HN user
We are in the midst of a massive trend towards automation and robotics. Every year, we are seeing more tasks and more jobs successfully completed by robots, and more and more robots completing "work" tasks more efficiently than humans.
I am not qualified to statistically prove the automation trend, but I believe you are being obtuse in rejecting the premise that said trend exists at all.
It is true. Apple has a 70% profit margin on sales that they reinvest.
Just because revenue is reinvested doesn't mean it isn't revenue or a margin.
And, seeing as Apple has >$100,000,000,000 of cash and near cash, your "reinvestment" line is a total fantasy. Apple is printing cash with a massive profit margin, and reinvesting a tiny tiny tiny fraction of that money back into their business.
Actually, the part where you invent a bad strawman solely for the purpose of labeling me an asshole makes you an asshole.
You couldn't even quote me. You couldn't even use my words. You just invented a pathetic little fantasy and then attacked ME directly based on your fantasy world.
Pathetic, dude, pathetic.
Hey, step out of the 1980's!
I have used telecommunication services for over a decade now, and I have never once done business with AT&T or a Mabell company.
Perhaps it's YOU who needs a sense of proportion. It isn't 1984 anymore. Mabell isn't a massive monopoly: Google, however, is becoming one.
Instead of arguably, I think "currently" works better. We are currently much better robots at these tasks.
Your entire rant completely forgets that Apple runs, on average ~70% profit margin ($700 phone costs about $200 to make). Samsung's profit margins aren't AS high, but still are massive which help drive profit.
Your analysis pretends that Apple and Samsung are selling very custom hardware at a margin, and so one cannot beat the margin AND beat the custom hardware.
But there is a LOT of wiggle room to experiment with price when the incumbents are running 70% profit margins.
Kent described anarchy as law and freedom without force, and a republic as force with law and freedom.
I'm sometimes amazed how otherwise competent adults believe that one investor focused for profit corporation isn't capable of behaving just like another investor focused for profit corporation.
When I look at Google services, I see a lot of monopolies forming. For example, Hangouts now takes over SMS messages, and is automatically installed on all Android devices as a system app that cannot be removed. Or, in order to interact with Youtube, one requires a wholly unrelated public Google+ profile.
For someone to say that Google is incapable of abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, while they are already abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, is amazing to me.
"In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone."
This is totally absurd. My choices are "click one button" or "do a whole lot of bullshit that sounds like a lot of annoying work".
I hope you can understand why "one button" is taken more often than "raise hell on and offline".
The real solution is to separate spam and unwanted emails. Gmail and services need to add a separate button for non-spam unwanted emails, so they can categorize and learn about usage habits effectively.
But it's horrific, insanely bad UX design to create a flawed system then blame the users for using it naturally. I'm sorry but the user is not wrong, the system is wrong. The solution isn't "user training", it's "system redesign".
If the system were designed correctly, users would naturally gravitate to the correct option without training. That's good UX. Until then, it's perfectly acceptable to use whatever tools are available to achieve the desired outcome. That's software for you.
Personally, there are a select few brands from whom I enjoy reading unsolicited emails.
They have proven themselves to me and I like them on an irrationally human level.
What bothers me, however, is when the other 99.9% of the brands I interact with automatically assume that they are the 0.1%.
Yes, it's possible and acceptable to have that kind of relationship between a client/business, but the problem becomes when a brand believes that they can control that relationship, or define it themselves, or simply assume that it exists.
"Personal vendetta"
Hahaha! YES! I have a personal vendetta against unsolicited email.
If you send me an email that I am not expecting, then I will flag it as "unsolicited".
I do not care if you provide other mechanisms for handling unsolicited email. I do not care if you used a dark pattern to technically ask me to solicit the email without my conscious knowledge.
The way you call it vindictive is empowering and enlightening.
It's your way of calling it unfair, of attacking the person as immoral and undermining the point of their behavior. You're trivializing them as petty. Instead of saying "I understand why someone might be unhappy at me sending them email they do not want" you say "it is vindictive and petty for someone to treat unwanted advertising from for-profit businesses this way". What a sick joke.
