capkutay

I think ground-beef is easier to mimic with vegetarian substitute for whatever reason. Probably because fast food meat is already so weird and processed. Same with vegan sausage/hot dogs versus the meat-based sausage.

Obviously if someone loves eating expensive steak, that would be hard to replace with a vegetarian substitute.

Honest question: is the unicorn valuation just a tool for VCs to inflate the value of their stock in the second market?

Here's a scenario that happened recently. Investors X and Y invested a $30 million Series A in UnicornCompany. Lets just say its a $200m valuation.

Those same exact investors invested a $50m Series C at a $2 billion unicorn valuation (no new investors).

Doesn't that mean their initial investment is now worth 10x in the open market? Thus making their return at least $300m on $80m invested?

that's what happens when publicly elected lawyers and actors draw up complex infrastructure projects. something completely idiotic and infeasible must have been done in during the planning process.

> I wish to keep HN away from the masses as much as I'd like a broader perspective in the light of how things go with typical social networks

Agreed. I downvote ferociously on HN when I see people attempt to be funny or meme on hacker news. It'll be a sad day once people try to use HN as some sort of hacker joke thread.

yeah what you're describing is almost a textbook example of enterprise services/consulting that companies like Oracle/IBM/HP have been doing for decades.

and what you're describing was also debunked as a scalable core business model by many companies...

https://a16z.com/2014/02/14/why-there-will-never-be-another-...

Sorry but this is bullshit.

As others have mentioned, public transit beats uber/lyft when its actually the better, faster service (e.g. London, Tokyo).

But when public transit is poorly planned, slow, dirty, crime-ridden like it often is in the US, uber/lyft wins every time. Even when cities like San Francisco choose to spend billions on improving public transit, they mess it up every single time. There's a long list of hilariously short sighted decisions made on projects like the Transbay Terminal, The Central Subway, Geary/Van Ness BRT.

My daily commute literally runs along the t-line in San Francisco, but I never take it because it's basically the same speed as walking, slower than biking, slower than uber'ing. Poor planning and management is the cause of public transit's decline.

> Children under the age of 10 taking the trains by themselves or with friends, even in Tokyo.

that has a lot more to due with safe transit. I would NOT send a 10 year old kid to take BART or MUNI by themselves. In fact i literally know a couple who's 12 year old son basically got intimidated into giving away their iPod on MUNI.

It would still be funny to imagine California taking over electricity services.

"State-wide power coverage is estimated to be completed by year 2035 after a 10 year Environmental Review and pending lawsuits from neighbors who don't want power lines in their neighborhood. The costs were originally estimated for $10 billion but are now expected to be around $40 billilon"

....

"Meanwhile a startup called SmartZap is providing cheap electricity that you can purchase through their smartphone app."

Not necessarily true. A lot of acquisitions are 'acquihires' meaning they were bought just for their talent capital.

I used Chariot for about a year commuting from the Marina district of SF to Caltrain. It was basically an adult version of a soccer mom taking the neighborhood kids to practice in a mini van. It's definitely an improvement over taking MUNI...but its not any better than using UberPool. It wasn't 'fancy' by any means. You were just crammed into a sprinter van.

As far as I remember, UberPool either wasn't available or popular at the time Chariot started. Obviously the concept of Chariot wouldn't seem viable at all if you tried to do it in 2019.

also the areas south and east of san jose are far more affordable. if you actually want to buy a home in the bay area, your best shot is somewhere just outside of Milipitas.

It was PRIVATE land, zoned for OFFICES, owned by SALEFORCE, then sold to the Warriors. And 50% of the land is still being used for corporate offices (Uber HQ will occupy it).

Not sure what closed doors you're talking about.

The Warriors stadium is literally a gold standard and a model that other sports teams should follow. Not only did they pay out of pocket, but they donated millions to the city to help manage traffic in the area.

Chase Center is a pretty sorry scapegoat for SF housing problems. It's 100% financed by the team and was welcomed by residents. You can instead blame the thousands of acres of property in SF zoned for single family residences and all the empty plots in the Mission near BART.

There's nothing wrong with building entertainment venues in cities if they're financed without tax payer money.

should cities not have entertainment venues that are welcomed by local residents?

It's worth noting that between 2012-2017 'open source' and 'enterprise software' were synonymous. I saw many examples where VCs refused to entertain any enterprise investments that weren't fully SaaS and/or on-prem apache licensed.

Explains why there was so much marketing hype behind open source; hundreds of millions of dollars of VC investment was being pushed into it.

I can't wait for a company to raise $100 million Series A to sell 'Enterprise, Open Source MIPS', then come back in 4 years with a blog post about changing the license due to concerns that large companies are taking advantage of it.

Sounds like she was using a neti-pot. I thought most of the neti-pot products made it pretty clear that you're supposed to use previously boiled or distilled bottled water. Maybe they need to make it more clear that the consequences of using tap water can be pretty dangerous.

The problem stems from companies that raise $100 million dollars to sell open source software after the project has already been popular for years. Then they complain all their free adoption/marketing from being open source isn't monetarily advantageous for them so they need to change the license. It's really a bait and switch.

I really hate the 'This startup's revenue grew at x%!'

Like what does that actually mean? For all we know they went from $100k to $170k in revenue while raising $100 million dollars. It could either be very impressive or just lame click bait to inflate a company they invested way too much money in.

Because you have actors/lawyers planning a vast complex project with input from voters who have no clue how to build anything at this scale. if it wasn't political, then it would be feasible. But thats not the world we live in.

i never said it doesn't work well for end users.

I just question the intentions when they do a huge PR campaign for an internal project...then the leader of that project leaves to start his own company shortly after.

And no...more PR about heron is not going to convince me that 'it's a huge improvement over Kafka'. Kafka has massive adoption, and almost no Kafka users I've come across have expressed a burning desire for Heron or Pulsar.

I'm curious if there's some conflicting, underlying motives from their senior level technology folks.

They had a game changing tool in Apache Storm...once Nathan Marz (creator of Storm) left twitter, another senior engineer took over that group and created his OWN variant of Twitter Storm called Heron. After much engineering PR and github fanfare [0], couple years later he leaves to start his own company to do 'enterprise heron' [1].

So is the goal here to use something that works well for their end-users? Or is it to create a shiny new tool that they can spin off into a new company?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770758

1: https://architecht.io/streamlio-founders-on-why-the-world-ne...

This has to be a joke? This looks more like 'how to use a k-v store 101 for non programmers'

I don't want to put more content under a terrible post, but the best resource for this material Jennifer Widom's MOOC.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html

I really loved Google Wave back in 2009/10. Used it to collab on a college project and we thought it was buggy but pretty useful.

Sad that this is a highly upvoted comment on HN.

Some of the best things that happened in my career spawned from networking at good conferences.

I had the unfortunate luck of reading the breaking news as I was eating a caesar salad at a restaurant. The restaurant didn't seem to be aware of the news.

Except he's a deeply technical product guy with 20 years experience managing the development of the worlds most profitable database.

Its funny that Hacker News hates on Oracle, but their database is far ahead of the competition in a highly competitive market. Say what you want about their other products (that are indeed terrible), but that core database gets them billions in revenue for a reason.

Yeah I usually only double check airline types for comfort rather than safety. But I think you're right that these heavily publicized events actually create more scrutiny/cautiousness, especially from US airline pilots.

Would it be overly cautious to avoid flights on Boeing 737 MAXs?

edit: of course with the downvotes for an honest question. this site can be ridiculous.

That's probably good for getting a lot of sign-ups with no intent to become a paying customer/active user of your product, but I'm curious how many of those users would convert down funnel.