Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#301

Post by _delirium » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

fleaflicker wrote: post #252

chollida1 wrote: post #226

Yahoo got all cash, which is nice as it gives them more flexibility, the last thing they'd want after the Alibaba spin off fiasco is to have to try and sell 4.83 Billion in Verizon stock. Bloomberg just put up a head line saying that Yahoo will return all the cash, minus Operating Costs to the share holders. If anyone has any guess as to how much "operating costs" will be, please email:) So I guess queue Alibaba and…

Why does everyone keep pointing out Mayer's compensation on this deal? Nobody said a word about the $200M that went Tim Armstrong's way in the Aol deal. [1] Can't help but think that if Yahoo had a male ceo nobody would be making these comments. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2015/05/12/tim-armst...

People complain about golden parachutes all the time, e.g. the executive payouts in the Blackberry and Nokia acquisitions were also heavily criticized. One of thousands of articles: http://business.financialpost.com/news/fp-street/how-golden-...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#302

Post by geodel » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

evmar wrote: post #289

ryanmarsh wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I hate my job but tell me some other way I can make $300k (I'm basically doing management consulting). I'm 38 with 3 kids and my wife doesn't earn an income (she homeschools the kids). I suck it up so they're well provided for.

300k is nearly 6 times the median US income, and even the median US income is double that of high-quality-of-life places like Germany. Literally most of the planet has happy families with significantly less money than that. It's facile of me to diagnose your life over the internet but I often think of the deathbed quote: "I wish I had earned more money and spent less time with my family" -- no one ever

I think that deathbed quote is more about people who had reasonably successful life and had family. I doubt that 100s of millions in 3rd world dying in penury with no family to talk of would make similar statements. Perhaps their statements would be so pedestrian as not to be noted down.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#303

Post by matt4077 » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #47

What the hell has Marissa Mayer been paid for? Everything about this smells like Yahoo! is being run by idiot MBAs with some spreadsheets somewhere totally misunderstanding that technology can empower people to do fantastic things including those working within Yahoo! - instead it's been hamstrung by each property not being held accountable to it's competitors effectively. I would have started competitors (startups)…

Mayer is a Stanford CS grad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Early_life_and_e...

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#304

Post by geodel » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

OneNoteIsFree wrote: post #164

saryant wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I have a number of friends at Verizon Labs doing some pretty cool work with Scala and Haskell.

Just using cool functional languages has little to do with this work culture. Lets not propagate this notion please.

Unfortunately thats the reality of many 'cool work places' where your years of experience in delivering products will not be important enough if it not in Scala or some such.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#305

Post by michaelcampbell » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

utopcell wrote: post #295

gerad wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Marissa was essentially a developer. She taught CS at Stanford and majored in Symbolic Systems, which is closely related.

taught CS ? I doubt that's accurate. At most she was a TA for some course.

According to Wikipedia, it seems accurate.

> During her junior year, she taught a class in symbolic systems, with Eric S. Roberts as her supervisor. The class was so well received by students that Roberts asked Mayer to teach another class over the summer.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#306

Post by vram22 » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #75

vram22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the heck do people use 'bn' for billion and 'mm' for million? I've seen VC @fredwilson use 'mm' many times on his blog (avc.com), and IIRC I read some reasoning for it, either there or elsewhere, which made some kind of sense (they said Roman numeral for 1000 is M, so for million we use MM, though not sure if that is quite right logic), but why then the inconsistency between 'mm' and 'bn'?

I used to work in finance, and there is a bunch of obscure terminology and conventions, adopted from different cultures (eg you can trade a "Lakh" of silver). See how the currency sign for GBP looks like a capital L? and the currency sign for shillings and pence was "s" and "d"? (now the uk use "p" for pence since decimalisation). So "Lire", "Soldi" and "Denarii" were the denominations of Italian currency in the the…

Good point. Yes, lakh (sometimes spelled lac) in English is from the Hindi word laakh, which I think is from Sanskrit laksha. (Many Indian languages are descended from or influenced by Sanskrit.)

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#307

Post by Doctor_Fegg » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #251

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIUI Verizon is buying the brand, so although there'll be corporate continuity from today's Yahoo! to Lucky Internet Investments Inc. (or whatever the China/Japan/patents vehicle is called), "staying at Yahoo" means "moving to Verizon".

I believe it's "#1 Lucky Internet Investments Inc." Also that's racist.

Had genuinely not thought of that angle: I simply meant they were lucky investments.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#308

Post by Doctor_Fegg » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

gaur wrote: post #294

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just to indicate reported speech: "this isn't confirmed fact, it's something we've been told". Absolutely standard journalistic practice.

At one point, the headline was changed to read "Syrian migrant 'behind German blast'". But at that point, the fact that there was a German blast was widely known; the unconfirmed portion was that a Syrian migrant was behind it. So if anything, the headline should have been written "'Syrian migrant' behind German blast". But the BBC didn't do that, because all indications are that BBC journalists pepper their headline…

Ok, absolutely standard British journalistic practice then, where the BBC (and I) come from.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#309

Post by monocasa » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:42 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #110

byuu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really had to be the dumbest moves in computing history. "What does the #2 CPU maker need to become #1? The #2 GPU maker, obviously!"

Well NVIDIA wanted to spin off into the CPU market also, they sorta did with them building ARM based SOC's with NVIDIA GPU's. There were also rumors of them licensing x86 from Intel. Oddly enough NVIDIA back in the day made what arguable was the best chipset for AMD CPU's - NVIDIA nForce.

The nForce wasn't really their IP though; it was AMDs. The original Xbox was in prototype phase and consisted of an AMD CPU and AMD chipset with some Nvidia IP for the GPU. Intel comes along and offers a PIII variant for really cheap. Part of the deal that Intel struck was that there can't be any AMD logos on the box, but they don't haven enough time to change out the chipset whoelsale, only to switch out the FSB. So Microsoft pays AMD to licence their 7XX chipset to Nvidia, so now it's all IP properly owned by Nvidia. For whatever reason, there were no restrictions on Nvidia only being able to use this for the Xbox, so they continued updating and releasing that genetic line of IP as nForce.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#310

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

ptio wrote: post #32

bogomipz wrote: post #20

"The US telecoms giant is expected to merge Yahoo with AOL, to create a digital group capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook." Can someone explain how combining two "past their prime" entities like Yahoo and AOL, with the Verizon telecom bureaucracy is going to produce anything "capable of taking on the likes of Google and Facebook"? Telecom companies have a pretty horrible culture. It is not one of in…

Note that Verizon has a division - Product Innovation and New Business - that is run separate from the telco business that you are mentioning. In recent years Verizon has acquired technology companies EdgeCast Networks (CDN) and upLynk (Video Streaming) which form the core of Verizon's Digital Media Services [1]. Combining these assets with AOL (AdTech) and Yahoo (if the deal happens) gives Verizon an end-to-end plat…

I know Edgecast well, I worked on a couple of projects for you guys. I remember being very surprised on hearing the Verizon acquisition news since EC was such lean and nimble engineering shop. It's good to hear your feedback and that its business as usual post acquisition. Great company and great CDN.