mblevin

Interesting that it says "every keystroke is encrypted" - seems this is pretty fast and doesn't have the lag that I would expect in that case.

This dude just cannot tell the truth even for a second.

Obviously nobody needs a VPN to watch something on a national broadcast and he's clearly up to SOMETHING that he shouldn't be under the guise of accessing his NFL game pass account.

This is continual sociopath behavior from someone who can't possibly believe that they could ever do anything wrong, and they are simply misunderstood.

It's utterly maddening.

Funny enough - Satya Nadella introduced a new mission statement at Microsoft shortly after he became CEO[1].

It's pretty anodyne, but by design - it's a way to push the company towards different ways of operating by creating a pretext to say "X project is part of the new mission and here's why" from a top-down perspective.

1. https://www.geekwire.com/2015/exclusive-satya-nadella-reveal...

The other issue is also does "organizing the world's information" fit as the right mission for the company? Company missions change over time.

Larry Page said almost 10 years ago (!!!) that Google's mission probably needed to be updated. That's a long time to be lost in the wilderness.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag...

Very much on purpose and I stole that from somebody else long ago.

The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.

I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.

From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.

It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.

Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.

Exactly. And it's not just marketing emails.

The dichotomy between "marketing tracks, 1-to-1 emails don't" is false. There are hundreds of millions if not a billion installs of people using tracking for 1-to-1 email.

Sales people use dozens prospecting tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, etc for tracking.

Likewise, millions of individual consumers use tools like Gmelius, Mixmax, Streak, etc.

This feels like either manufactured outrage or willful ignorance by a community of supposedly technology-savvy people who should know better.

Definitely the best part is the link to this image from JP Morgan's report on "Unicorns Vomiting Rainbows":

http://imgur.com/VJ4zvWH

I wonder if that speaks to the general issue that Twitter has had in terms of being an effective advertising platform - either in terms of targeting capability or demographics of the userbase.

If even the candidates who are spending money like it's going out of style aren't even using it...

Except most people's natural reaction when they don't understand other people's value systems is not empathy - it's criticism.

It happens on a much lesser level with food, music, movies, etc - the reaction from a non-fan to a 15 year-old girl's declaration that she loves One Direction is not "ok I see why someone could like this music and why this tribal affiliation is both socially useful to a teenager" but rather

Snapchat is the technology version of One Direction for a lot of adults. But also remember many adults couldn't understand why teenage girls went crazy for The Beatles in 1964 either.

Rocket Internet are the biggest ones, but there's a lot following this strategy.

Fabrice Grinda, a prolific entrepreneur/angel coined the term "International Idea Arbitrage" years ago.

See: http://www.fabricegrinda.com/entrepreneurship/international-...

This is 100% a decision in line with much of the core premium Windows audience - corporate employees who use Excel and other programs with numerical data entry on a daily basis.

There has been massive encroachment of MBP and MBAs into the corporate world as BYOD policies have been adopted.

Very smart move.

Rule #1 of the internet - if you're not a consumer and you're not paying for something, you're actually the product.

Exactly - the theory of course is that Zenefits will be able to eventually negotiate down the rates and match or beat Trinet, but right now it's basically doing "awareness arbitrage" - especially with something that people only think about once or twice a year, which is a lifetime in startup land.

It's accidentally brilliant.

I would argue that this is actually the fundamental innovation here - shifting of the cost from the employer to the employee.

With Trinet, you get negotiated rates that are pretty fantastic - but all the employee sees is an outdated interface, and all the employer sees is the monthly overhead cost per employee draining their bank account.

With Zenefits, the employee doesn't see that their health care actually costs more (the employer typically covers the same amount regardless), and the employer doesn't have that monthly fee.

It's as compelling as it is accidentally insidious.

Brilliant from a PR perspective though for your average NYT reader.

I would kill to get an article like that written - it's lengthy, detailed, has an accurate representation of the actual function of the app with tone a that's not breathless or sycophantic, and just the right level of skepticism thrown in so that readers believe a deep, detailed analysis has been done and that this is the future.

Exactly - given an average of 500+ friends and years of being active daily or weekly for a large chunk of that time, the probability that you've at least witnessed an embarrassing incident is many orders of magnitude greater than just having done it yourself.

I really believe there's a high level of wariness among the general FB user population that no amount of marketing or changes in authorization policy can fix. It's a level of trust that's irretrievable.

My sample-size-of-a-few take is that it's a combination of factors:

1) The probability that a Facebook users at somepoint has had a bad experience with rogue Facebook app publishing personal information (or even an accidental acceptance) or was witness to a friend's experience is non-trivial

2) The increasing awareness of the scope and scale of personal data that is taken from logins and shared with advertisers

3) The demographic shift in Facebook usage to older users

4) The large secular increase in awareness of ongoing privacy and financial information breaches that rightly or wrongly is associated with over-sharing of personal information

Not paid directly - it's a combination of 1) brands being top of mind 2) what people / robots will recognize and ever so likely potentially to share or what will have the tiniest bit of extra SEO juice.

