d4nt

14 ms·

121.
by d4nt 13y ago
It's not really a zero sum game because marketing costs money. If you can figure out how to do marketing for less money per new customer than the other guy then you have freed up money that would otherwise have been spent on marketing.
122.
by d4nt 13y ago
Yes, Iraq and Syria were very different situations. If anything Syria is the one we should have got involved in. I just raised it to highlight how a non-intervention policy is now firmly establish following years of pressure.
123.
by d4nt 13y ago
I agree, but... Things like this matter in the long run. Remember how, before the war in Iraq, over 1 million people marched in London against the war? We still went to war, but Tony Blair never recovered from it, and when the issue of Syri
124.
by d4nt 13y ago
When it happens I think it'll look like an explosion in semi-telecomute jobs. All those people who spend weekdays away from their families at the moment will find they really only need to be in town for 1 or 2 days per week, and compan
125.
by d4nt 13y ago
I agree. Having lived through an SAP implementation while at an in house IT department, I think SAP is more of a lifestyle than a technology. The whole point is that consultations are done, RFPs are written, sales executives shmooze, direct
126.
by d4nt 13y ago
This is a big deal, one of the key benefits of Coal/Gas/Oil power stations is their ability to provide frequency response (where the power output is adjusted to keep the AC as close to 50 Hz as possible) or to participate in a bal
127.
by d4nt 13y ago
You shutdown all the targeted benefit programs that try and give money to people based on certain criteria. Things like unemployment benefit, state pensions, food vouchers, tax breaks for people on low incomes, tax breaks on goods and servi
128.
by d4nt 13y ago
This is the title of the actual Guardian article, and the convention on HN is to use the linked article's title.
129.
Lavabit founder offered to log users' metadata if FBI paid him $3,500(theguardian.com)
70 points by d4nt 13y ago|44 comments
130.
by d4nt 13y ago
What I find fascinating about the video is how "human" it looks when trying to stay upright. I doubt they've tried to emulate human behavior as such, it just emerges when trying to redistribute weight.
131.
by d4nt 13y ago
I think you're sort of right. Banks don't think of themselves as tech companies. Their culture, priorities and upper managemet aren't those of a tech company. But they are now tech businesses. Here's an example: Last yea
132.
by d4nt 13y ago
It would have to be an ongoing service, a sort of "Clean Web Subscription" that got updates. Believing that there's a human curating it is what makes it valuable I think. I'd pay an annual fee of $30 for that. I may be a
133.
by d4nt 13y ago
Have you considered maintaining a [paid] chrome add-in with all this stuff in?
134.
by d4nt 13y ago
What's more, there would be a lot fewer people around if computers weren't helping us grow food, generate energy, cure diseases and move everything around just in time. The more I think about it, the more I think computers are a s
135.
by d4nt 13y ago
The fundamental issue here is: who's responsibility is it to keep people safe? The author, without really acknowledging it, makes the assumption that it is up to someone in authority to keep us safe. If you accept that premise, then ye
136.
by d4nt 13y ago
Your point is a good one. Without wanting to get too deep into a design for some hypothetical system, I guess I was thinking that I'd either try and modify the current request such that it can return something to its caller (e.g. Rende
137.
by d4nt 13y ago
I think async is a systems programming tool rather than an application programming tool. If you're writing a web server or a web browser, it'd be useful. But for a web application, you're already sitting on a highly scalable
138.
by d4nt 13y ago
Part of the problem here is that any open [web] community will eventually contain more people who've joined after you than people who joined before you. Consequently, stuff you learned long ago is still new and interesting to the major
139.
by d4nt 13y ago
But this is the public debate that Snowdon called for. The leaks put pressure on tech companies to defend their reputation and when they do, each new development keeps the story going.
140.
by d4nt 13y ago
You're right about Windows being very profitable up till now, but there's something clever in this idea... Businesses pay for Windows, but ordinary consumers by and large don't, they get it for "free" when they purc
141.
by d4nt 13y ago
Yes, Azure. It's developed into a good offering and I'm pleased for them that they're doing well. But, there was a time when Microsoft entering a market would send all the existing players running for the hills. They used the
142.
by d4nt 13y ago
I've always felt MS is two businesses, an enterprise systems (Office, SQL Server, Project, Dynamics, Azure) business and a consumer devices business (Windows, Xbox, Phone, Bing) which should have started building hardware sooner than i
143.
by d4nt 13y ago
I think some business models only make sense at scale. While the caveat does apply to facebook (they probably could have been a profitable niche student social network) occasionally I see businesses that it just doesn't make sense to e
144.
by d4nt 13y ago
This got me thinking. I share many of the authors frustrations, but I realise that people are just trying to get a thing done, and they really just want to outsource all the IT knowledge, just like I want to outsource car maintenance and fo
145.
by d4nt 13y ago
In the early days, Linux was not the only open source kernal out there. It's possible that Linus's blunt approach is actually a key factor in Linux's success. Society hasn't yet had long to establish a set of norms for w
146.
by d4nt 13y ago
While I agree with the points you make, there are no easy answers here. The problem with technology concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people is that it gets really hard to tax those individuals. Partly because these peopl
147.
by d4nt 13y ago
Agreed, the idea that whole teams of people were employed to basically prevent the government being embarrassed, and that they view their role as critically important, suggests that the state has grown way to big in the last 100 years or so
148.
by d4nt 13y ago
The definition of "anyone who does anything that might piss off a government" includes a lot of people. What if I become a political activist in 20 years time, I might well piss of a future government, should I stop using gmail no
149.
by d4nt 13y ago
Sounds exactly like Droplet ( http://dropletpay.com ) which is already live in the UK.
150.
by d4nt 13y ago
The value of a lot of these apparently lightweight B2C apps is derived primarily from the attention that they get from their users. If you can build something that gets attention, then that's worth a lot of money. In a world where people ar

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