23,077 karma · joined November 9, 2011
If I'm a SV startup I already have problems with office rent, taxes, cost of living, etc. It's expensive to be in the Bay Area. And on top of that, most of the engineers I hire will either be of worse quality than FAANG or I'm going to have to pay them more than FAANG. While this is great for the employees, it's really hard to fit into the budget for many startups and the tradeoff becomes existential when the cost of your engineers starts adding up but you haven't found market fit yet. And the ever-increasing wages being used to draw people from one company to another just keeps making the Bay Area more and more unaffordable so the problem keeps compounding.
It works nicely when there's just one or two big companies to draw employees from, but there's just so many big SV companies now with billions of dollars in their pockets, I don't see how any true startup could possibly compete. If you don't like Google, you go to Uber. Or Facebook. Or Splunk. Or Airbnb. Or Yelp. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Salesforce. Or Workday. Or Juniper. Or Autodesk. Or Nvidia. Or Palo Alto Networks. Or...
There's just too much competition from the billion-dollar companies. Sure innovation and entrepreneurship still happens in SV, but I'd argue it would be better for the area if it were easier for smaller startups to compete.
Getting it early and getting immunity works great for fairly mild things like chicken pox, which is less likely to leave permanent/long term damage. But not for something where so many people report that they've still never fully recovered from even months later.
Anecdote: I drive a newer BMW 328i. I live in the northern US where it snows, and it's a rear-wheel drive car so it sat on the lot because no one around here wants to buy an expensive car they have to park half of the year. I bought it certified pre-owned for under $30k, but the MSRP brand new was more like $50k with the package/options mine has. And yet I get so many comments about how it's an impractical car (It's a four door with a full size trunk and gets 30mpg...) and I must be rich for driving a BMW. Oftentimes I get this comment from people who drive pickup trucks that cost $60k-$70k, but that's apparently okay because Ford isn't a "luxury brand".
I got my "luxury car" for less than the average purchase price of a new car in the US, and I still get comments about how it's so expensive and I must be rich and I've had family tell me not to drive it to family events because it makes people feel like I'm showing off. Because when they think BMW, they think "fuck that's an expensive car" but it's not. BMW makes expensive cars, yes, but mine was not. Heck I was looking at replacing my SUV and the base-model Chevy Blazer costs more than my BMW.
But also yes, I've frequented some Toyota forums for my SUV and I've seen a lot of comments when someone wants to discuss their Lexus because "it's just a Toyota that costs $10k more!".
There's a reason I work in IT and not architecture these days :)
That's what I love about these forums, is getting the cultural experiences of other people and finding out they're not always the same as your experiences. Very eye-opening.
I wish I had a use case where Elixir's concurrency model makes the initial lift worth it, but my work doesn't even require me to learn how to make Ruby scale past a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.
For a few years I ran a successful business in my small-but-bustling town of using the Facebook Events API to pull in all the events in the area and putting them on a single calendar, then pushing those events back to my business's Facebook page before the event started. At that point everyone in town can either visit my website or follow my Facebook page, and now they have one central place to get all the town's news. I could never convince business owners to put all their events on my site directly, because "our audience is all on Facebook already" but people would have to follow a couple dozen pages and check them each individually (because Facebook won't show you everything you've followed).
Facebook eventually shut down that API (with no notice, against their own SLAs) and I kept scraping the data by hand because the residents and the businesses found it so useful. Then the pandemic hit and these small businesses had no money to pay me and they weren't holding events anymore anyway. But even after we're done with the pandemic I doubt I'll be picking it back up because Facebook is an abusive business partner to begin with, and the people you're then forced to interact with on Facebook are some of the worst and most toxic human beings I've ever met. I've had death threats from my own neighbors because an event I advertised was sold out. I've had Facebook followers stop me on the street and complain to me about taxes and zoning because they can't tell the difference between a news outlet and the city government.
But it really does highlight that Facebook is meeting a demand that nothing else, not email or RSS or SMS or anything has been able to meet. It's just a shame that they're the worst possible company to make a social network that you'd actually want to interact with.
Whoops. We got so excited about the pool table and the bar and the reception area that we forgot the only thing that makes a restaurant actually a restaurant... a place to cook food.
Boston Dynamics makes utility robots that are cool from an engineering standpoint but not super useful (or even welcome) in someone's home. Hyundai makes a lot of sense, since these expensive-but-handy robots will fit in well with their other industrial robots and military equipment.
1) VR ever becoming a huge player. It might. It might not. Right now there's no real evidence that VR will actually become a big deal, and Facebook could argue that this is a niche offering that can't be anti-competitive because there's no real market yet.
2) The feasibility of VR technology independent of major vendors. There's a strong possibility that without a huge R&D budget VR will never overcome the hurdles that might keep it out of the mainstream. Facebook could argue that removing Oculus would doom VR to failure in the market.
