Alternatively, you're writing/reading enough code, but it just happens to be in four different languages because you're doing a mix of greenfield and legacy, and all of these languages have syntax that's both similar _and_ different enough to mess you up from time to time.
I have been on a date with a conspiracy nut, and can confirm that this is something I'd want to filter out if I was still dating and not in a long-term relationship.
They're buying pageviews/traffic for their content. According to Alexa[0], Yahoo is still the 5th-largest site globally and in the US. That's a pretty large amount of traffic. Assuming Wikipedia (at #7) gets ~765M monthly views [1], and Yahoo gets more than that, that's close to a billion monthly page views. Even if they do nothing other than switch out the Yahoo "relevant stories" algorithm to one that features more of their own, they can still extract a decent amount of value from that.
To your other point - as a consumer, I've personally never really enjoyed any Yahoo offering other than Flickr and fantasy sports. However, as a developer, I saw them do a whole lot of great stuff that they never followed through on. YUI [2] was the first UI framework I used, and was great for rapidly prototyping/developing a good-looking UI half a decade before Bootstrap was a thing. Yahoo Pipes [3] was a rather interesting experiment that sadly never really took off. YQL [4] evolved out of that, and is a pretty neat way to API-ify page scraping. I've used it in a couple small projects.
From my understanding, this is because neither of these are actually true "Chinese" dishes,. Ginger Beef was "invented" by a Chinese immigrant in Calgary in the 1970s [0], whereas the westernized Orange Chicken is actually a variation on General Tso's chicken, which was invented/popularized in New York in the early 1970s [1].
I want a tool that cleans up my bookmarks. I'll often bookmark a page to look at it later, but then never get back to it or forget I bookmarked it. After a few years of using Chrome, I've got a crapload of bookmark bloat. Here's what I'm looking for in such a tool (I might try to build this unless there's something out there already that does this):
* Surface bookmarks I haven't visited in the past N days/months, give me the option to delete them
* Identify groups of bookmarks that are similar (share most of the URL path or one page links to the other) or duplicates.
* Suggest folders to place the bookmarks in based upon what Google knows about the websites (Sports-related, WebDev-related, etc), and/or time (I bookmarked five pages about similar topics on the same day, it's probably part of research I was doing for something)
* Remove dead links or offer to convert them to the Google-cached version
This might be a naive question, but why has there been no strong push to reform patent law in a way that eliminates non-practicing entities? It seems like it would be wise to have a law that a patent expires if the company who holds it goes a certain length of time (2 years, perhaps) without producing a product covered by the patent or transferring it to a company who does.
Would such a law increase innovation (companies are more willing to build products without fear of being sued by patent trolls) or decrease it (patents being less valuable might decrease R+D investment)? My hunch is that it would increase innovation, but I'm not completely sure.
I could see it being more like the DVD/BluRay Extras model - $5 for a pack of commentary tracks, $2 for deleted scenes, another $2-4 for the behind-the-scenes featurette, etc. It would be similar to the more successful DLC implementations, where a handful of enthusiastic users would make up a significant amount of the revenue.
It would be interesting to see how this would/could be applied to both rentals and purchases - rent the bonus features for $0.50-2 each, purchase them for $2-5 each or something like that.
Is there a way to set a maximum price or time you're willing to pay for each request? My biggest hesitation about using something like this would be that it would end up costing way more than I anticipated - something I expect to take 30 minutes could take 4 hours cost $400 instead of $50.
Adding to this, "the free market will decide" can sometimes be a cop-out, but in this case it applies perfectly.
There are reasonably low barriers to entry in this market, for the most part. If Uber treating its drivers as contractors rather than employees impacts Uber drivers in a negative enough way that they would prefer to work elsewhere, there is likely ample space for a competitor which offers a better deal for its drivers.
Drivers have little-to-no incentive to stay with Uber if they can get a better deal elsewhere (based on what I've seen, many already also work for Lyft), and users have little-to-no reason to stick with one on-demand ride app if there's another app that has more availability/drivers.
If cost-of-ride is the biggest competitive differentiator, the price of the ride will stay the same and drivers will be able to choose whether they want to work for a company which treats them as an employee but takes a bigger cut, or a company which takes a smaller cut but treats them as a contractor.
Compartmentalization, as runjake mentioned below, is key.
I worked at Microsoft during the development of Windows 8 (disclaimer: I no longer work there, and only speak for myself here). Certain "secret" features were not available in the "default" OS configuration until shortly before they were announced. Access was restricted only to those who needed it, and only then with manager (or, I believe at one point, director) approval. If you had access, you were under strict instructions to only enable the features when nobody else was around.
Artifacts from this process are probably what resulted in the "workaround" in the Developer Preview build [0] to revert back to the classic start menu.
Similarly, with the Surface, much of the company was in the dark until the official announcement. Some of the lengths they went to in order to keep it secret, included only a few executives knowing and trying to avoid ordering multiple parts from the same vendor [1]. The team worked in a vault-style building where one door had to close before the other would open [2].
There's also the giant "fear of being sued or prosecuted" thing. Big companies can afford good lawyers, your average employee probably cannot. Hell, Win8 was released over 3 years ago, I no longer work at Microsoft, yet I've still gone back and triple-checked this post to make sure I'm not disclosing anything about it that's not well-known to the public.
I've been hoping for a Junkyard Wars reboot starring a rotating cast of Mythbusters cast/alumnae (including the B Team members). I love the crazy builds and seeing their thought process in how/why they build what they do. A show like Junkyard Wars would be a perfect venue for this.
Spotify already tracks user listening history. I can see a "Recently Played Artists" section on my profile, and I assume they're using some of it to generate the user-specific "Discover Weekly" recommended music playlists.
I think there's a lot of interesting things that are going to be happening at the intersection of health and wearables in the next few years. $100k likely isn't enough to start a full-fledged company, but it's enough to create a good enough prototype to get some outside investment
Some ideas for said company that I'll probably never implement because I don't have said $100k:
- Running shoes that give feedback on your running form using pressure sensors and accelerometers. Depending on the type/placement of sensors, could also double as a weight tracking device that doesn't require you to weigh yourself
- Smartwatches aimed at diabetics, which can continuously monitor insulin/glucose levels, while also serving other smartwatch functions. Alerts for low/high levels.
- System that would let paramedics/doctors access recent pulse/skin temperature/etc data from a smartwatch and display it in a usable manner. Could help figure out what happened in the minutes leading up to an emergency call.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls...