noodle

Depends on your definition of "big $$$" probably.

I don't have many specific examples, but the cases where it would work tend to be focused around investing in people with track records doing capital intensive things.

For selling the book, or for the book itself?

> except that one highway exit on 101 that kills you

The conversations on the topic that I've heard involve building special, dedicated exits, sort of like truck weigh stations. And having them live not particularly close to urban centers.

So it a bit more of a holistic approach than bottom up, and something that will take a while to implement since you're not able to roll it out everywhere at once.

Not to say that there still won't be issues. I'm sure there will be. And I'm sure there's a long way to go still. But its also not a black and white issue.

AFAIK this is the accepted path forward (minus the side hustle aspect). Automate that which is easier to automate: the long distance highway driving. For the first/last mile, let a human do the work.

> that HN mentality

Is that the HN mentality? It might lean more that way now, I suppose, but I've always felt it was more in the "scratch your own itch" territory and less in the "complete industry outsider disrupts XYZ industry with revolutionary ideas" area

There are also comparatively very few people who live in the Redmond area and who commute to work downtown Seattle. It probably shouldn't be a heavily serviced path, realistically speaking.

> The housing being built in Portland over the past handful of years is of a specific type and a certain price range.

This is true for every city. Developers don't really build low-end units. They build high-end units and rely on the age/deterioration of other buildings to eventually turn them into lower-end buildings.

This is sort of working out because people are generally moving back into cities and are willing to pay a premium for it.

The reason why I think this article about Portland is interesting is either their influx of people into the city has slowed/stopped, or they've built so many units that its outpaced the influx. A common narrative in cities is "we're building so many units yet prices are still high!!!" But clearly the equation should be rate of new units coming into the market vs rate of change of city population.

Which also feels like common sense. But maybe its more like, this article is interesting because it shows there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Levels knows how to code too. Now, maybe he's not as good as others, but he's even live coded the creation of new projects of his.

Levels is a digital nomad who has consistently posted in-depth articles about his businesses and codebases for years. People like him and his travel lifestyle the same way we like Patrick.

Some will have to be in the JS, but that isn't really any different from non-SPA web apps. They still serve up JS files that have business logic. JS and business logic are, to some degree, inseparable.

If you're giving trust to a user to query the API, they could also maliciously leak data or execute queries inside a normal web app just as easily if you build something appropriately secure.

> Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city

I'd be more interested in how "prime" is defined here and what the percentage looks like if you include what they're presumably defining as secondary office space.

Eat a variety of foods in your diet and most of the micronutrient stuff works itself out. You have a problem when you stick to a regimented meal plan, always eating the same sets of foods. If you're worried about it, grab a multivitamin.

Other than that, it depends on how heavily you want to keep track and for what purpose.

> My uneducated guess was that these pictures represent the "official" and branded street culture.

It represents the prevailing trend of an entire year. Which is to say, what is the most popular. So yeah, its going to trim away the fringe, and that does end up being a lot to cut away.

But that's really flexible, though, right? If a lot of people lost their jobs from minimum wage increases, wouldn't you expect the unemployment rate to increase at least temporarily around the same time while they initially look for new work before falling out of the market?

To add to this conversation, you can parlay consulting into software without a ton of problems.

Do work for customers. While doing work, try and find a shared pain point across your industry/customers. Build software for it and use your existing relationship to sell it. Or sell it and then build. Whichever.

So low wage workers are getting cut but unemployment is still at 3.2%? Which is ~1.5% lower than the national average?

Kind of sounds like this study might be looking at only half the story.

Is the core argument here is that SaaS enables the success of software companies that have little value and that "post-SaaS" means that those companies die?

That doesn't really ring true to me. That already happens, doesn't it? SaaS as a pricing model or platform strategy in and of itself won't do shit for you if you have a terrible idea, right?

Or is the author trying to argue that SaaS will eventually become a race to the bottom and that the market should shift towards value-based pricing?

There are still plenty of people who regularly play in a casual way. I regularly play and have a number of friends who do.

