mikeash

40 ms·

391.
by mikeash 7y ago
That would be really bad, but we're very far from that point.
392.
by mikeash 7y ago
That's true, but the viability of other options limits their ability to set prices or exclude competition.
393.
by mikeash 7y ago
In their graphic, I count 7 15" ports and 8 24" ports, which at their before L-12 pricing is over $50 million. There's also the large port on top, which doesn't list pricing, but is presumably quite a bit more. The L-12
394.
by mikeash 7y ago
The insurance for that one got complicated. It was destroyed in a static fire test that would have been a few days before the launch. Their launch insurance wouldn't cover it, because even though it was destroyed by a rocket exploding
395.
by mikeash 7y ago
It takes more than “a significant share.” Being excluded from Walmart blocks you from a significant share of retail sales but they’re not a monopoly. If the argument is that Amazon might become a monopoly in coming years, I can totally see
396.
by mikeash 7y ago
Doesn’t seem very scalable. Maybe you can knock over 10x as many houses in a night as a normal criminal. Normal criminals are 1000x (at least) more numerous, so it’s not a big increase in the threat.
397.
by mikeash 7y ago
There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon for sellers too. None of them are as big, but they are there. If Amazon has the power to set prices, why are their prices the same as everyone else’s?
398.
by mikeash 7y ago
So don’t sell on Amazon. There are tons of other options. Amazon is merely the largest, not the only.
399.
by mikeash 7y ago
Seems quite fair to me. Uber is using VC money to crush competition without worrying about making money. It is also true that traditional taxis suck. This is an orthogonal fact.
400.
by mikeash 7y ago
I wish this elaborated more on how Amazon is a monopoly. The interviewee defines it as having the power to set prices and exclude competition. I don’t see either of those happening. There’s a ton of competition, more than enough to severely
401.
by mikeash 7y ago
Picking a lock remotely seems rather pointless.
402.
by mikeash 7y ago
Mine silently truncates to 8 characters and does a case insensitive comparison. Good thing they have all the liability....
403.
by mikeash 7y ago
Or any other physical security issue? There are massive differences in the security of standard physical locks. How much does the average person know about that? How many people are buying locks based on an informed decision about its pick
404.
by mikeash 7y ago
Why is a WiFi lock so bad? It opens you up more, but the number of people who can hack even the most insecure example is vastly smaller than the number of people who can kick down a door or break a window. Household locks are almost always
405.
by mikeash 7y ago
4 is a bad number because it sounds like “death.” Tall buildings tend to omit floors 4, 14, etc., the way tall buildings in the US often omit floor 13. Amusingly, Chinese building often omit 13 as well. So you might be on floor 15 and only
406.
by mikeash 7y ago
This is a bad analogy. Hens are a relatively cheap, rapidly depreciating asset that require constant maintenance and will cease to be productive in a few years. The capital cost of the hen itself is essentially negligible. Of course you don
407.
by mikeash 7y ago
Exactly, with similarity being a second important thing. For example, maybe you’re lucky enough to have three ISPs to choose from, but they’re all big American companies with nearly identical corporate cultures, and odds are good that if on
408.
by mikeash 7y ago
Cloudflare isn’t an ISP so “all other providers” doesn’t make sense, and Comcast isn’t a competitor.
409.
by mikeash 7y ago
Being able to call people is pretty essential in the modern world. That’s why these laws exist and why governments have put so much effort into making these services available to everyone. The phone company is required to serve you even if
410.
by mikeash 7y ago
That’s always the way. Censorship/moderation isn’t given a second thought when it’s just sex-related.
411.
by mikeash 7y ago
A utility is typically a natural monopoly providing some sort of essential service. Cloudflare is neither.
412.
by mikeash 7y ago
“We made a mistake, don’t make the same mistake” isn’t moralizing nor is it hypocritical.
413.
by mikeash 7y ago
Boot any modern OS and you’ll have megabytes if not tens of megabytes of these strings, and spend a small but significant amount of CPU time looking them up. This may not matter on your Ryzen desktop with 97 cores and 318GB of RAM, but it’s
414.
by mikeash 7y ago
I think this sort of support has to be good because your alternative is to return it to the store, and this costs them way more. In the past few years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of material included in the box that attempts to preempt
415.
by mikeash 7y ago
If you look through lists of companies with the worst customer service, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation with competition. For example, Best Buy frequently appears, and they have tons of competition. Other retailers show up, and ban
416.
by mikeash 7y ago
Even if you can ride the fine line to keep frustrated customers, they’ll tell friends, family, and strangers about how much you suck and you’ll have a harder time acquiring new customers.
417.
by mikeash 7y ago
The technology isn’t why. Idiot businesspeople focused on the short term who think it’s good business to piss off their customers as long as they don’t switch to a competitor is why.
418.
by mikeash 7y ago
String-keyed hash maps are really common, and the keys tend to be ASCII. This would increase their size by a factor of 4, resulting in substantially increased memory usage and decreased performance.
419.
by mikeash 7y ago
Funny how using a famous phrase coined by one of the most respected US presidents can be so controversial.
420.
by mikeash 7y ago
They didn’t make it expensive and difficult to park in the city. It is inherently expensive and difficult, because space is valuable and cars take up a lot of it. What they did is expose that expense and difficulty directly to the car own

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