Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42337361

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

This is maybe the second phase after AWS found a fit and built a consumer base? Once I am in the housing market, I have a need for everything (mortgage, building contractor, construction materials, designer, hardware and accessories, upholstery, decor, etc).

My entry to AWS started with EC2 in the very early days because it of its commodity nature (any size and shape, for however long, with per-minute billing) and instant availability. The elastic nature solved scale. A lot of people didn't move to RDS until later but it was inevitable.

Everything else followed on from there, cross-sells and up-sells for reliability and convenience were always a click away for captive consumers who were already onboarded.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38692211

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

What it also ignored (along with some of the comments here) is data ranking. Google didn't just build a search engine by crawling more of the web -- many search engines before it had already done that. Google managed to rank what's relevant and what isn't. Relevancy is hard. Similarly, not all scientific publications are ranked equally. Or for that matter, even publications with a lot of peer reviews or citations can become obsolete through new discoveries.

Reddit's data has value in that it can fill in a lot of the gaps left by more qualitative sources and furthermore the data is user-ranked by a trusted community. This also has implications for specialised querying, for example training on just r/fitness could be fairly useful for that community.

As a side note, other valuable data stores are not just text but voice/video as well. YouTube and podcast transcripts are readily available, for example to Google. Data and ranking is valuable all over again.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36219473

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Most likely, just as happened with Stable Diffusion, a community of models will emerge. You could use a pre-trained model for writing chrome extensions, or a model for writing material UI using tailwindCSS, or a very specific model for writing 2d games for Android.

Since a lot of this is trial-error, improving on each iteration the feedback loop (compile, deploy, run, etc) will matter a lot more. Real-time development workflows like React should be interesting at the least. Exciting stuff, truly.

For example if I search Facebook, I get dozens of icons. Now how do I find the same style of icons for Twitter, etc. If you can fix that, it'll truly make you awesome.

It's more common for people who are in-between jobs to take things that would be otherwise compromise their monthly salary income. It's less common for someone to quit a high paying job and take on a risky endeavour.

Relatedly, the Tarzan strategy is another way to mitigate this risk (side projects or finding your next gig before just quitting the current), etc. Called Tarzan because you hang on to the next rope before letting go of the current one.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025369

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831#up_469940

It results from lack of ownership which makes accountability hard (politicized institutions with diverging agendas). During these rains, an entire township (Naya Nazimabad) sank underwater and many areas are still waterlogged. This township was built on top of a low-lying lake that was reclaimed. The approval of such projects involves dozens of authorities, each of whom charges an "expediency fees" and corruption is deep rooted within them. An officer who comes in for a 2-4 year tenure on low government salaries is incentivized to maximize his earnings during his short tenure.

The second is the lack of engineering involvement. The government sector doesn't exactly attract the top talent at good salaries. The tenders on the other hand are awarded based on nepotism and personal gain. There is a long list of botched projects in the civil sector. None of the desalination and water treatments plants are operational, in the entire city, for example. They have not been for years now.

The sewerage infrastructure in many parts of the city, as exists right now, is worse than the French sewers built in the 14th century[1]. These sewers are open-top and become dumping grounds for garbage due to lack of a garbage collection infrastructure. The encroachments around and above these sewers fall victim to Tragedy of Commons[2]. The whole thing is a mess with no easy solution and if this years' heavy rainfalls become a future trend, the situation will be unsustainable. Many homes were waterlogged for days and weeks with no power or connectivity (cell towers have around 24-48 hours of standby power after which they went down).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_sewers [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Saturday 3AM shift with a 5 minute downtime would work just as wwll. Unless this server has had historically 100% uptime this would go unnoticed.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21412184

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21029665

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Services revenue in general is where all devices are going. If you subscribe to Netflix on your smart TV, the TV maker gets comms. Again, this referral/conversion model is pretty dated. Otherwise TV maker has no incentive to pre-bundle your app (same as Windows, some Android phones, Lenovo laptops, etc).

Reversing the symlinks means Dropbox becomes the source of truth and the dependency on Dropbox increases.

Personally, I used this to easily backup my Downloads and Documents.

They just broke all clients using this feature.

I bought a brand new Pro 2019 model but haven't opened it yet and hoping to resell it since Hong Kong doesn't do returns -- where it was purchased. It's keyboard was already listed in the replacement program, even before I bought it. My current Air is 6 years old and chugging along (i7 1.6Ghz with 3.1Ghz boost). The new MBP won't last beyond 4 (Apple support expiry on keyboard replacement).

Not sure how a minor membrane change can help alleviate the keyboard issues. CPU throttling is another known issue. Best to wait it out for the new Air with scissor keys due up later this year.

For 5 damn years the Air didn't get a Retina display. Right now, I can't buy 2.8Ghz Macbook Pro unless I get the TouchBar. I can't buy an Air unless I settle for much lower specs.

The dongles and USB-C are a mess. The 2-meters-at-most charging cables are a downgrade which will mean shorter battery life due to lesser plugging in. The lack of Magsafe is a downgrade, they removed a feature. The lack of any port variety which my 2013 Macbook Air did exceedingly well is a major downgrade. Consumers must carry a variety of dongles because the laptops don't offer a variety of ports.

Profits are fine as long as they don't lead to perverse behavior. Apple needs to stop playing these fucking games and ship some pragmatism.

The Apple of Cook is reminiscent of the Microsoft of Ballmer. He is totally out of touch with the product -- the very thing that Jobs inculcated.