whopa

17 ms·

121.
by whopa 17y ago
> Startups should be very risk averse. One misstep can mean death. That contradicts a lot of sentiment on HN. > And Microsoft can afford to take more risks than Facebook, etc. Where is Microsoft making more risks than Facebook? They
122.
by whopa 17y ago
That's the weird part. Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse. In contrast, Facebook has over 10x the people, and 10x the user base, but
123.
by whopa 17y ago
Weird list, as Las Vegas and San Jose already have free wifi. Perhaps others too? Great that SEA gets it though.
124.
by whopa 17y ago
But one of the points of the article was that people who have the potential to be the next Einstein or Berners-Lee are disincentivized to pursue that potential, and instead follow a path that makes more money, but doesn't add value to socie
125.
by whopa 17y ago
The Internet in general is not as narrowly scoped as Twitter's feature set, so that is not the same.
126.
by whopa 17y ago
"Twitter is what you make of it." If what most people make of it is banal posts and celebrity watching, is it deserving of all the hype?
127.
by whopa 17y ago
"Anyone can become a broadcaster" also counts for blogs, mailing lists, usenet, etc. People still have to opt in to tune into you, so why is Twitter more interesting than all those other options?
128.
by whopa 17y ago
> It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley. That's because there are government subsidies to bring broadband to rural areas, but none to bring fiber to Silicon Valle
129.
by whopa 17y ago
> How is Mac version holding back Chrome in terms of adoption when mac represents roughly 9-10% OS market? Because Mac usage among early adopters and other tech influencers is a much higher percentage, and they're the ones who recommend
130.
by whopa 17y ago
To be fair to Google, they tried to contribute to Firefox back in the Firefox 1.x timeframe, but they realized that Mozilla is rather dysfunctional open source project. It is incredibly hard to get feature work into Mozilla as an outsider,
131.
by whopa 17y ago
Online advertising doesn't compete against traditional broadcast advertising on a level playing field. You can directly measure a lot of the effectiveness of an online ad. That's much harder to do with traditional ads, so everyone uses stat
132.
by whopa 17y ago
Realistically, disk filesystems have to be linked into the kernel (FUSE isn't going to cut it: too slow, and can't be used on boot), and Apple isn't going to link GPL code into their kernel. All the stuff you listed is userspace.
133.
by whopa 17y ago
btrfs is GPL, which is an automatic no-go for Apple legal. I'm curious, where does the Apple/Oracle bad blood speculation come from? I don't remember seeing any references to it before, so was Gruber just grasping at things? The NetApp laws
134.
by whopa 17y ago
It still boils down to switching costs. If Google pulls shenanigans often enough, some users will notice, and they switch to Bing or some other search engine with very little effort. Google doesn't want to lose those users, so they have inc
135.
by whopa 17y ago
And as I said in my original comment, you can't rely on user education. If we've learned anything about the psychology of phishing, it's that.
136.
by whopa 17y ago
Except the phishing aspects make it worse for inexperienced users, since an arbitrary website can redirect to a page that asks for a potentially more sensitive username/password, and that's actually considered normal flow. I don't underst
137.
by whopa 17y ago
Low tweeting is a big issue, since it negates some of the Twitter narrative. The whole "pulse of the planet" realtime search thing isn't really valuable if most of the users aren't contributing to the corpus. Also, if it's just a handful of
138.
by whopa 17y ago
Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.ht
139.
by whopa 17y ago
> Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. Is it really true th
140.
by whopa 17y ago
Sure, but citing an outlier as an example as something that could happen isn't really meaningful, since it is so improbable.
141.
by whopa 17y ago
Maybe with the current economy the bank and credit card leads don't pay out as well? And the mortgage stuff is still in total downturn. Perhaps between the crappy economy and whatever Yodlee is charging for their data, Mint may not be anywh
142.
by whopa 17y ago
Being able to target ads well doesn't do you any good if you don't have the ad inventory to make use of that advantage. That's Facebook's problem: their users aren't apt to click on ads while on the site, so they don't convert very well, he
143.
by whopa 17y ago
Apple is an outlier. Intuit is not.
144.
by whopa 17y ago
Yes, I am a C coder. The variable names use awful Hungarian notation, but are often otherwise tersely named beyond that. It could use more whitespace to signify logical blocks instead of running all the logic in a function together. It's we
145.
by whopa 17y ago
Well, the internals of SQLite are far from beautiful or clean. I do agree that the external interface is very nice to use, and the docs are actually useful.
146.
by whopa 17y ago
> Tax revenues are now above those levels (after adjusting for inflation and population growth). Got a source for that? > Do you really want to argue that CA isn't spending enough money? No, where was I saying that? CA has a problem
147.
by whopa 17y ago
Uhm, this is patently false. California is gerrymandered to hell, there are safe Republican districts which elect some rather far-right representatives, to both national and state legislatures. It's actually very hard to be a moderate Repub
148.
by whopa 17y ago
Huh? They don't have that many projects, they only officially support 3 platforms, most of the localizations are done by volunteers, and there isn't a whole lot of innovation going on. The only real project is Firefox. There's some support
149.
by whopa 17y ago
"Mystique" is a good word, since they have this mystique about being this egalitarian, community driven organization, but in reality, Mozilla is a fairly badly run open source project. The 40% number in the article counts localizers, doc wr
150.
by whopa 17y ago
> Maybe 3.5 will change that though. Doubtful. The new JS JIT is only turned on for web content, so extensions don't benefit at all.

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