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wantreprenr007

54 karma · joined February 19, 2016

I'm boring as fuck.

Watch these people instead: https://youtube.com/jehugarcia https://youtube.com/CaseyNeistat https://youtube.com/JoshPalerLin

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wantreprenr007··on Opera CEO: Sale to Chinese Consortium Wasn’t Our Decision
NCSA was before them, and Netscape (and later Mozilla after server business didnt materialize) basically clean-room copied NCSA from scratch. Pioneers in new directions can define space but still get slaughtered because the next entrant (Chrome) doesn't have product inertia and has/should learned lessons of what didn't work.

Some of it maybe popularity/marketing of not having a huge org behind them, but odd rough-edges did more to sabotage stickiness. Plus, competing with deep pockets giving away something for free is an unnecessary competitive war of attrition, especially by not differentiating: most secure browser or best browser for X/Y/Z.

wantreprenr007··on Introducing CloudFlare Registrar: Designed for Security, Not the Masses
It's perceived risk/reward opportunity for getting away with something (ethics)... better to test a potential cofounder beforehand (know them well before) than find out later with random founders that could be crooks. Plus, having overlapping social ties with cofounders, investors, customers, etc. tends to reduce trust and risk issues because their reputation means something.

Another thing I say: a contract or any agreement is only as good as relationship on which is written.

wantreprenr007··on Opera CEO: Sale to Chinese Consortium Wasn’t Our Decision
I always wondered why, for the longest time, they thought competing with Chrome and Firefox was a good idea when they didn't have any compelling durable advantages and had distinct disadvantages like not being able to set alt search engines as default until recently and it's basically Chromium with "richness" tweaks and branding.

Their investors were lucky to get an exit.

The well-upholstered lady sung the swan song, I'm afraid... I hope those guys refocus on something that does change the world for the better rather duplicate what others are already did.

wantreprenr007··on Just Landed Is Shutting Down
Failure to monetize such as hypertargeted/local ads/deals or freemium features.

Winners tend to turn challenge into profit opportunities rather than give up and disappoint many people when they had something sizable which could be sold to someone whom can fix it or fix it themselves.

Too often, when people whom are uncomfortable with uncertainty and don't know what success looks like, they give up and throw away opportunity which may never come again because of their past behavior / reputation for not finishing things. My cousin nearly had a florist shop by having tons of orders, but gave up when he didn't know what to do by feeling overwhelmed... and I was so disappointed that he didn't handle it better to come out ahead in something he had passion and opportunity that passed by. (Self-sabotage or novice mistakes, who knows.)

I see these shutdown notices not as some self-deprecating contrition but as braggging about letting people down, destroying value and wasting their and all their customers' and investors' time and money... don't shutdown when you have a good team and customers, pivot or sell. (Don't squander assets: talent, social or capital.)

wantreprenr007··on Lila Tretikov Has Resigned from Wikimedia Foundation
I've worked in startups and large ivy league universities... the latter has more focus on social capital than necessarily delivering value or customer service because there is less survival risk, so the emphasis is on social organizational capital (family-like, countryclub departments) than monetary profit (except for university profit-centers). I've also seen massive corruption, empire building, laughable leadership cognitive dissonance, waste, privacy disasters and embezzlement at one university which shall go nameless.

It's true that the fights can be so brutal because the stakes are often so small.

There are some exceptions where good leadership and teams exist and deliver worthy value without economic or social forces, but these are outliers.

wantreprenr007··on Introducing CloudFlare Registrar: Designed for Security, Not the Masses
Interesting. Just watched a Ben Horowitz interview containing the paraphrase quote "it's all rainbows, smiles and sunshine until someone stabs you in the back."

People tend (not always) have habit of changing when valuations increase, another reason trust and relationships pre-venture are more valuable for when things get interesting.

Consider it a cheap lesson overall about gradual ebb/flow of trust, and that people's (mis)behavior either self-selects them in or out of the running for future opportunities... their punishment is their lives.

wantreprenr007··on Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack
As much as I <3 Apple, they're still a SPoF just like Lavabit or anyone else with centralized servers that aren't "SWAT-resistant." If iDevices could work without iCloud and usefully communicate with each other directly (sans cell network too), that would be impressive... storage, processing and wireless tech are all getting cheaper... p2p "iCloud" might be within the realm of not-quite-insane.

(Somehow, I feel iMessage and related apps are MITMable because there is no mandatory, mutual, out-of-band validation of a recipient's identity.)

wantreprenr007··on San Jose: A Place Where the Poor Once Thrived
The could've called it "Silicon Valley." Including Monterey county is weird because that's inland and costal to the south.

Santa Clara county encompasses most of Silicon Valley "proper."

San Mateo county includes the peninsula which starts at Menlo Park and just NW of Palo Alto/Stanford.

