Hacker News Reader

xfouron Microsoft accused of sharing data of Office 365 subscribers with Facebook

If this is true, there really isn't any true reason why a user would expect it. It's kind-of out of the blue that Microsoft and Facebook would have any connection. Microsoft's services are more or less compulsory work services, and Facebook is in a completely separate leisure space.

In short the only entities that benefits from this is Microsoft who gets more revenue, and Facebook, who gets more user data.

The users are simply being literally sold.

xfouron Eviction Filings Are Already Rising

People misjudge the landlord market there are yes tons of huge corporations or “family businesses” with a portfolio where a default doesn’t really matter but the vast majority are people with 1-2 additional properties that feel like forgiving rent will make them not be able to make the mortgage against the property and then they’d default.

So the “heartless” landlord situation may be a bit more nuanced than these articles seem to indicate. Where it’s legal to evict, landlords might be looking at their own finances and feeling like they don’t have a choice either.

xfouron Doordash and Thousands of Other Companies Passively Send Your Data to Facebook

I'd see a high probability it's for retargeting customers in ad-spend that Doordash itself uses. So what often happens is people have an interest in using Doordash, don't complete and then pay facebook to "retarget" the user to try and keep them top of mind until they complete the transaction.

xfouron A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming

Absolutely amazingly clear article which I’d sum up as we are screwed sub-headline bring that we had a path and we failed to follow through and it’ll be worse than the last wave now.

xfouron Google Steers Users to YouTube over Rivals

Good point, the data is the key. There's of course the common crawl data now, doing some sort of that plus deltas of "current" likely could be a starting point. But also turning that into usable indices that can be returned in milliseconds is an art I'm sure.

My main point still stands though. How is there not anyone willing to take another shot at competing here, the world's love affair with Google is no doubt over. DuckDuckGo is relatively popular even though it doesn't seem to offer anything truly original in the search space.

A truly new way to search that helps fight the monopolistic search behavior would be very useful. It feels like something Mozilla foundation would be into if they didn't receive so much funding from Google.

xfouron Google Steers Users to YouTube over Rivals

These types of moves really remind me of what caused Microsoft to get the ire of regulators in the 90s. Doesn't this seem pretty anti-competitive if it can be proved that the results from other companies are better, but youtube results are chosen instead. Of course the definition of "Better" is subjective, so there's a huge amount of wiggle room.

It's interesting that the "brand new" search engine seems like a dead industry. All of the newer competitors aren't starting from scratch and are just aggregating together results in new ways or focusing on privacy. Is it really that impossible to bring into existence a new search engine. For the vast majority of queries Google seems to only return major brands anyway.

xfouron Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job

When I was early in my career I would do a variation of this. I would read the job descriptions for something unique that I could write a demo app for the show that I actually, A. Had the skills to do the thing they wanted, B. Had the dedication to do something like this.

It got me to the interview stage often and then it was up to whether I knew the nonsense whiteboard leetcode situation, which I've never been particularly good at.

If I got the job it was because they were pre-sold on step one's effectiveness I've always felt like.

xfouron Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

Couldn't agree more. I've also made this point ad-nauseam. How is this not more the typical story. The tech industry we all work in is just so good at selling snake oil in terms of technology that isn't relevant at inflated prices, we seem to have branched out into entire companies that don't make sense.

xfouron Openstreetmap, a global map for worldwide insight

Surprised that no one is talking about ways to leverage the server so you’re not doing all the work on the client. You can shift layers by precomputing either raster or vector so you don’t push your poor, maybe mobile client to the max.

Classically you would do this with Tilemill for rasters which was amazing software, if crashy. And since we’re on a mapbox thread what I think put them on the map. I wish it was still actively developed and adapted for vectors.

xfouron Zuckerberg: advertisers will be back to Facebook 'soon enough'

2:10pm 7/10/2020?

xfouron Markets, Rent and WFH

Yea, I have a similar take on it that as this WFH drags on, I mean most companies have said until the end of the year. It's been 4 months and feels like forever, add at least another 6 months and we're going to back into the new normal.

If for example Newsom or SF pushes back dates or asks for draconian style "masks all times, 2 people per conference room" or whatever vs. what has been forced to "work fine" for all these companies, people will just realize this is silly to try and put the "genie back in the bottle".

Status quo pull works against returning to offices I believe more and more as this drags on.

xfouron Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly

I think they were an "association" until the spun out into a company in their own right recently.

https://money.cnn.com/2008/03/21/news/companies/visabanks/in...

xfouron Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly

While I agree with the sentiment, things have certainly opened up lately quite a bit with the mainstream-ization of the crypto currencies. One could conceivably avoid Visa / MC in a way that just wouldn't have been possible before.

Visa / MC remind me a bit of Ticketmaster in that they've got parties on both sides defending them because of kickbacks. You charge the merchant the "interchange fee" plus some amount and that fee goes back to the "card issuing" bank, so they like the system.

