20yrs_no_equity

I made the mistake of applying for a job there once. I was discriminated against. Despite being in a protected class, I was so surprised to be so obviously discriminated against by them. (I've interviewed a lot, I don't always get a follow up, this isn't sour grapes, this was very different.) But of course the HR people are careful to not say things that are overtly discriminatory. But when a company insists on a VIDEO call rather than a phone call (despite asking them to do the first one by phone since I was not in a location with good bandwidth at the time they wanted the call)... and then visibly reacts to your image when they first see it, and then pretty much blows you off, despite being well qualified for the position... yeah, it's not what they say.

Plus anyone who thinks that "Public" schools are not for profit hasn't looked too closely.

My "Public" University was basically a football program which had classes to try and justify its existence.

Think Stanford isn't for profit? Harvard? University of California?

The only difference is who is making the profit an what their incentives are.

ITT doesn't make money if its students don't get jobs. Does UC Santa Cruz really care more?

Reading their FAQs I don't think they understand how consistency works, or the CAP theorem. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems they are replicating what Couchbase does already (and has been doing in production for a long time) but thinking that they can somehow avoid the "issues" of "stale" reads in the face of partitions. But nothing indicates they can do so any better than Couchbase, so I'm not sure why CockroachDB exists.

One of us is missing something for sure, maybe me.

True, but to be fair the entire "startup" industry is highly optimized for people who are just out of college.

One advantage of using elixir is that when you hire elixir programmers (or people with just some functional programming experience) you tend to get better programmers.

If a given CPU can do X amount of work, with a C-based language you can maybe get 0.8X performance from that CPU.

With elixir you might get 0.4X performance. From that perspective Elixir looks slow.

But you can deploy 10 servers and thus get 4X performance overall, with essentially no cost for Elixir. On the other hand to make distributed system in C you will spend 10X the development time.

So Elixir is fast in the sense that you get a distributed system much faster, and you can get more overall performance by scaling across multiple CPUs.

(And I'm kinda avoiding that on a quad core CPU your C program is really going to only use one core out of the box while elixir will use all four.)

These ratios are just examples, of course.

The REPL is really powerful in elixir. You can get a command line into your running app, effectively.

Elixir projects tend to go thru three phases- early its' green code and everything's working, then there's a phase where you find a whole lot of errors and it looks like you're in trouble, but once you get past that you end up with code that you can put in production and literally forget about.

In that second phase, being able to connect to servers and inject data into them and see the results etc can be very useful.

You don't need to use an intermediate party to use bitcoin. You can submit transactions directly to the network from your wallet software without running a miner. The miners secure the network, but the nature of the system is that they are trustless, so long as %51 of them are honest. By having the cost of mining being high, that makes the cost of an attack on the network high. Which aligns the miners incentives (Eg: keep the price of bitcoins from going to zero as it would if the network were compromised) aligned with yours.

The blockchain is a bit large at 80GB but you don't need to download the whole blockchain to run a wallet and make transactions there are "light wallets" that will do this, and currently in testing is an even more efficient method of doing this called segregated witness.

The devil is in the details. Banks have been talking about "permissioned blockchains" for awhile, and whether this is really a bitcoin alternative, or just using the blockchain as a jumpstart for interbank transaction software remains to be seen. (The article is very light on details.)

If it is a bitcoin alternative then it will be distributed and tustless. Those are some of bitcoins key innovations. Being distributed means that no central authority can rewrite history by changing balances. Being trustless means that the system keeps accurate records even if participants are compromised (assuming less than %51 are compromised.)

Banks are unlikely to want to give up that level of control and probably will make it centralized (eg: a few banks run the miners) and trusted (eg: only authorized transactions and probably they will put in a way to rewrite history.)

Which means, if those assumptions are true, this isn't an alternative to bitcoin, but simply banks jumping on the blockchain hype to create a centralized system of fast settlement.

You're right it doesn't automatically mean they have any particular insight into business, competition or technology.

In my experience founders thinking they do is half the problem. Them thinking they do, and using the weight of their money, and signaling like "well, maybe we won't participate in the next round..." to influence the course of your business is the other half of the problem.

I've seen this very frequently as well, and when pushing back or pointing out that it's not a good idea, they respond with the argument that we have to do what they say because we will want to raise another round eventually, or just the general perspective that they must know better what they are doing than the engineering staff in the company.

I have long felt that one of the reason such young founders are funded is that they are possibly less likely to push back on onerous terms or instructions.

I'm not sure when those days were. Maybe the 1980s? In the 1990s VC firms I interacted with were made up of partners whose background was non-tech and associates who were freshly minted MBAs. (Who had lots of opinions about what we should be doing which seemed to be totally buzzword driven.)

There is a real dearth of VC critical perspective. The VC blog posts are not just content marketing, but they are also self serving. This is natural as you're going to write about things from your perspective.

