htormey

“Really? You don’t see why FB may post a decline in users, after all the pushback they’re getting? Why Twitter might enter a spiral soon? These just seem impossible to you?”

Not really sadly. I’ve been monitoring the App Store rankings through out all of the recent scandals. The only time the top 10 changed recently was due to March madness and that golf tournament thing. The main apps in the top 5 have remained social right through out.

Even in the social category, I didn’t see signal or any privacy related apps make it into the top 50.

I also bet that large portions of the public don’t even know Facebook own Instagram and it’s growing like crazy. Same with WhatsApp.

I can also see a scenario where any regulation that does occur, short of breaking up Facebook or google, benefits the incumbents. I don’t think they are gonna be broken up in the USA anyway due to the way anti trust law is written.

I agree, the situation with law school a few years ago is a good analogy. Just because you got a degree from a random law school school doesn’t mean you are going to cut it in the real world.

My girlfriend is a lawyer who is transitioning to become a UX researcher via a bootcamp. The general standard of people in her bootcamp clas is quite high. On the young end you got recent grads from top tier schools (UC Berkeley English) on the older end of the spectrum you got a VP of marketing who’s worked at reasonably high profile consumer brands and who has a pretty good undergrad degree. Some of these bootcamps can be quite selective and aren’t easy to get into. They want highly motivated people who are smart. Those kinds of people are in short supply.

It really doesn’t feel like a correction right now at least in the tech sector:

- The job market is unbelievably hot.

- I don’t see why any of the big tech companies will turn in outrageously bad numbers this quarter.

- Everyone I talk to is hiring.

- A bunch of people at startups that went public or are about to go public will unlock a lot of stock really soon.

Yet I still feel a bit nervous. I’ve been in the Bay Area since 2008 and I remember how fast the place cleared out after the last big crash. I could see some stocks taking a hit in the short term however I just don’t see what’s on the horizon that’s going to do in tech in particular.

I’m not so sure. Many tech related jobs are fundamentally hard things for the majority of people to do. Even those with college degrees.

The problem with a bad hire in tech is that they can be worse than useless. Mentoring a junior software engineer can be very expensive and not many companies want to do that in an environment like the Bay Area where people hop between jobs frequently. Personally I think this is very short sighted and sad as I love mentoring junior engineers.

Thinking logically and being able to clearly articulate your thought process is a rarer skill than you would think.

I do a lot of teaching/consulting in the Bay Area. I see a lot of people coming out of bootcamps trying to get entry level positions.

Some of the candidates graduating from these bootcamps are awesome and have lots of potential but those are few and far between. Also, their is a shortage of entry level positions.

The best bootcamps filter heavily and generally only take people with a vaguely related college degree (Economics, law, physics, biology) or who have shown an aptitude (portfolio).

I’m summary, I wouldn’t be surprised if the growth in tech jobs outstrips the supply of quality candidates. If anything having years of relevant experience is going to become even more valuable as time progresses. It’s the entry level candidates that are going to have a harder time landing a job and paying rent in the Bay.

So what do you think the first signs of this will be?

“I also think the tech sector in general (especially any company that is driven by ads) is due for a major correction soon, if not a full burst.”

Why do you say that? Haven’t all the tech companies been performing well across a variety of metrics these last few years?

Most if not all of the top 100 mobile apps are native applications.

Hybrid mobile frameworks like Cordova tend to get a bad rap these days especially with the arrival of more performant alternatives like React Native.

How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans?

I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven?

If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?

“2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?”

Right now many new desktop apps are just badly ported web apps wrapped in electron. They are slow and eat a lot of memory as all of their UI is a being rendered in a glorified standalone chrome tab.

This is less about iOS apps on OSX and more about making it easier for the iOS developer ecosystem to build desktop apps. Right now it’s web teams that are building desktop apps because for most companies it’s too expensive to hire a dedicated desktop team. Even big apps like slack/WhatsApp use electron.

Making it easier for iOS developers to build desktop applications with the APIs they currently use should hopefully lead to higher quality apps.

Nah, both companies have a major weaknesses that no amount of money seems to be able to solve. Namely, user experience.

Example 1, Dropbox: Google & Amazon seem like companies ideally positioned to destroy Dropbox. They excel at making network infrastructure at scale, they both have competing products and massive existing customer basis. Yet Dropbox has managed to compete and win on user experience.

