mrobins

With Amazon and Google you’re paying half in monthly fees and half with your mineable data. This service seems geared towards people who don’t want that.

Rolling your own on top of a cloud storage provider is great too but for an incremental $100-$200/year some people would pay for something that “just works”.

I’ve been watching this project for a long time and personally am very excited. The fact that it’s #1 on HN today (congrats!) makes me think I’m not the only one.

There are also a lot of valid concerns in these comments about privacy and use of algorithms. A lot of it depends on what you’re looking to gain by adopting a new service/switching away from something else and individual concern.

Personally, I’m looking for a place to store personal photos: friends, family, travel etc. Critical needs - easy sharing ideally not locked into Apple’s ecosystem - not to have my photos mined for advertising and social graph data (most important) - ideally around for the long haul but in my mind this is for sharing, not backup

I’m not particularly concerned about warrants, government surveillance etc. Again for me this is about sharing so the expectation of true privacy is low. Any photos I considered sensitive I would store elsewhere.

For me, the biggest point of confidence I have in this project is that they charge money from day 1 and don’t have a forever free plan. I’m excited about projects that offer the benefits of “social” but where the software, not my data, is the product.

This breaks in systems where an empty string “” != null but I don’t have an elegant solution.

I think it’s less in Google’s long term best interest and more a marriage of convenience. Hopefully a temporary one.

Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm.

One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.

Crime doesn’t “proliferate” around housing projects in Bed Stuy, it exists just as it does everywhere. Bed Stuy and NYC as a whole rank as one of the safest cities, especially large cities.

Linking the housing projects to crime without rigorously accounting for all other factors is irresponsible. Perhaps housing projects are more heavily policed so more crime is recorded. What factors (ie poverty and low political capitol) led the housing project to be placed where it was.

Housing instability is a critical issue and increasing density and available housing stock is an urgent need.

Except that moving inventory, and to a lesser extent generating repeat business, is more critical than ancillary ad revenue. If The screens don’t work or the ads aren’t effective, and I don’t open the door to get those high-margin also-bought drinks than they definitely do not achieve the store’s goal.

That’s fair. Things that start out as a killer feature definitely have the potential to break out into wildly successful products/ecosystems. Instagram is a great example but I’d argue their early killer feature was even more similar to Clubhouse’s - being just photos without the rest of the noise of social media.

Maybe Clubhouse can find that spot that helps them benefit from not having the baggage of Twitter etc. but seems like they’ve been slow to capitalize while everyone else is catching up.

Clubhouse feels like a prime case of “that’s a feature not a product”. They did a great job pioneering a new conversation medium but implementations like Twitter Spaces that piggyback off a social network feel more natural.

Audio rooms are great for unique, impromptu content - more collaborative than a post or a video but less staged than a podcast. Unfortunately audio-only discovery is hard and slow.

I can’t speak to the conversion costs, but let’s pretend there’s a creative solution (modular construction?).

Converting office space to mass market housing could be a huge long term win. Cities like NYC and SF already have a huge shortage of overall non-luxury units which has caused rents in previously less expensive further out neighborhoods to spike. These neighborhoods aren’t super exciting to live in now so they’ll naturally be more affordable to start. Hopefully over time by mixing housing and residential in these central business districts they’ll become more vibrant w/ an economic engine that runs on nights/weekends too.

If commercial vacancies really do spike it may be better for cities to incentivize these conversions rather then let their midtown’s stagnate.

Whether it’s capped or not is irrelevant. It’s still taking advantage of a paid resource without explicit permission. Also if it leads to increased demand across an ISP it will inevitably cause higher prices.

That is a great explanation. It’s to Uber’s credit that their app seems so deceptively simple. That said all those special cases make me even more skeptical about them getting on the right side of profitability.

Every one of those localized special cases that Uber puts a team on is them defending a moat against localized competitors. For the upstart localized app, that country’s payment system, driver laws, airport rules etc more similar to the basic 5 screen app Uber seems to be.

Anytime Uber let’s it’s foot off the gas in a particular place one of those will show up, offer drivers a slightly better deal, and Uber will have to match - killing any margin.

