Profile picture
, 3 tweets, 1 min read
Saw this mentioned by the owners on HN: crontab.guru , which is a mini-application, which they acquired, whose business model (performing well, per their post) is the one house ad on it.

I love everything about this. Have seen broadly similar things work out elsewhere
There are a *lot* of man pages which could be executable documentation that actually answers the user need, where those documents would produce plural engineering salaries a year of harvestable value.
"People should just read their man pages."

If you like your man pages you can keep your man pages, but there are a few million people operating systems professionally who ask their questions to Google because Google has a reputation for providing actual answers quickly.
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh.

Enjoying this thread?

Keep Current with Patrick McKenzie

Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @patio11 see all

Profile picture
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I feel like every time someone has ever written a phrase like this (from @matt_levine's newsletter) they get surprised at how creative people can get with e.g. for loops and Maliciously Compliant Capital MMCCXVII, LLC.
@matt_levine "You couldn't found a company with a for loop, though."

I mean, I work for a company which founds a lot of companies and keeps its nose very clean, so I would absolutely never do that and never provide legal advice to someone to attempt doing that clearly possible thing.
@matt_levine The classic example of this, by the way, is "Verify this bank account with microdeposits."

I have read ~3 accounts over the years, on the public internet, of how companies did not model "We'll send you two deposits of between 1 and 99 cents; tell us the numbers" as abusable.
Read 6 tweets
Profile picture
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There's a huge number of $100+ an hour tutoring businesses to be built, and plausibly some very large companies serving as demand gen, around this.

The need isn't new, at all, but the addressable scale is.
I know a relatively small number of Japanese professionals who paid "lawyer money" for either English practice or, from the one who was savviest, effectively just accent modification. (He worked in finance in NYC and his explicit goal was sounding "from nowhere in particular.")
(As long as we're doing storytime: I attempt to have my Japanese accent suggest "generic Tokyo salaryman, maybe a bit too polite" because when I let it drift into the accent/dialect that prevailed at my university or in Gifu people thought they were *hilarious* from a white guy.)
Read 3 tweets
Profile picture
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There is someone trying to SMS spam me into accepting a fraudulent publishing opportunity.

Torn between “Evil fraud grumblegrumble” and “Look clearly there is enough sophistication in marketing and CRM implementation here to support an actual software company. Why not go legit?”
“Wait what?”

So there’s a business process being run here, right? They have some offering which extracts money out of people who want to be published, and that offering runs at some amount of scale.
And I landed on a lead list, which suggests that they’re smart enough to know this is relevant to my interests. And then they found out my cell phone number, likely via going from a public database where it is tied to one of my businesses in a discoverable fashion.
Read 4 tweets

Related threads

Profile picture
Karol Cummins
@karolcummins
Trump Tower Toronto

💰The Financial Times investigation into Trump Tower Toronto

The Investigation revealed that the venture connects Trump with a “shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.”

Background #Firtash #UkraineGate #RaiffeisenBank
“The tale of the Trump Toronto illuminates what it means for the US to have a president whose business model has long depended on exchanging his family name for money with a murky past, no questions asked.”

amp.ft.com/content/157a64…
“Trump signed up to the Toronto project in 2001, alongside Ritz-Carlton and a little-known developer called Leib Waldman.

The project almost collapsed when Waldman was exposed as a fugitive fraudster & Ritz-Carlton pulled out.”

amp.ft.com/content/157a64…
Read 33 tweets
Profile picture
Arvind Narayanan
@random_walker
When we watch TV, our TVs watch us back and track our habits. This practice has exploded recently since it hasn’t faced much public scrutiny. But in the last few days, not one but *three* papers have dropped that uncover the extent of tracking on TVs. Let me tell you about them.
The first paper looked at Roku and Amazon Fire TV. These platforms let you subscribe to “channels”, which are basically apps. As you can guess, they are loaded with trackers. Doubleclick alone is on 97.5% of Roku channels. tv-watches-you.princeton.edu/tv-tracking-ac…
There are some channels with over 50 trackers. Also, the majority of trackers were able to grab a unique ID such as MAC address. A few channels leaked email addresses to trackers and many leaked video titles⁠—often unencrypted, so your viewing history is exposed on the network.
Read 20 tweets
Profile picture
Filomena Rocha
@Filomen03258997
40. The Legacy of US, UK, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bahrain, Canada, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Jordan, Nato in Syria
1 to 20. The Legacy of US, UK, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bahrain, Canada, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Jordan, Nato in Syria 🤨👇🏼
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1136642…
21. The Legacy of US, UK, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bahrain, Canada, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Jordan, Nato in Syria🤨👇🏼
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1137566…
Read 344 tweets
Profile picture
Turner Novak
@TurnerNovak
$SNAP Q4 earnings today. Bad DAU numbers will tank the stock, but Snapchat has a core, sticky userbase and is being under-monetized.

Here's a thread on the Facebook Power Law and a look at how Snap could do up to $10 billion in revenue in the US alone in its current form.
Lots of going on at Snap (see link), but as someone who appreciates product and design, I've learned a lot following their product strategy (ie: creative new revenue generation in consumer social). Lots of lessons from what Snap has done right.

marketwatch.com/story/snap-ear…
To summarize my prior Snap earnings threads (below):

Snaps per Day is Snap's key metric, the US and EU are what matters for monetization, its ad prices are insanely low, and the market is not appreciating Bitmoji, Snap's AR platform, or the Snap Map.

Read 54 tweets
Profile picture
Amit Malik
@amito_malik
notes the black swan thread
1 When Taleb was student he was advised to choose a scalable career path. If you’re a doctor, dentist, consultant or message proffessional, there is a limit to the amount of clients you can see in a day AND the amount of money you can make in one day
2 t isn’t scalable.The pay is more or less predictable and depends on your continuous effort. There will be differences in your income over time, but no single day of work will have a huge impact on your lifetime earnings.
3) The d/f between the successful and less successful isn’t to big, and at least somewhat predictable. These professions isn’t black swan driven and is performed in Mediocristan.
Read 35 tweets
Profile picture
oliver beige
@ecoinomia
One of the momentous things in dot-com history we are, uhh, "privileged" to witness in real time is Facebook's shift from Schumpeterian monopoly to Ricardian monopoly. In ten years, business school cases will be written about this stuff...
This isn't the first of course. Microsoft maneuvered itself into the same position ca. 1999, and the verdict back then was MS is irrelevant now that it missed the whole internet thing and is just flailing around, but MS never stopped being a hugely profitable key player.
There's others, but the key lesson learned should be: you can coast on cruise control for quite some time, 20 years plus apparently, when you can milk Ricardian rents. And that's a problem.
Read 29 tweets

Trending hashtags

#InspirationalQuotes #supporters #PBSGershwin #terrorist #Ask #TurkeyArmy #NewAge #FinalVictory #group #Infinite #digital #terrorists #HappyMothersDay2019 #refugees #aggression #message #USArmy #allies #Syrian #JustSaying #SyriaArmy #Idleb #LinkedIn #Chinese #Americans
Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just three indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!