raiyu

Don’t forget that Instagram was originally just an app with no website. The fact that you got a website to see some posts technically is a step towards openness. =]]

I never thought of the blocking of links as spam prevention but it makes complete sense.

Now that they’ve progressed a lot they have swipe up links for various accounts that integrate with ads and other publishers so they are loosening the grip.

At first i hated not having links and being able to click but now i rather appreciate it because anecdotally it definitely reduced spam.

Would be a great outcome for Slack as Wall St. really hasn't liked the stock since it went public highlighting the consistent battle for customers that they are waging against Microsoft Teams.

Meanwhile for Salesforce, obviously the street isn't happy about it because it puts Salesforce more directly in competition with MS and they are doubtful that Salesforce backed Slack will have more success in engaging with these customers than they are having already independently.

The cost of delivering the video decreases over time and unlike Netflix which has to pay for content YouTube doesnt which gives it tremendously better margins.

Just look at the debt load of Netflix.

The cost of acquiring content is so much greater than serving it especially now that every traditional media company has launched its own streaming service.

Also you can never compete with the viewer numbers between a product that is paid versus free so the most that YouTube has established is clearly much greater and visible in that it has no direct competition in the user generated video space for 15 years until perhaps maybe tiktok but tremendously different platforms.

Meanwhile Netflix has competition from Amazon Prime, Disney, Hulu, HBO, and others.

It would be worth more than that.

It’s per user revenue is low and can be increased to $20 as author notes.

Today’s market values growth over everything and since they are profitable they will get a steep multiple.

Markets are irrational and trade on momentum.

The valuation provided is more of the floor than what it would trade based on growth expectations and general excitement.

Unlike FB which has competition from Twitter and Snapchat and would be suffering had it not acquired Instagram, YouTube itself has no direct competition in its space.

More likely it would trade at $250-350b

Either way it along with Instagram are the two best acquisitions in modern tech history.

Face book would buy it in a heart beat

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve turned off a few movies because of shaky cam. Every now and then for a bit of drama or action is ok but not the entire damn film.

This is the same as Blue Apron that had heavy marketing spend to acquire new customers because old customers were churning very quickly.

If you had a scalable channel you would expect to accrue more customers as old cohorts retained customers, but this instead just looks like exchanging ad dollars for one, two-time purchase customers which is why the ad spend is so high and the life blood of the company.

Hard to imagine this company not getting hammered by the street unless they have a one-time lift from COVID shopping, but long term hard to bullish on this company especially when comparing their S&M expense vs R&D expense.

I always said if you do something do your best at it. If you find yourself not doing your best, then choose not to do it. If you can't choose not to do it, that means this is essential, and so go see #1 again. Do your best.

I think of it from the same perspective of business. Instead of doing OK support do your BEST support. If you are struggling, then choose to do no support - if your customers leave because support is critical, then guess what, you will probably get more benefit from doing your best.

So I think that advice works well as a way to really minimize your engagements, and figure out which ones are essential, by not just doing them just cause, by trying to cancel them entirely otherwise.

When you look at 30% of revenue from Peloton, and that their interest rate revenue is lower than merchant fees, it's basically companies paying to finance larger purchases for their customers because they get to book the full revenue on their books immediately, pay down the interest through merchant fees themselves, get higher numbers on their books, increase their market cap, and for consumers it's a benefit because why not finance it over a period of 39 months than be out of pocket immediately or finance it through a credit card with high interest rates.

So really it's a great way to take advantage of the credit markets and public company comps being extremely high while benefitting the customer.

3,000-10,000x return approximately.

Depends on later stage dilution and what the pre-money is, but still a ridiculous markup. No comparison to S&P.

When Covid hit and they had to cut advertising expenses from 2019 they didn't see as large of a drop in traffic as they expected based on ad spend.

So they are definitely getting a tremendous amount of organic traffic because "Airbnb" became a verb like Google or Uber.

Especially around the fast growing millennial sector which is very focused around experiences and travel.

Usually within 4-6 weeks of the S-1 becoming public.

I guess now it's as simple as checking whether cost of a dev team to do recurring billing is < 0.5%

The good news is that printing volume has decreased so much that this is really HP's swan song trying to milk that last nearly dead cow.