+New Relic One

The article doesn’t say Andelans think only making 1/3 of their billing rate is unfair. It says they don’t make 1/3rd of their bill rate but the company perpetuates the fallacy that they do. It both makes Andela’s pay scheme seem more generous than it is while creating social misconceptions about how well off Andela’s workers are.

Most bucket-based APIs I’ve used allow you to go beyond your tier and you’re either automatically bumped up to the next expensive tier or charged overage rates (i.e. SendGrid). If you use less than you commit to they keep the extra but go over and it’s automatically usage based.

Either way bucket pricing is designed to work out better for the provider than the customer almost every time.

Same with Airport Express which had a killer side-feature of a AirPlay-able line out. When mine goes I’ll be searching eBay for another one.

HN isn’t a community of luddites and articles like this get tons of people up in arms almost everyday. Same is true at most other tech sites.

The point is that bad faith actions (forced obsolescence, surveillance, no commitment to security, weak sharing of protocols etc.) are holding back smart home and IoT significantly. This technology has so much potential and is not THAT new but adoption is still hit or miss. It’s a bad sign that so many self described techies are comfortably waiting on the sideline or worse, afraid to have some of these devices in their homes.

I agree that smart tech is beyond useful but when the big IoT players ignore detractors and repeat the same mistakes over and over again it’s just flushing potential (and value) down the toilet.

It would be great to see industry take complaints to heart and begin to build trust in their ecosystems.

> Also this report has way too much background of the “Hacking Team” that really sounds suspect from me.

Consultants write like high school students with a ten page research paper requirement. If you don’t have real content pad it with extra background, bulleted lists and superfluous tables.

The final product needs to be long enough so people think real work was done but boring enough that they don’t actually read it.

Yes but they quickly run the risk of ruining the in-person customer’s experience. In NYC the use of ghost kitchens[1] is booming. There are 2 within a block of my office - one is a multi-tenant space that serves several restaurants and the other is a pickup-only storefront for a salad chain. These outposts increase capacity but also require way less staff to manage and fewer skills to train.

It makes sense but it’s also sad to see that the best use of valuable retail-level real estate is restaurants designed for no one to go to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen

Link to incident on Google Cloud status:

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/developers-console/...

Finally up on Google Cloud status:

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/developers-console/...

Same for me and most travelers, but previously there hasn’t been much of a reason to care.

If nothing else, now I’m glaringly aware that Southwest and AA are the primary U.S. carriers that fly Max’s. Chances are it would at least be a passing thought if either had a good option on a metasearch site.

You're spot on and what happened to the company as a result is tragic. Kodak pioneered digital camera technology, patenting their first digital camera in 1978 and developing a digital SLR in 1989. Unfortunately they chose to shelve it all rather than market it in fear of cannibalizing film sales.

That incident still gets me angry. Migrating wasn't a horrible experience but they way they went about it demonstrated they couldn't be trusted with anything remotely mission-critical.

Autonomous trucking is the only thing they're currently working on that I can see being a game changer. Everything else is a highly-competitive, marginal cost business with no moat.

And require Uber to continue subsidizing fares in that market. If you assume Uber operates at a loss everywhere they subsidize then smart competition will compete everywhere.

The newest Above Avalon podcast makes the case that Apple is embracing secondhand markets and key to that is increasing device longevity.

If it’s true they’re thinking about devices as likely to have multiple owners it makes sense to take precautions against hardware backdoors.

https://www.aboveavalon.com/podcast/2018/10/26/above-avalon-...

Also a side effect of AMP and factoring in page speed in rankings. Publishers got bullied into AMP-ifying all their content and now their winning the recipes and movie review game.

Completely agree. Fragmented communities run by mods meant that reputations were built on time and trust rather than #s of followers. Influence in that sense was built by long-term commitment to a group organized around a specific topic. That dynamic disincentived bad behavior and diminished its effects in ways that mimic real human relationships. The same isn’t true on social media.

To my knowledge this hasn’t been either verified or disproven, and no methods disclosed, but apparently CellBrite claims to be able to unlock iOS 11.

http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/26/cellebrite-...

Not speaking about S3 specifically but overall I disagree. Assuming there’s a business case that requires multi-AZ or multi-region redundancy of multiple services it’s hard to match AWS in terms of price and simplicity.