3) The Sirus/XM merger removed 100% of satellite radio competition (there's only one vendor left after the merger), but both Sirius and XM successfully argued that the market isn't big enough to support multiple vendors. Facebook could argue a similar case, that for the health of the VR market there should be fewer competitors.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if any of those would be winning arguments, but based on previous anti-trust cases I've followed that would be the strategy I would expect. And it might be why the FTC didn't go down that path.
It's a good question and really only time will tell, but this same comment was made about these chips in the iPhone: "impressive yes, but would they be able to scale up to power a laptop?" A lot of people said no back then, and yet here we are.
Apple's not stupid and they're not going to slap Intel in the face like this if they're not 100% sure they won't need them again in the future. I'd be willing to bet they already know the answer to these questions (and likely even have 32/64GB M1s running in their labs). There's just no way they'd go into something like this blindly.
You must be thinking of a different Open Source community than I am, because the Open Source community I know thrives off of providing community support for software on major vendor's hardware.
We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows?
I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company, because you seem to think we're talking about a company who runs in the face of competition, where the Apple I know confronts it head-on and goes out of their way to be compatible with the competitors.
Or do you disagree that planning for a total failure of one and running redundant workloads on other vendors increases your costs 99.99999% of the time? Because that's a fairly standard SLA from each of the major vendors. Let's even reduce it to EC2's SLA, 99.99%. So 99.99% of the time you're paying 3x as much as you need to be paying just to maintain your services an extra four hours per year. Again, you can disagree with that but that doesn't make it incorrect.
Some businesses might need that extra four hours, the cost of the extra services might be cheaper than the cost of four hours of downtime per year. But you're not going to find many businesses like that. Either you're running completely redundant workloads, paying 3x as much for an extra 4 hours per year, or you're going to be taken offline when any one of the three go down independently of each other.
Single providers go down, yes. And three providers go down three times as often as one. Either you're massively overspending or you're tripling your risk of downtime. If multi-cloud worked, you'd be hearing people talking about it and their success stories would fill the front page of Hacker News. They don't, because it doesn't.
The hard part with multi-cloud is, you're just increasing your risk of being impacted by someone's failure. Sure if you're all-in on AWS and AWS goes down, you're all-out. But if you're on [AWS, GCP] and GCP goes down, you're down anyway. Even though AWS is up, you're down because Google went down. And if you're on [AWS, GCP, Azure] and Azure goes down, it doesn't matter than AWS and GCP are up... you're down because Azure is down. The only way around that is architecting your business to run with only one of those vendors, which means you're paying 3x more than you need to 99.99999% of the time.
The probability that one of [AWS, Azure, GCP] is down is way higher than the probability that just one of them is down. And the probability that your two cages in your datacenter is down is way higher than the probability that any one of the hyperscalers is down.
I say that as someone who runs a business focused around increasing customer engagement with local businesses in small towns, but honestly it would take a monumental effort to save so many of these "general store" type of businesses that a small number of people paying the "local" tax on commodity goods isn't going to cut it.
Local mom-and-pop stores need to be looking for ways to differentiate from their mega-competitors. It's possible, and many stores are doing it successfully. But hardware stores? Selling bolts? Their only customers are people who don't use Amazon (older/rural) or people who need that bolt right now and are willing to pay 2-3x retail price for it. Especially in a pandemic where Amazon/Walmart are allowed to be open with few restrictions, but mom-and-pop has to close.
Successful small business going forward has to offer something Amazon/Walmart can't copy. Authenticity, experiences, memories. Escape rooms were a huge success story, creating axe throwing and fowling and other group activities, and often those places opened their businesses in the empty stores of businesses that couldn't compete with Amazon/Walmart and went out of business. Live music is another place Amazon can't compete with. A beautiful river-front promenade with park benches and an ice cream shop and a coffee stand and a vendor selling popcorn from a cart with some people getting ready to launch their kayaks while others are fly fishing, Amazon and Walmart and big box stores and strip malls can't compete with that. That's downtown, small, local. That's high profit margin.
Rather than clinging to the past where shopping local meant paying high prices on commodity items, we should be looking forward to a future where shopping local means "I can't get this anywhere else". That takes innovation. Grocery and bolts aren't innovation, they're commodities.
You do if you want to scrape what you're reading on your mobile devices too, or you need to write an app for every platform (like I mentioned). Safari on iOS won't let you do that.
Copyright is an issue if you're planning on selling this as a service or distributing it as open source (like youtube-dl).
Then you run into copyright issues...
I used to use DayOne as a journaling program until I realized the same thing: as soon as I stop paying, all those memories are gone, lost in time like tears in rain. Sure it is really nice and convenient software and the user experience is fantastic but if I stop paying, it's all lost. If they raise their price higher than I want to pay, it's all lost. If they go out of business or pivot or get sold or... it's all lost.
I'm willing to take that risk... but I'm not willing to pay for the pleasure of taking that risk. I ended up just writing everything in Apple Notes that's free on all my devices. Sure it's the same risk, but at least I'm not paying $165/year for something that can disappear whenever the founder gets bored.