Interview with Ed McManus, Technical Advisor for HBO’s Silicon Valley [audio]
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
This scenario cracked me up. It's difficult for me to mentally separate TJ Miller from his character, Erlich. I'm imagining this playing out on the show, with Erlich Bachman paying a woman to pretend that she didn't know who Musk was, all so he could somehow build up hype for Pied Piper.
If you didn't know who Elon Musk was years before 2014, and your proud of being in some mindless film, I can't take you serious as a critic of culture. What do people pay attention too?
It's fine to be dismissive and sarcastic to people who deserve it but you can't just wantonly dismiss everyone without facts when you apparently spend most of your time mesmerized by pop culture, sports etc.
As for him not immediately recognizing Musk at the party, I was thinking Musk might have looked a bit different from his photos when seen in real life. By the time the woman handed Musk the camera, Miller had already figured out that the person he was talking to was a very big deal.
- Billy Joel
I wouldn't be so quick to not take a person seriously because she recognized an actor from a film you didn't like or see.
But you sound like you're falling for Survivorship bias.
I think the underlying point trying to be made though can be summed up by this quote from a movie clip I saw channel surfing in a hotel the other day: "You want the job after this job, but you need this job first."
There exists a reasonably reliable path to success for most people:
- Look at the people whom you consider to be successful who got there mostly through hard work.
- Do what they did, think about the things they think about, obsess over it. Let it consume you. You won't be good at first, but keep doing it. It will take time.
- Don't think you know better.
- Try not to spend too much time or too many brain cycles on recreation or non-work-focused friendships/relationships. (If you choose to do this, that's fine, but recognize that it is a choice that will define your future.)
That's about it.
However, there is no reliable path for a woman in Saudi Arabia, or poor child with drug addict parents, or the family of the lowest caste in India who have no assets. Surely they can help little by little and better their future generations, but they will by and large be gone before anyone gets a "windfall".
So strictly speaking, that value was always coming your way you just received it early for less effort than otherwise. Unless you're scrumping that is ;-)
Not sure how this ties in to our metaphor here but it kind of feels poignant.
I can't believe you responded in a thread about not looking at one guy who worked hard and succeeded by telling people to "copy one guy, work hard, and you'll succeed".
I love your spin on it though. Have no friends!
There's a lot of talk about survivorship bias, but I have to admit, in 10 years that I've worked in game development, I've never seen anyone like that.
Either people change careers, industries or you can see that they're already burned out. I've never seen a good performer with a lot of experience in the same field and career, and ambition for more, who would be stuck.
That's almost the definition of survivorship bias.
Hard work pays off quite often. Hard work opens you up to opportunities quite often too, especially in an information-related career.
You made a bunch of typos in "tremendous amount of luck" :)
Unless I'm missing something about Peter's character that indicated he was far right?
The idea is that Gregory was based on Thiel. Peter Thiel did in fact join the Trump campaign and administration as an advisor. The Trump campaign was, in fact, far-right -- which is part of why it took the Republican Party by surprise in the primaries.
However, Gregory died when his actor did (of blessed memory).
I think that a good Silicon Valley storyline on this subject would have been a great use of the character they had. I don't want them to introduce a replacement character to hit a plot-point, after going through the trouble of mourning Peter Gregory and replacing him with Laurie Bream. For me it would cross the line from affectionate parody into, in a sense, appropriation of Thiel's life.
The other issue would be that the show has no plans of actually giving us hard-biting political satire. That's not its thing in the first place.
Maybe if they picked it up with Laurie delving into far-libertarian and far-right politics as a part of inheriting Raviga Capital from Gregory? Maybe he left some will saying whoever runs the company has to get involved somehow under certain conditions? Then they can at least make the comedy of this all-business-all-the-time character Laurie seeing how Gregory's weird hobbies play out. Hmmm... and it could turn out Russ Henneman was involved in it, too, so she'd have to swallow her hatred for the guy and do weird stuff alongside him, lest other Raviga partners accuse her of failing to carry out Gregory's wishes.
