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You Are Not Late

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Re: You Are Not Late

#51

Post by skybrian »

jamesisaac wrote: post #42
beaner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the employees of those companies do not work on those problems. This seriously underappreciates all of the amazing products, open source work, and research that these companies have provided - and that is what the vast majority of their employees work on.

Well, agreed that they don't directly work on those problems, but as far as I'm aware, these companies make no profits from "products, open source work, and research" - it's practically all from the advertising which can be integrated with, or come as a result of, those ventures. I'm not looking to discredit the work of talented individuals at those companies - just pointing out that the driving force behind where in…

It's still a dumb quote. Discounting important projects because of where their money comes from makes no sense. For example, Google's search engine is an amazing achievement. Switching to subscriptions would not make it technically any better or more useful to its users.

Re: You Are Not Late

#52

Post by jamesisaac »

skybrian wrote: post #51
jamesisaac wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, agreed that they don't directly work on those problems, but as far as I'm aware, these companies make no profits from "products, open source work, and research" - it's practically all from the advertising which can be integrated with, or come as a result of, those ventures. I'm not looking to discredit the work of talented individuals at those companies - just pointing out that the driving force behind where in…

It's still a dumb quote. Discounting important projects because of where their money comes from makes no sense. For example, Google's search engine is an amazing achievement. Switching to subscriptions would not make it technically any better or more useful to its users.

I think you'd find that would make it better, because the top results would no longer be ads belonging to the highest bidders, but would actually be the most useful and relevant links.

Yes, you can avoid this by having an adblocker installed or being savvy enough to recognise what is and isn't an ad, but that doesn't apply to the majority. Just did a search now with adblock disabled, and 70% of the page is taken up by ads that look extremely similar to organic results.

Can't find the link right now, but there was a well documented case about companies who buy Google ads for things which should be provided free via the government, and slap a large processing fee on top of it. These companies end up making big yearly profits by duping people who don't know any better, and trust Google to show them relevant results, not realising that it's actually showing them the most lucrative results first.

Yeah that one might not bother you, but it's just one example... there are many more ways, some a lot more subtle, that having a primary focus of ad revenue degrades the quality of products.

Re: You Are Not Late

#53

Post by jeffreyrogers »

michaelochurch wrote: post #45

What I learned in my 20s is that I'm not an island. I may be a +4 or +5 sigma "visionary" (not to say that I am one) but if I refuse to learn the people-hacking skills necessary to make people like and trust me (and for a long time I thought that game was "dishonest", which was defensive rejection) then it doesn't matter. Strong teams beat brilliant individuals, so if you're the latter you still have to understand th…

Your first point here is critical. I've been lucky enough to get to know several extremely successful people (outside of tech), and while all of them are bright, they're probably about average for most of the people I went to high school and college with. The thing they have in common though is that they're all very good with people and got their starts through favors others did for them.

Re: You Are Not Late

#54

Post by icebraining »

lukeschlather wrote: post #46
Animats wrote: post #7

I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this…

> Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Whatsapp did a tiny sliver of that - they got acquired by Facebook. It's a trap. The social network needs to be run by a non-profit.

Nonprofits can be acquired too (maybe not the org itself, but everything including staff¹). The reason most don't is because the people who run it are usually not interested, but you can get the same result with a for-profit company. Just don't let VCs invest :)

¹ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/05/what-happens-when-non...

Re: You Are Not Late

#55

Post by skybrian »

jamesisaac wrote: post #52
skybrian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a dumb quote. Discounting important projects because of where their money comes from makes no sense. For example, Google's search engine is an amazing achievement. Switching to subscriptions would not make it technically any better or more useful to its users.

I think you'd find that would make it better, because the top results would no longer be ads belonging to the highest bidders, but would actually be the most useful and relevant links. Yes, you can avoid this by having an adblocker installed or being savvy enough to recognise what is and isn't an ad, but that doesn't apply to the majority. Just did a search now with adblock disabled, and 70% of the page is taken up b…

They are always marked. For me, ad blindness works almost as well as an ad blocker. Of course not for everyone, or people wouldn't pay for the ads.

On the other hand, making money from ads requires attracting users at very large scale. You can see this with Facebook and Google who try to make their product universally used, to the point where they have major initiatives to make their services available in third-world countries.

A subscription-based service deliberately leaves out people who are unwilling to pay. Even if those who do pay get better service (sometimes but not always true), there is a loss of utility from serving fewer users, particularly on the low end.

Re: You Are Not Late

#56

Post by jamesisaac »

skybrian wrote: post #55
jamesisaac wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd find that would make it better, because the top results would no longer be ads belonging to the highest bidders, but would actually be the most useful and relevant links. Yes, you can avoid this by having an adblocker installed or being savvy enough to recognise what is and isn't an ad, but that doesn't apply to the majority. Just did a search now with adblock disabled, and 70% of the page is taken up b…

They are always marked. For me, ad blindness works almost as well as an ad blocker. Of course not for everyone, or people wouldn't pay for the ads. On the other hand, making money from ads requires attracting users at very large scale. You can see this with Facebook and Google who try to make their product universally used, to the point where they have major initiatives to make their services available in third-world…

"Ads or subscription-based" is a false dichotomy though. There are many other options (https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324) which don't require excluding those who can't pay, and don't, as the quote describes, revolve around getting people to click more ads.

Re: You Are Not Late

#57

Post by wellboy »

CPLX wrote: post #29
wellboy wrote: post #19

Adding to this, for every new app, there are three new apps you can spin out of it. Take AirBnb, now there are dozens of AirBnb for X models. Uber? Dozens of Uber for Xs as well. AirBnb for boats, office spaces, parking lots. They all worked. You could start an AirBnb for X RIGHT NOW. :)

Airbnb and Uber are the same model.

What do you mean? AirBnB is for renting out stuff that is actually yours, Uber is for getting something to you with the press of a button.

Re: You Are Not Late

#58

Post by CmonDev »

michaelochurch wrote: post #44
CmonDev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least don't write the code in an assembly of your times :).

Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. :) What you want to avoid is writing 2014 COBOL, and that's what typical enterprise Java is. There'll be jobs maintaining that stuff for a while... But little mobility into anything more exciting.

> Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting.

Yeah, all ~100 of them.

Better normal Java than it's scripting counterpart though (the assembly of the web).

Re: You Are Not Late

#59

Post by tim333 »

lispm wrote: post #11

In the mid 80s I had shortly this impression that computer science and programming now are mostly done. It was when I had read the books (blue, green, orange and purple http://www.world.st/learn/books ) on Smalltalk 80. OOP, large class library, UI, ... All done. What would be needed more?

Strong AI has a way to go.

Re: You Are Not Late

#60

Post by greenyoda »

sanderjd wrote: post #49
ColinCera wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups. It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a smal…

> they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends But those aren't the viable alternatives! These aren't typically wealthy people with time on their hands, they're people trying to find a good place for themselves in the economy by working on something that they think people will like. The real alternative is work…

"What I'd really like to see would be more 'small businesses' and fewer 'startups', but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that."

My guess is that there are currently many more small software businesses than startups, but we don't hear a lot about them because (1) they're targeting business segments that we're not familiar with (e.g., writing accounting software for law practices, or creating web-based front ends for legacy COBOL systems) and (2) the media doesn't find them compelling enough to report on.

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