161–170 of 272 posts
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My understanding was that almost all of that is due to the insane benefits and pension requirements placed on the USPS in 2006. Happy to be corrected if I'm offbase.
The same ones private corporations are required to follow.
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Then you end up with the "postal service".
Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime. If our "leaders" stopped actively sabotaging the USPS, it could be doing even better.
Make the firehose available for anyone at an affordable price and the earnings will jump. Talk is cheap but in a way this is what Google did with AdWords. In the past you should have a budget of thousands dollars to advertise on popular sites like Yahoo. Google found a way to keep the required budget at a minimum. I think Twitter haven't done that because it is always more comfortable to talk to a few customers who c…
The other companies I can think of (FB, Google, Tumblr) utilize the social graph to provide ad-targeting services, but don't charge to access the graph itself. The live nature of Twitter's firehose is probably better suited to sale as a recurring commodity than FB or Tumblr's.
I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
Yesterday: "Twitter CEO Dick Costolo laughs off 'crazy' calls for his resignation"[0] [0] (warning: auto-play video on page) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...
I had 2 autoplay videos and 1 popup, ibtimes has really gone to shit.
How come Twitter doesn't lift the character limit on tweets? Then you could allow content writers to write a more coherent thought (IE not breaking it into a 20+ message tweet storm) and then normal length tweets could serve just as comments. Lifting the character limit could make Twitter a publishing powerhouse over night. With the right API support, writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as…
The origins of the 140 character limit are interesting; it was originally put in place because Twitter was SMS-based, and SMS limits the number of characters to 160. 140 allowed some wiggle room. But retaining the character limit changes the platform entirely. "Lifting the twitter limit" does not a publishing platform make; it changes everything that Twitter is. I think Jack explained the psychological reasons very w…
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Many small biz retailers form clothing store, restaurant, even bigger coffeeshops have told me this.
I see Square all over the place now. Maker Faire uses it; we bought our Christmas tree with it; the ferry to Angel Island uses it; we bought some vodka from a tiny distillery in Seattle with it; we found a great smoked fish shack in Central California that uses it. All these places were cash-only before Square. There's certainly a lot of competition in the space, but I'm amazed at how different the small business lan…
Of relevance - Square is still a backend payment processor for several companies, even if it doesn't have the device on the front end. They still process payments for Starbucks, in lieu of Bank of America. It is not clear whether they make any money at it, though.
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>The line about 'no severance package' seems highly unusual and would lead me to assume that this was a forceful 'push' to step down. It's rather normal for people to not get severance packages when they quit. Costolo is remaining on the board, and got a ton of stock when he became CEO. Considering that he grew the company's valuation from $3 Billion to $23 Billion (7.6x for those doing the math), I can assure you he…
and he's also getting a nice return on his angel investment in tellapart . . . which twitter acquired a month ago for $.5 Billion.
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Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime. If our "leaders" stopped actively sabotaging the USPS, it could be doing even better.
If it was wildly successful, how did we end up with tons of private competitors with a large market share (FedEx, UPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc). The U.S. Is one of the only countries where the state run postal service isn't sufficient. In Switzerland, for example, there is only the Swiss Post. Most countries, to my knowledge, operate with just one major postal network.
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Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime. If our "leaders" stopped actively sabotaging the USPS, it could be doing even better.
It was only wildly successful until our leaders "sabotaged" it by forcing it to obey standard actuarial practices. (Unlike the rest of the govt, the USPS is now required to fully fund it's pension plans.) See this comment for a more detailed explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6710602 Also, it's pretty hard not to be "wildly successful" when you get a legally enforced monopoly. Comcast is also "wildly s…
It's been argued, deftly, that even with a decline in volume for mass mailers, raising the price from $0.49 to $1 would not only put the USPTO all the way in the black but enable them to meet obligations for years to come.
But convince Congress that it's a good idea...
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Good for yahoo, but he should just run a hedge fund if that's all he's good for.
Engineers :) If Jerry Yang did not have the credentials of Yahoo founder/CEO at the time, do you think Jack Ma would've let him in? Alibaba was growing very fast at that point, and one big reason they let Yahoo in is its brand.