But VC and founders interests are not always aligned. In fact, in my experience, the number one cause of startup failure is that the VC isn't giving "advice" but orders. EG: not "you should do less email marketing" but "you will pivot away from this business into another one", and things of that nature. The number two cause of startup failures in my experience (over a couple decades) is fights between the founders, and a large portion of those are caused because one founder wants to do what the VC says and the other thinks its the wrong thing for the business. The number three cause of failure is being too early/not addressing the right part of the market/lack of customer development.

Things are a bit better these days with angels who seem to want to exert less control, and more participants in rounds.

But we really need a good blog that is critical of VC perspective, and arms founders so that they don't get screwed every time.

There's a book by Remus Sutten about buying a car called "don't get taken ever time". Yet IMNSHO Founders are still getting taken every time.

> businesses turning out respectable multi-million-dollar-a-year profits without ever being a target for a billion-dollar acquisition.

Very hard at the seed stage to tell the difference between a business that will turn out to be a $3M a year business and one that will be a $80M a year business growing at %30 a year. That latter might easily sell for over $1B. ( After all $80M in profit is only a 13X multiple to reach $1B, and growing at %30/year means that's a cheap.)

I hate the term "lifestyle business", it comes from redefining "startup" to be a very specific narrowly defined form of startup of the kind that is popular in silicon valley in the past decade.

I was delighted to discover one of the startups is doing what I'm about to be doing. So they are ahead of me and they have gone thru YC. So they are primed for success, while I'm still busting my butt to get to the point where I can apply to the next round of accelerators.

But they have taken what I consider to be the wrong approach, and seem to be missing a tidal wave of disruption. They are aiming for a where the puck is going to be in a year, not where it's going to be in 5 years (the first one is a lot easier than the second)

Plus going thru YC and getting on that SV ... path ... has its own costs and risks. Taking VC starts a clock and limits your options and in some ways, opportunity, to what the VC can see. For example how much revenue you have in a year has a huge impact with whether you can raise revenue a year from now. If you really have a better view of the market and future and technology than VCs and Accelerator Mentors (and you should, after all, because you're an expert in this area- and if you aren't you will be in 6 months) those limitations are not to your advantage.

In my experience in an accelerator so many of the companies were still trying to figure things out. They didn't know things well enough to confidently know the difference between the good and bad advice they were getting from the mentors. (mentors even giving good advice can be wrong, simply because their expertise isn't what you're doing-- if it were, the market you're attacking would already be taken.)

In the case of the competitor to what I'm starting, I can see how they have made some bad choices already (just from the TechCrunch article, haven't even clicked thru to their site) because they are already practicing the cargo cult dance, building paper maché airplanes hoping for VC money to rain down from the sky. That's fine, they may win that way, but I still like my chances.

If you read these articles every demo day and watch the YC and TechStars startups, eventually you get to where you can tell which ones have something and which ones don't (though of course there are some outliers.)

None of these companies have it made, so don't lose heart.

TBH a few down votes are not so bad, but the heavy downvotes are annoying... its' the harassment, and the threats, especially from moderators, and the snotty treatment... especially knowing that its' a game of smear the queer.

You respond in anything other than an obsequious manner and you will be kicked while the people engaging in name calling, harassment and stalking (all of which I've experienced on this site in the past) or threatening (Something I've seen moderators do) will get a pass.

I first visited HN in the 2006 or 2007 timeframe. Possibly earlier. I've seen the site evolve, over the years, from a place where free discussion was valued to a filter bubble where having unpopular opinions results in slow banning and hell banning. At the time I redacted these statements, I had just previously seen dang smear another poster with a dishonest characterization of him, when the poster made less than supportive (or mildly critical depending on your feelings) comments about a company that went thru YC. The threat and the implication was clear. Further it was consistent with the past decade of moderation on this site. I'm not painting the whole HN community based on a few days of posting here, I am painting it based on a decade of observation. This includes multiple times where I have seen dang harass and threaten people who later got banned. I knew I couldn't defend the other poster to him, and so I swallowed it and said nothing. And then there was vaeliled threat in this thread as well from someone at YC.

The culture here is faux intellectual where "civil and substantive" is "valued" only when they agree with the ideology. A little bit of deviation is allowed so long as the posters are sufficiently obsequious. If this were not a filter bubble you could criticize a YC company or even YC without being threatened.

But since those who agree with the party line are immune from these threats they do not post "civil and substantive" responses (you are an exception even though I am disagreeing wit you you've clearly tired to be fair) and far too many of the responses to my posts have been... patronizing, obnoxious or intellectually bigoted.

