981–990 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh, was about to post this one myself. My buddy got in big trouble in the high school computer lab making this typo. I wonder what percentage of domains in the late 90's were simply "adult" sites trying to capture traffic via typos. It certainly felt like a lot.
Then there was expertsexchange.com, which was always bound to disappoint one of two demographics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was really common to type in random words as domains expecting something. People would make mistakes so people would buy domains with common spelling mistakes.
I have a random memory of the website at hanson.com having a banner alerting visitors that the website of the popular late-90s boy band was in fact at hansonline.com, and that you would only find information about guitars made by the Hanson company should you further browse the site at which you currently found yourself. Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too bad that as soon as AT&T gets to commercialize the lab it ran it to the ground. Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful. That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit b…
The profit motive spurs innovation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country. His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.
> The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families HN does so much moderation, with dang slapping people for being nasty. Why is obvious, egregious misinformation like this not subject to moderation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spending too much time around other developers. In the current environment, E-commerce is a less interesting space for startup founders vs. cloud SW. This led parent commenter to assume the cloud is more important than E-commerce. This is a fallacy, of course, since E-commerce is probably the largest / most important market on the internet, it just doesn't FEEL that way b/c Amazon has an unprecedented control over ne…
AWS is 57% of Amazon's profit in 2020. Cloud has barely begun.
If ecommerce remained flat for the rest of time, do you really think the cloud would grow?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spending too much time around other developers. In the current environment, E-commerce is a less interesting space for startup founders vs. cloud SW. This led parent commenter to assume the cloud is more important than E-commerce. This is a fallacy, of course, since E-commerce is probably the largest / most important market on the internet, it just doesn't FEEL that way b/c Amazon has an unprecedented control over ne…
AWS has 40 billion in revenue, 12 billion in profit and is growing 30% YoY. It's got great profit margins, huge lock in, and is a natural monopoly. Not sure how much it would be worth on the open market, but wouldn't surprise me that it's 50%+ of Amazon's market cap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.
I mean, you can say you have the fastest Fiat, no doubt someone will point out that Fiats on average are all slow next to a Ferrari. The you can just point out that we are just talking about Fiats, not Ferraries. But that doesn’t change the fact that the having the fastest Fiat is not that impressive given that Ferraries are an order of magnitude faster then Fiats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I contacted support twice in 2 years for Prime subscription I didn’t want. Each time: “Are you sure you didn— Yes I’m sure, I knew intended to avoid it, so it’s clearly not me.” Both times they correctly cancelled it.
The system is mostly designed to prey upon inattentive seniors with disposable incomes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is increasing efficiency always net good?
Because we get more than we had before. As costs go down, the risk of innovation goes down, we're able to be more responsive, able to do new things. People are able to have more variety to meet their individual needs and preferences. In short we get more or work less and the overall quality of life for everyone increases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the ideas behind federalism was that government / the state need not have a monopoly on everything. Corporate monopolies usually only persist due to two reasons: regulatory barriers or technological stagnation. Both are solvable.
If not for regulatory barriers, do you really think Bell Systems would ever have lost its monopoly over US telecoms?