"The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents , according to Tadelis’s calculations." - that issue isn't related to a problem with digital advertising, but to horrible financial management
Readit NewsWarren Buffett famously said: "When you read EBITDA, you should think BULLSHIT". The only reliable metrics are EBIT (if you precisely know the debt and tax situation of the company, which is usually laid open in the reports), and NET PROFIT.
Remember just 1 month ago, when WeWork tried to FRAUD everyone with their "we invented our own EBITDA"-metric, which they called 'EBIT adjusted for consciousness, because we sell consciousness, so we factor in the amount of consciousness we generate per square mile!!!!' ?
countryqt30 commented on React Concurrent Mode reactjs.org/docs/concurre... · Posted by u/gmaster1440
This seems quite complicated. Rarely the big perf hit is in js. The big perf hit is usually layout, composite and paint cycles. They are eons slower than manipulating a virtual dom tree in js.
So I don’t get it. You can’t interrupt the browsers native paint cycle. Once you say node.appendChild or change some attr/style. The browsers gonna do what the browsers gonna do.
React was simple. With hooks , concurrent mode, virtual events and mumbo jumbo. I don’t get it anymore. It’s not a lean mean library that takes minutes to run and one can’t read the source in a couple of hours
We switched to vueJS and never regretted :)
countryqt30 commented on Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/akrain
What are good examples of Reinvest Software? My guess would be Amazon, but what others?
@sifilpov: Most high-growth startups are like this, and a fair share of "growth companies". Differentiating the two is exactly the difficult part ;).
One upside of saving it as hundreds of lines: You can immediately spot if somebody is copying or stealing your logo. I think very well that that might be intentional.
countryqt30 commented on Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era vice.com/en_us/article/d3... · Posted by u/Osiris
During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.
Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.
However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.
Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.
Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.
So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.
In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.
That's exactly the spirit! The internet makes it so easy for "poorer" countries to level up damn quickly! Spread the word there! <3
countryqt30 commented on Ask HN: How did your startup change after an exit? · Posted by u/after_the_exit
Rest and vest... rest and vest...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BaoxI75TRs
I couldn't watch that clip when it first came out. Too close to home.
He got a contract and nothing to do? Perfect, it's free money on the table and he can also take another paid job at the same time! <3
Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.
I'm so happy now that Steam purchases aren't tied to platform and that most gamedevs don't target Mac exclusively. I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. Probably lots of people will do the same.
At the same time, it will also WEED OUT a lot of crapware. Only the best and best-cared-for software will remain :D.
countryqt30 commented on How much does air pollution cost the U.S.? earth.stanford.edu/news/h... · Posted by u/hhs
I don't know why Tesla and other electric car manufacturers don't yell and shout more about how much better electric cars are for human health in cities. The climate change argument for EVs is kind of weak, since you still have to produce the electricity. But it's much better for lung health to produce the electricity in a far-off place and then transport it via the power grid to the EVs in a city, than to have the vehicle itself burn the gasoline and emit the exhaust right out on the streets where people are walking around.
Because if you would REALLY CARE, you would walk by foot or not leave the house at all! ;)
eBay ran into millions of problems, because they focussed on "how could we improve sales by 0.0001%" and is the ROI of this ad 0.001% or 0.002%?