exelius

77 ms·

661.
by exelius 10y ago
> Imagine if instead of becoming an uber driver, you retrofit your car with an Uber Automated Car Taxi Converter(c), "guaranteed to put your car to work for you!" No way; see my comments above about the differences in car desig
662.
by exelius 10y ago
Yeah; that's ultimately why Uber treats driver quality as a short term problem and they don't do a lot more pre-employment checks... it's a problem they'll fix by removing the drivers entirely; so better to sweep it unde
663.
by exelius 10y ago
So I do this for a living... and I'd estimate the value of Uber's brand at $20-30 billion right now and growing. Brand perception among mainstream consumers is extremely positive and they're aggressively expanding globally. T
664.
by exelius 10y ago
The airline industry is much harder to differentiate because it is so capital intensive. Airplanes are super expensive because failure is so catastrophic -- thus they are built with multiple levels of redundancy (and production / mai
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by exelius 10y ago
I think Uber's business model relies on self-driving cars. They're paying subsidies now to build a brand -- the name "Uber" has become synonymous with "pull out your cell phone and call for a ride" -- that will
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by exelius 10y ago
> I think you vastly underestimate how much low-hanging fruit there is in this field, and how difficult getting and maintaining good data (so you can find the things you can do) really is :) 100% agree. Health insurance data is about as
667.
by exelius 10y ago
Ehhh... not so much. Some of the mid-size companies are okay at this; but the low-end guys are very, very unsophisticated (there are a lot of local / state plans as mandated by various state laws) and the super-big guys just have so mu
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by exelius 10y ago
IMO we're kind of headed that way now. I always saw this as the point of Google's combined interest in TensorFlow and Kubernetes. Containers are the piece of the toolchain we've been missing. Now we actually have some feasibl
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by exelius 10y ago
Exactly this. You don't go to containerization because it's cheaper / more efficient, you go to it because it's more flexible and lets you simplify your tech ops into business ops faster. Containers require a LOT of infr
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by exelius 10y ago
IMO this is more just that people are really bad at reading themselves. With someone else, you can see the body language and know that they're upset; but with yourself it can be harder to observe body language and other clues. Most peo
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by exelius 10y ago
I imagine they'll have separate AI brackets, and they could potentially simulate at multiple APM levels.
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by exelius 10y ago
Well, there are a lot of things that look bad but aren't criminal.
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by exelius 10y ago
I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requiremen
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by exelius 10y ago
CDNs are simply good architecture -- in any good system, you have multiple tiers of storage, and web systems are no different. Multiple tiers of storage providing caching over intermediate links which may be saturated -- this is a pretty co
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by exelius 10y ago
> CenturyLink is already one of the big players and they'll never enter markets that Comcast, ATT, or Verizon are already in. The market is drastically changing. Wireless has quickly become the center of the telecom industry; look f
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by exelius 10y ago
"Goodwill" is simply an accounting term (remove any preconceptions of what "goodwill" actually is). Goodwill is essentially what happens when you pay over book value for an asset. It's quite common in telecom, becau
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by exelius 10y ago
CTL is much stronger in the commercial space than they are in residential. Vertical integration is the name of the game in the commercial telecom space, and has been for 30+ years. And really, think of CTL as a decades-long rollup of baby B
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by exelius 10y ago
> Definitely. If fiber provides a 10% return on investment, definitely. Telecoms return about 10% at scale . Startup stage of a telco is incredibly expensive; and you typically won't see positive cash flow until a decade or so late
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by exelius 10y ago
It's not even about that. Google's services are delivered over the Internet, so they're reliant on someone else to deliver their traffic (and advertisements). Their corporate strategy playbook in those cases is to either comm
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by exelius 10y ago
I don't think they were idiots; but Google's whole operating model is built around taking Very Smart People and throwing them at Hard Problems. Sometimes, a problem may seem to be ripe for disruption because it is held back by wha
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by exelius 10y ago
I'm sure it had some impact in generating market demand for higher speeds; because the reason nobody offered gigabit to the home was that customers value 100 mbps Internet at something like $60/mo and only value gigabit Internet a
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by exelius 10y ago
Fiber's operations and infrastructure will be sold to one of the major telecoms within the year (just like Google did with Motorola once it ceased to be useful). My money is on CenturyLink since Google's approach meshes well with
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by exelius 10y ago
> I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief. They were never worried in the first place. Their network architects are not idiots or anything; they know the economics of what Google was trying to
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by exelius 10y ago
It's all unsubstantiated, honestly. I don't believe any of the rumors on either side, because both sides have a huge incentive to lie and insinuate bad things about the other. It's dirty politics 101, and the Clintons invente
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by exelius 10y ago
> thou candidate who despises half the country she supposedly wants to lead, Show me a candidate on either side who hasn't made these kinds of statements. This is more a symptom of our partisan divide than any one candidate. > is
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by exelius 10y ago
Because he has shown time and again that he thinks the rules do not -- and should not -- apply to him. A candidate running on a law-and-order platform who thinks he is above the law is essentially the textbook version of a dictator.
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by exelius 10y ago
I don't think any model has accounted for how personally distasteful Trump is. Regardless of his politics (which I find abhorrent as well, but that's another matter), there are a lot of Republicans who refuse to support him simply
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by exelius 10y ago
Right; so instead they've built their security model around assumptions that other companies' (namely telcos) account processes are secure. That way Google can say "it's not our fault; we can't do anything about it!
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by exelius 10y ago
Didn't Nokia try this already? I'm pretty sure the camera world has settled into two kinds of cameras: cell phones for people who just need to take a few snaps, and DSLRs for people who need more features than can possibly fit in
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by exelius 10y ago
Where would you go to show ID? In many places in America, the closest telco customer service office may be a 2 hour drive away. Everyone saves time/money by being able to do it over the phone; but unfortunately the customer service rep

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