whoisjuan

If Delta can produce any evidence that such app ideas were already discussed before he brought his own concept to management he is screwed.

Honestly this isn't very novel idea. It's possible that many people came up with this very same idea before he did.

This app is not new...I have used Monodraw for as long as I can remember.

Believe it or not, there’s people who just want to write code and get paid well. In fact I know more people like that, than those who are lofty about their goals.

He hints that’s the way he feels in this comic: https://goomics.net/309/

Well the problem with this argument is that it totally ignores a basic economic concept. Price elasticity.

It’s kind of naive to assume that your CAC will grow linearly and your revenue exponentially if you set a higher price. Maybe if you’re lucky to find a market that doesn’t care about how much you charge them and get equally attracted to your product at any price rate.

More realistically price increases will increase you CAC because customers will take a longer thought to decide if they want to pay for that.

Maybe $5 a month doesn’t build a real business but you will be launching too late if you’re developing features that justify a $29 a month price.

It’s easier to launch at $5 and raise your prices as you build features. If you happen to have loyal early customers who never churned as you build those features, you can grandfather them into legacy plans and develop transition programs for them.

If you’re also expanding for their own use cases they will be happy to be moved to newer more expensive plans. They will most likely do it if you have been paying attention to their needs. And if they churn anyway, you’re getting 100% accurate data on the elasticity of your prices and the overall perceived value of your service.

Having a $29 a month service with customers doesn’t mean that your service provides a $29 value. It just means that you have a market where people are willing to consider a $29 value proposition until your value is proven to be less or when your customers find some other vendor with better price-value alignment. That’s when they churn.

So you think that because someone works on marketing or marketing related areas they’re technically illiterate?

As a former Gitlab employee I can tell you that Gitlab has a lot of technically accomplished people doing marketing.

People at Gitlab understand Gitlab because they eat their own dogfood. Everything at Gitlab is build using Gitlab including several marketing workflows.

Thanks for sharing details about the architecture and infrastructure behind this. That's pretty neat.

Have your heard about a little thing called lobbying.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

This happened to me when I transferred to Schwab. Surprisingly it was Schwab the one that eased my mind. I called them and they put me through the cost basis department which told me that RH basically has to prepare the cost basis manaually and pass it to them/ They told me that it had been taking a while but that they were indeed receiving the Cost Basis for other customers.

So I just had to wait. Of course this sucks because it blocks you from selling, but it will eventually show up.

If you talk to people outside of tech circles and you bring up Turbotax into the conversation, you will notice that people have a relatively positive view of it. Most people think of TurboTax as something that’s helping them to comply with their tax duties and navigate a complex tax system. They think of it as a helping hand when it comes to dealing with government bs.

Not surprisingly, most people think the complete opposite about the government.

So where Intuit is diabolically good, it’s at arbitraging those colloquial narratives and embedding itself in the middle as the savior. The good guy who is here to help.

They screw you, so they can later come and help you. As I said before, a sinister business model.

Already said in this thread, but I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit. Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").

A sinister business model in every possible way.

I always find surprising that Robinhood was able to build such a large business with such mediocre customer support.

I switched to Charles Schwab and just the fact that there's a 24/7 phone number compensates for the lack of simplicity. I used to think that I wanted the simplicity of something like Robinhood. But I have learned to appreciate the complexity of Schwab. The reality is that behind Robinhood's simplicity there's a lack of sophistication and process in their operation.

I commend what they built, but Robinhoood it's too exposed to the cross winds of retail trading and regulatory scrutiny. I feel that by having my investments in Robinhood, I'm adding some sort of risk multiplier that has nothing to do with the nature of my investments. It has to do mainly with how amateur-ish their brokerage operation feels.

I honestly think that the idea that social networking is monopolizable is absurd.

There are billions of online person to person interactions that happen outside of Facebook. There are hundreds of thousands of websites and communities that allow communication, discussion and sharing of user generated content. There are hundreds of thousands of online spaces that provide an outlet to augment a message.

So if anything, regulators should start by redefining what's a monopoly because the current definition clearly doesn't fit the classic narrative around monopolies.

Aggregation and distribution are virtues of large communities, not small ones. The sophistication of Facebok's business is what allows the creation and distribution of content. I agree that if Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, Nextdoor, Twitter etc, didn't exist, small communities would fill that void... But they would do through a fragmented and siloed user experience that is hardly discoverable for the majority of the connected world.

