81–90 of 117 posts
It's always interesting to me how little credit is given to GPS in Uber's story. The existence of space-based, free and ubiquitous semi-precise navigation was an enormous subsidy.
I listened to a podcast this week ( https://why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes.simplecast.co... ) where GPS featured prominently. It's about an upcoming ~Netflix show (called The G Word), so I assume there'll be a whole episode on it?
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could you imagine the expense of a FAANG having to pay Microsoft Windows licensing for every machine they use? how would that affect a startup's runway? so instead of the languages, maybe open it up to Linux/FOSS in general
Startups I've worked at have struggled with various expenses but OS licenses weren't one of them. OTOH finding devs 100% comfortable working on pure linux machines would be a genuine blocker.
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> how little credit is given to GPS in Uber's story Uber would not exist without GPS. I wonder how many other of the unicorns: * Twitter without Rails * Facebook without PHP (I think this is fair but maybe not) * Reddit without Python * Tesla and Solar City without huge government subsidies Crazy to think how many Lake Tahoe vacation homes were transferred thanks to these projects.
Reddit without Python might still have been written in Lisp!
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IIRC, they were able to fully rewrite it in Python in a weekend. I guess that shows the (small) scale of what it was at that point.
Why did they need to rewrite it in Python? Isn't lisp more powerful, meaning it would have been easier to create and experiment with more features?
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I want something that doesn’t operate on scarcity (like the corporation), but can work at the velocity of a corporation. Things like GPS and the internet would’ve been deployed much faster by a private corporation but then they would be dumb monopolies as opposed to the public good they are now. Also we need a space to work on big dumb ideas and toys[1] and neither Unix, Uber or GPS fit in that category. What is that…
The Internet already got out so fast it beat the Big Government Solution, which was OSI, so comprehensively that people these days don't even know that there was an OSI protocol suite, let alone that it got beaten by the TCP/IP stack. Back in the early days, the ARPANET stuff was seen as a sideshow, whereas OSI was going to be the Serious Network for Serious Users, with X.500 directory services supporting X.400 email…
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I want something that doesn’t operate on scarcity (like the corporation), but can work at the velocity of a corporation. Things like GPS and the internet would’ve been deployed much faster by a private corporation but then they would be dumb monopolies as opposed to the public good they are now. Also we need a space to work on big dumb ideas and toys[1] and neither Unix, Uber or GPS fit in that category. What is that…
I think the answer is corporations — but with a different culture. Social purpose corporation with crowdfunding and transparency seems like it would accomplish much of what you want.
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Startups I've worked at have struggled with various expenses but OS licenses weren't one of them. OTOH finding devs 100% comfortable working on pure linux machines would be a genuine blocker.
Maybe my perspective is different because I'm relatively young, but everywhere I worked every dev was using GNU/Linux at work and only a tiny minority expressed that they'd prefer macOS. Windows was always something that was used exclusively by non-dev departments (aside of testing machines for checking compatibility). I seem to remember only a single exception, and that was a WordPress developer who worked with and…
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Maybe my perspective is different because I'm relatively young, but everywhere I worked every dev was using GNU/Linux at work and only a tiny minority expressed that they'd prefer macOS. Windows was always something that was used exclusively by non-dev departments (aside of testing machines for checking compatibility). I seem to remember only a single exception, and that was a WordPress developer who worked with and…
I don't doubt such shops exist but based on job ads I've seen and interviews I've done they're very much the minority at least in my part of the world. Why a non-iOS developer would choose macOS I don't quite get but each to their own. I'm willing to bet a significant percentage of developers do typically use Windows, even if there is growing tendency to use WSL+Docker for core development activities.
An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that's needed by competing entities. That's exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It's an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn't issue cards. It doesn't handle money. It just transmits transaction data betwe…
There’s also the cooperative. Here in Switzerland they are rather popular - some of the biggest banks, insurances and property owners, and more notably, the two largest supermarket chains (making up >80% of food / non food market) are organised this way. Your customers could be part of the ownership structure of your company, which creates a strong loyalty effect and a focus on organic & vertical growth rather than g…