But if democracies put together modest bids that their citizens can accept and authoritarians promise to make it spectacular + offer larger bribes, who will win?
I agree that you can learn more facts about place than you can by visiting for a few days, I think this is kind of misleading. I've mostly interacted with the world through the internet and have a decent sense for other cultures, world leaders, political systems, leading exports, types of food, etc but the <20 days I've spent abroad really feel like much richer experiences and were very eye opening. I think globalism and the internet make us think the world is a little smaller than it is.
As an immigrant and International Relations major (forever ago), I definitely believe in the value of traveling. But I also believe in "living like a local" wherever you go to truly experience what that place is about... which is virtually impossible during any global event like the Olympics or the football World Cup
Markets are imperfect and irrational, but you really don't think that there is a trillion dollar misunderstanding about the efficacy of the practice? Idk jack about advertising but it seems unlikely to me.
That's fair but homepathic medicine is dwarfed by regular medicine in the industrialized world. There's no homepathic Pfizer or Bayer. I think if there was another practice that was way better than targeted advertising, targeted advertising might exist as a distant woo-woo second.
I mean... add text and you can describe most of the internet and digital information in general. I don't think it's a useful way to make a comparison at all.
The commonality between FB, IG, Tiktok, Snapchat, Twitter (and YouTube to some extent) is that they're primarily personalized algorithmically generated infinite feeds of stories. The particular algorithms and their objective functions differ from app to app but the underlying model is just the same. These sites generally do have other ways of consuming information, but the dominant mechanism is the algorithmically generated personalized feed.
There are alternatives, such as sites like HN (single feed for everyone), Reddit (per-subreddit ranking which is global rather than algorithmically targeted), many news sites (organized by department vs infinite scroll, newsletters (here's today's set of stories for everyone), etc.
I see what you mean but this string of social network website all have this "come together to do nothing but comment" basis. And that's probably why they spin into data hoarding nothingness, because there was no evolved purpose in the first place.
I'd have a hart time comparing HN, deviantart and a few other places with facebook and instagram..
Is the couple days work thing really relevant? You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine) and it's worth thousands of times Wordle. I think it has to be customer base, IP, and developer team that they're really paying for.
> You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine)
I've never worked there, but I imagine you are hilariously wrong. You couldn't even make static copies of the website and mobile apps on all platforms in a couple months. That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. There's also the fact that none of it would stay running without the active maintenance by the ops team and developers. Zooming out, the consumer facing stuff we are talking about probably makes up about 10% of their total codebase and the practices around it. Zooming further out, the business would grind to a halt without the operational practices and personnel keeping it running.
You might be able to make a clone of what Airbnb looked like a few months after it started in a few months.
While building all of airbnb is hard, let's look at a clone like outdoorsy, which is airbnb for rv's. It was very functional a year ago, and i doubt if it took a decent team more than a few months. The lore of how to build for scale is now far more widely known, and anyone doing dd on a codebase can figure out if scaling a monolith will require a full scorched earth or whether its has nice modularity allowing it to scale in flight, and/or get to fairly high scale with light application of autoscale shards and now commonplace cloud methodology.
The issue is brand and usability, and wordle has it. The method for social sharing is genius, i think. A great example of privacy by design (sharing is explicit and through an image not a share button going who knows where).
It would take months to make static copies of the website and mobile apps? There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.
The AWS bill and ops are definitely relevant but didn't seem to be in the spirit of the original point about it taking X days to make. I didn't take "make" to include the effort of staffing up customer service people and whatnot. Maybe I should've but I dont think that's even what the person I responded to meant.
Web, Android, and iOS? Fully internationalized? Every single screen, including hundreds of variations that only apply to specific weird scenarios that you only see once you're managing hundreds of thousands of stays a day? Special promotions? Screens that only appear in specific markets? All of the little frontend interactions?
I'm guessing you saw a guy bang together one or two simple screens in english and skip a bunch of details
" That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. "
Nah, people use way too much bloatware in that stuff. OKCupid had a big advantage over its competitors back in the day because they wrote fast code that saved them a ton of bucks on servers. Some of it is FOSS now: see okws.org . These days I'd consider seastar.io as an alternative.
