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Gazpacho posted:Something I've noticed about crowdsource startups is that they don't seem to have any concept of a sales pitch. Even after they've started operations, if you go to their home page at least half the time it's a vague mission statement and an exhortation to sign up before you can read anything else. Because A/B testing shows that it results in a higher signup rate
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Jun 5, 2017 16:39
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Somebody else's A/B testing maybe showed that, for their product. The crowdsource guys just copy whoever seems successful and hope it works out. To be clear, what I was getting at is that even the companies that actually do A/B test poo poo do it poorly and follow the results of their poorly conceived and implemented tests blindly, leading to bad user experiences for the sake of goosing a single vanity metric
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Jun 6, 2017 05:16
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blah_blah posted:Basically every senior+ engineer at a reasonably paying company in SF/NYC is going to hit the AMT. This is not true, there are plenty of circumstances where you won't. One being if you just have a really high salary. You probably also won't hit it if you have ISOs and don't wait forever to exercise them (depending on valuation increases)
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Jun 13, 2017 04:00
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blah_blah posted:Living in SF or NYC results in a lot of deductions due to high state/city taxes -- even if you're a single person with no dependents or other deductions. As soon as you get around 250-300k (could be salary, RSUs, whatever -- there's no difference from the AMT's perspective) -- you're in AMT land. The scenario I was highlighting was that if a senior employee at a pre-IPO company has their equity compensation in the form of ISOs, depending on whether / when the options are exercised in any given year and if there's been a new valuation since granting, there may not be any substantial income subject to AMT in that year. That is with the caveat that you can probably fairly dispute whether that illiquid equity compensation is "reasonable," and if it ever does become liquid you'll probably get hit with AMT then.
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Jun 14, 2017 04:57
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outlier posted:There was more than one, no surprise. Maybe a marker of the tech industry is the tendency to duplicate already existing ideas? As opposed to those other industries where all the businesses are based entirely on new ideas
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Jun 23, 2017 19:06
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fishmech posted:Apple's products aren't popular in the way that actually counts: selling in large amounts. Their last dominant product, the iPod line, has effectively been dead for going on 5 years now with the market it was in. This is ridiculous. The way that actually counts from the perspective of a business being successful is returning a profit, and by that account Apple is wildly successful, considering they are the most valuable public company on the loving planet. Jobs was a dick, and I am not amazed by Apple's products, and the business success of Apple by no means excuses any of his personal flaws. But continually throwing in the additional horribly wrong argument that "oh also Apple isn't actually successful" is not helping you at all.
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Jul 2, 2017 21:42
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fishmech posted:No, it's not ridiculous. The stupid have a habit of grossly overestimating how popular Apple products are, that is why so many people are convinced that Steve Jobs needs to be respected. You're right that stock value has little bearing on the quality of a product, but the same can be said of market share. I'm not saying Apple's products are good, but you seem to be arguing that Apple isn't successful, which is horseshit. Your Snapchat analogy is also stupid: Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, they are an extremely valuable company by any measure.
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Jul 2, 2017 22:01
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Housing and real estate in the east bay absolutely has increased drastically already. The UC Berkeley campus bubble must be functioning particularly well, I guess?
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Jul 5, 2017 20:24
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A big flaming stink posted:how the christ did soundcloud stay operational for this long while having to host a goddamn petabyte A petabyte is not as much data as you apparently think it is for a relatively large scale internet business. I'm sure that was a relatively small percentage of their overall costs. Back of the envelope calculation: storing a petabyte of data on AWS S3 and Glacier (as I believe they do) is roughly $25k a month. Not chump change, but it's not going to kill the business either.
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Jul 14, 2017 15:31
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LanceHunter posted:$25k/mo = $300k/yr As fishmech said, I wasn't responding to or doubting the projected costs to store the data in perpetuity. Just the idea that it would have somehow been a significant burden for SoundCloud to have stored that data in the past (which it was not).
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Jul 15, 2017 16:38
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Google Inbox assumes that you want to attach a file from Google Drive; if you actually want to attach a file from your computer you have to click a second button after the attach button.
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Jul 20, 2017 16:05
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fishmech posted:Google Inbox is a completely separate app and interface from Gmail, which just happens to use your Gmail account. I understand that. I wasn't the one saying that it was bad in Gmail.
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Jul 20, 2017 17:10
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nm posted:While I don't disagree with the gist of this statement, the top-10 universities tend too be quite cheap for people of modest means due to huge endowments which allow for large need based scholarships. The lack of knowledge of this system may prevent some people who would otherwise be admitted from applying. I went to a top 10 university and my need based financial aid grant was more than tuition. I do feel like I had a fairly privileged upbringing in many ways, but my parents were not wealthy (nor were we poor)
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Aug 9, 2017 15:38
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Arsenic Lupin posted:There is a large area within which you're too rich for need-based scholarships but too poor to pay cash. Those are the people that wind up with crippling debt burdens. They're also generally well off enough that I don't feel terribly sorry for them. At least in my experience, need based aid at these schools is quite generous, though that may have changed substantially since I went to school.
