Hacker News Reader

wonder_breadon Twilio's valuation crosses $10B

TTM Revenue is $561 Million. Am I the only one that thinks this is insane? Even with the Q4 market route some of these cloud stock valuations have a bubble feeling to them.

wonder_breadon Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

Stockrow.com

wonder_breadon Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it

EDIT: fixed a spelling error

wonder_breadon Amazon is recruiting entrepreneurs to start delivery networks

"Entrepreneurs"

wonder_breadon Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

I tallied those amounts using the before-tax operating income, both companies reported adjusted losses in Q4 because of the tax overhaul

wonder_breadon Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

Kind of interesting to see Microsoft & Amazon 'passing by' Google lately, considering how much more earning power they have than either of them.

Even if Amazon didn't spend a dime on R&D the most they could've earned on operating income is ~$26B, if Microsoft zeroed out their R&D they could've had about ~$35B.

Meanwhile, if Google decided to go full-profit last year they would've had on the order of $42B.

wonder_breadon Square to buy Weebly for $365M

Also improves their offering against companies like Shopify and Salesforce. Square's never really offered an online store option beyond allowing you to link your account with companies like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. putting them at a disadvantage as most brands want a strong online presence that a horizontally integrated offering won't be as good at providing.

wonder_breadon Snapchat launches Spectacles V2

>"I actually wish you could set them to instantly go to your story rather than having to transfer the photos to your phone and do it manually later."

Is there any word on why this is? These would be a lot better if I could just click the button on the glasses and have it post to my story automatically (I understand this means the user wouldn't be able to add any overlay effects but I feel like the vantage point of the video is the main attraction to posting it in the first place). With this friction it makes the process a bit less sexy.

wonder_breadon Why there are so many online mattress-in-a-box companies

Seems like part of what this article is discussing is the emerging 'Shopify effect'. The barriers to entry for starting an online brand-based business have plummetted to the point where even people with little means financially and no means technically can still set up a business for a fraction of what it cost in the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if we're in the middle of a Cambrian explosion-esque period for consumer-based brands.

wonder_breadon Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

Very good postulation I had not thought of that. I think it will be important for HN to retain that level of quality as I think we have all benefitted from the higher-than-average level of thought that goes into an HN comment relative to other internet communities.

wonder_breadon Snap is laying off 100 employees mostly in advertising and sales

Seems like the quality of content & comments posted on HN goes down dramatically whenever the discussion is on Facebook or Snap. I understand these are hot-button companies but I think HN could do better than to have these aimless discussions on obscure things. For the vast majority of companies this news would hardly even get posted.

wonder_breadon Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook

Can anybody who lives in the valley speak to whether people really hate Zuckerberg enough over there to the point where this seems like a rational thing to do? I live out in Mass and while the 'scandal' has definitely been front page news, for a company to do this (especially with a well-known entrepreneur) would be decidedly odd.

wonder_breadon Spotify Form F-1

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/

wonder_breadon Spotify Form F-1

A brilliant CEO in Elk and an unfortunate industry. It will be interesting to see how they face marginalization. The risk factors of Apple being able to retain 100% of their revenue while Spotify being forced to give away 30% back to Apple is kind of sad. It really does feel like there's continuously diminishing opportunities for companies to get in front of consumers without facing some sort of platform tax.

wonder_breadon Alphabet vs. the SEC: Google fights YouTube revenue disclosure

I find it unfathomable he doesn't have a firm pulse on how YouTube is progressing as a business. It is effectively their Instagram and could end up being bigger than Google search itself. It's their next step forward in monetization which clearly (one would think) would solilcit regular oversight by the founder of the company.

wonder_breadon Dropbox S-1

Seems like the move away from AWS to it's own infrastrucutre is starting to pay dividends. 33% GM to 67% in two years is certainly impressive!

wonder_breadon General Mills to buy pet food maker Blue Buffalo for $8B

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ8HVWAOTEk

More poking fun at it than saying it's not viable

wonder_breadon General Mills to buy pet food maker Blue Buffalo for $8B

I wonder how long it's going to be until we hear about a direct-to-consumer online pet food store that gives a bag of food to a dog in need for every bag purchased

wonder_breadon Snapchat petition attracts one million signatures

Snap and Bitmoji are at the top of the charts in the app & play store (even above Instagram for the most part) since the update came out, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

wonder_breadon Amazon will launch its own delivery service to compete with FedEx, UPS

Under/Over 10 years after Bezos retires, does Amazon end up looking like GE does now? This spree of Amazon getting into markets that are already at near-perfect competition levels is a bit worrying. How many people could reasonably handle a business this complicated, with so many competitors?

wonder_breadon Training an AI to convert design mockups into HTML and CSS

Is this a dupe of FloydHub's blog post from a couple weeks back? Markup looks very similar

wonder_breadon Tesla’s Elon Musk May Have Boldest Pay Plan in Corporate History

https://electrek.co/2017/12/01/chevy-bolt-ev-us-sales-record...

When I initially read your comment I was inclined to disagree with another automaker incumbent-smashing opinion but upon researching, I have to say, 2,000 units a month in the nascent mainstream market for EV's is definitely impressive. Kudos to GM there

wonder_breadon Amazon Will Buy Target This Year, Gene Munster Predicts

Typical click-bait; An extremely bold prediction with an article that takes less than two minutes to read with a re-direct to another Bloomberg article about a less-sexy potential Amazon acquisition.

wonder_breadon What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its skills

Overall it seems that time spent using skills/apps on Echo devices is a relatively low proportion of the total time spent using the device (relative to the proportion of time people are using apps on their mobile devices, that is). Time could certainly change this, however

wonder_breadon Amazon Comprehend – Discover insights and relationships in text

Clear shot at Watson Tone Analyzer/Personality Insights. Is there anything unique IBM has left in ML at this point?

wonder_breadon General Motors Is About to Do Something Big with Self-Driving Cars

Fricken's comment is better than the article itself. The Motley Fool is not a place you want to go for credible business/investing journalism

wonder_breadon Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?

If TensorFlow is what you're interested in I personally found "Hands-on Machine Learning with SciKit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron" to be the best introduction after introducing myself to the subject with Siraj's YouTube videos

https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Machine-Learning-Scikit-Learn-T...

wonder_breadon Tesla’s Dangerous Sprint into the Future

You're making a lot of good points IMP but it's hard to get away from the fatalist undertone in everything you're saying.

I think we can all agree there is a time and place for certain technologies but I think those variables are a lot broader than you are giving them credit for.

wonder_breadon Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status hit 300M users, nearly 2X Snapchat

Is anybody else confused by the spate of articles on Snap's decline as a direct result of 'stories' through Insta the last 6 months yet Snapchat still seems to invariably sit on/near the top of the Play Store/App store charts?

wonder_breadon Amazon gains wholesale pharmacy licenses in multiple states

It’s amazing to watch all this happen on the consumer end but how many more industries can they really do this to? Is Bezos not essentially setting up his successor for failure by turning Amazon into a conglomerate with razor margins in so many areas?