mseebach

54 ms·

631.
by mseebach 9y ago
It's easy to get distracted by the value of the transactions, but they're just the payload. Nobody is "buying" a product worth those billions in transactions, the same way someone bought $N worth of books for a bookselle
632.
by mseebach 9y ago
That's not what capital intensive means[1]. A company that has low margins as its business model necessarily needs to have a large body of transactions to get much revenue. Six years to get profitable is not really a remarkable period
633.
by mseebach 9y ago
You don't need a text editor , you just need to be able to read a sequence of bytes. XML anchors at the almost lowest possible point: you have the stream of characters. It's a pointless exercise to consider a format except on the
634.
by mseebach 9y ago
Well, yes, this applies to reasonably well-designed, expressive XML (which OpenDocument is). You can definitely write XML that is perfectly incomprehensible without extensive references.
635.
by mseebach 9y ago
Yes, and that only difference is important, and it makes XML more open than SQLite. Perhaps not enough to matter (depending on your needs), but it is more open. You may not want to look at XML without a tool, but you could. Or, most likely
636.
by mseebach 9y ago
> sqlite files couldn't be more open Yes, actually they could. They could be readable without any software at all. Like XML. All of the improvements suggested in the article could be implemented by extending the XML format to allow
637.
by mseebach 9y ago
Also, if we're considering ecological foot print, structural use of wood is near-permanent sequestering (ie. carbon-negative) which is better than most other uses of wood such as burning for fuel which is "only" carbon-neutra
638.
by mseebach 9y ago
> it does seem like the one time pad could encrypt the entire message simply by using some clever way of "extending" the key Any way of meaningfully extending the key will be vulnerable to a kind of analysis well understood 70
639.
by mseebach 9y ago
If you're only reusing it once, then I guess frequency analysis gets tricky, but the problem you have instead is that you have provided a validation function: Where, using a one-time-pad, any key that yields plausible cleartext is a po
640.
by mseebach 9y ago
If you reuse your pad, you're vulnerable to frequency analysis, which is literally the oldest trick in the book. You might as well send in plaintext.
641.
by mseebach 9y ago
The problem, of course, is that you're just flipping the problem around. For every bit you need to send A->B, you need to first securely send a bit B->A (the pad). That's practical for a number of applications, and obviously
642.
by mseebach 9y ago
Also, literal survivor bias: The buildings that weren't well made simply ceased to exist, and the ones still standing today are the ones that were well built, whether by design or accident.
643.
by mseebach 9y ago
There's a (large) middle ground between "personal project" and "official product". It not hard to imagine a project being build as a proof of concept as part of someones regular job, yet not making it to "produ
644.
by mseebach 9y ago
That's only half of the analysis, and suffers for it. Compare pre-internet print news; also almost entirely dependent on ads, and yet having delivered immense societal value. The other half of the analysis is that Facebook can only mak
645.
by mseebach 9y ago
I would consider that a bit of a design smell, but yes. I think the danger point has more to do with training new converts: it is very unusual in any language that changing the order of class internals can change its external behavior.
646.
by mseebach 9y ago
I suppose the use case is for when it's not practical or desirable to do the legwork of setting up a full connection, with libraries and everything. You could imagine a "(web)serverless" web app with Javascript querying the D
647.
by mseebach 9y ago
Software and knowledge jobs take very little space - just whatever a single employee takes up. Even in a small private office setup not much, but even less in open plans - here's perhaps a hit to why open plans are popular in offices t
648.
by mseebach 9y ago
Online delivery supermarkets have made the same realisation (so-called dark stores), but a few years earlier.
649.
by mseebach 9y ago
> How dystopian You're objecting to an aesthetic, not frankly anything of substance. Very few restaurant kitchens are particularly pleasant places to work, often cramped (because they take up square feet in prime real estate) and ve
650.
by mseebach 9y ago
Once a pattern like that has been noticed and (crucially) correctly analysed, it tends to disappear, as the affected actors modify their behaviour in response to this analysis.
651.
by mseebach 9y ago
It's a good point that it's difficult to defend the position of protecting children from seeing boobies, but not fake news. The trick, of course, is that very little of what is broadly considered fake news by various people is jus
652.
by mseebach 9y ago
Can I combine it with the one about Bill Gates donating $10 per forwarded email, or does it have to be separate forwards? Please clarify, happy to do either.
653.
by mseebach 9y ago
It's not a linear outcome space. There's also the outcome where automation enables tons of new dull (but in different ways) jobs, currently embodied by the so-called gig economy. I think this area is nacent and has a lot of potent
654.
by mseebach 9y ago
Not really. FDA approval is already the Amazon Basics of generic drugs. If it says Acetaminophen 500mg, that's what you're getting, nothing more, nothing less, within a very narrow tolerance, entirely regardless of brand. Not so w
655.
by mseebach 9y ago
The "technology" required is the same as the postal service have provided for centuries (think pizza delivery for more urgent situations). Sounds like that insider is spending too much time on pop business sci-fi and too little ti
656.
by mseebach 9y ago
> [...] undifferentiated service [...] basically a commodity industry That's pretty much Amazon's sweet spot.
657.
by mseebach 9y ago
Premium economy - a better seat/legroom, but otherwise much the same service as economy (modulo sometimes free drinks or nicer food presentation). It's nowhere near universally available, but where it is, it's often available
658.
by mseebach 9y ago
Why can't the real goal be the stated one? It's already very beneficial to Amazon, serving to further build a moat around Amazon being where you buy everything. This constant lazy conspiracy theorizing every time a large company d
659.
by mseebach 9y ago
> but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people Google and Microsoft makes about $200k/year profit per employee, Facebook 4x that. The problem, I suspect, is that you probably don't net any
660.
by mseebach 9y ago
> In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?

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