I personally like the JetBrains model where one can pay yearly and get updates but if you have to stop paying due to some reason you can still use the version you originally paid for.
Right, for much of that time we didn't have digital distribution. 40 years ago we were buying vinyl records (probably superior products) and cassette tapes. 10 years ago, selling subs were a pain because we didn't have providers such as Stripe to make it easy.
I am not American and don't live there but have American friends. Most of them anecdotally were happy about the op-ed you mention - they probably aren't members of your political tribe. But then they don't subscribe to the NYT anyway.
My point is that the GP is right, this is survival. They tried to be neutral by publishing an op-ed the other side probably liked. Didn't work and therefore it pushes them more into one camp to survive.
Just a guess based on anecdotal information.
> Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
If a group of supposedly "peaceful, law-abiding protesters" is going to make the revolting moral equivalence of corrupt cops to properly behaved cops, they shouldn't complain when they themselves are considered equivalent to the worst among their group.
The problem here is that the protestors are against what they perceive as excessive use of force. Sending in the national guard would escalate the situation further. One of the reasons these protests persist is that they elicit from the police much of the behavior they detest. The protests are self-fueling.
My friends and I have this theory that the top management at Google feels they are extremely close to general AI. With acquisitions like this we would hazard the guess that they want to see what data they are missing that could feed that borg and then buy a company that could supply the missing bits. They just have to promise that they won’t use it for ads. But if that AI gets better and better soon they have enormous new opportunities.
Just a theory though.
Interesting. Would they be behaving differently if they were just racing to be first to general AI rather than already being "extremely close"? Seems like they're making great strides with specific applications but given the reported limitations even in that class of AI (see Duplex) I'd be surprised if they were on the brink of general intelligence. Of course, you might consider close to be in the next decade or two, in which case [shrugs].
If you consider communism as far left, then yes the far left has absolutely killed millions. If you do not consider communism far left, I don't know what to tell you.
I suspect he's talking about individuals and activist groups in the US and Europe, rather than governments, state actors, and more formal armed militias and rebel groups.
Broadly speaking, one side believes that the government should only own guns while the other side believes that everyone should own guns. So that makes sense that you won't likely see a radical leftist use guns but you could very much see an authoritarian radical leftist government use weapons against it's defenceless civilians.
Expanding your criteria to encompass all of history isn't really all that helpful. Today, in the actual situation we are experiencing as opposed to political movements that have been dead for decades, the far right are more violent than the far left by a large margin.
far right are more violent than the far left by a large margin.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but you're going to have to define your terms more narrowly if you want your argument to hold. Which countries, who's "we", are we talking state actors or individuals, how to Maoist rebel groups in Asia and South America feature into your calculus etc.
Here's my question off the bat: Facebook is known for using Onavo to find networks that take off and then buying them (I forget names - tbh was it?). I know of course this early in the process you don't know what the future holds, but are you open to acquisition by Facebook? I place a very high value on using the product depending on that answer.
Great question! Prior to Millow, I built Screenhero, which was then acquired by Slack (my team and I built Slack voice/video/screen sharing). Working at Slack was a great experience, and I love the company and the product (and use it with all my current projects, I have 14 Slack workspaces in my sidebar!).
Why is this relevant to your question? For two reasons:
1) Financially, we (we're a husband & wife team) have a very long runway. We own 100% of the company, and have no plans to take on venture capital. Our financial situation means we're also under no pressure to monetize, and we are doing what we're doing because we believe in the mission of our company and product. We want to have stronger connections to our friends and family, and we want that for society at large. Of the 10,000 other things we could have chosen to do, we chose this, because we believe it is the most important thing for us to do.
2) Acquisition is neither a goal nor an option for us. We want to stay independent, build what we want to build, with our users being our only North Star. If Facebook did acquire us, we would a) no longer be independent, b) no longer own the destiny of our product, c) be slightly more financially well off, but (c) is not worth (a) and (b) to us. After a certain point, money ceases to add value to one's life — it's in the study we quoted in our "learn more" section! We're building Millow because we believe in the mission, not because we wanted to make $$$ (if we did, I'd have done another SaaS B2B company like Screenhero).
Also, Millow is in many ways the antithesis of Facebook. Facebook believes connecting people is inherently a good thing — and the more connections, the better. We disagree! Too many low-value connections make it harder for us to focus on those that really matter. This fundamental mismatch in vision makes us believe that the only way for us to get the impact we want is to stay independent forever.
Happy to chat more. This is a topic I have strong opinions on :)
Thank you for the great and detailed answer. I feel very strongly about using Facebook and since this app would focus on people I am close to, a future FB acquisition would mean more of my info in FB’s hands. I support acquisitions, just that my personal trust matrix has an FB exclusion zone.
I replied to the parent comment, but here's my response to your particular number.
Thanks to my previous company's acquisition, we are financially set. More money at this point won't mean much to us. Instead, being able to have a positive impact on the world is what really drives us. Hopefully, this is visible from what we've written, and what we've built (there are no growth-hack-y, spam-your-friends "features" in our app). And in the coming months, we'll continue to expand on this vision in our product. We hope you'll use the product so you can see this for yourself.
To be clear, I am not saying they shouldn’t be acquired - if they get acquired by Twitter/Microsoft/AANG I am totally going to be a supportive user. It is the F word I consider unworthy.
On acquisition, we would cease to be in charge of our destiny, whether by FB or by Twitter/MSFT/AANG [1]. If we're successful in our product & business strategy, we'll stay independent forever, and will monetize through restaurant reservations at local businesses when we help you make a plan to meet up with your friend. Glad to hear you'd be a supportive user even if we were acquired, but we'd like to keep a direct relationship with you ourselves and never be acquired :)
I think idea that this blog post is conveying is overrated. People said the same thing about Microsoft under Ballmer. Then he left. Nadella came in and continued many of the things that he did, and their stock price has soared. For Apple the opposite happened - their profits and stock price have soared, yet Tim Cook can't catch a break. Every little error leads to a chorus of "It wouldn't have been like this if Steve was around". Perception isn't everything.
In my humble opinion, Sundar Pichai must go. Ballmer said it best - "I am a pattern"[0]. I think Pichai has been a great manager but he, from the outside, doesn't seem to be a great leader. If he steps down, the new person gets leeway to change some things and get some social capital.
Apple sells privacy, iPhones and then the content services around them. That's a powerful combination. AR/VR are the obvious next generation things we need to get right as is the AI.
I am not sure what all this is supposed to enable us as customers or users to do. What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no longer calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in an email. But from the perspective of someone who dealt with Google's awful customer service, maybe they could use this in that regard to actually have a voice on the phone even if it isn't human.
Automation is a great thing until you see the human cost. At some point Google is going to have to use its vast capacities to not give people more time, instead give them more opportunities. For e.g. the DeepMind paper showing how to save energy - that was cool.
> What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no longer calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in an email.
Auto-complete is hardly "avoiding human contact", is it?
Regardless, these features are all optional - if you feel as though you're avoiding human interaction by using auto-complete, why not just... not use it?
This company has been marketing one of its products as an automated burger maker. Not sure if they have McD's as a customer. They claim 360 burgers/hr[0]
Completely OT but somehow relevant in my mind: this kind of submission getting up symbolizes how HN is now becoming mainstream - there is nothing even marginally "hacker" about this post - unless they were using some cool new optic fiber to make the statues "invisible".
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I am not sure the main focus of hacker news is really hacking, it is more "VC backed startup stuff".. then various world news on top of that.
When I hear of hacking I think of either black hat (which is basically not discussed at all here) or tinkering (which is discussed here, but maybe a little bit less than good ol slashdot).