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Aug 9, 2017 15:57
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Arsenic Lupin posted:When did you go to school? It's quite relevant. I graduated in 2007. $48k in debt is not insignificant, you're right about that, but in the context of the original point (that hiring from top 10 schools vs others tends to benefit the wealthy), it's important to compare that number to what the same person would pay at other schools. I honestly don't know if it would be comparable at many state schools, but that's an important comparison to make either way. At the very least, I think the aid policies at top schools result in a much greater different in what wealthier people actually pay vs poorer people. eschaton posted:It's not always price that keeps people out of the top schools. This is all absolutely true and I have no disagreement here. I was merely speaking to the price tag once you are accepted, which I think is important because many people don't even bother applying because they assume they can't afford it. I had a great upbringing even though we weren't super wealthy, and I credit that for my acceptance. I credit the university for making it affordable for me to attend: my parents didn't pay a cent.
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Aug 9, 2017 22:47
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JailTrump posted:I mean I wish Americans had more 100% juice available to them at a reasonable like they drink in south and central america but nope. Big agra is not going to let that happen. What about just fruit? Can't people just eat fruit? gently caress
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Aug 22, 2017 04:05
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nm posted:Fruit juice isn't really much healthier than any other form of sugar water. Take the fiber out of fruit, and it isn't really that great for you. Yeah, that's my point. What's the obsession with juice???
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Aug 22, 2017 05:40
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fishmech posted:Is there really an obsession? I mean the whole reason the Juicero guys are the juicero guys is their old business of fancy juice "bars" went under due to lack of customers. I think so, yes. It is certainly not broad enough to fully support the businesses popping up to cater to it, but there is a reason they are appearing. Call it poor word choice if you want, I'm not married to the word "obsession" if it's not fitting.
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Aug 22, 2017 16:13
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I'll add a bit of context as someone who has used Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, does not anymore, and doesn't think that their long term outlook is particularly good. I personally did not try it because I didn't know how to cook; my wife and I have been cooking our own meals for many years, and we both generally very much enjoy cooking. The main reason I tried it was that it was too easy for us to fall into a rut and cook the same things over and over again, and I like variety but also suck at meal planning, making trivial decisions like "what should we make tonight?" and thinking of new and interesting things to make. Also our local CSA had just shut down, so we decided to try something different. So having 3 dinners that we hadn't made before predetermined for us each week sounded interesting. I do not deny this was appealing to me because I was lazy; but it's not that Blue Apron makes the cooking itself much easier, it just eliminates the meal planning and shopping steps, and I think it sort of does okay at that. Ultimately we unsubscribed permanently after a few months of switching back and forth between services to milk them of their discounts. The reasons: - we still had to shop and plan for all of our other meals, snacks, etc, so we didn't really shop any less - the amount of packaging made me feel pretty lovely about myself - while the expense wasn't crazy high for the Bay Area, it was definitely more pricey than what we were doing before. Of course this hits on the same fundamental problems already brought up: crazy high customer acquisition costs (especially due to people like me abusing their acquisition tactics), and poor customer retention. I vaguely recall their S-1 claiming average acquisition cost of $50-60, but that was misleading because it was an average of the total that didn't account for the fact that it had increased over time, and the marginal acquisition cost was several hundred dollars per customer. Not good. Anyway, while I don't think it is a sustainable or good business model, their target customer base is not just people who don't know WTF in the kitchen; I never saw that as the main selling point.
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Sep 10, 2017 03:54
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How many of you have actually used it? It seems like not many, based on how people are talking about it. Like I've said I'm not optimistic about their business, but for the most part it is real cooking, at least the cooking part of it. The part it eliminates is meal planning and shopping. For the most part any part of the meal that can be made in under an hour is still something you do; so like chopping and mixing ingredients is not done for you, but if you're making, say, hamburgers, it'll come with buns. The cooking process itself is about the same as a typical home cooked meal with mostly raw ingredients from the grocery store. e: I just reread your comment and I think I misread/misinterpreted the first time around. On second read I think I agree with everything said. It is hard to imagine too many people subscribing and staying subscribed long term, nor any way that they could realistically adjust their offering continually over time to keep people subscribed. Steve French fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 11, 2017 |
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Sep 11, 2017 18:42
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It's not a new thing, either. I remember having Pizza Hut pretty regularly in elementary school in the early 90s. Maybe every Tuesday or something?
