nostrademons

601 ms·

3151.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Innovation is a different skillset from maximizing profits of an existing product portfolio. Ballmer was pretty good at the latter and sucked at the former. With the exception of Azure (which was a little late to the party), the business
3152.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Nadella brought life back into MSFT, but they were an also-ran from about 2000-2014.
3153.
by nostrademons 6y ago
His complaint wasn't that Microsoft (or himself) didn't make money, it's that Microsoft became complacent and lost the will to innovate. Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They also basically ceased innova
3154.
by nostrademons 6y ago
There's more variance with small-time landlords. With a corporate overlord you know exactly what you're getting: they are going to be firm about sticking you to the exact terms of your lease and will raise your rent by the maximu
3155.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Because banning protests would create a serious 1st amendment constitutional question. It was the same with the Reopen protests - they were allowed, just stupid. Health authorities say the same thing here - a lot of people are going to get
3156.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Land taxes are actually better in those regards than income or capital gains taxes. You can't hide land, and if you want the state to enforce your property rights, you can't alter your behavior in a way that lets you avoid paying
3157.
by nostrademons 6y ago
> There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person? It's not what you can think of that matters, it's what the people who control the state apparatus can think of. The vast majority of human beings ar
3158.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Nominal interest rates are artificial. Real interest rates (nominal rates - inflation) are not. If central banks set nominal interest rates too low you get inflation which negates the purchasing power of the borrowed money. That's w
3159.
by nostrademons 6y ago
I could believe that, but the question that most people are asking is not "What is the average rent that people who choose to stay in the Bay Area are paying?", it's "If I choose to move, can I get cheaper rent?" C
3160.
by nostrademons 6y ago
I'm starting to see this - of the 8 or so houses sold in Los Altos over the last month, one was 5% under asking and the other was 18% under asking. It's still pretty rare though. More interesting is the huge hit to the volume of
3161.
by nostrademons 6y ago
In 2009 rents dropped rapidly in Mountain View. I moved here in early '09 and my employer paid a realtor to show me around for a day. Told him my budget was $2000/month, and asked about a fairly swanky mostly-corporate-housing-b
3162.
by nostrademons 6y ago
I think real estate will follow later. I've seen price cuts of $100-200K on the units that actually sell. Real estate is sticky - many people hold the line on price hoping that a buyer will come along later - and the economic crisis
3163.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Yeah. I was driving through Mountain View & Palo Alto yesterday and basically every apartment complex has a "For lease!" sign on it, many with generous move-in specials. The steady stream of moving vans leaving the area hasn
3164.
by nostrademons 6y ago
There's an adverse selection problem with today's public markets. If you're profitable, in a solid and sustainable business, you a.) usually don't need more cash b.) if you do need more cash, there are plenty of private
3165.
by nostrademons 6y ago
It's whenever you have that feeling of "I just can't decide between these two options", and don't have a strong feeling either way. Quitting a job or ending a relationship can be a marginal decision, if you'r
3166.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Flash loans are one example. These are zero-collateral, low-fee loans that are paid back at the end of the transaction . If the loan fails to be paid back, the whole transaction that made it unwinds, which means the risk to the lender is
3167.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Oftentimes the VC cash is needed to actually cross the chasm. One of the difference between early and mainstream adopter populations is that a lot more product polish, and oftentimes explicit sales or advertising outreach, is needed to ple
3168.
by nostrademons 6y ago
There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle: On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate u
3169.
by nostrademons 6y ago
The big tech companies all deal with this issue as well. One of the big problems when I started at Google in 2009 was that an experiment would show a mild negative effect on click-throughs when what was actually happening is that it was a
3170.
by nostrademons 6y ago
AI has plenty of useful applications for business. Fraud detection, forecasting, enterprise resource planning, logistics - all of these were considered AI at one point. The specific problem the author cites - digitizing data in PDFs - shou
3171.
by nostrademons 6y ago
> The problem imo is on the business side, most businesses don't know how to transform unpredictable progress into profit (even if average on a large timeframe that progress might be HUGE). There's an interesting whole vs. part
3172.
by nostrademons 6y ago
A lot of FAANGs are moving to using RSUs rather than options and eliminating the vesting cliff. They really are identical in that case. Then again, the companies that are doing so are generally the ones using GAAP earnings and including SB
3173.
by nostrademons 6y ago
In search/social/IR: reputation graphs, PageRank, reachability, link canonicalization & dupe detection, identifying "objects" that are referred to by different names (eg. people, company names, knowledge graph, synon
3174.
by nostrademons 6y ago
I have a friend who works in a NYC hospital and they absolutely were overwhelmed. Every available space (including supply closets, ERs, staff briefing rooms) converted into a coronavirus ward. A few staff members (including their ER direc
3175.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Until you actually have an antibody test result, be careful to equate "probably COVID-19" with "COVID-19". I have a friend who lives in the NYC metro area who was sure he had COVID-19 in March. All the symptoms matched
3176.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Is it really? My recollection is that IBM was already not an R&D powerhouse when the IBM PC came out in 1981, hence them building it out of commodity supplies and outsourcing the OS to Microsoft. As late as 2011 ( 20 years after IBM&
3177.
by nostrademons 6y ago
Most new cryptocurrencies are moving away from PoW because a.) it's a massive waste of electricity and b.) it's not actually secure anyway, because we've seen a consolidation of mining power with major ASIC customers who have
3178.
by nostrademons 6y ago
The very first job that the software engineering profession automated was its own. Assemblers, compilers, libraries, frameworks, package managers, macros, shell scripts, scripting languages, IDEs, unit tests, code browsers, and refactoring
3179.
by nostrademons 6y ago
GPGPU. GPU performance is still increasing along Moore's Law, single-core performance has plateaued. The implication is that at some point, the differential will become so great that we'll be stupid to continue running anything
3180.
by nostrademons 6y ago
This is usually called an "area tech lead" in FAANGs and "software architect" in more old-line software companies.

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