laser

In a software business? Presumably the margins per additional customer is 90%+, although with fixed costs it could obviously be much lower overall. But the marginal profit per user is the primary concern here I think with regards to payment provider cuts? As the fixed costs of development are already relatively set whether they have one user or one million.

Apple shouldn't be able to get away with doing this. Full stop.

But from a pure business perspective, if they're charging on an annual basis, if the average subscription length is say, 4 years, after the first year the rate is 15% not 30%. Additionally, Apple pays all the transaction costs, which on a $99 charge would be ~3.3%. That means if they go with Apple's system they'll effectively pay 18.75% versus 3.3%. Do they really think they won't achieve 19% [1] more subscriptions with a native signup flow and payment option compared to only recruiting customers outside Apple's ecosystem? That's what they need to break even on Apple's cut here. If they do think that, I'd be tempted to claim they don't really understand the power of App Store distribution.

[1] 96.7% revenue cut / 81.25% revenue cut

Incentives are a lot more complicated than simply being non-profit = altruistic mission optimizing. The president makes a million bucks a year. Faculty pursue status, power, and resources for research or personal interest. Alumni often wish to keep their institution exclusive and elite to increase the value of their degree and average member of their community, and provide resources to their institutions (Donations) as a means of control over “mission”.

Of course, that’s all on the pretty cynical side and the majority of people I think are overall aligned with the mission of providing the best possible education and research environments. But, the above is where Scott is coming from, and certainly holds some water. Particularly in his area of academia ahem business schools ahem.

The most competitive universities in Canada, like McGill and UBC have 46% and 52% acceptance rates. Canada has more of a culture of going to college in the province you grew up. To compare that to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. that have sub-10% admittance rates and have to review tens of thousands of applications is failing to realize the scope of the problem these schools face in selecting students.

With Google taking 32%-49% of ad spends [1], and perhaps even more as AdMob appears to be undisclosed (although let's assume in this range), if competition could cut this take in half while maintaining equal targeting efficiency, we might see an explosion in growth of niche businesses. If the cost reduction resulted in a 50-50 split between higher publisher revenue and decreased ad costs, then that ~12-24% higher revenue plus 9-16% advertising cost reduction would make a ton of businesses with LTV:CAC ratios on the margins vastly more profitable. Even more importantly, they would be able to reinvest earnings on a far tighter cycle back into their businesses.

The vast, vast majority of young businesses do not have access to institutional capital, fueling their growth through positive unit economics. Relatively small changes in costs and revenue relative to margins can have huge effects. For example, an ad-based business with $1 CAC and $2 LTV, where 50% of the LTV is earned over the first 12 months, 25% in the first 3 months, takes a year to see it's ad spend returned and break even, at which point it can reinvest that dollar for new customers and start the cycle again.

With 15% lower ad costs and 20% higher revenue, the LTV:CAC becomes $0.85:$2.40, and assuming the same earnings-curve, at three months in $0.60 has been earned, and $0.85 in under five months. That means this business, and those like it, are suddenly able to grow at over 2x the rate as they could prior to such a breakup.

As much as many people hate advertising, it is still one of the primary channels for people's wants/needs (often unknown) to get matched to supply, and thus removing a monopoly and increasing the efficiency of this matchmaking could stimulate explosive growth in new and existing products and services that can't currently cost-effectively reach their customers. Ultimately, this would be a great benefit to everyone.

As a final note, this is relatively loose thinking and doesn't account for second-order effects like increased ad spend competition with increased revenue, but I think still an interesting thought to get out there, as I think the gist of it still holds.

[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en

But if this reserve is 6-25 billion cubic feet, that’s probably just a drop in the bucket as annual global production is 15-20 billion cubic feet and US reserves are over 700 billion cubic feet.

On one consumer iOS app with email and apple sign in as the two available options, 34% opt for apple, 66% for email. No meaningful change in conversion rate, but this generally isn't an issue 90%+. The prior arrangement wasn't just email, though, it was email or phone sign up, so take what you will.