It's hard to define clear boundaries of what San Jose because it sub/urban sprawls into many other communities (Campbell, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Santa Clara), like individual trees growing into one massive tree cluster. Plus, most readers out of the area aren't familiar where Willow Glen, Blossom Valley or Almaden Valley are without maps.

It might've been more interesting to compare the price fluctuations as a heatmap and a function of distance from economic intensive areas.

wantreprenr007··on San Jose: A Place Where the Poor Once Thrived
Interesting. I was fortunate to be born in the late 70's in Blossom Valley in SJ because both sets of my grandparents happened to be US military families whom lived in Europe, US and Asia. I remember the wineries along Blossom Hill Road and a couple of the hold-out farmers, one whom had this massive square field at Allen Avenue & Blossom Hill Road, plowing every autumn as a signal school would start soon. Also, occasionally finding rusty shards of nails in the backyard from the turn of the century and roaming the hinterlands of Almaden Valley on a bicycle (flying down Hicks Road at 38 mph while riding the rear tire).

Even luckier that my father's small business allowed my attendance for K-3 to a private school, then public SJUSD and finally UC system mostly because the herd was steamrolling onto Harvard, MIT and Stanford (where I later moonlighted between quarters).

As a point of reference, my grandparents paid 30k for a house in the late 60's which is now worthy a megabucks... no middle- or working-class person could afford that today because the global demand to be in SV wasn't what it is today obviously. It is somewhat of goldrush fever, however the density of talent, wealth and customers is a compelling, complete ecosystem which evolves as fast as anywhere, probably with a nod to the historical demographic "filter" of the more open/risk-tolerant persons venturing to the mostly "new" land c. 19th century onwards (take Japanese culture as one example, where misfits and eccentrics tended to flee to other major cities).

Overall, it seems that the quasi differential equational model of resource scarity meets population / technology / wealth gradually leads to better technologies, cheaper goods/services but it becomes gradually harder (but not impossible) to profit from innovation (3000th ToDo list app), afford to pay workers fairly (coupled with decline of unions) and materials tend to become more expensive (before pervasive recycling).

It may be that prices are pushed up as workers get smart and demand higher pay, since fewer living in their cars working minimum wage and exploitation in emigration limbo (hospitality, agriculture, industrial), seems like a Good Thing(tm). Another enabler would be more rapid mass transit such as hyperloop, able to foster more distant suburbs to make city work livable for more families, despite increased distance.

Space and biomedical seem the most promising industries long-term, as are other business models that are durably defensible or decommodifiable (wow, I sound PHB).

Finally, static anything is an illusionary, psychological construct affording apparent safety and continuity; change is but one of the constants.

wantreprenr007··on Amazon Free Shipping minimum is now $49
Sadly, Amazon can just undercut and outspend them.

"Competition is for losers" - Thiel

wantreprenr007··on Amazon Free Shipping minimum is now $49
Now that Amazon has a de-facto monopoly on distribution and fulfillment with around a billion skus that rivals the likes of WalMart, it's no surprise prices begin endlessly ratcheting up.
wantreprenr007··on Evidence that fish have feelings
First, condescending backslapping is rude and rationalization of ignorance is dumb.

The sheer volume of methane from animal production is raising the temperature of the planet dangerously.

Next, the Petri dish that is playing Russian Roulette by exhausing antibiotics and incubating the next pandemic are the two final nails in the coffin of meat.

Good luck with that belief that energy-intensive lifestyle should or can scale to 10 billion people.

We should be setting a better example for developing nations and choosing wiser diet and lifestyle behaviors which won't doom us to move entire cities inland.

wantreprenr007··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
Not going to argue, it looked like Python with some continuation syntax inspired by others to me. I only have data on my perception until we all get neural implants to argue cyberneticly. ;)

Doesn't matter.

wantreprenr007··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
Maybe there is a lack of available video courses teaching functional style, it might not be as hard as it seems (wan't for me, but a sample size of 1 is anecdotal). Give it another try perhaps?
wantreprenr007··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
LabVIEW?
wantreprenr007··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
Etoys and many others have tried, maybe a good language and good IDE could have sufficient benefit, but I'm unsure how a UI would ever map to complex algorithms better than textual-interface paradigms. They can try and see, even if the likelihood of failure is unfortunately very high (until it's not). VPL seems currently like an utopia, apart from dashboards, configuration of control systems which naturally map to the real world and interface builders.

One interesting VPL I ran into is a free fractal editor on iOS which lets one build up visual LOGO execution pipeline(s) of operations.

wantreprenr007··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
It looks strongly influenced by Python, probably to ease novice users into it.

Edit: Not to be confused with another Luna Language: https://github.com/luna/luna

wantreprenr007··on Vapor: a type-safe web framework for Swift
There is no arguing with Turing equivalence of Go and most other languages but there are practical limitations which prevent more complete general purposeness.

