chaz

NPR Planet Money did an episode on this: "The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is $30 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. If it were a private company, it would be bankrupt. And instead of preventing risky behavior, the NFIP may be encouraging it. Among the NFIP's many problems are houses that flood again and again and again. Throughout the program's history, one percent of homes have been responsible for more than 25 percent of the claims. The NFIP can't drop these homes."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...

For a lot of people, new emoji are a great reason to upgrade and not miss out. Apple's been training customers to do this for years.

I found a good name for <$200 on Namejet. Also check out Flippa.com for good names from people willing to sell.

A piece of advice that worked for me: don't get stuck on the name. It's hard and it takes time (and sometimes money). Pick any temporary name for $10 and keep building instead. You can always change it later. Many companies and projects have changed their name as they became successful. It feels like it's important in the beginning but it usually isn't.

News stories are different from editorial, opinion, informational, entertainment, etc. articles. For example, the top article on Google News for me right now is a NYT editorial: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as It Looks." If I saw that on old-fashioned newsprint while skimming down the page, I would definitely stop and read it. I also clicked the article to read the story on GN.

Is it clickbait? How would you retitle this article? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/upshot/the-jobs-report-is-...

NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority posted a cute 8-bit video about the same problem, but for subways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eShtZSx4kWc

Do the roots matter if the rules have never been enforced? .com is flooded, .net and .org haven't meant anything in a couple decades, and many country TLDs are just wordplay that anyone can reg. At least .edu, .gov, and .mil are enforced.

Because iOS is a huge market all by itself.

I also add an extra column to my SELECTS:

  SELECT
    users.id,
    users.email,
    1
  FROM
    users

I can just use "--" to comment out any line without having to manage the last comma. Especially useful when building aggregations.

Most tech startups don't have full-time lawyers, but they have full-time programmers.

Tim Berners-Lee says the double slashes was a mistake and should have been left out. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1220286/Sir-T...

Netflix currently has 94 open engineering open reqs, plus another 22 data/analytics open reqs. Perusing through the list should give you a sense of how complicated their products are: http://jobs.netflix.com/jobs.php

It's also heavily populated with people who work at or with Google's competitors, of which there are many more. Bias and differing opinions are everywhere.

All the people who pick up coffee at Dunkin, Starbucks, and McDonald's seem to think so. The cost of Keurig over making your own is a pittance compared to the multiple you are paying at those places, but millions do that daily.

I'd agree if it was B2C, but I think B2B is different. Logo soup can work surprisingly well for establishing trust. Also, their website is probably not their biggest acquisition channel ... it's probably offline BD.

Isn't that behavior -- asking to do something before it does it -- the behavior that you'd like? I would be upset if it went ahead and did that, and then I discovered the feature later.

If the Tesla Model E was going to be sued by Ford for their E-Series vans, won't the the Tesla Model 3 get sued by BMW for their 3-Series cars?

You can search on completed listings. Looks like only 2 copies were listed, both unsold. Also, it seems like a long way to get Bill Gates to write a guest column in the WSJ to make $260 (top bid $81 now).

Do you think he should have recommended a book that was otherwise hard to get? I think people here, after reading this article, would have thought it ridiculous that the book wasn't available on Amazon.

My guess is that it is legitimately was his favorite book (he's known for his voracious reading and recommendations) and he wanted it to be read by a lot of people. So he pitched it to the publisher and the WSJ to get it done. I don't see what's so bad about that. I hardly think he's motivated by money or fame right now.

I was commenting to a friend that the limited functionality in these types of services have very steep edges. It's great when you're in the middle, but trying to do something a little bit different can lead to long, poor, difficult code as you try to work around the constraint.

I think we'll start seeing more "opinionated" platforms, similar to what Rails and others have done for web development. Parsing query strings, managing database connections, and wiring your own user reg code are all distant memories for most web developers most of the time today.

We might see something similar here, where groups of common functions or services are stacked together to form a unit that works well together and covers some set of use cases very well. LAMP comes to mind as a comparison, and you can definitely use SQL Server instead of MySQL, but it probably won't work as well when it comes down to drivers, libraries, recruiting, etc.

These stacks will differ as well to serve a broad range of customers. I cringe a bit when I see Amazon EC2 comparisons to Hetzner or Digital Ocean because they are serving quite a different set of customers with different needs. To think that all hosts should end up standardizing on the same units would leave many customers unserved. It's easy for innovation to be called vendor lock-in, but it's hard to compete or innovate on heavily commoditized products/services.

