kjw's comments

kjw | 1 year ago

Completely agree with you re: Bloomberg's somewhat shady history of reporting. However, in this case, the article is citing a research note written by TD Cowen equity research analysts.

For example, here's another article from MarketWatch citing this same research note -- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-research-note-thats-ra...

Leads me to lend more credence to the news even though OP is linking Bloomberg.

kjw | 2 years ago | on: What Happened When The IRS Got [IT] Audited

Link to original GAO report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-104719 "IRS Needs to Complete Modernization Plans and Fully Address Cloud Computing Requirements"

"The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) legacy IT environment includes applications, software, and hardware, which are outdated but still critical to day-to-day operations. Specifically, GAO's analysis showed that about 33 percent of the applications, 23 percent of the software instances in use, and 8 percent of hardware assets were considered legacy. This includes applications ranging from 25 to 64 years in age, as well as software up to 15 versions behind the current version. As GAO has previously noted, and IRS has acknowledged, these legacy assets will continue to contribute to security risks, unmet mission needs, staffing issues, and increased costs."

kjw | 3 years ago

"Snowflake has no incentive to push a code change that makes things 20% faster because that can correspond to 10–20% drop in short-term revenue. In a typical Innovator’s Dilemma, Snowflake prioritizes other things that generate an ever larger menu of compute options, like Snowpark and data apps built on Streamlit, that will bleed your organization dry."

This is not true. Snowflake has done just that - it has continuously improved performance resulting in reduced credit consumption and revenue from customers on a unit compute/storage basis. And it has negatively impacted their revenues and stock price. Snowflake's incentive is to strengthen their competitive position and to hopefully generate more long-term revenue from their customers.

The CFO forecasted a $97 million dollar short fall when guiding for 2022 revenue resulting from product improvements. Snowflake stock dropped immediately after.

See Q4 transcript -- https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2022/03/02/sn...

"Similarly, phased throughout this year, we are rolling out platform improvements within our cloud deployments. No two customers are the same, but our initial testing has shown performance improvements ranging on average from 10% to 20%. We have assumed an approximately $97 million revenue impact in our full-year forecast, but there is still uncertainty around the full impact these improvements can have. While these efforts negatively impact our revenue in the near term, over time, they lead customers to deploy more workloads to Snowflake due to the improved economics."

Also see the Bloomberg article -- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-02/snowflake....

"Snowflake Inc., a software company that helps businesses organize data in the cloud, dropped the most ever in a single day Thursday after projecting that annual product sales growth would slow from its previous triple-digit-percentage pace.

Executives said improvements to the company’s data storage and analysis products will let customers get the same results by spending less, which will hurt revenue in the short term, but attract more clients in the future.

“The full-year impact of that next year is quite significant,” Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman said on a conference call Wednesday after the results were released. But “when customers see their performance per credit get cheaper, they realize they can do other things cheaper in Snowflake and they move more data into us to run more queries.”"

kjw | 4 years ago

I would not have guessed Roblox was on-prem with such little redundancy. Later in the post, they address the obvious “why not public cloud question”? They argue that running their own hardware gives them advantages to cost and performance. But those seem irrelevant if usage and revenue go to zero when you can’t keep a service up. It will be interesting to see how well this architecural decision ages if they keep scaling to their ambitions. I wonder about their ability to recruit the level of talent required to run a service at this scale.

kjw | 5 years ago

A great survey of the current landscape of ML tool innovation.

This reminds me of the explosion of "big data" tech, which feels like it started exploding in 2010 and peaked maybe five years later.

If ML follows a similar cycle, then in perhaps five years, most tools will have receded into obscurity but a few frameworks and approaches will become dominant. Big stakes and justifies the prevalence and investment in OSS.

Comparison of "big data" and "machine learning" in Google Trends -- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...

kjw | 6 years ago

Second MF. While expensive, their individually bagged teas use cotton muslin.

kjw | 7 years ago

Thanks for the pointer; didn't realize he had posted part 1 separately already. I have now posted links in the comments of that HN thread.

kjw | 7 years ago

Related to this, supervoting shares are popular with tech startups that are going public, but the street generally frowns upon these structures from a corporate governance perspective.

Founders pitch supervoting control as a way to make sure the company can realize its long term potential by protecting themselves from activist investors with a short term view.

So far, ownership of new IPOs hasn't been affected much due to their small market caps and subsequent miniscule weighting in indices. It will be interesting to see if increasing concentrated ownership by index funds may eventually play a factor and perhaps increase acceptance of supervoting.

kjw | 7 years ago

I'm hopeful about the news that a new Dune adaption is currently in the works.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14471312/dune-movie-adapta...

Does anyone have other news about this? (Anticipated release date?) Googling around, the bits of news seem to indicate it will be a movie that covers only the first half of the Dune book.

In the meantime I'll need to check out the documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune", which appears to have been well received.

kjw | 7 years ago

A move that was necessary. Diane wasn't able to shift the existing Google culture to one where the enterprise customer's needs came first. (Observable as reflected in their pricing, sales, and support challenges.) Thomas now has a similarly tough job navigating the organ rejection risk of transplanting anything that looks like Oracle culture and practices.

kjw | 7 years ago

The new company will be based in Boston. I wonder if this is a harbinger of Amazon’s HQ2 opening in Boston as well.
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