It is annoying that we still have to print anything, and the same for all of the things you receive in the mail.

Thank god for docu-sign and electronic filing.

Would be great if everyone concerned about the environment would also focus on mail, priting, to add to the list of plastic straws

That's doubtful, companies get harder to manage at scale not easier.

And real long term issues like this are usually fixed through massive culture changes, leadership changes, followed by extremely heavy lifting by ICs.

Just look at Microsoft evolving from Windows to the Cloud, to Azure.

Two years, when you are dealing with a ton of software and hardware and a CEO who has somewhat of a "god" complex - it's unlikely that things have changed all too much.

More likely, if they decided to retool for the Model 3 and build from the ground up, yes, but that would add time delay, and Elon always feels like he's racing against an internal clock in his head so it's doubtful.

The problem for Docker wasn't that per say, Docker itself was the free part that got everyone interested it's just that their paid for tier went head to head with Kubernetes and lost.

Had Kubernetes not existed they would be doing just fine economically as they would be the dominant platform.

They got beat by competition.

Find a segment of the market that the bigger players aren't focused on and over optimize for those customers.

cofounder DigitalOcean

I'm not saying it's statistical, it's just a reference to a small issue which is compounded because of high fatality risk and that the dynamic environment makes the likelihood of unlikely events more likely to occur.

The problem with self-driving cars is the 1% failure of software.

Cars travel at a high rate of speed and a 1% error can easily be fatal. Either by hitting a pedestrian or someone on a bike, or by the car failing to acknowledge something and crashing itself head on into something.

Because cars travel in a highly dynamic environment this 1% error and the fatality risk associated with it is very high, so you need to have something that is 99.99999% safe which is extremely challenging because of the dynamic environment.

Meanwhile, if you look at automated train and rail systems. Because the environment is 99% controlled and less complex a 1% error is actually much smaller, because the environment is so controlled.

The high rate of speed, coupled with fatality risk, coupled with dynamic environments, is why this is such a challenging problem.

As a native New Yorker riding the subway for 20 years your suggestion is genius. Can’t count how many times I exited on the wrong stair case.

Watching the video their acquisition of Lyrebird now makes a lot more sense as it allows you to edit audio via text and create a very seamless editing experience.

It’s great to see someone taking a different approach to video editing as that has traditionally been a market with high barriers to entry for every day use because of tool complexity.

Isn’t Squarespace or Wix aimed at people building websites with no code experience?

Or is that not extensible enough?

I guess on the one hand if the conversation didn't warrant you returning to it in a timely fashion, maybe it wasn't that critical.

For any company related stuff I usually checked in regularly and also have google alerts set up.

But for casual banter, I think the no notification is a nice feature of HN and probably reduces some of the bad noise other public forums have.

That being said, still a nice feature to add for those who want it =]

Discord won because they found a unique purpose and focused all of their efforts on it while, making sure that all secondary features were also well crafted.

What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.

Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.

Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.

However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.

I think Showtime should have followed this. Usually the first season is spectacular, and it's almost as if the writers are surprised it is renewed, but they wasted their best material on season 1.

Weeds Season 1 was amazing, the rest not so much. Dexter, season 1 should have just been a single season, sooo good, after a while you wonder how many serial killers reside in Florida. Billions, season 1 amazing, it hasn't been too bad after, but after a while it just starts to seem forced.

While this pandemic will definitely create global shifts and city shifts, it's a bit unfair to look at the losses of service sector jobs and call them permanent.

I'm sure there will be permanent job losses but the majority of major cities are no where close to being 100% reopened, and the public even in open cities hasn't returned to normal life.

If anything what the article highlights is that it is easier to shift your job if you were spending all day on a computer to remote work, and a service level job can't do that.

The V-shaped recovery stopped for service level work and basically shows to watch extent major cities are still "closed".

Looks like they had a reasonable alternative of getting back into the app store and placing the 30% revenue collection into an escrow account.

Seems like a very sensible approach that they refused.

With how frothy the public market is for SaaS companies with growth looks like their growth may have stalled out.

Usually board will look to make changes, replace founder CEO and if that doesn’t work then push for a sale.

Very smart acquisition for Twilio though.

A lot of the information here looks like it’s direct from airlines.

Obviously they have no benefit from touting the safety of air travel.

Right?

end sarcasm