It's [still] an exciting time to be in tech.

I don't think anyone suggests that it's that simple. This entire space is young and evolving quickly. Identity and data sync is a good place to start, though.

For your example of a leaderboard, Parse has Cloud Code. It's designed to do exactly what you describe -- define a function that sits on Parse's server, handles client queries against your data, and returns the relevant data. Their example is for computing the average rating for a movie from your users' reviews: https://parse.com/docs/cloud_code_guide#functions

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft aren't there yet, but I can only imagine it's on their roadmap. And Parse's implementation only works for fairly easy stuff. But I think things will look very different in 5 years.

I think Google banned the domain from Adsense. I had a neglected UGC site that gradually became inundated with shady links and content, and this happened to me. Perhaps a site with low clicks and repeated, short-lived ad serves is worth banning.

from ~11 hours earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7981002

The article doesn't mention the email contained an attachment. I've sent and received a lot of emails with confidential data in the form of people chatting, parts of a spreadsheet pasted in, or an entire HTML automated report.

How would you fix this problem? Because something similar happened to me.

Someone pasted in a bunch of confidential info into an email that was for discussion, with a few replies back and forth. After a hallway discussion with another colleague, I sat down to forward the latest email to him, but Outlook autocompleted the email address to an external vendor. Before I knew it, the email was away. I quickly sent the vendor rep asking him to delete the email I just sent, and he agreed. I assume he was professional about it.

What can be done? Confidential discussions via email is a must. Trying to get the entire company into a secure web/app-based platform only is a non-starter. You can't take away the ability to send email out. A custom "Internal Distribution Only" flag in Exchange might work, but I can already hear the complaints already of having to set/unset it with every email.

To add to the other comments, proprietary Google OS integrations are unlikely if the app exists on iOS where such things don't exist but have similar features. A proprietary Google web service integration is a potential reason to build a substitute app + service, not to build a substitute OS.

Only if apps don't matter to that target user base. Most people will probably not want to go without Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pandora, Netflix, etc., and devs won't build for a small user base (just ask Microsoft or Blackberry). A Google-stripped Android phone would at least be able to run Android apps.

Google's Nest seems to be setting out a home automation standard, partnering with Whirlpool, Mercedes-Benz, Jawbone, LIFX, IFTTT, Logitech, and Chamberlain. Over the weekend, Quirky announced its $79 Wink hub, partnering with Home Depot, Honeywell, GE, Rachio, and Philips.

The two announcements were obviously timed against each other. It's hard to tell who is reacting to whom, but my bet is that Quirky is hurriedly reacting to a pending Google I/O announcement this week, and getting the word out by giving the NYT an exclusive [1]. It also looks like Nest has an actual, planned microsite vs Quirky, who only has mention of GE on their website (https://www.quirky.com/ge) and doesn't have much of an official Wink page yet (https://www.quirky.com/wink is bare).

Add to that Apple's Homekit, announced at WWDC, partnering with Osram Sylvania, Skybell, TI, Chamberlain, August, Honeywell, Haier, Schlage, Philips, Black and Decker, Netatmo, Withings, and others. More brands/logos, but it's early.

Regardless, it's at least a three-horse race and we'll see it get worse before it gets better. All have serious brands on board and consumers will be confused for quite some time. A single, open, interoperable standard is coming but the race will encourage a flurry of product investments to get smarter devices in the initial stages.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/technology/quirky-hopes-wi...

> a gimmick that's valuable only because of a government imposed monopoly is a sound investment

City streets are a limited public good. Aside from ensuring quality and consumer protection, regulation & limiting the number of taxis ensures that traffic can actually flow. A traffic consultant says that NYC's plan to add 2,000 medallions could slow down all traffic by 12% because taxis don't park -- they roam the streets constantly.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157477611/does-new...

Is the consumer market for second-hand drives large for them to be concerned about it? I always thought that >99% of people keep the drive their desktop/laptop came with and junk/sell/donate the whole thing without ever turning a screw. The number of people who are savvy enough to know about SSD, be willing to upgrade a drive, willing to shop for a used one vs a new one from Dell/Amazon/Newegg, and still be able to be duped might be a pretty small market.

> glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts

I don't know anyone that takes these seriously as a signal for hiring someone. You just do what you usually do -- call people you know that have worked with them before to get the scoop. But I don't blame LinkedIn for building and promoting these features. They're like Facebook Pokes -- light touch interactions that promote engagement with connections, and revisits back to the site. Anecdotal observations suggest that they work.