akronim

445 karma · joined December 4, 2008

akronimon Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

Maybe £40k is too low for London, but they're in Leeds which is a different story. It you look on itjobswatch.co.uk for "developer" the average in London was £50k, in Leeds £32,750. (I don't think you can use "iPhone" as a keyword sensibly given that most of the ads for Leeds are probably this one and its clones)

akronimon Ask HN - what tech skills are in demand, for freelancing?

The difference is that with a technical skill it's hard to break away from $x/hr, but if you can leverage the technical skills into areas that have a direct impact on revenue for your client, you can charge some percentage of the revenue increase, which can be way more than your hourly rate.

akronimon Does Anne Hathaway News Drive Berkshire Hathaway's Stock?

I would also think that no Anne Hathaway news should result in no positive price changes for a correlation to exist

That's not correct. Imagine the stock price can be derived from two factors A and B such that price = A + B. A is correlated with the price, but a positive price change could also happen caused by B. So no change in A does not guarantee no change in price. And in the case of BRK.A there would be many such factors.

akronimon Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life

Also the industries aren't comparable directly on revenue numbers. Walmart had net sales of $340 million but the net income after tax was $11 million. That's a very low margin business compared to software, where a typical result might be $55 million in revenue to make $11 million.

http://walmartstores.com/Media/Investors/1976AR.pdf

akronimon Netflix Gets Into The Original Content Game, Buys Upcoming Show For $100m

Maybe the long term plan is going vertical, this is the start of owning content production, then later expand into broadband.

akronimon How rich kids already won the career game

"traveling the world surfing" is within the reach of anyone who can afford the initial airfare, provided it's to somewhere you can live cheaply and survive on odd jobs. Think Morocco not Maui, Indo not California. There is a happy medium between 5 star hotels and living like a hobo...

akronimon LongReads: a refuge of long-form articles in this Twitter-crazy world

Also http://longform.org/ + http://www.instapaper.com/

akronimon How many users do you need for a 100MM / year consumer Internet product?

In stark contrast to B2B where if you get the right niche you can be charging a few thousand per client per month. Even one client == ramen profitable. Then again I guess it's not as cool as having the millons of users required for B2C!

akronimon 10.7 Lion allows multi-user remote computing

Mac OS X Server had (has?) decent support for proper accounts, with the client machines essentially just diskless terminals that boot from the server, and with all accounts on the server - called netboot. So not like screen sharing at all. This worked pretty well in a lab setup, but didn't support remote logins - this sounds much better.

akronimon Did launching a web startup become 10x cheaper between 1998 and 2011?

Also, in 1998 if you had a budget of a few million you didn't need to think about commodity hardware, so you called sun and blew some cash. Investors wouldn't take you seriously if you had a ramen profitable bare bones 2011 style operation!

akronimon Ask HN: Is TDD/BDD hampering your startup's agility?

    I sometimes have a difficult time writing and passing tests...

That sounds like a design issue - if you don't design the code to be testable you'll probably find it hard to test. Even programming in the small e.g. at the method level, you should be thinking "how will I be able to test this"?

akronimon What is Stack Overflow's business model?

I'm not sure experts exchange were making that much of a killing selling access subscriptions? There's clearly a lot of ill will towards them, but I would imagine they are still in a pretty good place if they want to move to a more usable ad supported model they would hardly be starting from scratch.

akronimon How I Built a Startup High Frequency Trading Firm

I don't see any step 3 - what's he selling?

akronimon On Getting Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg

The commercial ones use real people I think, not really an option for a free service.

akronimon How Much Trouble is Early Foul Trouble?

Why not keep them out there and get a lead sooner, then hope to keep the lead if they do foul out?

akronimon Profit from frontpaging HN and Reddit - what now?

Do they set the user agent?

akronimon Bingo Card Creator (etc) Annual Report

Patrick's is 0.18%, amazing to see the range - especially considering the Bingo Card Creator funnel is pretty optimized.

akronimon Groovy Array: it just keeps going...and going...

They're aiming for compatibility with Java 1.4, which doesn't have varargs. In java 1.5 you could just write

  public static Object[] createArray(Object... args) {
    return args;
  }

akronimon The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard

Sounds like he's perfectly positioned to help people transition from X-Serves to whatever gives the best migration path.

akronimon Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website

Do rankings change often enough to need daily emails?

akronimon Apple to abandon their XServe line

OS X Server is just OS X with some additional services and admin tools, and probably less effort to maintain than a whole different hardware form. Given that the Mac Pro Server was only just announced, it looks like that's the tactical fix to fill the gap in the lineup left by the X-Serve.

After the X-Raid line's name was already passed onto a third party (Promise) this isn't really surprising.

akronimon American teens are sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month on average

So the teen girls sending 4,050 average a month are sending a text every 7.5min on average while awake?? If that's the average what are the top, say, 10% doing?

akronimon Facebook Sells Your Friends

I can see zero evidence of ads being targeted to me,

try changing your status to engaged...

akronimon Ask HN: looking for a tech cofounder, already have 13k users after 2 months

My co-founder is moving on because he thinks "Priority Inbox" is too big a threat.

I would have thought it just introduces more people to the idea. It's not like Google will release an outlook/Mail.app/Notes plugin for it.

akronimon Is It Better to Buy or Rent? (NYT tool)

Interest paid to the bank is also forever gone.

akronimon BP Cancels Dividend to Set Aside $20 Billion for Spill Costs

Since the probability of this was high, it would already be factored into the current price. The announcement just confirmed it.

akronimon Things you didn't know about java.util.concurrent, Part 1

The whole "things you didn't know" series is aimed pretty low, more like "things you didn't know because you never used it at all". Was the same for the collections series.

akronimon Allan Odgaard's Latest Comments on TextMate 2

Mozilla - his example in the essay - eventually got re-written as the most popular browser in use today

It worked out ok for end users, but didn't lead to such a great outcome for Netscape.

akronimon Google Storage for Developers

It's a labs release - they don't want to get every S3 customer on day one. This pricing is a good way to get some beta users and soft launch. I'm sure they wouldn't be in this if they weren't going to match s3 pricing at some point.

akronimon 93% of 2006 AAA-rated subprime mortgage-backed securities now rated junk

Exactly - the majority of AAA bonds would be US/Euro/Sterling government bonds, which are still AAA rated.