This is the equivalent of running a taxi business vs running an airline. Sure, a taxi can fulfill several transportation needs but it could never replace what an airline does.

This is so hard to understand. It seems like a service to create fixatons or bug bashing events in you org, but they also say it's a global competition (?)

I fail to understand the value of this. Seems to me like they want you to use and pay for CodeGuru, which will tell you shit about your codebase. Then you can import those issues into some sort of campaign inside this BugBust thing so you can create competitions and as you do it you compete with other teams around the world from other companies(?)

If that's what it is, then this sounds like an idea created in a vacuum, with no customer input at all. I fail to see any value on this.

This is something you can quickly see with Git. If the comment lines are older than the code lines you can at least start with the assumption that the comment might be outdated.

That’s more useful than dealing with stale documentation which can also be outdated. At least with code comments you have contextual proximity.

I’m on the same page. Just look at the given example. Does it look wasteful to say that you’re adding a vertical bar when you have the following line of code?:

  // Add a vertical scroll bar
  vScrollBar = new JScrollBar(JScrollBar.VERTICAL);
  add(vScrollBar, BorderLayout.EAST);

Perhaps. But the comment is making a lot more than simply describing what’s below of it. The comment is doing the following things:

- It’s creating a visual boundary that aids to the readability of the code. It adds context within a large set of instructions.

- It’s providing context that might not be there for the person who is reading the code. Just because you think the name of that function and what you’re passing into it clearly describes the instruction, doesn’t mean that everyone else does. At least not in a snap. The comment helps to reduce the cognitive load of reading the code because it’s explaining the instruction in plain english.

- The comment itself could be part of a larger narrative that is trying to explain what that file is doing. It’s not there to make the obvious more obvious. It’s there to make the whole file obvious which is evidently important to write readable code.

Look. I know there are purists that get offended with obvious code comments. But you cannot expect everyone to have the same proficiency you do. Writing good code, also means writing code that a newbie can at least comprehend. And sometimes that means explaining in plain english what could be already obvious to you.

People like to think they are writing code like prose that is delightful to the reader, but many times are just writing reader hostile code.

Write code focusing on clarity. Not elegance by obscurity. Make it clear, add structure, add visual boundaries. Ask yourself if what you think is obvious is obvious to everyone. If in doubt explain it with a comment. I’ll rather see an obvious comment and say “well that’s obvious” than spending valuable time trying to understand what certain piece of code is doing.

How? Facebook invests billions of dollars into advancing the tech behind Oculus, reducing the form factor and making it economically viable, and the conclusion is that FB killed the Oculus brand and tarnished VR?

I don’t understand why people are not capable of separating the good from the bad. Of course you can shit on FB regarding many things but this is objectively not one of those things.

Facebook and Google have always been regarded as some of the best tech employers in terms of compensation, benefits, perks, etc. Apple, not so much.

Could you explain roughly what was the biggest tell that he copied Replit's architecture patterns? No need to go into details, but perhaps this would make your side of the story more clear.

So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar.

Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.

Hahaha true. Using that only as a proxy of EV charger cost.

Why aren't all gas station in the US buying at least a couple of timed/metered EV chargers? They are cheap in Aliexpress. Between 400 USD and 1000 USD per charger. I would assume that a gas station already has the electrical setup required to hook a handful of them since they have other equipment with high electricity consumption.

With a couple thousand you can create a small EV charging operation. It baffles me when I see gas stations with a new car wash system that is probably expensive as fuck and not a single EV charging station in miles.

Is EV charging a regulated industry or something?

Here’s the thing, while remote work this year has been a net positive in productivity for many tech companies, that wasn’t necessarily the case for all companies, mainly because of their inability to measure it. Many companies were more concerned about trying to keep a iron grip on employees than enabling them to be successful as remote workers.

There are some naive executives who believe having an office is a big part of what helps them operate successfully. These executives are just entrenched in the old ways. They can’t fathom a world where their employees can work efficiently in a remote environment because they build all their management based on the idea of personal face to face interactions.

There’s another group of executives that’s even worse. Those who simply operate from mistrust. They need to have their employees in the office because otherwise they can’t validate and measure their employees output (although this is just as hard to measure in person). They need to see the employee physically present because for them employees salaries can only be justified when they add working hours, not based on the merits of their output.

