blunderkid

If ever there was a valid application of monopoly abuse laws, it is Apple's extortion for no value provided. Saying that as a blue blooded iFan who owns one of nearly every Apple product and service out there including the Apple Cloth. It is disgusting what Apple is doing. And it makes no sense that it is getting away with it. And if Google is doing the same, well then both need to be set right.

Fresh looks inspired by Remix. Is that right? Not that there is anything wrong with that. But given that Remix does claim to be production ready, what makes Fresh better? I have been playing with Remix in a side project. I do like their simplicity vis-a-vis Nextjs. And the fact that it is all server rendered by design and not as a special case.

First off, being a "monopoly" (dominant market share) does not make one a "despot blinded by hubris" as the OP suggests. Anti-trust laws target "abuse" of monopoly.

Secondly, YC may very well be a "new age monopoly" much like Google or Amazon or Facebook i.e. the customers of those companies (in YC's case - founders) gravitate to them not because there is no choice but the value that they offer is so far above and beyond any competition that exists today. The point to note is - traditional definitions of monopoly abuse don't apply, unlike for example: Apple extorting 30% from app devs, which is a blindingly obvious case of abuse.

YC just put out a superior product for their customers who'd otherwise have to pitch to 20 other angels. If you consider YC like the Amazon marketplace, this new deal can be considered a new private label (like AmazonBasics). It is quite likely that this hurts the economics of some angels. But YC is still makings it primary customers happy.

And talking about superior products, by virtue of its early stage and program design, YC does in fact add substantial value when your company is most vulnerable and needs the most help. A16Z/Sequoia/etc founders, are happy with the money and the short lived legitimacy the branded money confers.

But most YC founders seem to owe their existence to YC i.e. they love YC like an alma mater, which is exactly how YC positions itself. No angel/fund can compete with that emotional connect with checkbooks. Soon YCG will be giving later stage VCs a run for their money.

Disclaimer: I am a yc alum. YC is far from a guarantee of success as my dying company can testify. And they are quick to remind that the Harvard analogy doesn't go very far because the median YC company is still a dead one.

Well, cost of doing business. So it’s not perfect, nothing is. But is it still a better store of value than your bank and pension which you may not realize, but are getting robbed by the Robinhoods you voted to power to replace the manchild?

I am an gadget fan. I wouldn’t be caught dead with an Android or a Windows thingy in my hand. Also a small dev. Here is the thing. Apple offers no revenue promise when I publish my app on iOS. If I don’t figure out how to market my app, it will just sit there and rot. But as soon as someone buys my app, I have to pay 15% to Apple. What for? It did NOT help me get my customer. If my app gets featured then may be I ll pay for the purchase bump. But what if I don’t want to be featured if it’s not worth the cut. I am paying plain and simple because Apple has the key to my customers phone. Where I come from, that shit is called extortion.

What Apple is going is just obnoxious and as clear a case of anti-trust as has ever been. 30% of revenue for no services offered, just because they can, is the definition of extortion. The only thing stopping them from asking 30% off of your Amazon orders placed via Safari is because the consumer has a choice of another browser for free. Otherwise these high priests of design and aesthetics would make the shirt on your back cost 30% more. Your app can't even tell the consumer that they can pay outside and avoid paying the Apple tax infinitely AFTER paying for their really expensive device. This is keeping the consumer in the dark to exploit them. This isn't capitalism. This is monopoly abuse.

fuck yeah brother.

Haha, take your point about the tendency to "classify". There is good reason for that however: he is a VC. One of the big things that keeps VCs busy is classifying/stereotyping teams and looking for patterns of success. Yes, he should probably keep some of these "frameworks" to himself. There isn't enough since in there to be taken seriously in a peer reviewed paper. But hey, he is PG! And there are weaklings, probably not members of his favored quadrant, who swear by his views :).

Desperate move to keep up the charade of not being a CCP shop. On a slightly separate note, given all the virtue signaling of companies like Apple in the context of BLM, its worth reiterating that any US tech company helping the imperial CCP spy and silence its citizens is unambiguously although quite duplicitously with the dark side. Any doubts the world had that the CCP is peace loving humans just like us, now stand well and truly shattered. They are communists and they are rich. They are more dangerous than the Soviets ever got to be.

You'd imagine the Chinese communists would be smarter having been in business for 50 years now. But when pushed into a corner on taking the responsibility for the deadly virus, all they can think of is grabbing land and starting wars with their unfortunate neighbors. But better sooner than later. Now you know that when the dragon becomes a super power, it will be nasty, petty, manipulative, bloody, totalitarian & downright ugly. American capitalism propped up CCP. But CCP covets land and power more than money. And they'd rather go to war with their neighbors than accept that they were responsible for the breakout and the spread. The only fault of TikTok, just like that of Huawei and every other Chinese company is that their ultimate masters is the CCP. And yes that's enough reason to ban them.

