eldavido

58 ms·

511.
by eldavido 9y ago
The thing I hate most about Flask is how hard it makes testing. There's too much global state and stuff you have to mock/hack. A little too lightweight for my taste. I'm using Pyramid and it's decent. A little less conve
512.
by eldavido 9y ago
I think a better choice of word might have been "asymptote". Thanks for pointing this out. At the risk of being a bit pedantic, limits don't imply stability, though, only that something is heading in a certain direction, and
513.
by eldavido 9y ago
This is from Marx, who wrote The Communist Manifesto, among other things. I won't try to summarize, other than to say Marx treats this ("late capitalism") as a developed state of capitalism, sort of a mathematical limit/
514.
by eldavido 9y ago
To further corroborate, I'm working in hotel software at the moment and these sites drive a _ton_ of traffic. 10-15% commissions on every booking they process. booking.com is such a piece of shit in so many ways: strip-mall aesthetics,
515.
by eldavido 9y ago
Yeah I agree. There's also a general proclivity to discount boring, but effective solutions to problems. I'm writing a hotel property management system right now for a hotel chain. In its first year, it will move more money than m
516.
by eldavido 9y ago
Also off facebook for about five years. I've said it many times, it's surprising how little I miss it. Sort of like junk food, it tastes great but surprising how little you miss eating it when it's gone.
517.
by eldavido 9y ago
I work with hotels. They face the same problem (how to get customers). There are basically two approaches: either pay someone a commission, or build a brand. Building a brand is hard, it takes a long time, but it's worth a lot and is m
518.
by eldavido 9y ago
Profit vs. for profit doesn't matter. You need to recruit the right faculty, people at the top of their field who can go anywhere - THAT is the hard problem.
519.
by eldavido 9y ago
I think you're talking about this, which was cited in the book Grit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3910317/
520.
by eldavido 9y ago
Why did they shut down? This whole page is long on emotion, not that that's not important, but very short on facts. Regulation? No tenable business model? Couldn't charge enough to pay instructors? etc.
521.
by eldavido 9y ago
Thank you for this comment. I'm sorry it got downvoted and I disagree with much of what's written, but I appreciate the thoughtfulness and general tone. I have actually read and thought about the Communist Manifesto quite a lot, b
522.
by eldavido 9y ago
For my money I would much, much rather own shares of stock in my retirement plan than have a state- or corporate-backed pension. Have you seen the movie Casino? That actually happened, the Teamsters pension fund came under control of the mo
523.
by eldavido 9y ago
Without a citation, that seems right, in the narrowest sense of "owning single shares in a company". Keep in mind that "owning stock" isn't well-defined though, that could mean (a) own individual shares (narrowest),
524.
by eldavido 9y ago
This is a good point and I think it explains a sea change in US business. In the late 80s, business went from being pretty clubby and centrally planned (think big 4 auto companies, lots of union control, with big cross-industry labor bargai
525.
by eldavido 9y ago
There is so much wrong with this article I hardly know where to begin. First, it presumes a 19th-century separation of "capital" and "labor" where "capital" is a bunch of greedy pigs trying their damndest to ex
526.
by eldavido 9y ago
Surprisingly, we don't any long-running tasks.
527.
by eldavido 9y ago
I've been working in a related space for a few years and wanted to offer a few counterpoints to the article. First, if you're doing request/response using messaging, you're probably doing it wrong. Pub/sub and reque
528.
by eldavido 9y ago
Are they? What would "not hiding" it look like, a clear statement of it in their S-1, of the form "X is our churn rate?" I'm just not sure what people want. They show cohorts and give a lot of data on aggregate perf
529.
by eldavido 9y ago
Hi Chuck I didn't get this part of the prospectus either, the language was pretty thick. It's probably some kind of cleanup/recapitalization? Probably wanted to shed some protective provisions or something. Please do comment
530.
by eldavido 9y ago
You're forgetting a major third reason: to have a currency to do acquisitions. If your stock isn't publicly traded, you can't issue shares to buy new companies. Most acquisitions aren't all cash, they're a mix of ca
531.
by eldavido 9y ago
To throw some actual _data_ into this conversation: From the S-1, this is a 68% COGS business, meaning their unit margins are 32%. You can debate whether some of their opex belongs above or below the line, but let's assume the 32% numb
532.
by eldavido 9y ago
If by "even though all they've really done", you mean, (1) They've opened several proprietary warehouses, (2) They've developed direct sourcing relationships with numerous farms, cutting out any distributors/wh
533.
by eldavido 9y ago
If you're used to working at startup speed, just take a job. It'll seem easy, people will work way fewer hours, and at lower intensity, than you're used to, and you'll catch up to them skill-wise in a few years. Don&#x27
534.
by eldavido 9y ago
Well not just that, but also, Uber and Lyft are moving a lot of people around, cheaply, all while providing income for drivers. All that's going on here is that cabbies made a bad investment and are losing. Sorry, but if you're ty
535.
by eldavido 9y ago
Longtime Android user here. I would love to see this company succeed, but I don't see how it's possible. Even if you can design a better phone, Apple has two massive moats protecting them, namely, iOS and their manufacturing prowe
536.
by eldavido 9y ago
The tone of this post is a little flippant, but ultimately, I have to agree. It comes down to how much trust the executive sponsors have in the face of the engineering org, and how the business views technology, as responsible professionals
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by eldavido 9y ago
Ask the CEO whether the investors would buy your shares as part of the funding round. I've seen a company do this. It's a win for everyone. Offer a moderate discount (10-20%) to make it worth their while. - Company gets to re-conc
538.
by eldavido 9y ago
Bandwidth will almost certainly be their dominant economic input. It's funny, a lot of people think you exit AWS/GCE to rack your own machines, but I was on a datacenter tour in SV a few years back and was reminded that having fin
539.
by eldavido 9y ago
I think it's getting harder and harder to justify. Especially given what mid-career devs at these companies are earning. $150-200k base plus 100k/yr or more in stock after a few years, that's far cry from 90k + 0.1% of some j
540.
by eldavido 9y ago
I read their S-1. The other problem is that ex-US, bandwidth is more expensive than in the US, even though the addressable ad markets are smaller. People are poorer and don't spend as much. You have to admire facebook. They've b

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