The people who played and quit with the hype weren't the people paying money in the first place. The people who were throwing money at the game are still playing and still paying money. And they now have corporate sponsorships rolling now as well. For example, I just saw an event this past weekend that clearly paid to have lures up at all stops in the area.

I don't think that things "aren't looking so well" yet. It doesn't have the peak playerbase anymore, but its certainly still making good money.

Everything I've read and everyone I've talked to about it have told me that there's a perception of startups being perceived as crazy, crazy risky with real life implications (finding housing without a salaried job is supposedly difficult). And the money being available is primarily available to older, less risky-seeming business owners with safe business plans, not younger ones doing interesting things.

YMMV, though, as I've only read and discussed the topic and not experienced it myself.

While your statements aren't wrong, there are other large companies that are doing this type of thing. AT&T for example is running incubators and is on the order of magnitude of size as SoftBank.

> why does SoftBank invest so much money in existing companies, instead of doing something a la YCombinator?

IIRC, Japan isn't particularly culturally friendly to startups. That probably surfaces itself in the leadership's business decisions.

If you've been around HN for a long time, you'll have watched him take the path of a salaryman, to a small-time app, to a SaaS product, to consulting, to productized consulting, to a new and better SaaS product, to selling a company, to angel investing, and beyond, etc.. While he's really good at some stuff, he's also not an expert at everything. Its a really relatable story for so many people here.

And he's transparently written about all of it along the way, including a lot of financial stuff

> I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types"

Two things:

1. Atlanta's tech scene is largely b2b. Its driven a lot by people who worked in industry and then had a great idea for a company and left. Or serial entrepreneurs who are capable of building a business but not a product. So a lot of companies simply originate from "business types" because they're founded by them, for them.

2. ATV. ATV strived to make itself the face of the ATL startup scene, and generally succeeded. But the resources ATV provides are all primarily aimed at business types - pitch practices, VC events, demo days, and networking gatherings. And so business types gathered there, since that's a convenient place to be, and the successful companies went elsewhere due to rising rent. So now, ATV is largely the face of startups in Atlanta, and yet is a building filled with "business types" hustling to get their company started or funding secured. The optics on the startup ecosystem are consequently very heavily "business types" because everyone tends to just look at ATV as the thermometer.

I feel like the question is, if an Uber driver takes longer to arrive due to unforeseen/unforeseeable circumstances, does Uber pay them more than price X? Or is their comp always capped at X?

If they pay more than X, then what Uber's doing is fair-ish. IMO. If the driver can never earn more than X, then that is a problem.

> But in some circumstances it's not necessarily that the consumer is trying to cut time and effort.

> I just decided spur of the moment to get some.

No, that's still cutting time and effort. Okay you want something spur of the moment. Your option is to buy it and then go home and slice it, buy it pre-sliced, or don't buy it at all. That is still a choice of convenience vs payment. You're not being forced to buy the mango.

You can apply that argument to basically any convenience or luxury.

The answer being, some want mangos and value their time and effort more than the the difference in mango price and sliced mango price.

Yeah, I've run high margin deals before and even those aren't really worthwhile. For it to be successful you have to be fairly sophisticated with your methodology, and most small business owners (the people who tend to use Groupon the most) just aren't that sophisticated in their setup.

A lot of people around here do "invest" in this type of tech by working for companies producing that tech. For the average person, you can't throw your money at a random startup.

And generally, its not exactly a safe bet either. People who do throw their money at startups tend to also have lots of other very safe, diversified investments to balance out the risk of larger singular investments on specific bets/companies/tech/ideas.

For example, the author is advocating and claims to invest in your basic Vanguard Retirement Target fund, but he's also an accredited investor who also does just what you suggest

As others noted, the declaration happened before the weather hit. People could reasonably move their cars. All of the affected spaces are super clearly marked and people who park there regularly should've had very ample warning about it.

Additionally, based on my understanding, a lot of local parking lots/garages drastically dropped their rates to help accommodate.

> A less "grow fast and explode like a Unicorn" business model would probably make it work better for participating businesses.

I know a few more local versions of groupon who went into the game with this game plan. They all failed or pivoted out of it. It seems like a product that can only succeed by going big.