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Sep 12, 2017 02:07
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You seem to be saying that they have poor market penetration, and also that their addressable market is small. And yet they have ~$200 million in revenue. It's hard for me to reconcile all three of those things. And where are you getting this information that they are out of runway, or is it baseless speculation?
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Sep 19, 2017 16:40
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FamDav posted:the implication is that slack addresses most of their market (let's call it 2-500 employee companies) but doesnt have sufficient inroads into the enterprise market, which is an order of magnitude or so larger. or at least that's how i read it. Right but the assumption there is that they won't be able to penetrate that market. It was sort of stated as fact by someone that they haven't and can't, but with nothing to back it up, and it was also contradicted by at least one person claiming that it is used in some enterprise firms. And slack claims to have a "foothold" in some large percentage of fortune 500s. I mean, maybe true, maybe not, I'm just playing devils advocate against what appear to be unfounded statements and assumptions about their potential for growth.
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Sep 19, 2017 18:50
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fordan posted:Most of them require a credit card and/or app to get the bike; they aren't there for for people unable to afford a bike. https://www.fordgobike.com/pricing/bikeshareforall quote:Bike Share for All provides a one-time $5 annual membership for qualifying residents. The program also includes a cash payment option for those who do not have a debit or credit card. Bike shares are great, gently caress "ride sharing." I own more bikes than I need, and I still use bike share bikes on a near daily basis. The idea isn't "oh people can't afford bikes so let's rent them" (though for some that is a valuable thing), it's more about having bikes available when and where they are needed so that getting around via bike is more feasible for more people. For example I use it to get from BART to my office; takes 5 minutes on a bike or 20 minutes walking. Taking Uber/Lyft/muni would be slower, more expensive, and all around stupider.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:05
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"Rich enough" to itemize includes pretty much any single person making more than $100k in California.
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Oct 2, 2017 00:33
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fishmech posted:So get a cpa with your $100k. But why Like if you are itemizing sure you can probably afford one, but it doesn't mean you'd actually benefit enough to justify the added expense.
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Oct 2, 2017 00:40
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To be clear: I was putting forth a hypothetical young single person living in CA with a stupidly simple tax situation that would want to itemize solely because their state income tax exceeds the standard deduction. I was not describing *my* situation, which is a good bit more complex and I probably should talk to a CPA! My point was that the tradeoff between Turbo Tax and CPA has more to do with tax complexity than it does level of income, and there are a significant number of people who itemize deductions with stupidly simple tax situations. Motronic, your point is taken, though it applies as well to people who don't itemize deductions
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Oct 2, 2017 05:49
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High profile short seller makes pronouncement that a stock is overvalued, said stock drops in price shortly after. Hmmmmmmm.
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Oct 4, 2017 17:39
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2 hours a day probably meant 2 hours each way, because let's be real, there's no loving way you're getting from Stockton to SF on a train in only an hour
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Oct 27, 2017 03:34
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Morbus posted:I'd actually be interested in seeing some estimate / breakdown of Twitter's costs. Their bandwidth and storage requirements have got to be minimal compared to a lot of other applications. ~200 billion tweets per year at ~200 bytes per tweet is only 40TB/yr. Even if you assume something crazy like they are storing ~100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet, and that the average interactions per tweet is as high as 10,000, you'd still end up with ~200,000 TB which is <10 million dollars in storage. And that would only translate to an average bandwidth requirement of <10 Gbps...Even allowing for much larger spikes in peak bandwidth and data redundancy, servers in multiple locations, etc, it seems their infrastructure costs should be quite low compared to a lot of other web services, on the order of 10's of millions per year. Others have already pointed out several flaws in this reasoning, but I'll add a few: first, it's entirely probable that they are storing at least 100 bytes of metadata every time someone views or interacts with a tweet. They're probably saving access logs (not indefinitely, but for some period of time) for every single web request for diagnostic purposes. They're probably also recording and broadcasting these events for analytics and streaming application purposes, and likely storing them downstream in several different places for different consumers. Additionally, for every entity they're storing, it's certainly being stored several times over in different places: you don't just add up the size of each unique piece of data: it's all going to be stored and indexed in several different forms for redundancy (as you mentioned) but also indexed and denormalized in various ways for efficient access (for example, search, and also how do you think they ensure that it's not horribly slow to determine and load the most recent tweets from the people you're following each time you load the app/page?) That of course all matters even less if you stop assuming that storage and bandwidth are their most significant computing resource costs: they also have to actually pay for all of the computers that are running this: serving web requests, implementing application logic, broadcasting analytics events, performing batch jobs on bulk data, database servers, etc etc. Raw storage is probably a small fraction of their total server infrastructure costs.
