bhl

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361.
by bhl 8y ago
I haven’t looked at their annual report recently, but back in 2016, advertisement made up a majority of their revenues and profits — around 90% if I recall correctly. I’d be willing to bet that keyword advertisements on search make up a lar
362.
by bhl 8y ago
I don’t have any Google home devices, but I’d be curious to know how many of those queries are simply commands “Google play my music” and how many are actual internet searches “Google what is the capital of Alabama”.
363.
by bhl 8y ago
What is the value of a college education? This is a contentious question that I believe more and more people should be asking, and debating about. Is the value in the education that one receives, or in the the network that one gains access
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by bhl 8y ago
> People don't use social networks because of protocols. I agree with this point: usability is often not affected by what happens in the back. However, with open standards, it would be possible that people create other social networ
365.
by bhl 8y ago
With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network similar to how people host their own email servers or websites right now.
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by bhl 8y ago
Ideally, open standards would mean that the network effects, which today keep people trapped in walled gardens like Facebook, would create a more distributed / federated community instead of a winner-takes-all model. I think this is la
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by bhl 8y ago
I would say that statement holds true for most countries. The Nordic model [1] is an exception, and why I said California should invest more in its public welfare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
368.
by bhl 8y ago
This seems odd, sort of paradoxical, since in the last 10 years San Francisco seems to be on a decline: not in the number of tech companies or new high rises being built, but in public health with the homeless population and cleanliness of
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by bhl 8y ago
With great wealth comes great inequality: for the most part, California condenses all the extreme parts of the U.S. economy into one state. Unless California invests more in its public utilities (or anything that allows for an even playing
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by bhl 8y ago
They're more similar than dissimilar. For example, both try to have a selective process where they try to gauge potential of applicants, and whether they're worth investing resources into. Universities are actually a specific subs
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by bhl 8y ago
When does a company stop innovating and start becoming a rent seeker? Don’t most companies eventually become the latter?
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by bhl 8y ago
That would be horizontal integration. But that’s even a hard argument to make since Apple doesn’t have a monopoly or large market share of any of those segments — remember how Apple’s growth was supposed to slow down since their customer ba
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by bhl 8y ago
The larger issue is that Amazon does not treat each product equally. When you search for an item, they don’t necessarily even show you the “best item” — most bought or highest reviews. Products which buy advertisements or Amazon’s own brand
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by bhl 8y ago
Google isn’t only search and ads. Their adverse is worse in smaller markets like Maps and Cloud, where they use revenue from another market to commoditize and build a moat in another — thereby unfairly competing.
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by bhl 8y ago
> You can replace Google/Amazon/Facebook in seconds. This is largely false: look at market share of all their competitors — network effects are really hard to replace.
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by bhl 8y ago
> I'm mostly focusing on Google here, and yes, they at least occasionally lobby for things I like because sometimes their interests and the interests of the public in general happen to align. There’s definitely an argument to be mad
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by bhl 8y ago
Here’s an alternative source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against... “Anyone who said that the 1990s prosecution of Microsoft didn’t accomplish anything — that it was companies l
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by bhl 8y ago
In my opinion, Amazon as a platform has leveraged network effects to be both a monopsony and a monopoly: in essence by aggregating both consumers and suppliers, both sides of the transaction feel compelled to use Amazon as a middle man.
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by bhl 8y ago
People already do this type of filtering implicitly. In sociology, it's called "social sorting" [1]. In fact, all the characteristics you're looking for can be satisfied by going to a top-tier university or a nearby city
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by bhl 8y ago
I do recall looking up the definition of 'bijection', and seeing that it slightly resembles a graph. As a generalization: so an n-dimensional tensor can be viewed as a weighted n-partite graph?
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by bhl 8y ago
Humans have an odd focus on individual intelligence, even though most of the achievements that we have accomplished as a species have been through collective intelligence – rarely would I say that people function and create alone.
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by bhl 8y ago
You can’t have an economic model that just focuses on all the positive aspects of a deal — that’s just intellectual dishonesty. What about the negative externalities? The strain on public services, transportation, housing, etc? To be clear,
383.
by bhl 8y ago
Wait so, you want shoppers to present a purchasing list, and have retailers compete to fulfill that order? Essentially like an auction with a ceiling?
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by bhl 8y ago
Not really: I’ve found very useful information by using Google and just having site:reddit.com, and or using the iffy reddit search bar. The benefit of having a voting system is that ancient gems will always get bubbled up.
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by bhl 8y ago
> (From experience) providing solutions interferes with the learning process of my own students at Illinois. I have to change up homeworks and exam questions every semester, because otherwise students will look up and copy/memorize
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by bhl 8y ago
Two different approaches: Jekyll is often top-down, start with a theme that you like and make edits to the css and html files until you get something you like. Downside is if you want to make major changes, you’ll have to understand complex
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A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned(theoutline.com)
247 points by bhl 8y ago|101 comments
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by bhl 9y ago
The instructors have explicitly said, if you have previous CS or Statistics knowledge, the class isn’t for you. This is for people who don’t know how to program and haven’t taken a statistics course yet.
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by bhl 9y ago
Weirdly enough, I feel like saying the blame should not be put on the people for being assholes; assholery is not something people are born with. Rather, the type of environment is at fault for self-selecting for them.