This was amazing on Google's part. We are a small company with a teeny-weeny seed round, struggling to take off and Google's credits literally extended our runway and saved the team a lot of anxiety in the next 12 months. Just wanted to share with HN, not least because this is what I had criticized Google for in the past right here.

In 30 years if not sooner, humanity will look back and be horrified with this time when we let a whole vulnerable generation fall prey to social media and hyper connectivity while parents bought stocks of the very same recreational drug manufacturers and peddlers who hooked our children to their product.

Well put sistah!

Apple charges 30% from newspapers and magazines - an industry that is struggling to make any money. But not Facebook which makes way more money than all the newspapers in the world taken together. Yes Apple built the platform but by charging a 30% margin it is fleecing it’s customers who already paid through their noses for the devices and/or skimming the entire profit of some developers. It doesn’t even seem like a good business practice from a corporation that makes most of its money through other seemingly legit means. Bottom line, all the virtue signaling aside, Apple is very much a capitalist concern with the morality of a cute crocodile. What’s a monopoly without a little price gouging, eh??

Very magnanimous of big G! Obliging us with virtual trinkets that cost them nothing when most of us be out of jobs soon and a few really unlucky ones may die. Bet their PR department is made up of lawyers only. Complete lack of empathy and imagination. Full marks for greed and being clever by half. Let’s see if other companies in valley follow their “lead” in hand waving or actually do something that matters.

There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.

Or he is quite happy to have cashed out instead of wasting his life away trying to run a low (if any) margin, weak network effects business with local competitors and regulators nibbling at your sanity.

Exactly. The real reason why FB is evil is not because it makes a ton of money from data that you willingly provide it, its simply because of what it is - a platform that takes advantage of a human weakness - vanity, to keep you "engaged". It is an addiction that Zuck sells, pretty sure he knows it. The privacy bit is only a red herring and what should be the least of user's concerns. Just stop "using".

User friendliness aside, the 30% that Apple keeps is just plain & simple monopoly abuse, especially on the iOS App Store where Apple does control a majority of the market in US. That they haven't been held up for anti-trust shows that capitalism is not all well. Apple provides no value in exchange for that 30% except charging gatekeepers fee for the entry ticket to their platform. And as this article states, they in fact stand up more hurdles by shoving their limited payments system down the developer's throat. The companies worst affected by this are digital content providers like news/mags which are already struggling.

Public cloud is definitely a great value for startups. When you are small and want the flexibility and speed and the sophistication that cloud providers make possible. The premium they charge is well worth up to a certain point at least. When you are an established business with mature tech and of the size of BoA, it is a whole different math. Your investment in your own cloud if done right can be a huge saving that can give more mileage (on Wall Street) than your competitors speed in execution, esp if you are a bank, where time to market isn’t exactly a winner.

I recall a case study about the telecom industry and how it was a race to the bottom laying undersea cables and then the bubble burst. But that assessment was in hindsight. I guess a distinction needs to be made between a "bubble" which is a part of the market economy, and what can be called a "ponzi scheme" which is malicious from the very beginning.

Care to spare some details? Your first hand experience even without the names can be most useful/interesting for HN types.

If this thing is "smart", wouldn't a software reset like via a voice command be easier?

I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration.

Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness.

Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.

I am a web dev and react debug console matters a lot to me but on FF it does this weird scroll to the top thing every time I switch file tabs. And it’s in general buggy. Now it may have to do with the plugin dev but if you want to be a viable platform, dudes need to be writing good software on top. I love the promise of FF and would want to make it my dev browser but using Chrome out of sheer necessity.

Useless idea. Social networks esp FB should come with a statutory warning: Excessive vanity can cause permanent brain damage leading to a dysfunctional real life with real friends/family who may actually give 2 fux about you.

Curious how this stacks up against draft js?

Harmful content as in all that vanity driven public posts by otherwise normal humans. Wait who specializes in that?

What Google had to do was to blindly copy Fakebook and use its search engine to market the hell out of it while there was still hope. In other words be ruthless. But that trait comes easier to MarkZ than the Google trio. If you couldn’t, at least don’t use math guys to build a product for humans. You see Circles and collections and a plus one button may sound cute to HN audience but are far too complex ideas for an average user. The avg dude needs a textbox and a feed. Any value adding concept scrambles brains.

There are good PMs and those pretending/forced to be, just like not all "hackers" are LinusT. In product minded startups, at least one founder has got to be a good early stage PM. Most calls in the beginning are gut calls but good PMs/founders will quickly get in a state where data begins to take over gut increasingly. Although the best PMs also have the best guts and know when to trust one over the other.