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Oct 28, 2017 17:48
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Groovelord Neato posted:uhhh the double polo thing has been out of fashion for over a decade lmao. That is an old photo; possibly more than a decade old.
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Dec 17, 2017 09:03
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Uhhhh hey everyone can't the distribution and payment problems be trivially solved here by just throwing blockchains at them???
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Jan 23, 2018 01:19
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Before reading the article one thought that I had was that if you wanted to ask people some more nuanced questions as part of a survey, perhaps you might also ask less nuanced questions to add context around the other answers? E.g "well N% of respondents think doing X is okay, but 90% of them also said sexual harassment of children is ok, so maybe we ignore them" (perhaps weeding out junk answers?) Anyway the article didn't actually seem consistent with that guess, and I've also never designed a survey, so that's probably not it.
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Mar 6, 2018 03:46
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twodot posted:The only way the second one isn't going to be a thing is if you moderate your friends to not click buttons that share everything they can see. Once you publish information, you're relying on everyone that can see it to not be lazy/uninformed. The obvious implication is that Facebook can solve the second problem. The fact that they have, in fact, not only not solved it but created it in the first place is among the reasons people are upset.
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Apr 6, 2018 16:04
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VideoGameVet posted:Want some rye? I'd like to buy you a drink
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Apr 10, 2018 06:51
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divabot posted:tbf, tiles are the bit that's costly. Using OSM data yourself tends not to work out actually cheaper, from what I hear (haven't done it myself), but it's worth it for more control. I'd be surprised if you couldn't buy OSM data rendering as a service. Like this? https://www.mapbox.com/maps/ For what it is worth, my nearly-direct experience with using OSM data directly is that it was worth it for more control and also cheaper than paying Google, by a significant amount. That said, we are pretty heavy map users and this is likely not a reasonable trade-off for most consumers of Google maps, and they probably know it.
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May 6, 2018 02:58
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Condiv posted:yep. if PII is hard to remove for "right to be forgotten" then you're not doing due diligence in the first place to protect it from being stolen I agree with you in general on what you've said with respect to GDPR so far, but this is a bit of an overstatement or generalization, I think, depending on your definition of "hard." For example, if you've got a very large dataset that isn't indexed by a user identifier. I don't think that makes PII any easier to steal, but it can be difficult or expensive to address in an existing system. Caveat: certainly keeping the PII you are now supposed to delete makes it easier to steal. But if you're referring to due diligence in protect PII in general, I don't think it is true in that example. Also, of course, in that case you just suck it up and change the system, and I don't think it's too onerous a requirement. I just don't see that example as an indicator of previous lack of due diligence for data security.
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May 27, 2018 20:11
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Condiv posted:if the PII is eligible for deletion under the GDPR, you have at best a temporary case for keeping it, and should back it up accordingly, not like an idiot pretending he gets to keep all info forever. because you don't get to keep it forever if the user doesn't want you to. thanks GDPR! However, that same PII may be user data that they are expecting you to keep for them indefinitely, and it should be backed up accordingly. You don't know whether you need to keep it indefinitely or delete it within 30 days until the user requests it. Limiting backup retention is an easy solution, but one that doesn't necessarily work for all cases, and keeping long term backups while also ensuring that specific data can be removed from them on demand easily and on a regular basis is not trivial. Again, a case where designing with GDPR in mind makes things a lot easier, but can be a lot harder to retrofit. I'm not complaining or objecting, but I do think it's okay to acknowledge that certain aspects can be expensive or difficult to comply with, and not just for those acting in bad faith, even if worth that expense and difficulty.
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May 27, 2018 23:53
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enki42 posted:Any startup with "double digit" yearly growth is an abject failure in the eyes of a VC. VCs usually consider a startup struggling unless it has 10%-20% month-on-month growth. One saying is "triple triple double double double", which means you should triple your revenue in years 1 and 2, and double your revenue for the next 3 years. That's considered a baseline to be on an IPO path. You omitted the part where the dude started right off the bat with the goal of building a billion dollar company, which is pretty important context and certainly impacted funding rounds and resulting investor expectations.
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Feb 10, 2019 17:04
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enki42 posted:For sure, but my overall point is there's no such thing as setting VC expectations for less than 100% YoY growth (and in the first couple of years, even doubling revenues every year probably puts you on the loser track in a VC's mind) Kobayashi posted:You won't get anywhere in Silicon Valley if your pitch doesn't include a path to the unicorn club. Maybe 10 years ago there were VCs interested in multi-million dollar companies, but that poo poo is a rounding error in industry dominated by trillion dollar companies. Neither of these is consistent with my personal experience. I'll happily believe that it's the norm, and for sure believe it is when you, like that guy, go out with "billion dollar company" from the word go. But I'm not convinced it is a universally applicable rule.
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Feb 10, 2019 23:53
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