Hacker News Reader

quizme2000on The art of the dinner party

My wife and I's friends all have children the same age as ours and they are toddlers. Dinner parties are right out, but Sunday waffle brunch is on point. It is a fun affair with everyone including the kids. After everyone eats it becomes comically victorian. The Sober Dads and Friendly Neighbors drink coffee, BS, and supervise the kids (Out of Earshot, of course). The cocktail crowd will relax into an adult conversation as much as any dinner party without the urgency of a baby sitter or the guilt of leaving ones partner at home to enjoy an evening out. I enjoy our brunch with friends as much as any dinner party I can recall.

quizme2000on eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos

Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of walmart in general.

quizme2000on Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

This is ripe in the animation and CGI studios also. ILM/Lucas Arts were notorious meat grinders of young professionals. There must be an upper bound to hours worked in a shift/day/week legally for salaried employees/management/executives. No game or movies is worth working someone to death to keep on budget.

quizme2000on Profits Without Prosperity (2014)

It seems there is an uptick in news stories in general about stock buybacks. With the Bush tax holiday, corps bought back $70B in stock out of the $223B that was repatriated. Even a rookie accountant would see the value of holding offshore profits until another tax holiday (now estimated to be $2T). Thus starting a cycle that is the biggest tax shelter in corporate tax history. The odds are pretty good that of the 3 goals of the trump tax plan, only the tax holiday will pass. So we can expect to see around $700B in stock buyback and the rest will pay dividends to keep stock prices from correcting the current %25 over inflated stock price caused by the tax holiday plan.

quizme2000on The quest to make a crystal harder than diamonds

"... with a device that can fit in her hand" and no photo of the device. Yet, another example of bad/poor effort science reporting. The structure of this article looked like an 17 year old copied and pasted some shit from google and performed some really bad unit conversions. His/her editor should be ashamed of such a POS article.

Device in question: https://idw-online.de/de/newsimage?id=42938&size=screen

quizme2000on Solar Roof

I think Elon got ripped off on his last shingle roof. The bar chart is nice but off by at least 150%. I've had many roofing subcontractors as clients past and present in Northern California. Based on an average of 870 roofs in 2016 for Single Family Residential homes in the bay area, Asphalt shingle roofs are $3.12 per square foot for materials and labor. The highest was $5.75 psf and the lowest $2.35 psf. Note that the SF bay area is considered one of the most expensive in roofing market. Also note that Solar City has a poor reputation in the industry for hard selling larger than needed residential solar systems.

quizme2000on Ask HN: Should I create a clone of a popular SaaS with rock-bottom pricing?

There is an inversion building in small market Saas pricing. Due to Saas consumers being burned by disappearing or deprecated services, a low or rock-bottom price is a red flag. This is especially true for a Saas services that are business oriented.

If you can deliver a true clone, why not double, triple, or 10x the price? Most Micro or Small Saas are under-priced anyway. You will not be able to snipe a competitor's customers, unless their service is not working, just by having a lower price.

However, if you can clone the service and attract your own customers you should charge more. Revenue will allow you to build out a more valuable/reliable product.

A potential customer will assume the service is more valuable and reliable than the product you cloned simply because it's higher cost.

quizme2000on Juicero's CEO responds

This should and will probably become a case study on how flawed the startup funding ethos of creating a monopoly for your billion dollar business creates an environment that encourages fraudulent products and services. In fact Juicero can and has easily ticked off all the boxes of a perfect startup model company to the tune of $120MM. The biggest weakness of a water monopoly is being destroyed by foreign conquerors. In all the cases where the primary resource for a startup is individual users, no one has a monopoly and ergo is not immune to negative value perception, ethics concerns, or bad press. Startups even with a 90% market share, huge users bases, and/or great revenue should never be run or funded like they will never face market competition because users will just abandon them and the market segment all together.

quizme2000on Tesla, Inc. Slashes the Price of Model S

Its $7500 off, Since fool.com is currently on fire with its click-bait articles.

quizme2000on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2017)

  Location: Novato, CA (Marin County)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: MySQL, MonogoDB, Node, Java, Php, Javascript, React, Linux, AWS, Digital Ocean 
  Résumé/CV:   linkedin.com/in/james-dykstra-91473694
  Email: james@brokebytes.com

quizme2000on Programming won’t be automated, or it already has been

This is why you shouldn't run commands as root.

quizme2000on Lawsuit alleges Magic Leap workplace is 'misogynistic,' 'dysfunctional'

Vaporware 2.0

quizme2000on Zenefits, a Rocket That Fell to Earth, Tries to Launch Again

NBC replayed a John Kerry Cyber Security sound byte and the Zenefits logo was in the background. They were a sponsor of the Virtous Circle Conference. Not sure if Zenefits should have been asked to sponsor this event.

"A virtuous circle is often described as a self-reinforcing system that creates positive benefits throughout the economy."

quizme2000on Tokyo police are using drones with nets to catch other drones

Probably the thought, "Next time I'm bringing a machine gun!"

quizme2000on Open-source metal 3D printer

That's a pretty glaring omission. I imagine the prints look pretty awful, but it a neat idea. In the normal use a wire feed welder the arc (bright sparky part) would be uniform to create a bead. From what I saw in the videos they are using a "bad" welding technique that would build up the instead of penetrate the metal. They will need to replace/control the wire feeder and the voltage of the welder in order to better results.