HN's not the right place for these discussions, so I'd rather not dig into it more, I was just curious why you said that.
The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-anything. Trump's a mainstream American politician by definition.
The Weimar Republic in 1933 seems like a pretty good counterexample to that. Incidentally, it shortly stopped being the Weimar Republic and became known instead as the Third Reich.
Having read a number of books on WW2 era Germany, attempting to compare the politically chaotic post-WW1 Germany, including the economic crisis, deep nationalist tensions, and the daily murders and gang fights in the streets of the capitals of Germany between the fringe nationalist socialists vs communist parties compared to America in 2016/17 is incredibly dubious.
And even ignoring the numerous lack of comparisons to the political environments before the elections and the differences of the subsequent assent to power that Hitler took compared to Trump, the differences after the elections are countless. Most notably how the courts (via a republican judge) quickly shut down the dubious middle east immigration ban - probably the only far-right policy Trump managed to push into reality - which demonstrated that checks and balances are far from being sequestered. An essential 101 indicator of proto-fascism.
This type of fear mongering is becoming less and less persuasive. Even though there are real and significant problems with the current administration it's not helping anyone to blow them out of context and pretend you're this vanguard against some modern version of Nazi germany. That's more likely to lose you support than help you achieve anything.
If anything the anyone-who-supports-Trump-is-a-Nazi brigade did more to help elect him than prevent it. I've read a number of profiles of people who voted for Trump and who now regret it who said they voted for him merely as an affront to what the opposition represents, rather than actually supporting him. Peter Thiel seems to fit into this category.
The error is to claim that Hitler became "center-right" or "middle of the road" upon becoming Reichskanzler. The center didn't move ultra-rightward (remember: the Communists also did well in that election), an ultra-rightist happened to win the plurality in a heavily polarized election.
If it is purely a matter of some random emotional tweet Trump made or some journalist filling in the gaps between what Steve Bannon may or may have not meant when he said x, then I will remain unconvinced that the US government is at any risk of being comparable to 1930-40s era fascist regimes.
There's Betsy DeVos' new move to eliminate Income-Based Repayment plans for student loans, and many state-level bills to criminalize any protests that interfere with economically significant business (including labor pickets). And of course Jeff Sessions trying to restart the Drug War when basically everyone else just wants it ended. Remember, "far-right" doesn't just mean "fascist". It also just means "extremely capitalist" or "authoritarian in a conservative or capitalist cause".
The American Right has actually spent a lot of political capital treating Trump as outside movement conservatism, as an aberrant far-right movement hijacking the Republican Party. They still have some of the William Buckley spirit to them, in which the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan get purged rather than integrated.
I personally preferred the SXSW talk [0], it has the writers with them too.
I didn't react that way. I imagined that their workload was extremely CPU-intensive, and (due to their incredible compression) did not require a datacenter-grade network connection. So it makes financial sense to invest in your own hardware. Amortizing the cost of that hardware, a company like that could be saving tens of thousands per month versus AWS.
But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your team ;)
Also, the scene at the end of season 2 where all the servers catch on fire was an incredibly memorable moment. I got emotional, being so invested in the characters and having my own memories of "putting out fires", and it was cathartic to see that team succeed and win the day.
The only hole in that story is that there's always too many hosting providers, you can't pressure all of them. But hey, it's a TV show.
Indeed. I took this another showcase for Gilfoyle's supreme skill. Indeed to this day, the guy that no-one never questions is Gilfoyle. Even in the last episode, Jared pitched Gilfoyle, not Dinesh for example.
In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
In case Craig or the person responsible for the audio sees this, you can help ameliorate this by tuning the dynamic range compression. Because the signal-to-noise ratio decreases the further you get from the mic, the recording may also benefit from some de-verbing and noise reduction first. (If you don't have good tools for this, ping me and I'll be glad to help.)