The merchant passes on the cost (generally) to the consumer, so they don't really notice, and the ease of moving the money in 99% of cases means everyone is happy.

xfouron Routine meetings are (mostly) a waste of time

If nothing else this made me realize that Digg still existed. Read the article which was pretty good. I think the blanket meetings are wasted time blanket statement is interesting. They serve a couple of different purposes when used correctly. The most important of which is shifting cons to pros on whatever the initiative you are trying to champion is. Status update meetings are the easiest to cancel, especially when there isn't enough changed to warrant the update.

xfouron Lemonade files S1

In parallel to this growth of topline and increasing efficiencies, our gross loss ratio declined steadily from 161% in 2017, to 113% in 2018, to 79% in 2019 and to 72% for the three months ended March 31, 2020. See "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations — Key Operating and Financial Metrics."

Seems like a struggle to get to profitability. With the ratio of closing the gap slowing, sure looks like it's getting harder. This is what bugs me about these companies, after years of running the business and doing 1 Billion in revenue it's still a coin flip whether they will ever be profitable. How is this any different from the first "Internet Boom" except that they've been floated to a much bigger revenue number by VC losses.

So now the VCs want return on investment. The public is getting a chance to buy, and some will, and the VCs make out, the founders probably already did by selling to the VCs, but where is the value creation? Just a shell game.

xfouron Museum of Computer Adventure Game History

Super cool, I'm sure the layout is inspired by the source material but wow is that hard to navigate. I was looking for Hero's Quest of the I just clicked through to the Adams wing, Floor 3, Sierra Online, Other Games (King's Quest get's a section but not the other anthologies), page two, found it! It's like a meta-game in itself.

I imagine the search works fine, but what's the fun in that.

xfouron Asana files to go public via direct listing

Didn’t see anything there in the article about the financials, is that because they filed “Confidentiality”?

xfouron Startup investments set to cool under pressure, except for regtech

That sounds like a pretty aweful outcome, honestly.

As overused and made to mean breaking the law, disrupting is a kind of exciting thing to be a part of.

You’re changing the game, reinventing an industry or something of those sorts.

Regulatory-tech, what’s the world changing story there? We help you stay in business while the ever increasing amount of paperwork and scrutiny increases?

Everything follows what came before it, and what came before and is paying off now turned out to be plenty of dishonestly in business in search of returns. In a word greed.

Now this next “generation” of startups is going to pay for it.

xfouron The Pirate Bay is trialing high-quality video streaming

Speaking of new streaming services, I was trying to watch The Expanse Season 4. Amazon famously made this happen, so thanks to Bezos there. But even though I have their Prime service there seemed to be a monthly service called Prime Video required. Amazon seems to be doing the Microsoft thing where everything is Prime something and it’s confusing and annoying.

xfouron SoftBank Is Selling Wag Stake Back to Company

Non-Paywalled https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/softbank-sells-stake-back-to...

xfouron Americans Are Moving at the Lowest Rate on Record

In California you have Prop 13 causing people to stay put. If you bought a house anywhere close to the coast more than 6 years ago you’ve likely seen 50-100% in value increase. Therefore if you move you’d pay that same increase proportionally in property tax.

In addition you have 6% Realtors fees to sell plus staging and being out of the house for open houses etc. the math just doesn’t add up.

xfouron The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway

Do you have a link to pictures?

xfouron Ask HN: What do you expect from a new manager in an existing team?

There definitely seems to be an opportunity to improve “line of sight”. The CTO/CEO brought you on for a reason. There exists some goal that those individuals want you to accomplish and you want to make them articulate it.

Once you know that your job gets easier, you now need to figure out how to get the team from the place they were to the place that the executives want them to be, remove blockers etc.

Don’t try so much to quickly enact processes as much as listen to what’s working and not working currently.

xfouron Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires

What's their cash on hand position, I believe I saw that there's 13B, after adding 8B in the IPO, that seems like a ton of cash on hand for a business that isn't showing any signs of turning of profit.

Could they not just without any further cash infusion continue to lose similar amounts for the next three years and be cash solvent. Does that then not give a big incentive to figure out how to become profitable in the near term?

xfouron Defensible App Updated to include overlay for PGE projected outages

Modern MapboxGL based map of general wildfire risk updated with PGE’s “Historic” power outage planned for later today.

Easier to view than the various other sources, especially on mobile.

xfouron Earliest known draft of the King James Bible discovered

That's a great point. There's some much arguing about what different passages in the bible mean, and what get's lost in those conversations that the passages in question are already a derivative source. The thinking must go something along the lines that everyone involved in each step must have been tasked by god himself with the wisdom to faithfully transcribe his wishes... or something of that sort.

xfouron Disney Bans Netflix Ads as Streaming’s Marketing Wars Intensify

Shhh... don’t force us back to piracy iPlayer is nice.

xfouron WeWork is planning to lay off up to 25% of its employees

Was almost an inevitability it seemed like with all the other news, IPO ended etc. While this is a huge deal, is it really going to change anything about the underlying business?

Let's say there's only 10% of employees or some very low number. Would then the Real Estate deals put in place vs. the Revenue received for re-leasing them pencil out positive?

xfouron Disneyland’s Disastrous Opening Day (2015)

Visiting there recently I was in awe of what it must take to run and maintain that place. Every single day... it’s more or less spotless at any given moment you have attractions shows security vegetatation water systems etc. it’s incredible any amount of staff can keep that place running.

xfouron Slack Is Down Again

Not saying that I know this is the case but when you struggle for years to reach a liquidity event and with the direct offering everyone reached that event at the same time, likely there’s a bit of a collective sigh of relief there and people are taking easier leading to higher SLAs on incidents etc.