OneWeb has an office in Mountain View apparently: https://www.oneweb.world/contact-us

I'm not sure this sort of meta-comment is allowed. But, given the importance of this information, and it's potentiality to induce outrage that leads to participation and commentary, and given the imperfect hacker news ranking algorithm which can fail to differentiate between conversation and flaming when punishing posts in visibility—might I implore you to refrain from commenting unless substantial so that eyes that may have power to action against such malfeasance catch note of this here? (Really likely of note only if comment:points ratio gets close to 1 and above. I accept that this comment's very existence is ironic, but with hope of the wider aim achieved.)

Nice.

Is that honestly what you derived from "While Google and YouTube paid $170 million, in another COPPA case settled this year, the operator paid a total civil penalty of $35,000."?

I know hacker news encourages us to assume the best intentions when responding to comments, but I'm finding that difficult to do when a $170 million COPPA fine was levied by the same agency in the same year, mentioned in the same sentence as the $35,000 fine that you derived your tidbit from.

In the abstract “Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants”

In other words, scientists who just barely missed funding “near miss” versus scientists who just barely were over the threshold to receive it “narrow win”.

As WeWork has raised $12.8 billion [1], that would be quite a devastating repricing. I would think they would just remain private at that price, but maybe they need the cash and no private investors will give it to them.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework/funding_round...

There's something that has deeply irked me for many years about these MWI probability constructions, and that is the largely glossed over fact that there's sort of a non-local numerical awareness and computation within the wave function necessary to construct the number of branches in proper ratio required to maintain self-consistency in the MWI universe. Additionally, this number of branches is incomprehensibly larger than simply splitting the universe once for every quantized event, and results in unwieldy levels of duplication of identical branches.

The reason for this is that if we take the most improbable outcome of a given wave function and say “This highly improbable branch occurs once”, we are immediately contradicted, as the next least improbable event is virtually certainly a non-integer ratio to the former. So, we give the wave function numerical factoring / self-resolving capabilities and instead, the least and second least improbable branches occur the number of times necessary to maintain status as whole integers with correct relative ratio. But then, that only resolves two possible events on the wave function, and so with the third least improbable event, almost certainly not an integer ratio to the first or the second, we must repeat this step again of multiplying the number of branches for the least and second least improbable, to maintain a consistent integer ratio for our types of branches. As you can see, as you follow this up through all the possible branch outcomes, to express their corresponding probabilities in whole integers counts of quantum outcomes, you essentially have to engage in a massive computation of finding common factors all the way up. Further, even the least improbable event will require an incomprehensible number of duplicate branches, and the most probable events will have an even more innumerable count of duplicate branches still.

The only way I can see to escape this madness with MWI seems to be give up on the notion of truly separate branches, and instead treat these “many worlds” as a stream of overlapping world-ish-nesses in which discrete outcomes don’t actually even exist, but then you have seeming contradictions in observable discreteness and it’s not clear it’s truly even MWI anymore.

Disclosure: I’m not a physicist, and it's quite plausible that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

If you remove corporate and private money from universities, you don't automatically receive more funding from government. A publication like Slate might like and lobby for this to be, but that's not reality. What you get is less students and professors, less research, less innovation, less progress, and less commercialization of new technologies that benefit us all. I'm sure Mr. Peters means well when he advocates for his conception of moral and academic purity, but he's implicitly advocating for gutting a part of our world-class research universities, which is unnecessarily destructive and not a trade we should be willing to make.

What platform and tools are you building with, and how far in? I created a roleplaying iOS (swift) app and Vue website, both on a shared Elixir Phoenix / Postgres / Elastic Search backend which currently has 1.5k DAU / 50k daily messages exchanged that I haven't created such tools for yet. Possible collaboration? https://apple.co/2jV2ZOa

Because humans are social animals, and far more people seem to have a need for social contact than to see their own creativity come to life, as evidenced by what most people spend their free time doing (not writing code or books, but enjoying time with family and friends). A creative social activity viewed as an enhanced social activity instead of a degraded creative one is perhaps the perspective you're looking for?

This is super neat! Thanks for the heads up :) there seems to be a bug where mic audio isn’t transmitted on mobile (iPhone X Safari, iOS 12.4)? Other than that works shockingly smoothly on mobile. Nice work.

