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zawazzi

25 karma · joined May 10, 2018

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zawazzi··on Uber's Losses Reach Double Digits in IPO Debut
Really? My perspective is that I use Uber as a substitute good for owning a car. If the cost of uber > car, I'm gonna go and buy one. So they can raise prices, but likely there's quite a bit of price sensitivity, particularly from their high volume users.
zawazzi··on Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? (2018)
Javascript in many cases runs on v8 which is a just in time compiler. Just in time compilers provide substantial performance benefits for lines of code executed multiple times. Perhaps v8 team (google) doesn't support typescript (microsoft). https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2754...
zawazzi··on If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too
Both supply and demand for housing is geographically constrained which mean that if demand in a local geography goes up, so does the price. This means that the market can be efficient locally even if inefficient globally.

Since food and water are not constrained in this way (i.e. can be transported), local price increases are usually due to inefficient distribution (supply chain issues/spoilage) or global supply shortages. This assumes that people consume a relatively consistent amount of food/water.

zawazzi··on Tesla to raise prices and keep more stores open
I actually think data is the problem. People were making their purchases online but the in store experience is what was convincing them to make the purchase in the first place. Hard to measure that kind of conversion.
zawazzi··on Toxic Workers Are More Productive, But the Price Is High
US Productivity grows by 2% a year which suggests in aggregate, most people are playing a zero sum game.
zawazzi··on AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income
I think I must have miscommunicated my position. I'm not reflecting on cloud as whole, but how AWS is particularly vulnerable to a tech sector downturn. In the event of economic downturn, existing cloud customers will optimized costs (pre-cloud they would have avoided infrastructure upgrades, now they will focus on different cost structures). My belief is that generic services, such as storage, compute, ect. will priced like commodities because the market is more efficient since multiple cloud provider have the same service. Tools like terraform allow easy enough cloud configuration porting that cloud providers have little pricing power for these products. One area of cost optimization is to utilize generic cloud resources instead of AWS specific services (where I see many of my costs). Many of the services that generate positive cashflow for AWS seem to be built on top of open source which means that converting existing costly services can be converted to use generic resources with out too much implementation difficulty.

I'm only a developer so I'm sure I'm missing Operations and Business perspectives. Would love to learn more.

zawazzi··on AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income
Historically, teams would just make their existing servers last longer. Considering most of AWS premium services have an open source alternative, guessing most people will port to containers. Built on open source has been their source of strength but is also their achilles heel. They shortened the learning curve on to their platform and off of it.
zawazzi··on Ask HN: How to found a company as a single founder?
I think it would be a distinct recruitment advantage not to have a cofounder. You could reallocate equity you would have given to a cofounder, to early employees. Cofounder or no, money talks.
zawazzi··on China Is Hunting for Foreign Buyers for Its Sovereign Debt
By the time it gets repackaged into derivatives and index funds, who will really know. Investor's aren't amoral, just creating plausible deniability via complexity.
zawazzi··on A thread for Junior Developers/Engineers
I think all humans are bounded by 7+/-2 chunks of working memory which I think correlates to upper bound of understandability. Personally I break up methods where I see more than 5-7 unique params/variables/concepts. Also usually co-locating related methods will help which is what OOP does.
zawazzi··on The Brexit Short: How Hedge Funds Used Private Polls to Make Millions
I think you overstate the demand for poll accuracy. A hedge fund may want predictive accuracy but I still click on the poll that tells me what I want to hear.
zawazzi··on Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [video]
Isn't global inequality decreasing though? Isn't extreme poverty decreasing? https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality

People tend to only care about the inequality where they stand the most to gain. Most US citizens would benefit from wealth redistribution in US, but unhappy with a global redistribution since they would average down.

In some ways globalization is causing both increasing economic equality for labor and increasing inequality for capital providers.

zawazzi··on White House earmarks over $1B for quantum technology research
The purpose of calling it a space force is to align the military industrial complex with NASA's mission. This isn't about creating a legitimate space force. Who would they fight? Its about the rebranding civilian science for military funding.
zawazzi··on Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities
Harvard has around 1000 admissions spots in any year. I think there are roughly 30,000 people who score a SAT 2200+ in a given year. Say half of those a have A level GPA. At that point there's more significant non-academic differences, than academic differences.
zawazzi··on Harvard Is Wrong That Asians Have Terrible Personalities
Absolutely this.

Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation. They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.

zawazzi··on Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
> I'm not fundamentally opposed, but I think this is akin to creating a "Condensed Matter and Nanophysics" undergraduate degree alongside "Physics."

Isn't this what Material Science is? A truncated version of physics for those with a greater interest in application than theory. Arguably most engineering derives from hard science that is converted into a form that is more easily applied.