Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more feverishaaron's comments login

This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss).

It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.


Kind of like the internet in 1992


Or the tamagotchi in 1998...

The fact that [uncertain thing] became a huge, lasting hit doesn't really give us information about [different uncertain thing], except the knowledge that the probability of being a hit is non-zero.


I don't think that's totally accurate. If you consider the popularity of adjacent technologies (games, mobile devices, entertainment), it's logical to predict that a certain technology will also be noteworthy.


More like 3D TV - lots of parallels between the two in terms of hardware limitations (need to wear something on your head), cost, etc.


Or VRML in 1996.


Or Second Life in 2004.


1986. When they had to put over 1000 machines in /etc/hosts.


Or CB radios in 1974.


or mullets in 1987


Dad?


Or just ask your designer to work @1x in a vector app like Sketch, and export PDF vector images for import into the asset catalog (Scale Factor - Vector Asset).

http://useyourloaf.com/blog/creating-scaled-images-with-pdf-...

-- A designer


Exactly. If it affects my personal livelihood, it is not logical to pursue.


Except when you are a public official it is your duty to pursue these sorts of cases for the public good.


Damn your duty, I have bills to pay. Point is, why risk my job when my boss wont have my back?


This statement makes me sad... I mean, I adhere to it, but I am not exactly a person who should be emulated.


It's their boss' (aka Congress) job to set a tone where it is not a livelihood risk to "do your duty".

If you're a peon, "doing your duty" is a great way to put a target on your back.


100% right. Before people start looking at those guys they should look at themselves. A lot of people in corporations do things they don't agree with or find ethically questionable but since the boss says so they will do it. "The fish stinks from the head". This is not isolated to government.


It's the same story everywhere. As long as there is hierarchy (which we do need in some form in most organizations) then there will be incentive for people to do things they personally disagree with due to the conflict of interest that arises.

It seems like one of the hardest problems to solve in our society because it seems to be so tied to our nature. I can recall doing things in grade school I knew was wrong but felt obligated to do because my peers and those I looked up to do too. While that isn't the same exact situation, the dynamics at play are the same. What can be done to combat this innate in-group/out-group behavior more effectively in our organizations and society?


Good or bad is not that clearly to distinguish. Going with the group is certainly the easiest path but on average it's probably also the right thing to do.


Especially when rents are rising 5-10% per year.


I think they have a ton of opportunity with a distribution platform like that. Tweets are already headlines for other products.

A few expansion areas come to mind off hand:

1. Media distribution

2. E-commerce (get the hottest, limited supply thing)

3. Events & ticketing

4. Financial market alerts

5. AMA-style Q & As

6. Chat/AI services and integrations


> 5. AMA-style Q & As > 6. Chat/AI services and integrations

This actually makes me wonder: if you increase or remove the length limits, how well would Twitter work as a private chat platform?

Because compared to the terrible internal "social platform" sites that some large companies run on their intranets, a company-wide private version of Twitter actually seems like a significant improvement. Use lists (including shared lists) as an equivalent to rooms or groups. That would give three different types of streams: your main feed (people you follow from across the company), the groups you watch or participate in (where most of the productive value comes from), and the firehose (to sample what's going on across the whole company).

As a bonus, if you add in a form of federated accounts, this could allow businesses paying for such a service to have a family of verified accounts on the public Twitter, all tied to their domain (similar to email addresses).


This is basically how Yammer was introduced, as "Twitter for the enterprise". I think the Slack model makes a lot more sense in most work contexts, though Yammer may be an okay addition in a big enough company.

The idea may not be too far-fetched as Facebook actually does have an enterprise product, Facebook At Work. I think Twitter is too focused on other things to try it though.


Slack?


In a way, yes. But far more people know Twitter, including employees and purchase-decision-makers.


Imagine "Enterprise Twitter", something like Yammer and Slack. I use Yammer at work and it is worse than Twitter in every way, except it has no post length limits and you can create groups. Without the annoyance of spammers, Enterprise Twitter could implement new features like following #hashtags. Twitter needs to fix their threading UI, though.

