wayne
Joined 19 years ago
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242
Member since
Apr 3
https://www.waynekao.com
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 25 days ago
patio11 wrote an in-depth post about how the Southern Poverty Law Center abused their ownership of a list that every payment processor used to decide which hates groups to de-bank: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...
Comment · 6 months ago
Yet he did still launch Vision Pro.
Comment · 7 months ago
If you search for them on LinkedIn, it's a small team of ~5 outside of Silicon Valley (Austin, Spain, Norway). I'm sure they're doing quite well but even if they were doing just ok it doesn't have to make billions for everyone to do ok.
Comment · 8 months ago
I enjoyed this program a lot as a kid. It had a very strange interface I found inefficient but the documents you could create were animated and fun.
Sounds like Microsoft had enough confidence in the interface after this to proceed with Bob and Clippy (Clippit): https://www.howtogeek.com/723648/did-you-know-microsoft-made...
Comment · 1 year ago
It might be a fad, but the current trend in US public aviation is increasing premium cabins and premium revenue:
https://simpleflying.com/why-us-carriers-doubling-down-premi...
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
Comment · 1 year ago
I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
Comment · 1 year ago
Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ms-moving-hotmail-to-win2000-s...
Comment · 1 year ago
We're well past 2016, but Stratechery had an opinion that Dropbox focused too much on infrastructure projects like this and would have had more success focused on improving product/market fit.
"That's why I actually find this announcement really disappointing. Apparently Dropbox has been devoting significant resources for at least two years to a project that will no doubt have a positive impact on the bottom line but a minimal impact on the top line. It's all well-and-good (and honestly impressive) to announce 500 million registered users, but the reluctance to disclose both active users and especially the number (and size) of its business customers speaks even more loudly. How might have the product and company evolved if the company had continued to rely on AWS and devoted its resources to fixing its product-market fit problem?"
https://stratechery.com/2016/dropbox-leaves-aws-should-ups-a...
Comment · 2 years ago
Very different from the airline industry which still honors lifetime flight and lounge passes sold decades ago.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/20/mark-cuban-bought-an-america...
Comment · 3 years ago
The immediate catalyst was the EU, but this is likely what Apple wanted all along by launching ATT and running all its PR about privacy. Users pay instead of advertisers, and Apple gets its 30%.
Comment · 3 years ago
I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA
Comment · 3 years ago
The article touches a little on flight costs, but as someone who'd love to visit sometime and never has, it annoys me how flights to Guam work. Given its location most airlines don't fly direct from the mainland, so many flights to Guam are from Asia. But, you can't buy a ticket from the US with a layover in Japan from JAL or with a layover in Korea from Korean Air because any flight with a US origin to a US destination can only be sold by a US carrier. That eliminates all Asian competition and the US airlines get a monopoly even though they barely fly there and many of these flights are codeshares being operated by Asian airlines!