Example 2, Netflix: Both google & amazon have tons of money and massive amounts of users to cross promote a premium video service to yet neither YouTube nor Amazon seem to have figured out how to produce consistently good original content to the same degree that Netflix has. Netflix should be dead by now yet it’s doing very well. YouTube/Amazon also have much poorer interfaces than Netflix.

I could go on. My point is that plenty of companies successfully compete with both Google & Amazon.

Glad you guys got a lawyer to look into this. Thread very carefully with crypto, taxes and the US government. Good luck.

I agree. Have these guys done any legal due diligence on any of this? Any lawyers care to chime in? I thought you couldn’t do this in many states without a money transmitter license.

Also, does this constitute financial advise? That’s also a big no no in the USA. The CoinTracker guys (current yc batch who make an app for tracking crypto) mentioned that as a reason for not offering a portfolio management product right out of the gate.

Also doesn’t stripes terms of service basically prohibit this? I bring this up because in the interview they say the following:

“What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Stripe for payments”

This is what Stripes TOS says:

“By registering with us, you are confirming that you will not use the Service to accept payments in connection with the following businesses, business activities or business practices.”

“Virtual currency that can be monetized, resold, or converted to physical or digital products and services or otherwise exit the virtual world (e.g., Bitcoin); sale of stored value or credits maintained, accepted and issued by anyone other than the seller ”

https://stripe.com/ca/prohibited-businesses

I think this is a cool idea, I’m just not sure if they are going about it in a compliant way. If they are doing the right thing they should stick a FAQ up on their launch page ASAP.

Assuming they are doing this legally I’d also love to know how they are handling taxes when they buy these 100 currencies. I.e when you buy alts using eth/btc that’s a taxable event. How do they factor that into the pricing.

How should we view these layoffs in comparison to say the ones done by twitter? They did a bunch of layoffs a year or so ago and it’s market cap has recovered significantly since then.

The first wave of layoffs Snap did were related to the hw engineering org. AKA those glasses they mad, right? They were a commercial failure and a distraction so I viewed that as largely a positive sign.

This wave of layoffs seems like they are trimming the fat in sales/marketing, again not necessarily a bad thing. Other companies like twitter have done this and gone on to recover.

I think the biggest problem with Snap right now is how similar it is to Instagram now that Instagram has cloned stories. Twitter served a far different use case from Facebook and they seem pretty safe now that FB is backing away from news.

I’ve notified this a lot in San Francisco/Oakland coming and going from the airport. I always comparison shop with lyft and sometimes their is a $10-$20 difference in price.

I know that, you know that, but is that something the average person is aware of or do they think it works like Venmo?

If I go to a bar should I have to cycle currency between addresses to pay for a drink and avoid the bar man knowing my complete financial history? That sounds like a terrible UX.

I shouldn’t have to think about it. This is why I like the concept of privacy coins.

I hate how everyone always stresses the illegal uses of Monero in these conversations about traceability. Monero has a lot of legal uses, many of which are listed here:

https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin

The big one for me is privacy:

“The most critical flaw in Bitcoin is its lack of privacy. If you give me your Bitcoin wallet address so that I can send you a payment, you immediately compromise your privacy. I can see as a matter of public record how much money you have in your Bitcoin wallet ”

I don’t want other people to know how much money I have when I pay them for goods and services or how much I have paid to others in the past. This wouldn’t happen with a bank account but could happen with bitcoin.

I don’t necessarily want people I am negotiating a contract with to know my hand. It potentially gives them an unfair advantage.

If my Monero transaction history can be figured out by a government agency with lots of resources but not the average business, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate Monero for my use cases.

Here is a story on the walkie talkie app I mentioned:

http://www.businessinsider.com/zello-walkie-talkie-tops-app-...

Unfortunately I don’t have any good articles to hand on seasonality and the App Store.

I’m mobile developer so I follow the App Store rankings throughout the year. It’s something you definitely notice.

Top ten free apps on the US AppStore have largely remained the same through out this current scandal:

1) YouTube

2) Instagram

3) messenger

4) google maps

5) Snapchat

6) Facebook

7) Netflix

8) Bitmoji (Snapchat)

9) Gmail

10) Spotify

These apps change when something major happens. When storms happen you see weather and walkie talkie apps shoot to the top.

In sports seasons you see sports apps for baseball/football etc shoot up.

When crypto was going crazy over Xmas, coinbase was number one for a few days.