Facebook has a "Facebook at Work" enterprise product and, from what I hear, the company dogfoods its own platform for work as an alternative to email and mailing lists.


> 6. Chat/AI services and integrations

6b. "Customer support in a box" services for companies that use Twitter to find and help customers with problems.

7. Micropayments: Twitter could monetize Likes using a Flattr-like micropayment system. Just add a "tip" button next to the heart button, to pay the tweet author $0.01. It could create a virtuous cycle of more tweets, more tweeters, and more idle funds in tip accounts for Twitter to reinvest elsewhere.


RE 2. Yea, wait... What ever happened to the e-commerce platform they started to roll out?


Companies that use their property – distribution networks, in this case – to profit from others without providing wealth creation back to society.

AKA Landlords, Realtors®, Middlemen, Licensures etc.


I know you're not OP and I understand this is the definition of rent-seeking behavior, but your examples are empirically and theoretically invalid. Landlords (renters of capital) and middlemen provide huge benefits to society.

Of course, this doesn't mean that it's impossible for a landlord it middleman to be a rent-seeker, but they would need to pursue some type of artificial benefit/restriction on others in order for this to be the case. This does happen often, but I have no idea why OP would suggest rent-seeking is the primary activity of sharing economy companies. One of Uber's greatest accomplishments has been significantly weakening the rent-seeking taxi industry.


I should have clarified by "Landlords" and "Middlemen" I meant the groups that lobby local governments to restrict zoning and growth, so they can retrieve higher profits.

Uber is very much within the "virtuous cycle" – but they may also become rent seekers via monopolization of private transportation.


I think we'd agree that a large portion of the current world economy is driven by rent seeking.


These investors aren't paying enough attention to their children / their colleague's children.

I would think that this guy's fame would have made this market opportunity super-obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Garrett

With his own personalized collection of Minecraft toys and all:

http://amzn.to/1O4VQNi


There's a big difference between YouTube fame and Twitch fame. Counterintuitively, there's actually little overlap.

Relaively few YouTube gaming celebrities stream due to quality control. Twitch celebrity streamers use YouTube primariy to host stream highlights as Twitch's VODs are not convenient.

Notably, YouTube Gaming, which was YouTube's Twitch competitor, failed miserably since there was no clear advantage to switching from Twitch (among UI/Content ID/monetization issues)

I know many YouTube gaming celebrities who have become successful enough for merchandizing, but not any Twitch celebrities. They're separate markets.


I don't disagree.

I used Stampy Cat to make the market point, because there were hints that the "alright, let's play this game" spectator video was going to be a big thing, even before Twitch was Twitch.

This guy has been operating since Minecraft was in it's infancy, and he had a large following before Twitch was a big thing.


There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables.

Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?


What about people who have a light load during a cycle (due to specialization), like to tinker with things in their 'spare' time, or would rather tradeoff their core and do something different?

Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.

The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?


Not sure why are you replying to me, it's entirely different question.

I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)


Maybe not, but IS is the people who actually end up getting promoted.


mPath - http://mpath.com - Palo Alto and San Francisco

mPath is a new type of mobile productivity platform for businesses. Most people don't need all of their business data on their phone – just the pieces that matter to them. With mPath, business folks (non-developers) can modify the app for their needs (without coding). All of this takes between a few minutes and a few hours.

We launched recently, and we're getting quite a bit of traction inside businesses. We need help building out our suite of productivity apps and extending the platform.

Our stack is

- React/Sinatra web app

- Swift 2 using MVVM on iOS

- Java/Dropwizard and Phoenix/HBase on the back end

- Java on Android

Right now, we have a small but very talented team, and we'd like to add more curious, intelligent people who are interested in solving challenging problems. interested [at] mpath dotcom

We have several roles open, but these two are stand-outs:

1. Senior Backend Engineer - Java and Phoenix/HBase

2. Android engineer

Check out http://www.mpath.com/about#positions


They don't respond to applications


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: