Gaussian
Re:Sam Altman's been fired before. The polarizing past of OpenAI's rei...
on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @10:17AM (#38380376)
Sam is a leader. Let there be no doubt. Does he have foibles? I’m sure. I do. Everybody has people out there who will proffer criticism of them, especially those at the top of the pyramid. Our summer at YC was heavily influenced by him; he always had time for us, and always thought hard about our problems.
Re:Apple is discontinuing the iPod
on Tuesday May 10, 2022 @04:54PM (#31332584)
So you're saying I was less wrong! I knew it. ;)
Re:Apple is discontinuing the iPod
on Tuesday May 10, 2022 @04:47PM (#31332497)
I always thought of the iPod as THE inflection point for Apple. Not the 1998 iMac, not the iPhone, even though it was the latter that made Apple the company it is today. But I think the iPod put Apple on a track to get to the iPhone-it's why Apple/Jobs were even thinking about it. The pod and the phone shared form factors and have always been intertwined in my mind. For that reason, when the iPhone came out, I automatically assumed that Apple had just killed its iPod business. I was wrong, but I suppose that it did eventually come to pass... 15 years later.
Re:Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension
on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @05:54PM (#30925543)
So is the extension hitting the Google Matrix API (excuse naming errors if I make them), or is it scraping results from sites such as Kayak asynchronously? Or is it something else entirely?
Re:Heroku was Down
on Thursday February 24, 2022 @11:53AM (#30457040)
We're down
Re:Their Baby Died in the Hospital. Then Came the $257,000 Bill
on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @10:02PM (#28612372)
Just terrible. There are thousands of similar, less sensational stories generated by the U.S. health system every month. All parties in the system are to blame, as all parties have twisted incentives—profit—when it comes to providing and paying for healthcare. This isn’t news, obviously, and without some kind of legislative sledgehammer that alters the potential earnings of millions of people who are now cogs in this system, the problem will remain intractable.
Re:Ask HN: Have you delayed laptop purchase waiting for Apple's larger...
on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:19AM (#28234147)
Agree. I am on a 2013 15" MB Pro that has been my horse for a long time. I hated that last generation of keyboards, which held me back. Then the promise of the M1 chip has delayed me once again. I've never really champed at the bit to spend $3k before...
Re:Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful
on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:16AM (#28234110)
Put in some time and get out. It will help your resume, but not your soul.
I have been working with a FAANG recently, one that builds EVERYTHING in house. Almost comical. There are great engineers all over the place, but no cohesive strategy or overarching sense for product outside of a couple of niches. Not a great situation.
Re:Ask HN: Have you delayed laptop purchase waiting for Apple's larger...
on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:13AM (#28234073)
Curious as to why? Don't want to wait it out?
Ask HN: Have you delayed laptop purchase waiting for Apple's larger M1 machines?
RPA vs. Process Mining
Re:Microsoft Word now flags double spaces after a period as errors
on Saturday April 25, 2020 @11:41AM (#22978905)
A-ha! Another consequential web outcome decided in Urbana-Champaign. As an engineer and a writer, I have monitored this debate for some time. Editors of mine have usually lobbied for two spaces, while engineers I’ve worked with say, simply and reasonably, browsers reading HTML deprecate the extra space, so why bother? Now we know why. Thank you for the fascinating inside story. The traditionalist in me, however, the part that still enjoys a paper newspaper, will always prefer the luxuriousness of the double space.
Re:Colorado voters are set to decide if wolves should be reintroduced ...
on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @04:33PM (#22313015)
I don't know if they're all rich. Ralph Lauren certainly is. But I tend to agree. There simply aren't that many ranchers. But there are millions of Coloradans—and visitors to Colorado, outdoor/nature tourism being a much larger business in CO than ranching—who favor reintroduction. If Yellowstone is any kind of guide, ecosystems would benefit. Wolves are all over the Northwoods of Wisconsin now, and the negative side effects are basically nil.
Re:Colorado voters are set to decide if wolves should be reintroduced ...
on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @04:20PM (#22312930)
Appreciate your input. As somebody with a house near a Colorado National Forest, I can corroborate that it is over-choked with fuel and a fire catastrophe waiting to happen. Not burning for decades will do that. As for the wolves, I think you have to offer something more around your wolves-attack-humans point. I've only seen statistics that say otherwise. What data are you drawing your conclusions from?