There's not much network effect for wordle. If you make another one tomorrow I can just as easily play it there. To be honest buying his game was as much a courtesy from the times as anything, if they were unscrupulous and didn't fear brand hit, they could simply copy it.
They definitely bought it for the current userbase not the actual content, the NY Times article opens straight into how they are hoping to switch it to a subscription after the "initial" period.
Even if they only convert 2% of current players to 1 years worth of subscription that's 2 million of whatever "low millions" they put into it without having to grow their own userbase from scratch while competing with the original free one everyone is already using today.
I don't think so. You could make a Wordle clone with exactly the same ability to share results, and there would be no reason to use the original Wordle over Wordle 2. This is not true of say, Facebook - the fact that all your friends are already on Facebook makes it more valuable than Facebook 2.
Airbnb is not about the app, it is the database of available rooms with reviews and photos and all the details, also the brand value that generates page views to make those bookings happen.
The app is very very small part of Uber or AirBnb business
I think it's normal to acquihire for stuff like this. But I'm not confident. Maybe it's just a condition of sale that he spend a week talking to the NYT games team about the design and codebase.
They could work around that last point pretty easily. Add NYT logo top left, add NYT puzzles promo and sub up-sell on the stats page after the daily play. That could be done in a way that wasn't overbearing.
Yes, they had incredible techniques. They could detect a remote island by the way the swell is disrupted. Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.
They set themselves a task that they weren't up to, and they failed at it. It doesn't make sense to say "it is remarkable that they made it", because they didn't make it.
You know this happened 500 years ago, right? If someone did this today and had that death rate, I would absolutely agree, but the challenges then were drastically different. No, not everyone made it, but those who did were the first to circumnavigate the planet - and they very much did make it.
A little off topic, but as a reminder of how different the world used to be: families used to move across the US on foot, maybe with a wagon carrying their supplies, and many died doing so. I'm quite thankful I can just get on a plane to see my family :).
Also, as someone who needs to remind themselves occasionally to be less negative, I would encourage you to be less negative about things that aren't 100% a success.
P.S. If you really want to hate on Magellan it would make sense to do so for something like him burning a village in Mactan because they didn't want to convert to Catholicism[0], not this. You may be pleased to hear that this directly led to his death.
By any metric related to exploration they were wildly successful. The amount of information that was gathered and relayed on a single voyage at that point in history was astounding, and the story was incredible.
Can't the company be compelled to provide salary data for the role? I assume there is some kind of enforcement mechanism. So then it's a matter of explaining why your lowest paid senior engineer makes 150k, the median makes 200k and you've listed a floor of 10k? The judge/jury don't have to accept a smarmy response about how the hypothetical candidate might conceivably make 10k.
And on the subject of the window, most places have much narrower bands than that for a role. It might be that wide for all engineers, but not for senior engineers for example.
An 60k is easily an entry level salary. And 300k is easily a principal engineer's salary. Put the two under the same job title and then you can say to the jury, "it's not just credible that this salary range could exist, this range actually already exist right now."
They do at my company. Everyone is just "Software Developer". I don't see anything wrong with it, I find that titles are largely meaningless anyways. At some companies "principal engineer" is handed out after 3-4 years of experience, and at others principal engineer is the highest title with only 1-2% of devs holding it.
I can accept that prospect, but the thing I find the be really messed up is how you can be diluted beyond what you agreed to? It's not a percentage of ownership. They can just issue more shares. I don't get that.
Dilution can happen when investors put money into the company, increasing the value of shares. Does it matter if you own 1% of a million dollar valuation company? Or 0.1% of a 10 million dollar one?
Separately, I haven’t seen an equity grant in terms of percentage of the company, so on paper one never agrees to a percentage ownership anyways.
Do you mean meaningful in the bull** jobs way or the moralistic way? I find the moralistic version confusing. I usually hear it applied to CEO pay, which last year was 350x the average worker. But what will ever feel like a fair or just differential? 7x? 3x? And what would be a fair metric? Are dentists less or more than social workers? What about dangerous jobs, are lumberjacks worth more than coal miners?