Relatedly, anyone know of anybody working on genetically modifying trees to create human-habitats on earth? It’s a fun and crazy concept, but perhaps it’s still far too technically difficult to approach with current tools.

Imagine planting many acres of genetically-modified trees and coming back in forty years to the primary structures of thousands of beautiful forest homes :P

Not what it once was, but 8tracks still has lots of good genre-tagged playlists: https://8tracks.com/

Also Spotify and YouTube.

Taking debt to pay back debt does not automatically lead to hyperinflation. The US federal government currently takes debt every year to pay off debt. That's sustainable so long as these payments stay a relatively small percentage of the total revenue. Unfortunately, as debt to GDP ratio continues to rise, if inflation drives interest rates to rise, things can get messy pretty quickly.

Such a condition would definitely explain the price—although that would still be a pretty surprising condition.

Broke it up into 3 paragraphs now >.<

If I bought Tumblr in a $3 million fire sale, I don't think I'd keep 200 employees on the payroll, but yes, it combined with the tax write-off and infrastructure costs it's reasonable for Yahoo to want to dump it as fast as possible—they could easily be losing $5M a month on it. I'm just shocked there aren't more opportunists in the market that would have bid the price up to at least something resembling reasonable. That being said, even an extremely well-executed turn-around could be 6 months until break-even, which would require potentially upfront $30 million in losses, in which context the sale price is insignificant, and so the question becomes who has web business expertise + $30 million in cash to burn and desire to confidently make a $15-20 million annual profit business a year or two out. Apparently, not many people/companies.

I had heard the "well below 20m" figure and couldn't believe it—and now Fred is saying they dumped it for $3 million? I suppose if Verizon is taking the tax deduction on an original $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo, the value of the deduction so much dwarfs the sale price that the difference to Yahoo between a $3 million sale price and a $50 million sale price is pretty minimal—they just want to close the deal to take the deduction and stop the losses.

Still, considering the fact that Tumblr still does over 2.5 billion page views per month [1], not even counting their mobile usage, I can't help but gawk at what a steal Automattic got. Really drives home what their CEO Matt Mullenweg said on here the other day about adopting a "Berkshire model"—although he was referring to independent management, what he's really talking about is buying companies grossly undervalued for dirt-cheap. Just monetizing the web traffic 2.5 billions monthly hits at a $1 CPM alone would generate $2.5 million a month in revenue, $30 million annually.

What kind of business, let alone web business, sells for 1/10th annual revenue? For reference, Reddit does 6x the page views, but is valued at $3 billion. Reddit's prospects are obviously better, but are they 1000/6 = 166x times better per current page view? Mind-boggling.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com

Unique device IDs are app-specific.

“This error of understanding has dominated Indian culture for centuries and has turned the principle of life upside down. Life on the basis of detachment! This is a complete distortion of Indian philosophy. It has not only destroyed the path of realization but has led the seekers of Truth continuously astray ... Indian scriptures are now so full of the idea of renunciation that they are regarded with distrust by practical men in every part of the world. Many Western universities hesitate to teach Indian philosophy for this reason.”

- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 12 January 1965, Preface to Bhagavad-Gita

You’re comparing quarterly revenue from AWS to annual Amazon? The proper ratio is more like 7-8x, not 30x.

Peak in Lymes disease stories may be related to it being summer time, and bug levels (at least speaking in the Midwest) are at the highest in recent memory, not to mention the surge in Lymes disease itself in recent years. Personally, I’ve been having more trouble with chiggers than ticks, but infected ticks are always that lurking nightmare scenario.

> It must be remembered, also, that labor-saving devices, and indeed inventions of all kinds, often absolutely lessen demand instead of increasing it. Suppose, for example, that the many attempts at producing a satisfactory traction engine should result in success; is it not evident that the number of horses in use would be greatly diminished? This would similarly reduce the demand for horseshoes, horseshoe nails, currycombs, and harness of all sorts, every one of which now forms the centre of extensive manufacturing interests, employing many men.

Also prescient, John Froelich got such a tractor working 14 years later!