#1 only comes from a lot of ongoing PR outreach, coffee chats, briefings, etc - which takes time and $$$$ usually via an agency working nonstop on developing relationships to keep a brand top of mind for side mentions like this and to be at the top of the rolodex when a reporter needs a quote or some help understanding an industry or technology space.

Openstack + spare capacity in a colo facility + a bunch of few years old servers offloaded in a facilities auction and you can build one pretty quickly.

Tech isn't the hard part - barriers to get a service up and running are dropping drastically.

Hard part is marketing & scaling, and as AWS expands services there are risks from pure-play vendors that do just one slice of the stack 2-3x better than Amazon does.

Yep - the article itself isn't terrible exciting outside of the core AWS numbers, but this now serves as the place for the HN community to talk about it - because the numbers are what's interesting.

TL;DR on AWS

- $1.57b in revenue in Q12015 on $22.72B total ($5B annualized for AWS)

- $265m in operating income (net loss for Amazon as a whole was $57m)

Looks like revenue was slightly lower but operating income quite a bit higher than most Wall Street estimates.

The best-case scenario here is articulated well by Tyler Cowen in "Average is Over"[1] - new, future blue-collar equivalent jobs are going to be created to interact with and train the Cambrian explosion of narrow AI applications and robotics, assuming an ongoing paradigm of mostly supervised learning.

The worst case scenario on the other hand is pretty dystopian.

I for one, welcome our new overlords.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Average-Is-Over-Powering-Stagnation-eb...

Don't forget the author (Erik Sandberg-Diment) of that piece's FIRST comically wrong prediction about the imminent failure of Microsoft Windows (and general non-command line interfaces): http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing...

Before there was Paul Krugman writing "the internet is a fad" in the NYT, there was Erik Sandberg-Diment.

The real question for me is: Has Tony Hsieh completely lost his fucking mind, is this the future and we just don't know it yet, or is this all part of some elaborate plan to fire everybody or stage some sort of internal company cleansing?

Seriously - somebody please tell me.

I don't get it.

That would be great - but companies are going to be exercising right of first refusal and changing option plans left and right long before that happens.

Actual price transparency (with low volume that will further distort the differences) for thumbsuck, pie-in-the-sky valuations in an overheated market has only a major downside for founders and investors.

Remember your incentive stock option plan can be changed on a whim by your "stock plan administrator" (e.g. the founders and investors).

This is actually the most insidious misperception that a wide swath of people appear to have about American education.

It's not that the government spends too LITTLE money - it's because it spends too MUCH without any in the form of cheap student loans with no risk based pricing.

Any 18 year old with no credit history can go and and take out over a $200k of student loans ($57,500 / year) from the government, without any regards to school or risk.

Barely graduated high school and majoring in underwater basketweaving at BoneHead U? As long as it's an "accredited school" (a sham process in and of itself), here's your money - at 3.5% interest! Nothing secured against the loan, no evaluation of your ability to repay, nothing - just free money with the not-so-insignificant fact that these loans are mostly non-dischargeable in bankruptcy or in some cases even death[1]

Majoring in computer science at Stanford? Here's the same loan at the same terms!

Now tell me which student is more likely to default and which is the better risk?

It's ABSOLUTELY because loans are underwritten by the US government willy-nilly in the name of "education for all" that we're in this mess, with universities building movie theaters and lazy rivers[2] at taxpayer expense.

It's a trillion dollar bubble waiting to pop.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_Sta...

[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/fashion/college-recreation...

This is a great move and incredibly employee-friendly. We'll see if this is the beginning of other companies following suit, but I doubt it.

As has been discussed before it's not the mechanics that matter here, but rather the psychology of founders.

More often than not, there is the belief that even if you've been an employee for 2+ years, if you're not "in it for the long haul" then you don't deserve to hold on to your equity without paying for it in cash (or taking the tax hit).

Not to mention there's very little incentive to amend these policies outside of generating general goodwill.

It certainly is a form of nepotism, but since when do we regulate nepotism?

The edge case of a VC launching a company themselves is so rare that we're talking about a single instance of when it happened.

Let's not forget every day some entrepreneur goes in to pitch an idea, and a VC picks up the phone and calls a portfolio company and says "hey I have an idea for you."

"VCs will steal your idea and launch it themselves" is not a real risk, especially relative to existing risks.

The issue of VCs launching their own ideas is purely between them and their LPs - if CALPERS is ok with it, then there's no issue.