Back to school prompts education apps to go to the top for a while.

The public doesn’t seem to care enough to ditch social media apps right now. Either that or perhaps a good alternative doesn’t exist yet.

Well, you can’t audit the proprietary hardware drivers most android manufacturers use or the many proprietary apps from google etc that sit on top of android or the changes that the carriers make.

I remember when I was an Android developer dealing with several issues relating to the fact that one carrier put a proxy in the networking stack.

Here is a recent example:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/15/android_phoning_hom...

I think it will hit them as well, just not to the same extent as Facebook & Google.

Microsoft owns LinkedIn, which is an advertising company. I also seem to recall that they make a reasonable chunk of change from search advertising and other online properties.

According to this link they took in a little over 6 billion in advertising revenue last year:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...

According to this link, amazon took in somewhere in the region of 1.7 billion in revenue from mainly advertising last quarter alone:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...

Have they invested in Lyft?

“In August 2017, Grab raised US$2.5 billion in series G funding from Softbank, Didi, and Toyota.[47”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_(company)

Great comment, that is exactly what I think is going to happen.

The big risks I see with the Telegram ICO have nothing to do with the tech. They are as follows:

A) They build out all this functionality to support crypto currency, etc and it sees low adoption/usage with their users.

This happened with Snapchat and messenger when they introduced the ability to send money. People still used Venmo, including many of my friends who work at Facebook.

B) They roll out this tech, it starts taking off, Facebook detects it and they smoother it by cloning the functionality and rolling it out in messenger/WhatsApp. Aka what happened to Snapchat with stories.

The question is how centralized does a network like this need to be?

Not sure if I am reading the white paper correctly but I think Telegram appear to be going with a masternode type solution initially for their proof of stake solution

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake:

“Another form of staking is running a masternode,[9] a form of decentralized server. The main disadvantage of operating a masternode is the relatively high barrier to entry as opposed to staking alone. In order to secure the network, those willing to run a masternode are required to purchase a certain number of coins as collateral at current market price.”

Will a solution like this, which is more centralized than something like btc be good enough? Will people be happy with this level of centralization or refuse to use the service on principle? I don’t know. I do think that at least the earlier parts of their roadmap seem plausible (2018). The 2019 section however does seems rather ambitious and ambiguous.

“You can see the telegram team pulling this off because you aren't in the crypto space. They are claiming to be able to solve open research problems that some of the best minds in the world have been studying for years, and don't have an answer to.”

Do you want to be specific? I suppose one question is do they need to pull off everything they claim in the whitepaper in order to be successful? Do you feel the things the Telegram team promise are an all or nothing deal.

If they just had hundreds of millions of people using Telegram for payments and perhaps filestorage/bots backed by crypto could they do that without all the things promised in the white paper? Would the market consider that a success and would that be reflected in the currencies price?

I wouldn’t be so quick to write the telegram team off. Most of the existing players in crypto have a vested interest in seeing them fail.

On the one hand the Telegram team have a solid track record & a lot of users: They produced a high quality app that’s used by hundreds of millions of users. Also add to that the fact that more of the crypto chat related channels are on telegram.

On the other hand if you read through the white paper they put out, they give a timeline that promiss to do everything from wallets, to distributed file storage/computing/exchanges. That’s a very high bar to set without providing a lot of technical details. A leaked copy of the white paper can be read here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha0...

Personally I think it’s worth taking a small bet on them. The biggest problem in crypto right now is a lack of widely used consumer apps. Getting hundreds of millions of people to use an app is a harder than solving some of the distributed systems problems facing crypto right now in my book. I could see the telegram team pulling this off.

I assume the whole point of the rule was to stop people spamming people right? It sucks because you were trying to do the right thing but I can maybe see where they were coming from.

Backroom poker games and people sharing copyrighted music they didn’t pay for are still a thing so most likely no.

You will still have the ability to start an anonymous exchange, it just wont necessarily be legal in all countries.

That actually sounds pretty interesting. Thanks for adding more information about what these guys.

I’m a mobile engineer who used to work at Apple/Facebook who’s gone down a similar path and now I work as a consultant/contractor. I think I’ve done a pretty good job sourcing work for myself but I’d love to talk shop with you sometime if you are interested.

Could you talk a little bit more about your situation and how you work with these guys?

I assume you are a contractor, can you tell us a little bit about your background and give us an example of how they helped you find work? Thanks.