> In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating the microphone."
Plosives become a problem if you get too close. If this inspires anyone to get on the mic, good general guidance is "put your lips one to two fists away from the mic".
I remember reading a suggestion about proportional fonts in a discussion on HN about code editor preferences. Switched to them several years ago and never looked back.
In fact, I think proportional fonts are something every developer should try for a while, even if you end up preferring a monospaced font. In particular, if you're in the habit of using column alignment, a proportional font will quickly teach you to stop doing that and use indentation instead.
Even if I use tab key for indentation, my editor can use either spaces or tabs when saving. It's configurable.
It's a bit like writing a best selling novel in a language you don't speak: theoretically possible, but just so far from normal reality that it's hard to suspend disbelief.
Did you enjoy the Sneaker's "can decrypt anything" plot line? How about that stupid TV show with a magical button that turned on and off electricity? I couldn't be in the same room when my wife watched that crap. Happens to everyone. I'm not dismissing what you say, more like welcome to the club. :-)
I think you're talking about "Revolution" which had JJ Abrams splattered all over the adverts.
I watched one episode and thought, after Lost, "I'm not falling for this again."
Another gem I discovered this year is Amazon's "Patriot". Coincidentally, it features one of the main actors from "Lost" :P
The old joke is if people bother him enough about the next Game of Thrones book it'll just be 1,000 pages of snow blowing across graves. When he's done with the series I'm not sure how many characters, readers or viewers will be left. Even so he's the only author I can point to who can create compelling enough content that people may stay to the end. I'll never watch another Walking Dead or Leftovers because I just don't care enough about the characters, but George will probably manage to drag me to the end of GoT. Damn you, George.
I was a little surprised JJ did such a poor job for backstory but then again don't get me started on his Star Trek reboots. :grumble:
Fortunately Stranger Things got to be what Super 8 could have been.
Lots of folks carrying childhood angst and wishing they could make things right, I guess.
This is true of story telling in general, though. There's really only so many story elements. That doesn't mean you can't write a new, great story with them today (just like there's still great music being made despite us only having 12 notes in Western music).
There are plenty of better compression techs out there for various use cases (zstd, brotli, opus, ...), and pretty much all of them today are thrown out by some major corp as open source. Even giving the better compression tech out for free it's incredibly hard to get people to adopt it. I mean github still uses gzip for their source downloads for whatever unclear reason.
Abandon disbelief my friend, and immerse yourself in the theatre. Focus on the message, not the lettering.
In order for them to come up with a business plan that made 100% logical sense to anyone with expertise on the topic, they'd have had to come up with a legitimate business plan, and at that point, they could have just launched a startup instead of making a sitcom.
"Well, we wanted to write this show that was a satire of the culture in Silicon Valley, but in the process we revolutionized the field of information theory."
The plot needs Richard to actually invent something revolutionary (and thus fail to get it off the ground time and time again), that is also simple enough for the audience to understand. Any algorithmic breakthrough that is real-world feasible would either need too much vague handwaving from the writing ("A brand new way to compute data!"). Or be close enough to reality that neither the layman nor the expert is happy (imagine the show having to explain why the big-O of Richard's new magic sorting algorithm matters).
Compression is the logical choice because it's:
1) easier to explain why fitting more data into less space is significant (laymen already have some rough visualization of compression),
2) lends itself to being "black boxed" in the plot ("Look at all the companies we can build with this one breakthrough"),
3) just barely feasible enough that if some SV nerd actually did make the discovery, then events would play out roughly the same as the show depicts (winning techcrunch, getting funding)
If someone was to stumble upon a heuristic that gives you noticeable gains for general compression as well, it could be close to as game changing as Richard's stuff is. Obviously we have a good handle on "theoretical maximums" thanks to information theory and so that end of the plot is BS, but looking past that embellishment the show isn't outside the realm of possibility.
I'd try to suspend the disbelief :-)