a4isms

27 ms·

211.
by a4isms 4y ago
Humanity seems to overestimate the progress that can be made in years, while grossly underestimating—to the point of not even understanding—the progress that can be made in decades.
212.
by a4isms 4y ago
As an author from time to time, I am keenly sensitive to the dynamic where so many books could have been a single essay, but there's no money in essays. Unless you have something to sell, and presto, so many essays and blog posts are r
213.
by a4isms 4y ago
Part of the problem is that selling to small/medium business sucks, unless you can make it very transactional (the cheap model above, just scaled per-seat). Anything that needs to be hands on costs you almost as much in labor costs as
214.
by a4isms 4y ago
> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money". This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire
215.
by a4isms 4y ago
The "hypocrisy" is only hypocrisy if you think that conservatives believe that all citizens should be treated equally. They do not, never have, and never will. Composer Frank Wilhoit's observation keeps coming up because it e
216.
by a4isms 4y ago
> spins a bit The letter's "a," "b,", "i," and "t" are doing enough heavy lifting to threaten SpaceX's business model.
217.
by a4isms 4y ago
The paper speaks to markets where there is strong information asymmetry, not all markets, and it doesn’t follow that no good can be traded, it simply says that in such a market, people will hold goods they feel have actual value and trade t
218.
by a4isms 4y ago
I was speaking to the pressure on businesses to inflate their promises, which drives real businesses out of the market, leaving only unicorn dreams and pixie dust prospectuses. If you are raising funds, you are telling investors you have va
219.
by a4isms 4y ago
Not just a direct incentive for fraud, “speculative exaggeration,” and “being economical with the truth,” but an indirect one too. If you have a fairly reasonable business and want to go SPAC, you are competing for investor dollars with all
220.
by a4isms 4y ago
I can’t insist that you’re wrong, but note that it is a very normal thing in business for the leader in any space to devote large amounts of investment cash to covering moves that might turn out to be disruptive. IBM famously did this with
221.
by a4isms 4y ago
I feel there are two separate things going on: First, the question of deduplication a/k/a normalization. Deduplication is cheap, and it's "a two-way door, not a one-way turnstile:" It's cheap to re-duplicate wh
222.
by a4isms 4y ago
Doug @Rushkoff says that the ethic of today's "entrepreneur" is to #GoMeta - don't provide a product or a service, simply find a way to be a predatory squatter on a chokepoint between people who do useful things and peo
223.
by a4isms 4y ago
Upon reflection, you’re making an excellent point! Einstein predicted things we’re still confirming empirically, but then again, he started by asking himself how the speed of light could be constant for every observer, which was the result
224.
by a4isms 4y ago
Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution. This is the case in physics and astronomy. People make pr
225.
by a4isms 4y ago
I am not in a position to say why the original NeXT was so different in philosophical underpinnings than the Mac, but there are a few differences one can observe from the outside that may (and I only say may) have contributed to the final o
226.
by a4isms 4y ago
Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations: 1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms
227.
by a4isms 4y ago
This is very good feedback, thank you.
228.
by a4isms 4y ago
Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior [2]: https:
229.
by a4isms 4y ago
Speaking of HyperCard: Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing gr
230.
by a4isms 4y ago
If you feel around the margins, you can find exceptions for everything. e.g. You can cook a fish in a dishwasher. But while anyone can modify a toaster to do wild things, they aren't designed to facilitate that and it isn't a main
231.
by a4isms 4y ago
I remember "Bicycles for the mind" well: http://raganwald.com/assets/images/bicycle-jobs.jpeg But as a metaphor, I don't think of a bicycle as an appliance. Mainstream bicycles are brutalist: The ch
232.
by a4isms 4y ago
First, you are right. Jobs himself said that he wanted to go beyond selling computers, and sell information appliances. In that respect, he and Woz were diametrically opposed. When he was squeezed out of management in his own company, it is
233.
by a4isms 4y ago
I feel this developer's pain, I remember writing a vituperative blog post about Apple's habit of buying or building their own clone of some independent app and muscling developers out of their market. With time I've mellowed.
234.
by a4isms 4y ago
I readily accept that this strategy has worked for you. In my particular case, I work with customers and software where making a change, pushing it to production, and finding out that I missed a key requirement when it breaks is sometimes u
235.
by a4isms 4y ago
Let's distinguish two different assertions: 1. The decision in the past was sensible at the time given what the people making that decision knew/believed/were incentivized to optimize for, versus; 2. It's worth knowing w
236.
by a4isms 4y ago
> Every time I've heard someone quote Chesterton's Fence, it's always been as a means to halt the conversation. From here forward you can say that almost every time you've heard someone quote Chesterton's Fence
237.
by a4isms 4y ago
How is being right about wanting to make a change a refutation of the idea that knowing why people made a decision in the past is an excellent idea? Nothing about Chesterton's Fence asserts that people in the past always made good deci
238.
by a4isms 4y ago
"Making good decisions, therefore, requires understanding past decisions. Without knowing how things came to be, it’s easy to make things worse." — https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence
239.
by a4isms 4y ago
I use "Eternal September" for the cultural effect on businesses that suddenly gorge themselves on new hires that have no exposure to the existing culture or context. The negative effects are loosely parallel to what happens when a
240.
by a4isms 4y ago
If Apple owned Tesla, there wouldn't be enough room in this comment to list all the reasons HN would hate it: 1. What do you mean, the OS and all its software is proprietary? Why can't I sideload my own fart app? 2. Highest margin

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