femto113

27 ms·

241.
by femto113 7y ago
Digging into those other costs is informative as well, the numbers for 2018: Pre-opening location expenses $350MM Growth and new market development expenses $475MM Sales and marketing expenses $370MM One could make some so
242.
by femto113 7y ago
Magical indeed. From the chart in the article it looks like for the most recent half-year they were paid $1.35B in rent and spent $1.23B to operate their properties, which works out to just $120MM in operating income for the year, let&#x27
243.
by femto113 7y ago
It's common for people outside of retail to focus on margins and ignore turns/sales velocity when considering retail issues, but it misses a lot of the reasoning. Obviously consistently making a loss on a product is a bad idea, b
244.
by femto113 7y ago
They do have a monopoly on Windows licenses, and they are trying to leverage that to sell cloud hosting of Windows servers, which they do not have a monopoly on. In this case Microsoft's defense would probably be "Windows is not
245.
by femto113 7y ago
This practice is a form of "bundling" in the antitrust sense, and while it is not inherently illegal different rules apply to such behaviors if you've been found to have monopoly powers.
246.
by femto113 7y ago
I think this wasn't really a bad deal for the drivers, but it was essentially a lie to the consumers: they think tipping will make a difference for the driver, but instead it only makes a difference to DoorDash. What's really nee
247.
by femto113 7y ago
The view that "Uber's main expense is the driver" is essentially backwards. The current economics are more akin to drivers paying Uber to find them business. Drivers pay for all of the physical expenses of a ride (like gas
248.
by femto113 7y ago
In Seattle we had HomeGrocer and it was awesome . Absolutely seemed like the future of groceries, they had great selection and especially great produce. The delivery people drove company vans (with a distinctive peach logo on the side) a
249.
by femto113 7y ago
"WeWork clearly is worth >0% of its current mark-to-market" I don't think that's at all clear. They own very little, so what they are "worth" is largely in the form of goodwill. They already have a lot of
250.
by femto113 7y ago
At the highest levels of play psychological factors are pretty minimal. Before a showdown which cards you actually hold aren't particularly material, as the only information you convey is through your bids. This means if you predict
251.
by femto113 7y ago
I dislike forced arbitration clauses as much as anyone, but I find it an untenable stretch to imply that third-party sellers are in any way in an "employment" relationship with Amazon, in fact applying the common "are you an
252.
by femto113 7y ago
As someone who does due diligence for a (partial) living I try to approach the question asking part of the process from as objective a perspective as possible, my goal at that point is to establish an understanding of the company's tec
253.
by femto113 7y ago
The distinction is nonsensical to me from a privacy standpoint. Your passport includes a picture of your face, anyone scanning your passport looks at that picture and your face to verify the passport is "you". I'm sure what
254.
by femto113 7y ago
That's not necessarily the worst thing, the cost of arbitration to the company is likely more than 0 (and maybe not even less than small claims) so I'll guess most companies would eagerly settle for at least the cost of the arbitr
255.
by femto113 7y ago
because I still think function foo() { ... } is a clearer way of indicating "I'm defining a function named foo". I tend to use arrows only for anonymous methods.
256.
by femto113 7y ago
The extra args passed by map coupled with the optional extra args in standard methods is the cause of a lot of confusion, but this feels like a missed opportunity for demonstrating functional programming. In the end author suggests [&
257.
by femto113 7y ago
"After all, there aren’t many numbers left between 5 and 0." Math purists may roll their eyes at this statement and clearly even if you are obsessed with integers you can just switch to picometers, but I wonder if it is time to st
258.
by femto113 7y ago
Bitcoin can't easily increase the quantity of transactions, so it's hard to answer that directly. Bitcoin transaction rates are currently limited by the time to mine a block and the number of transactions per block. Technical an
259.
by femto113 7y ago
Even without the exact figures it should be obvious that the inefficiency in Bitcoin is astounding. Consider e.g. that the Bitcoin network performs about 400K transactions per day while the Visa network performs about 150MM transactions pe
260.
by femto113 7y ago
There's a set of practices here in Seattle that I've come to call Skragile, which evinces the veneer of of Scrum, Kanban, and Agile, but embraces very little of the fundamental philosophies. The most distinctive characteristics:
261.
by femto113 7y ago
Quit and look for a more honest company. The kind of company that would lie in this way to get business is the same kind of company that would lie to you about their financial situation or throw you under the bus and lie to a client about
262.
by femto113 7y ago
It once was the canonical X in "we banned X why haven't we banned Y" (where Y is something like "assault rifles" or "peanuts") but perhaps only for people of a certain age. A more recent example: the Boei
263.
by femto113 7y ago
Lawn Darts only killed one person before they were banned, I think Autopilot is at 3 or 4 and counting, and Uber's driverless system has killed at least one pedestrian.
264.
by femto113 7y ago
"our data shows that, when used properly by an attentive driver who is prepared to take control at all times, drivers supported by Autopilot are safer than those operating without assistance" This is nonsense. The whole core of t
265.
by femto113 7y ago
Cool! That's pretty much exactly what I'm imagining, except tablet sized instead of phone sized.
266.
by femto113 7y ago
I've long wished for a "slot your iPad in here" solution for this sort of thing. Sure it might not stand up to automotive grade punishment, but you can remove it when leaving the car in the sun and if it breaks it is easy to
267.
by femto113 7y ago
For the patents yes, but the code is still copyrighted, so the new Apache/MIT licenses apply. They’re quite permissive though so I can’t imagine many uses that would run afoul of them.
268.
by femto113 7y ago
See for example this PEP suggesting they use GitHub issues for the CPython repo hosted on GitHub, opened a year ago https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0581/
269.
by femto113 7y ago
Less technical and more political. Python has a bureaucracy that can take let’s say “a while” to decide things. If GitHub approached them about this it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re still debating whether to condone it.
270.
by femto113 7y ago
Maybe because PyPI has a closer relationship with Python than the other package managers have with their core tech?

More ›