You say "gracious and well intentioned in their conduct"... you should be going after those who are not gracious or well intended in their conduct who are expressing views you DO agree with, not the contrarian ones. The contrarian ones you should give a wider birth. Right now its reversed... you have to be obsequious to express a contrarian view, and those who express the party line view get away with murder. This hypocrisy, especially coming from moderators, pisses me off, especially when wrapped with the smug self satisfaction that is so common on this site. (Example the "civil and substantive" threat above, which is pretending not to be a threat, and thus gives cover for pretending like it isn't a threat but the threat is obvious to the intended target.)

Multiple return is great, though sending a tuple back is how we've been doing it in erlang for 20 years. Not much difference between {foo, bar} and (foo, bar).

Go's error handling however is terrible, absolutely the worst and its tendency to panic is atrocious. Especially without supervision or restart capability. HEre's a spot where elixir has it right and is vastly superior.

Google is not the only entity that operates at scale, and simply because google does it does not mean it is the correct choice. That's kinda cargo cultish.

In distributed systems, go is fragile and dangerous -- because it will panic. IT has no supervision system, and it has the potential for deadlocks, in fact, unless you engineer around it, all coroutines and channels will produce deadlocks and can silently kill your program. When that happens you have no idea why things are broken-- nothings happening.

And this is a language without a decent debugger!

Having a lot of experience in Elixir and Go I will say that the advantage of Elixir is not excitement, but that you can reason about your code and expect it to work. For years. Half assed go programs will crash. Half assed elixir programs can run for decades without maintenance.

Elixir is way easier to understand than Go. If you will put one week into learning it, you'll be a lot further than you are with go.

I have a couple decades of professional experience, if you are building a serious system, you want Elixir. IF you are building a devops tool, where a single binary with no install process is what's important, you want go.

But given all the containerization and distributed programming people are doing these days using go for that kinda shows to me that most engineering is done by people who don't understand distributed systems.

Having written a lot of elixir code and now spending my days writing Go code, I think of Go as a tragedy of missed opportunity. If go did concurrency correctly, the way elixir and erlang do it, it would be the language I want to use for everything (well and the pipe operator from elixir is really special.)

But concurrency in go is a terrible hack, it's just slightly better multi-threading with all the deadlocks and mutex and hassles that come with it. Channels and goroutines are not erlang processes.

That so many people think of go as a concurrent language shows how little people understand concurrent programming.

Every engineer who thinks they are decent needs to learn at least one good concurrent language (elixir or erlang would be my suggestions.)

I like the idea of a timely conference, but it feels like the whole idea of conferences is a bit dated. Sure unconference means that it is more informal and in this case more timely, but I'm not flying across the country for a few days.

Shouldn't we, as the general set of hackers, be developing or exploring online virtual conferences? A Speaker in Norway in front of a camera presenting their stuff to thousands of people around the world.

Has this been tried? Is there a good platform for it?

This seems much more efficient- you can have conferences more easily and frequently without the interruption and cost of having to physically be there.

In my team there are a dozen global tech conferences that are relevant to us, but only the sales guys and "executives" at my company go to them. The engineers do not. Because it costs us thousands of dollars to send someone to shanghai.

And it's perceived that the sales guy makes sense to send, but not the engineer, cause we don't need to spend thousands on keeping engineers up to date with technology, or have them make cross relationships with others advancing the state of the art.

This brings up a good question. Companies have to price their options to employees at the "market value". They often make the exercise price the same as the preferred share sale price. Yet the options are for common shares.

How can a company know what these options or shares are worth when they aren't preferred-- because there is no market events for them?

Part of the problem is that the instincts of treating employees poorly is so deeply ingrained that companies who think they are being transparent often aren't. EG: You ask them about the cap table and they give you a verbal, off the head, assertion about who is on it. They don't let you actually see it.

Ironically this is the case often when they are making an offer, too. They won't tell you the number of shares outstanding, but they offer you 100k shares, as if that's a lot. Is it a lot? Or is it a trivial amount? Are they so stupid they don't realize that without knowing the total number authorized or outstanding that we can't evaluate the offer? Or do they think we are that stupid?

And when you do ask the total outstanding, you often get, again, off the head, old or inaccurate information delivered in a way that implies you're being nosy.

Hostile and unwelcoming is a fair characterization. Not all subjects have been that way, but this one turned out to be hot potato and so I tried to withdraw in the only way available on this site, only to have that used as an excuse to attack me (by an apparent moderator no less.)

[ And I've been slow banned. So there was no point in attempting to engage in discussion in the first place.]

Why UE4 over Unity? I have downloaded both and while both have a steep learning curve the one for UE is steeper, and the initial experience is much worse. Seems they never really tested it on the mac much.

It's not meant to be a deterrent to criminals, it's meant to keep regular people in line. It's very effective at that. This is why my suggestion that crimes committed against prisoners should be prosecuted produced such a harsh reaction.

And should be responsible, including fines and jail terms, for any harm that happens to the individual while under their care.

[Redacted for not towing the party line close enough.]