house before it's sold to someone else, isn't that fantastic?

It may appear that way, but it's not surprising at all.

First of all, it's a great business. Shopify is exploding like crypto kittens, and with millions of sellers, even if you secure just the top sellers, let's say 1% of the Shopify market, and charge $10,000 per year, that's a 100-million-dollar-business. That's incredible.

From there, you have a choice to either expand further in the market, or start offering more advanced tools to your best customers. Given that Shopify is currently at 100B market cap, yours could be 1B in just a few years, if not sooner.

It's brilliant!

As a Tesla owner, and regardless of the presentation, I have serious doubt that Tesla will be able to solve all the edge cases. Machine learning needs data, and with my family in the car, I don't want it to make a decision whether or not to break, while heading in ongoing traffic. I want the car to know.

Right now, 99% reasonable self-driving doesn't bother me because I am always in control, and I already know where the car is going to mess up and get ready to take control ahead of time. It works, and it works really well.

But the different between 100% and the 99% is all the difference that matters, and it's colossal.

I hope they can figure this out, but I don't know how. I hope they do.

I was reading somewhere that a while back Germany classified "autopilot" to be at least Level 4, where's in case of emergency the car needs to be able to take and maintain control for a least X-time duration. Under those rules Tesla does not qualify, and neither do other manufacturers. However, if the rules are rules, it would be unfair that Tesla gets to advertise something that others aren't allowed to.

The article doesn't link to the original study, but I would be curious to know how long was the next longest flap-less flight. If the first one is 5 hours, and the next is 4.5, awesome, but if the next longest bird was not flapping for only 35 minutes, I would attribute this to equipment malfunction rather than some awesome paragliding bird. Science is fascinating.

Love the idea of teaching kids skills relevant in today's world, instead of just doing projects for the project sake.

Got it! Thanks.

Thank you for the explanation, very interesting, and makes me want to dive more into lisp and see what's possible with this approach. Next thing you know, I am Clojure fanboy.

Can you help me understand, what is the purpose of (+ x 3) at the end of that let statement. Is that just the default return from the original function, using input given by the let function? Thanks!

For me it was always confusing why Lisp uses this notation (+ 1 2) until I read this blog post, and now I get it. Lisp is functional, and it's using a functional notation for everything. "The sum of one and two" makes total sense now! Thanks.

I've never heard of Lua, but now that I am looking at it, it seems very friendly. Love how they call things what they are, for example `local` is just a local variable, or `repeat X until Y` for a loop. It's a joy to see, to be honest.

p.s. One thing I can't figure out is if Honeycode can function as an API. If I am already using AWS for my other infra, keeping my data inside their "Excel" and then auto process and export it to somewhere using drag-and-drop automation, that makes perfect sense.

In fact, the whole "no code" Dreamweaver analogy isn't all that fitting. If they just said "Excel spreadsheet on steroids that integrates with other AWS product," would make more sense, to me at least.

Using data tables to publish websites and apps is an interesting concept and having an in-house tool to produce most commonly requested ones makes total sense. Look at their templates: Inventory management, Team Tracking, Surveys, Reporting...etc. It makes sense.

One hard problem here though, by the looks of it, the tool is a database designed by engineers in response to a lengthy requirements document. It has no regard for user experience, and is one of those things you can use, only if you go through a 3 week training course.

This, imo, is where AWS could borrow from startup playbook, and instead of launching a spaceship, start instead with a paper airplane. Imagine if all you could do was to publish an inventory-management tool, that in one-click integrated with Amazon Pay and let the customers buy your products on a website?

Maybe Amazon is waiting for someone else to build this on top of their tools, and then make it available, but that poses a question why. Why would someone build on top of Honeycode, only to have Amazon eventually make it their own?

Interesting concept, but it's got a long ways to go before anyone needs to be scared of what Amazon can do with this thing.

Why is this stuff getting upvoted? All we see is a Tesla that rammed into an obstacle on the highway, with evidence of anything else. We don't know that it was on autopilot, and the driver in this case would say anything to try and get his insurance money back. The car started to break when it saw an inevitable collision, but otherwise, it's pure speculation.