But a reality check is here for all of them. One positive outcome from Covid is that it’s fully rebalancing the power between employer and employee. Definitely eager to see how this plays out.

Clearly advertisement is a massive untapped market for Apple. They have all the pieces to create a money printing machine.

They can push contextual ads in so many surfaces: Safari's Typeahead, Maps, App Store, Wallet/Apple Card, Apple TV+, etc...

But the reality is that they can't create a narrative around privacy focused ads without betraying their general privacy narrative. Privacy and Ads are antagonistic concepts. Serving effective digital ads depends entirely on knowing certains characteristics and demographics of the end consumer.

Facebook and Google are better equiped to create a narrative that reconciles ad serving and privacy because their core services are "free". Apple simply can't because their core business is to sell expensive phones and computers. Perhaps customers wouldn't care about getting ads in their expensive iPhones, but once the cat is out, I find hard to imagine a situation where that idea wouldn't be deeply criticized and scrutinized.

I don’t think there’s a nicd way to say this, but this article is trash. Just a bunch of factless assertions, sensationalized statements and evident contradictions.

I think moving forward the term “Substack Journalist” will generally be used to refer to the authors of this low quality and factless reporting, that gets dangerously close to misinformation.

The same way that “Soundcloud Rapper” refers to the low quality and amateur rappers that upload their music to Soundcloud (although the latter seems to have some outliers).

But isn’t Boom selling a vision for affordable supersonic flights?

What you’re suggesting about “super-premium” flights doesn’t map to what’s being publicly said about Boom or the fundamental principles of commercial flying. As a matter of fact, the Concorde ultimately failed for those very same niche-economy reasons.

What’s your source for saying that business trips flying coach will diminish?

Well, for what it's worth the US is already 'getting its ass handed to it’ in real modern warfare.

The US has been playing defense with the misinformation campaigns and fake narratives created by adversary totalitarian states that salivate over the idea of dethroning the US from its implicit world leader status.

Sometimes it really feels like we are doing exactly what they want. To create a self-inflicted societal fracture and to blame it on America's favorite scape goat, Big Tech. Like if that was our real problem. The very same thing that is giving the US an edge right now (technology) is the very same thing that gets attacked by right and left politicians alike. How convenient for Russia and China, isn't it?

Given how expensive arbitration is, I'm not surprised they are changing this. When you have 75k disputes, it's probably cheaper to get sued through the regular judicial system than to pay arbitration for everything. Arbitration really only works when the two parties need speed. Like two large business entrenched in a multi-million dollar contract issue. Not for when you have disputes with your customers.

My guess is that this is a problem caught through an audit. They realized they were siphoning millions of dollars of arbitration fees to solve menial conflicts.

This is not surprising. It's kind of obvious that cloud costs will scale more dramatically than any other cost center. So it's really an attractive idea to think that you can cut your largest bill by going on-prem.

The problem with going on-prem is that for most companies this is so complex and hard to operationalize that they will likely just fail at that attempt.

Cloud biggest contribution besides seamless infrastructure access, is the way it has lower the overall technical competency threshold to operate an internet business. It's really easier to find someone that knows AWS or Azure than is to find that someone who knows how to build on-prem infrastructure.

I imagine that repatriation for the average large cloud business will only be possible for those who are already operating in modern infrastructure constructs like Kubernetes.

If you have critical workflows build on propietary cloud services, you're probably fucked. You will have to rebuild every single service from scratch and make it scalable out of the box. If you're a multi-dimensional business that sounds like a nightmare.

I honestly think that Dropbox was capable of doing it just because the nature of their business.

At the primitive level you're mostly replacing your storage vendor. It happens to be that storage is their business model so it's quite evident that repatriating that critical piece of your business will yield great gains. I don't think it's that simple for other cloud businesses.

From the article: “Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%. Most of any national economy, including ours, is domestic; you can't import a haircut, a house, or a hospital visit. So global trade is probably overblown as an issue generally. Which isn't good news; it's just to say that, as usual, most of our problems are our own.”

You seem to have forgotten the core expenditures of a household: Shelter, Food, Personal Care and Entertainment.

Very little in there is coming from China. Certainly not food and most likely basic goods like stationery, toys, electronics, furniture and clothes. Seems reasonable to think that chinese goods fit the 3% figure based on the expenditure in those categories.