So you know what? GOOD! If "vindictive" means "control over your inbox" then I AM VINDICTIVE. I will PUNISH anyone who gets into my inbox without my approval. Email is WAR and I am fighting for Inbox Zero. Send those emails my way lightly ... tread carefully with that send button, because you might just find your messages are unwanted and end up clearly marked as unwanted.
Insult us users all you want, trivialize us all you want, attack our behavior all you want: I DO NOT WANT UNSOLICITED EMAIL and will HAPPILY and "vindictively" (lol) mark unwanted email as "unsolicited".
I would point out the recent fun little study showing that the class we are (those who work for a salary) have less say in policy outcomes than the rich (those who do not require a salary).
They bill it as "The US is more of an oligarchy than democracy" because those very few >0.1% of Americans have a greater political say than the rest of us.
Surge Pricing is illegal in Berlin, and probably other European countries. And I imagine the illegality of price gouging ("surge pricing") while also skirting taxi regulation will be expanded dramatically in the coming years, all across much of Europe and blue states.
Yes, you can profit when you find loopholes in regulations that your competitors can't take advantage of. Color me shocked.
There is nothing we can do, really. Money is very close to power, and obviously the relatively poor (those who rely on a salary) have far less say and control than the extravagantly paid (those who do not require a salary). It is a fundamental trait of our free and capitalist society. We're merely mourning obvious inefficiencies, "bugs" in the convoluted system of laws and philosophies and culture that govern our society.
This is a suboptimum outcome, in our opinion. Watching inequality rise dramatically over a few short decades only bolsters the belief that these are suboptimal outcomes.
And watching these unmeritorious fools perform poorly while being paid thousands of times the average pay of their own staff is disheartening. It's obviously not a meritocracy. It's obvious that the extravagant, suboptimal pay scheme isn't buying quality leadership, nor is it rewarding any kind of out-sized risk on the part of management. Tiny risk compared to venture or entrepreneur, small or negative benefit, massive reward.
I apologize, I believe it's functionally untrue. I believe functionally that Intuit has approximately 0% effect on tax reform.
I was being glib in saying that they do have an effect, because to me a 0.01 - 0.05% level of effect is negligible.
A billion dollars has already been raised in the 2014 midterms. A non-presidential year, 6 months before the election, and a billion has already flowed in.
So yes, your millions are a very tiny fraction of the money flowing in.
That's wholly untrue. Yes, the tax preparation industry has made token donations to efforts to preserve the current tax code.
But I would argue that the failure of tax reform is not so simple. Major tax reform is a massive, massive legislative undertaking. And doing so redefines many of the basic American incentives. Having your say in tax reform is the equivalent of leaving your mark on the next 20-30 years of American society.
Suffice to say, the massive polarization of our Legislature, combined with the hyper-efficacy of Senate obstruction, and finished off with the fact that tax reform is hard to campaign on means that there is no real incentive for our legislators to reform. But sure, a token campaign contribution making up a miniscule fraction of total donations doesn't hurt...
"What? No, we don't do anything like that. What on Earth are you talking about?"
I mean that if you view a gfycat it's a totally white page, if you view a mediacrush your logo and navigation are all over the page. Gfycat appears unbranded most of the time, your service does not.
As for progress bar, gfycat shows you a real-time indication of the status of the upload. Yours is a dummy progress bar that gives no indication of progress and will run even if the service is doing nothing (as the "we don't support youtubes we just 'upload' endlessly until you quit" test proved to me).
Your fake progress bar and lack of error handling caused me to wait 20 minutes to upload a video for converting with zero indication that there was anything amiss. As I performed during my test, gfycat handled multiple youtubes and large gifs (1-10MB) in under 5 minutes total, while I waited 20+ minutes on Mediacrush before giving up on many of my inputs.
I had to contact a creator of the service to find out it didn't support one of the most popular and most used features of the competitor he claims to be superior to!
I understand I'm downvoted, I understand this community is rewarding you.
