exelius

55 ms·

541.
by exelius 9y ago
Pricing in health care is currently not a negotiation. The customer often doesn't know the price before services are rendered -- they're left to negotiate the bill after the fact. And in the case of life-saving care like chemother
542.
by exelius 9y ago
Right; AR is significantly less useful without a massive data platform backing it up. But the real problem is that Snap doesn't really have too many paths for growth that don't run into Facebook's existing network effects. Fa
543.
by exelius 9y ago
Agree with you here -- Facebook had a well-formed mobile strategy, the only question was whether it would work. Once it started to work, the stock took off like a rocket. Snap is a much bigger question mark. So far their plan looks to be &q
544.
by exelius 9y ago
I have observed a different phenomenon: in the last 10 years, "startup culture" has swept over India. There is very little innovative or cutting edge being done in the US either outside of the universities (where many of the resea
545.
by exelius 9y ago
It's gotten a lot better as everyone figured out the model, tooling and process. As long as you have someone onshore responsible for quality who doesn't let offshore get away with sloppy work, the model can produce high-quality pr
546.
by exelius 9y ago
I honestly read this article as taking more of a philosophical stance than a technical one. The fact is that we as humans will require proof and verification of human control over a system is an inescapable one. Basically, on some level w
547.
by exelius 9y ago
This is the way the big guys (Accenture, TCS, etc) went a few years back. Keep that in mind as you try this -- the further you go down this route, the more the market pressures will force you into an offshore sweatshop model. A lot of produ
548.
by exelius 9y ago
This is literally the entire value proposition of consulting.
549.
by exelius 9y ago
Well, if you have a corporate American Express card, you can pay $75/yr and you accumulate all the points on your corporate card for yourself.
550.
by exelius 9y ago
It is basically doomed to failure; but you'll learn a lot and be happy for the experience. The fun part is that it seems so simple on the surface if you're someone who doesn't know much about gardening. But without the bene
551.
by exelius 9y ago
Right; but it doesn't change the fact that any company capable of operating technical infrastructure at scale (aka any company with compute/storage needs above a half-dozen long rows of racks at a datacenter) can do it for about 6
552.
by exelius 9y ago
Considering most of our congresspeople are lawyers, any sort of tort reform in this country is basically a pipe dream.
553.
by exelius 9y ago
The problem is that the US has no moral high ground here. We too have prisoners manufacturing goods below minimum wage, and while you won't be jailed in the US because of your political affiliation, you definitely can be jailed because
554.
by exelius 9y ago
Maybe you're oxidizing the soil around the sensor? In any case, oxidization (especially with gold-plated sensors) is a concern. I was unable to get these simple resistive sensors to work consistently long-term.
555.
by exelius 9y ago
Not sure, but pretty much any plant with a root system will grow in hydroponics (which includes most flowers). The fertilizer mix may be different for different plants, but the concept is the same. The biggest pain with hydroponics is that
556.
by exelius 9y ago
This is basically hydroponics. And by "basically" I mean "exactly". Replace the soil with an inert, porous medium like hardened clay. And if you aerate the water with say, an aquarium pump/stone, you don't even
557.
by exelius 9y ago
1. Because solenoid valves that can work with a very low pressure differential (a few feet worth of gravity often isn't enough to "force open" the valve) are expensive and require higher power draw than an Arduino / RPi.
558.
by exelius 9y ago
So the reason your moisture sensor project failed is because those types of moisture sensors are really designed for "stick it in, test it, and pull it out" testing. If left powered on in a moist environment, the conductive materi
559.
by exelius 9y ago
It's changed a little bit -- 50% of your advertising budget is wasted, and you can generally tell which 50% -- but past performance is now a poor indicator of future returns. So you can tell what 50% was wasted, but it's harder to
560.
by exelius 9y ago
I think you bring up an important point: there is a class of homebuyer who is both wealthy (or at least high-income) and a control freak. McMansion (or more specifically McMansion builders) target this demographic with empty shells, then le
561.
by exelius 9y ago
Well, no barriers to entry basically means it's a commodity market and that consolidation/scale is the key to competitive advantage.
562.
by exelius 9y ago
This is why I believe ad tech is a zero-sum game. New channels (banner ads, social ads, online video ads, etc) appear ad old ones dry (TV, radio, etc) up. But the spend doesn't -- an ad buyer has a campaign budget of $X, and is looking
563.
by exelius 9y ago
My guess as someone who doesn't actively work in this stuff (but have dabbled in it) is that some large merchants get a break on transaction fees with chip/swipe that they don't get with Apple Pay/Samsung Pay/etc. A
564.
by exelius 9y ago
In many cases (RiteAid pharmacy terminals are the absolute worst about this, but far from the only offender) it's just crappy UX design. I have an American Express card and a RiteAid rewards card. Here's my checkout flow at the
565.
by exelius 9y ago
Tesla is a different story entirely. Uber is burning cash by subsidizing operations (aka buying customers); Tesla is spending it on capital assets and R&D. Money spent on operations generally won't benefit you beyond the current qu
566.
by exelius 9y ago
> Also these rental services/configurations will hardly be free. So the cost of the car/maintenance isn't eliminated entirely. For my situation, given that I've been driving the same car for the last 11 years, and it
567.
by exelius 9y ago
I think Tesla also understands that once autonomous cars are ubiquitous, you won't own one: you'll just rent one for whatever needs you have in that moment. I think the best analog for the market dynamics that this will create is
568.
by exelius 9y ago
Uber's valuation is based on a formula that looks something like (raw brand value in an autonomous car world) - (burn rate)^(number of years until autonomous cars are widespread). The valuation can be quite high if you assume that the
569.
by exelius 9y ago
I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company". If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young
570.
by exelius 9y ago
Also consider that the Mexican government and "cartels" have a lot of overlap. Local governments and municipal police departments in particular.

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