yggydrasily

Google wouldn't do anything interesting like that if they bought Pandora. The first thing they would do would be to require a Google+ account to use it, which everyone would hate. Then they would keep changing the UI and the name over and over until no one knew it even existed or what it was called anymore, and then finally they would shut it down.

The problem is that Steve Jobs isn't around any more to give the company the proper focus and hold everyone to a high quality standard.

The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.

Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.

This time, there may be no coming back.

I draw the opposite conclusion, as all of your examples are from several years ago. Three of your four links are more than 1600 days old!

Ever since AirBnB became the most valuable company in YC's portfolio, there has been a remarkable groupthink on HN where everything they do is good and criticism basically vanishes. Yet criticism of a non-YC company like Uber gets upvoted and creates a big dogpile, even when it could be equally applied to both companies.

Yes, things have dramatically improved, but there are still taboo subjects on HN. For example, try saying any of the same things about YC's own AirBnB and see how that goes over.

In fact, this very article had an early comment[1] comparing Uber's logo re-design to AirBnB's paperclip thingy[2]. That comment is now deleted. No way to tell if it was self-deleted or mod deleted, but either way it seems someone wasn't comfortable having that on here, for whatever reason.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11038131

[2] http://blog.airbnb.com/belong-anywhere

I wonder how much of their most recent round of funding went towards this.

Tim Cook doesn't seem to care about anything other than the supply chain. He came from being a COO, so that's all he knows. Consider how many different models of iPad there are.[1] It's like he's bragging. "Look how good we are at managing suppliers. Look! LOOK!" Meanwhile, the watch, Apple Music, and everything else that reached a v1 release under his tenure so far has been buggy and broken. But hey, at least they have a "gold" Macbook now!

[1] http://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/

This is the best explanation I've ever seen. Just lots of focus, attention to detail, and iteration until they got it right:

http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...

The cracks in the facade of phony, good-for-bragging-rights-only "valuations" are really starting to show now. Hold on, this is going to be quite a ride!

The only reason humans have had nothing to fear from machines so far is because of their brains. What happens when those are no longer a differentiator?

But if we just keep interest rates low / near-zero forever, then we can keep inflating the debt bubble forever too! Problem solved!

Biotech included:

http://www.businessinsider.com/venrock-partner-bryan-roberts...

Even though I really appreciate the idea behind it, I was never all that comfortable running f.lux on my Macbook. I never understood why it was free yet closed-source. It made me suspicious in a way, if that makes sense.

After a while I just gave up and uninstalled f.lux. Instead, I created a 4500K white point copy of the default color profile and manually switched to it at night, which seemed to have the same effect. It also prevented those big flashes whenever switching to and from full-screen apps.

I'm grateful that f.lux has pushed this issue to the point of getting traction as a built-in feature from Apple (and I do hope Apple brings it to OS X at some point), however unless f.lux becomes open-source, I don't plan to reinstall it.

The "something else" is money laundering (i.e., all-cash purchases with zero oversight). Thankfully, the US government is finally starting to crack down on this stuff:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/us-will-track-secret-bu...

But so far it's only in other cities. I'm hoping this will spread to the rest of the USA and then we won't have so many foreign criminals buying land with suitcases full of ill-gotten cash, driving up prices.

Zuckerberg is the new Bill Gates. In the 90s, Gates was notorious in his ruthlessness to define personal computing as a 100% Microsoft-only experience. Today, as you pointed out, Zuckerberg is pushing equally hard at defining the internet and Facebook to be one and the same. In both cases, it doesn't really matter whether or not the efforts are sincere. The outcome is just as undesirable for the general public either way.

"What if text was actually text?"

Imagine if you traveled back in time to the 90s and showed this to someone and said this was coming from the CEO of two multi-billion dollar 21st century companies.

If I had a self-driving car and some time on my hands, I'd get rid of my home and be in that thing practically 24/7, seeing the land and enjoying having it drive me around. No way I would rent in that situation. I'd definitely buy. There will be a whole class of similar nomads who will spring up once it becomes truly viable.

The future is not one-size-fits-all. Just because Uber execs and investors are blathering about how personal car ownership will go away (meaning they will own everything, how convenient) doesn't mean it actually will happen that way.

Or people could still own self-driving cars and rent them out AirBnB-style when they aren't home.

In the suburban sprawl where the majority of the USA lives, we already have a nicely distributed network of storage (homes with attached garages). That would be far more efficient than having Uber and Lyft build their own duplicate storage for cars, which would almost certainly put them further away from the customers who need them and be far less efficient.

I know this is HN and we're all supposed to be just super ga-ga over the idea of one single company owning the entire future of transportation, but there are many more possible scenarios than just "everyone gives up control and ownership of how they get around".

> Mom, dad, and kid all need to go to work/school at roughly the same time.

That's okay, once automation really gets going, Mom & Dad will be out of work, solving that problem.

The article only gives three examples of APIs that are "missing" on iOS, and one of them is the vibration API.

Since when is the vibration API a "good example" of something necessary to "give the full app experience on mobile" (using the article's language)? Other than message & phone call notifications, I don't want apps vibrating my phone all the time. The W3C page they link to describes it as a "form of tactile feedback", but that's nonsense, unless they are talking about the touch feedback that newer devices like the Apple Watch provide, which is done mostly at the system level.

Another example the article gives is CSS touch manipulation, which Apple has already started working on[0]. So, the article is 1 for 3.

[0] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149854

> Doesn't sound like they'll have the extra people.

When automation wipes out 99.99% of jobs, nearly all people will be "extra" people. Globally.

> That homelessness persists in Silicon Valley has puzzled me.

The reason is (as the paragraphs just below this line indicate) in fact the same reason for a great deal of issues in the Bay Area: lack of regional planning.

Planning in the Bay Area is far too localized. Cities constantly pawn off problems on each other. There are cities that approve thousands of new units of office space but zero housing. Transit systems don't connect to each other. Sports stadiums are constructed with no thought as to how people will arrive. Freeways have lanes that appear and disappear at various county boundaries, causing dangerous congestion. On and on. It's also why so many cities don't have enough shelters and just seem to expect (as the article states) that other nearby cities will pick up the slack.

What is needed is for the disparate cities of the Bay Area to stop passing the buck and come together as a region and plan together. Continuing to hope someone else does the hard work of solving problems will continue to result in them not getting solved.

Yahoo finance says the market cap is only $340M, but all the articles leading up to today said their valuation was going to be $2.5-3B.

Did they really only IPO less than 20% of the total company and keep the rest private?

So lemme get this straight: it's okay for someone to post this advertisement-disguised-as-an-article about a YC-backed company's product that doesn't even do what it claims to do (the "article" reveals at the end that there are an "unspecified" number of human beings actually doing things behind the scenes in Clara), but not for someone to post about a competing product that actually does live up to the over-hyped "AI" claims?

The report doesn't really say how this happens or what it means exactly. Does this result from say, people's fingers getting cut by the processing machines and little bits of flesh going in, or is it human waste ending up in the mix somehow?