Re:I Quit Social Media for a Year
on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @12:17AM (#20936519)
One magical thing happened: your site broke. Good problems, etc.
Re:Sam Altman on Twitter: It's gross seeing so many root against Tesla
on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @05:43PM (#19975390)
Being 'against' Tesla isn't being against the environment and innovation. The vector of personal transportation is pointed in the right direction here with or without Tesla. They have moved things forward, no doubt. But Tesla and these larger issues can and should be separated.
Best Snow in Colorado – And Historically
Re:50+ real world use cases built on blockchain architecture
on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @11:10AM (#17293969)
Even if these were all full-fledged businesses/ventures/operations -- most of them don't answer what is, to me, the real question of the day: in what applications are the benefits of blockchain an actual imperative to the use case? Most of these don't seem to clear that hurdle.
The power of chance networking led to VC being formed, Grubhub getting funded
Re:Subscribers are the new, new thing in business
on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @09:46AM (#16810977)
Good to see that the Economist is totally on top of the trends sweeping through commerce in 2014.
Re:Ask HN: Google QPX Express API is done next week – anybody found a ...
on Thursday April 05, 2018 @06:06PM (#16769202)
Thanks for this - looks promising.
Ask HN: Google QPX Express API is done next week – anybody found a replacement?
I used QPX to build a popular feature on our ski travel site:https://www.zrankings.com/powderfaresThe ski season is drawing to a close, obviously, so we'll basically make it through this season with this intact. But I have yet to find another API that gives the same kind of queryable access to the flight database (ITA, owned by Google).Is this simply a case where startups/small companies are...
Re:The Dropbox IPO is a transformative moment for Y Combinator
on Monday February 26, 2018 @11:55AM (#16466757)
Bombastic headline, but no meat here. Y Combinator is a fantastic place for founders/startups, especially for those that work hard at leveraging the available mentorship during that fleeting three months.
The article's comparison of YC to Ivy League schools is hackneyed, but relevant. YC's reputation, much like Harvard's, was built before most competitors were ever around; that kind of esteem is hard to build and doesn't disintegrate in a year or two. Paul Graham has said this.
YC's place in the tech world will hardly be subverted by a 'bad' IPO result for Dropbox. Zenefits' issues, it should be noted, didn't slow down YC, either—nor should they have.
Re:Ask HN: Can you get away with not working?
on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @12:10AM (#16364913)
Firing people is hard. It can affect morale and send all kind of messages that the founder may not want to send. I'm guessing this will happen at some point, but as a founder who has been faced with this exact kind of situation, I can tell you that it's awful. People who slack can still be liked.
Burger King Weighs in on Net Neutrality
Re:Does Life End at 35? (2013)
on Sunday December 10, 2017 @11:19PM (#15895135)
Interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I'm constantly plucking at deeper questions around this topic. High-level creative genius seems to fall off for many people in their fourth decade (their 30s), at least for musicians and many mathematicians. This is less the rule for writers, I've found, and I've often wondered about the reasons behind that. I have theories, but I'm more interested in other peoples' thoughts on the entire topic of being able to conjure creative solutions and at what age those capabilities seem to peak, at what ages people have been able to sustain them, and when people have noticed these capabilities ebbing.
RIP Flight Search: Google Shutting Down QPX Express API in April 2018
I have not found any material on what access, if any, Google will offer startups and smaller companies to the ITA/Matrix DB (flight, airline schedules and fare data) going forward. Needless to say, this is disappointing on many levels.Email just received from Google:Dear QPX Express API Customer,After careful consideration, we've decided to shut down the QPX Express API as of April 10, 2018.How...
Re:The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro [pdf]
on Thursday October 05, 2017 @11:06AM (#15409739)
Never Let Me Go is relevant and chilling. Most books fade in my memory; this isn't one of them.
Re:“Bing is bigger than you think,” Microsoft boasts, at 33% of US sea...
on Monday August 21, 2017 @12:38PM (#15065769)
I have seen analytics data for dozens of big sites and I have never seen numbers to even remotely support 33% to Bing. I have little doubt that MSFT is basing this on some form of data, but I'm guessing there is a twist or caveat in here somewhere. EDIT: For content sites and e-commerce sites, I see ratios that are between 18:1 and 50:1 for Google:Bing. Long way off from 33%.