I like Go since the beginning. However, Go cannot be easily used for kernel development, soft or hard real-time or embedded systems (no linker script support and porting runtime is weighty) and there are few transpilers.

Rust is slightly better, because PoC kernels have been put together with fewer hacks. Haskell, C, Ada, assembly are much more general purpose in terms of being able to build something like seL4, an F-15 cockpit, an engine management system or compiling code as ASIC circuitry. (Perl's supposed use in nuclear armaments notwithstanding.)

PS: I would like to see some geninuses come up with a back-back-end to LLVM or a disassembler which could formally prove binary satisfiability of program correctness without mind-bending, gibberish, over-mathematized, incantations inaccessible to us mere, stupid mortals.

wantreprenr007··on Reasoning About Code
"Don't make me think (unnecessarily)" is just one of several good ideals for scalable and maintainable projects, because valuable code is easy to learn and easy to add to. And since the code and doc is a shared, collaborative description of machine behavior, it should help new people understand tradeoffs, motivations for engineering decisions and history to better use or add to it.
wantreprenr007··on Evidence that fish have feelings
I was kidding. Of course I eat walnuts, pecans and other low-water tree nuts; fish, not so much.
wantreprenr007··on Evidence that fish have feelings
I almost felt guilty for taking fish oil and eating sushi, but then it's clear that a fever reflex doesn't equate to missing Jane the cute fish next door, writing Leaves of Kelp or being jealous of Henry's dorsal fins, although I must admit they are quite impressive. It might seem anthropocentric (it's definitely anthropomorphic), but Jane was really tasty with soy sauce and wasabi.
wantreprenr007··on San Bernardino County tweets it reset attacker iCloud password at FBI's request
Johnny clubfingers 5-0 clicks Ok, and destroys "evidence" for being a total idiot... I take it he/she was hungover during that 2 hours of computer forensics in the academy. For crooks, this is good news; for stopping potential future victims, this isn't good, and misapplied to innocent/MPAA/RIAA enforcement, it's destructive and lowers LE credibility.

The moral of the story is for individuals, whom should implictly fear government overreach no matter whom is in office, one has to back their shit up and make it SWAT-proof, even if that means running several TahoeLAFS boxes in countries like Switzerland, because running a server (physical or Linode) or just replicating data to a friend's server just doesn't cut it and never did.

wantreprenr007··on Scala's Option monad versus null-conditional operator in C#
This article is timely for us as we're using Scala for backend work.

Ruby 2.3 &. operator and Swift can do something like this pseudocode:

    if let city = article?.author?.address?.city?.ToLower() {
       // city present
    }
Too long?:

    if let city = article?
      .author?
      .address?
      .city?
      .ToLower() {
        // city present
    }
All are improvements over pyramids of doom.

(Be aware of subtle gotcha in Scala of var and val, really prefer Rust/Go/Swift keywords.)

wantreprenr007··on Scala's Option monad versus null-conditional operator in C#
Much better than the usual terrible patterns of pyramids of doom.

Another reason to set tab stops to 4+ characters: make PoDs impractical and better code legible.

wantreprenr007··on Why YC
It's at least 3.5x as good as the best advisor. Better to have 93% of something worth 10MM+ than 100% of 100k.
wantreprenr007··on Senator drafting bill to criminalize Apple’s refusal to aid decryption
Just goes to show you can't legislate morality, but a crooked politician can try to make scruples illegal.

(I so hope Bernie wins and has the DoJ investigate folks for corruption and racketeering, starting with Cheney.)

wantreprenr007··on What Happens If You Kill Someone on the Moon?
Moon dwellers will pool their money to hire a posse to chase the outlaw gangs out for burning down the saloon. (It could happen or be a western movie plot.)
wantreprenr007··on Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time
Reproducibility from source and build env are fundamental to science or making changes to improve something. Without these, it can appear to signal hoarded proprietariness waving the banner of FLOSS or just a poorly-maintained project without high standards, even if it were unintentional.
wantreprenr007··on History of massive-scale sorting experiments at Google
"Narrow" AI is already here: search, banking, insurance, internet ads, crime prediction, Siri, plane autopilot (autotakeoff/landing too), autoparking, driver assist, on and on.

(At Trimble, we had fully autonomous tractor PoC in 2001)

"Deep" AI (self-directed / human-interactive) will take more time and effort, and can have (simulated) emotions if so programmed; the determinate is how to sell such as a viable product or service that doesn't freak people out too much or do something stupid like place untrustworthy systems in charge of live nuclear missiles.

wantreprenr007··on New Python REST API and CLI micro-framework
Neat. Swagger and HAL support make APIs easier to digest
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