boomzilla

15 ms·

91.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Bitcoin newbie here. How do we know that's him?
92.
by boomzilla 11y ago
No I am not denying the value of the brand and the network, but I don't know how to valuate these assets. I don't see how they are worth 20B, but maybe some others do. In terms of the engineering platform, I am quite confident a s
93.
by boomzilla 11y ago
I am not so sure. They actually have negative earning, GAAP-wise, caused by a huge amount of stock based compensation and acquisition costs. Even with all these spending, Twitter is not showing any growth. Twitter will lose more engineering
94.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Believe it or not, you can freeze binaries for python apps too, if you like: https://wiki.python.org/moin/Freeze
95.
by boomzilla 11y ago
This is a key point. If you three all started from a coffee shop, why are they co-founders and you are the first employee? Even if the other two persons worked on the company a few month before you started, after 4 years, you'd been th
96.
by boomzilla 11y ago
That is because the taggers are not trained on the same data. You can't expect taggers trained on wikipedia data to do well in anything but other wikipedia articles. On the other hand, if one has access to Amazon review data, (with lin
97.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Neural networks, and the plain old trusted logistic regression :) handles raw, continuous data better than the other learning algorithms. For example, if your inputs are images or audio recordings, it's really hard to do classification
98.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Yes, and even when you run your own hardwares, it's still far easier to just KVM up your virts and "bash bootstrap.sh". For your developers, tell them to "vagrant up" with the same "bootstrap.sh". This set
99.
by boomzilla 11y ago
The Walton family hold a bit more than 50% of Walmart shares. This is by design. As they control the board, they usually make sure that Walmart buys back enough share to keep them in control. Their income are mostly coming from dividend, wh
100.
by boomzilla 11y ago
So, a consulting shop with some MIT, Google buzzword thrown around?
101.
by boomzilla 11y ago
There is a lot of "good will" in acqui-hires.
102.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Now that's a bit extreme. A lot of engineers would consider the company as nothing but "It's just a job as I'll jump ship as soon as some better gig comes along", and that's totally fair . You hire someone beca
103.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Can you disclose how much "better" for such rewrites? And what metrics were measured? I guess there is a conflict between CTRs on organic results and ads, so one has to be picked (or maybe a combo of the two). And what the magnitu
104.
by boomzilla 11y ago
This might be totally off base, but I can see the parallels in the shift of business in these companies: 1. IBM: main business used to be hardware, but now mostly IT services. This, believe it or not, is the most stable business. It's
105.
by boomzilla 11y ago
That'd always been possible on Cragslists, and in fact, AirBNB used Craigslists to bootstrap originally (and against the TOS if I may add). What AirBNB has executed brilliantly are: 1. They offer the complete booking workflow: from ini
106.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Interesting. I guess we can experiment with how many bits can be compressed to a video frame. Is there a guarantee that YT doesn't change the frame rate? Another idea is YT as code repo: essentially one makes a movie that shows code fi
107.
by boomzilla 11y ago
I think there are two other factors as why web apps are dominating client apps. The first is distribution cost. Even with AppStore and Android market, it's still very hard to get your app to the users. People browse to hundreds of diff
108.
by boomzilla 11y ago
It depends on the size of the company. Once past a certain size, there is not much a manager, even at director level can do to give an employee a raise out of review time. The HR "partner" have a big rule book on compensation and
109.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Not sure why you still have this problem. In Java world, Maven build system solved this long, long time ago. There is even a plug-in that builds a uber jar that can be invoked with JVM as the only dependency.
110.
by boomzilla 11y ago
There is no network effect. As soon as you pay the drivers more, and charge the riders less, they will install your app. What keeps drivers and riders from checking both Uber and SuperDuperUber apps at the same time to make/save some e
111.
by boomzilla 11y ago
This just shows that there is not much margin in this industry. They are essentially buying market share. However, as soon as Uber try to squeeze out some profit, they'll be undercut by the competitors.
112.
by boomzilla 11y ago
I understand UPS is probably not the most popular name around here, but their address API is actually quite good. I would also trust them with the data quality as they actually got real people verifying the addresses when packages are deliv
113.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Great answer. It's just a data point. There is no evidence that P(office manager, biomedical engineering) != P(office manager) * P(biomedical engineering).
114.
by boomzilla 11y ago
I've always wondered how YC is structured legally? Are they an LLC, or an S corp? How is the corporate organized? I think it seems to be a very efficient organization for a group of smart people putting up some money and make investmen
115.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Bing's under Qi Lu. I guess the main reason is that a search engine by itself can not improve its market share. You'll need more channels to increase the traffic. By giving more power to Lu, Bing can leverage other channels too li
116.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Uber has raised almost 6B. It's very unlikely their valuation drops to a few hundred millions as they must still have a few billions cash. However it's not impossible to see it drops to the 10B level or less if the economy tanks o
117.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Engineers :) If Jerry Yang did not have the credentials of Yahoo founder/CEO at the time, do you think Jack Ma would've let him in? Alibaba was growing very fast at that point, and one big reason they let Yahoo in is its brand.
118.
by boomzilla 11y ago
Is this the same CEO who said in Quora to the effect of: if you have to ask how it's like to work here, you won't fit in here?
119.
by boomzilla 11y ago
It can, as long as you store all the fields that will be needed for aggregation. Stored, non-indexed field retrieval can be slow as it might involve a lot of random seeks, so it might be slower than relation dbs. What use case do you have i
120.
by boomzilla 11y ago
What benefits do I get from ProtoBuf, apart from the standard binary wire format? JSON is just more popular as a serialization format. It doesn't matter what what programming language or OS I am on, there is almost always a built-in li

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