cpkpad

6 ms·

1.
by cpkpad 8y ago
External forces happen. I've certainly seen businesses shut down for reasons outside of their control. It's just that this happens a minority of the time. Most of the time, businesses shut down either because: 1. High-risk venture
2.
by cpkpad 8y ago
A lot of the more successful entrepreneurs I know operate a lot like Elon Musk. The basic model seems to be to: * Start a project in spare time * Validate technology (prototype something) * Validate market demand (talk to customers) * Valid
3.
by cpkpad 8y ago
I think you're actually missing the point. "Competent to execute" is far more important than "working hard enough." Elon Musk splits his life between Tesla, Solarcity (now part of Tesla, but essentially independent)
4.
by cpkpad 8y ago
You have to look at the other side of the equation too: expenses and family structures. $200k euros in the bank is a ton if you're a single student. It's a very short runway if you have 6k/month in mortgage, 2k/month in
5.
by cpkpad 8y ago
I've seen order-of-magnitude difference in abilities of companies to: * Build products * Sell products * Recruit * Build rapport with customers * Evaluate business models Most of that is ability. Few people have ability in /all&#x
6.
by cpkpad 8y ago
Nope. I've seen plenty of successful companies bumble around and have dumb luck. The reverse is also true -- perfect execution is rare and almost guarantees success. I'll reemphasize that even competent execution is rare; few peop
7.
by cpkpad 8y ago
Open edX
8.
by cpkpad 8y ago
It almost certainly is, and I sure hope the Apache Foundation starts to enforce their trademark. Otherwise, they might lose it. They have a trademark on "Apache" and even a lot of software under the "Apache Commons" bran
9.
by cpkpad 8y ago
I don't think that's what's being suggested. The idea that redlining should be reexamined by the courts every half century or so is what's being suggested. In 2018, courts ought to find its still illegal give facebook a
10.
by cpkpad 8y ago
To be fair, the system works pretty well on the whole. One of the reasons I switch to Uber/Lyft because of the extreme attention on customer service. Drivers are very motivated to keep customers happy. That's a big difference to c
11.
by cpkpad 8y ago
I have similar use cases. Startup time starts to matter once you either want to build test cases or put scripts in loops. If I have a script that parses one big data file, and I decide to parse 1000, it's often helpful if I can run tha
12.
by cpkpad 9y ago
.... Or they could have made play areas kids wanted to go to (when I was a child, going to Toys-r-Us was the ultimate thing), and sold toys people wanted (instead of branded sensory-overload crap). They failed to adapt to consumers of 2018.
13.
by cpkpad 9y ago
People hate Circuit City. Not quite clear why you'd want to start with a hated brandname. There was the whole restocking fee thing, the DMCA thing, and a whole bunch of others. I don't quite recall them all. Plus, it was always ov
14.
by cpkpad 9y ago
I would have much the same feeling if I didn't have a child myself. There are many good toy stores around. Toys-R-Us just isn't one of them anymore. At some point between when I was a child and now, someone cannibalized that whole
15.
by cpkpad 9y ago
8-year study of progressive education from a hundred years ago is probably the oldest result showing project-based learning works well. Miki Chi's ICAP is the current one. You have the same result repeated with a new methodology every
16.
by cpkpad 9y ago
> That implies they must find a lot of suckers to sell to. Stock prices are usually driven by analysts who spend their days analyzing companies to predict future performance. Good luck fooling them all. It actually indicates something a
17.
by cpkpad 9y ago
I'm in favor of ditching usernames. Using real names, though? If I were to short-list bad idea to kill the site, that'd be pretty close to the top.
18.
by cpkpad 9y ago
In many states, this has already happened due to a different area of law which operates on rumor and innuendo: divorce. In several states, divorce law was rewritten by feminists and a lobby of divorce lawyers. In those states, the vast majo
19.
by cpkpad 10y ago
I cannot sufficiently emphasize how true this is. Source: Intimately familiar with the Media Lab. As with most places, there is a type of conformable non-conformance. Kind of like casual Fridays at work, or office humor. The Media Lab, and
20.
by cpkpad 10y ago
Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills fo
21.
by cpkpad 10y ago
There is a scale of insincerity to rudeness. I've been in cultures where each of those is considered respectful and reasonable. The onus is very much on corporate America to accept diversity. Right now, the only persons of color who ar
22.
by cpkpad 10y ago
There were many people greatly superior to Linus technically in the BSD community when Linux was wiping BSD's chronometers.
23.
by cpkpad 10y ago
You're confusing corruption for incompetence.
24.
by cpkpad 10y ago
Ain't gonna happen. It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it. Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather tha
25.
by cpkpad 10y ago
Indeed. The quiz doesn't start with "What does the ANSI C standard guarantee about..." It says "So you think you know C." C is a cross-platform assembly language. I use it when I need to code to the metal. I know ex
26.
by cpkpad 10y ago
Make the work meaningful, impactful, and rewarding, so the kid will want to do it.
27.
by cpkpad 10y ago
It depends on where the pressure is places. If the pressure is placed on kids, sure. If it's placed on schools, that's not toxic. The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and do
28.
by cpkpad 10y ago
Boston is one of the original Uber markets. The market is as saturated as it gets. I talk to drivers. They're much better off. It's like night and day. Driving for medallion owners was sub-minimum wage, they'd sometimes lose
29.
by cpkpad 10y ago
I live in Boston. Taxi drivers are jumping to Uber and Lyft wholesale. They make more, and perhaps more importantly, the income is steady. With the taxi system, medallions cost about $600,000 to buy, and were owned by rich investors. Cab dr
30.
by cpkpad 10y ago
In Boston, Uber drivers make much more than taxi drivers. Taxi drivers pay around $200 per day to rent a medallion from an investor (medallions were $600k investments at the time Uber came in). They had to work insane hours to make a profit

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