But sorry buddy: outside of HN, Gfycat beat you with a superior service. Not because of the admins, but because users like me who willingly make the choice. Who submit links from gfycat not mediacrush. Who convert everything we see into gfycat. Because we compare services with videos, large gifs, small gifs and everything in between and pick what we like best. You didn't convince me: quite the opposite, you attacked me for judging your service and took zero criticism fairly, even when gfycat is easily and objectively better in the eyes of the users who you have to win over to see any viral success in subreddits. To see someone say "we're superior in every way" is such a heartbreak to me. How can you compete if you're unwilling to have fair perspective?
I will promote gfycat on reddit comments wildly, as I have in the past, as so many hundreds of users have loudly and strongly done so-- and thats why gfycat will succeed. Because of users like me who go into comments and convert every gif and video to gfycat and become the most upvoted comments. Gfycat succeeds because of viral attraction to it.
All the best luck, but you might consider adding basic error handling, upgrading your UI to meet parity with gfycat, and might want to add features like youtube if you want to compete. You can find legal reasons why you can't, but that just means I pick gfycat over mediacrush every single time. Your legal concerns are not mine-- I want the best service, not the "most proper" service or whatever. I'd move quick though, gfycat is already moving to become a mainstay in many video/image subreddits and your window to displace it is closing faster than you might believe.
"MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. "
I disagree. You're very protective of your work and obviously deluded to the quality. It's a shame.
As a reddit user I will continue to use gfycat as in my 25 minutes of testing over 5 different sources, gfycat worked in under 15 seconds and for 100% of the time, and provides an objectively superior feature set at every stage of the process.
At this point I don't even know what you support. You don't list it on your webpage (gfycat does), and you don't fail when bad input is brought in (gfycat does). You don't give a progress report for uploads (gfycat does) and you don't support speed changing on html5 videos (gfycat does). Your service brands all pages with your logo and naviagation links, gfycat hides the entire UI except for at certain times, for a much much cleaner look that almost appears like a native gif.
Just did multiple gifs as a test and gfycat is just objectively much faster at uploading and encoding. Gfycat finishes the whole process while your service says "pending" before it begins! I'm sorry, I don't see a single way your service is better. Maybe outline them instead of just claiming it is?
Sorry you don't agree. Keep blaming admins, I'm sure that'll help you build a truly competitive service.
@Sir as a long time reddit user, your total blameshifting of your services inability to compete with gfycat, coming right after listening to you blameshift on why you couldn't compete with imgur, stinks to high heaven from here.
At what point do you accept responsibility for the success and failure of your ability to create a service and make it popular?
At what point do you stop externalizing the blame and get down to the hard task (or simply lucky outcome) of succeeding?
For what it's worth, I just made a gfycat of a youtube video to share with my mom. So I decided to do the exact same process for your service that you tout as superior to gfycat.
With gfycat, it was super simple to paste the youtube link, select the time frame and output the html5 video/gif. Done in under a minute. Your service has not actually completed an "upload" of the youtube video from a link no matter how long I've waited. Whenever I click on the random floating microphone near the top left of your services homepage, I simply see "an error occurred". I don't know how long I'm supposed to wait for this to work, but I just made 3 more youtube->gfycats while waiting.
I'm not lying, here are the 3 youtube -> gfycats that finished while your service says "uploading" without a progress bar at all (gfycat has a working progress bar so I can helpfully tell that it downloads the youtube video in about 10-15 seconds). http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob
No offense but gfycat obviously blows your service out of the water, so perhaps you should play catch-up instead of blaming reddit admins? Which is silly anyway, because gfycat succeeds through comments and people sharing it and talking about it, not through owner spam or something else.
For the record it's been over 10 minutes since I began a youtube -> html5 conversion on your site and it still says "uploading" and I think it's broken.
How is it bad for the car? Are Tesla's accepting OTA updates while driving, and updating firmware while the vehicle is moving?
If so then you're right, they've made a terribly unsafe decision.
But if you have to stop the vehicle, put it in park or off, before it actually updates the software, then a bricked car isn't exactly dangerous, just a massive inconvenience and a source of incredible frustration.
"So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more! Any business owner should know this and withdraw from usage of any MS owned online systems"
FYI: Google and Yahoo have similar policies and similar histories of abuse.
If you feel this way about Microsoft, you should feel this way about Google products, sites and services too.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/yahoo-goog...