ChefboyOG

The only answer here is to consult an attorney, and I would be highly skeptical of any specific legal advice given to you with so little information being presented.

Founder disputes, especially this early on, can be nasty. I'm very sorry that you're going through this.

This article just seems to be saying:

- Jobs are being cut in the oil industry

- Unemployed workers are looking for other jobs in energy

It's sort of broadly gesturing at the idea that this is a sign of renewables overtaking fossil fuels—something most of us would love, obviously—but it's not really a part of the article's core.

It's not just entering common use. The specific case you're referring to has been used since the 1930s, and "creative" has been used more broadly as a noun for centuries.

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/can-creative-b...

This used to be more of a thing than it is now, in my experience. Culturally, it took a while for the perception of Javascript to change from "that janky language you had to use to animate web pages" to a general purpose language on the level of Python or Ruby. Node/React/Vue/etc. have been around long enough now that I think most of that has died out, though obviously, many still have a personal distaste for the language.

Yeah, but as you say, MXNet doesn't have the market of PyTorch or TF, and while AWS has deep ties within MXNet, they don't outright control it to the same extent that Google owns TF or Facebook has PyTorch.

That's fascinating, and makes sense. I didn't think of it until you brought it up, but the risk/reward of investing in automation vs. maintaining current margins certainly flips when current margins plummet.

TorchServe seems to share code with MXNET. I think this is more AWS/Facebook responding to Google's power in ML with TensorFlow/GCP. AWS doesn't have a framework, and Facebook doesn't have a cloud. This gives PyTorch better feature parity with TensorFlow (TorchServe == TF Serving) and gives AWS a point of differentiation from GCP.

I don't fully understand the arguments in these kinds of pieces. Haven't businesses always been economically incentivized to automate everything, because that's just how labor costs work?

It seems implausible to me that the bottleneck to mass automation (or rather, more widespread automation) is the willingness of corporations to invest in it. The more feasible blockers—the fundamental technology even existing, the cost of research/production, etc—don't seem correlated to Coronavirus.

I have this weird polarity in the work I enjoy.

I'm like you in that I enjoy just making things work, even when they're trivial. I particularly like doing it for other individuals.

On the other hand, I also enjoy harder research problems. Obsessing and learning new things quickly is probably the biggest joy I get out of work.

What I hate is the middle ground. I hate solving trivial problems, but in a high-pressure environment, for people I'm only circumstantially committed to.

Netflix's UI, more specifically, is anti-Search.

Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.

That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.

I wonder how these mass layoffs are going to affect junior level hiring. Obviously, they're going to have an effect across all hiring, but the particular dynamic is interesting to me.

I have friends who worked in investment banking in 2008, and several of them have talked about how the industry (or at least their perception of it) became more "diamond-shaped." By this they meant that past the initial hiring freezes, entry-level hiring eventually picked up as normal, but that senior level promotions took a while to pick back up. There was a glut of experienced VPs (more of a mid-level role in IB than in engineering) who were making lateral moves between banks—not competing for entry level roles—but none of them were moving up to higher positions.

There is way more risk from the salesperson's side, especially if you're not divvying up shares.

If you're a salesperson looking at either taking a job at an established company with a proven product and a pipeline of leads, or a startup with no traction and no proven product, the only thing that could possibly incentivize you towards the startup would be equity and (potentially) an insane commission rate. With no equity, you're doing a much harder job with less upside and significantly more downside.

My advice to people looking for a "technical cofounder" is always to learn to code—and not in a snarky, "learn to build it yourself" way. Having even a cursory ability to code and a CS50 level understanding of computers will give you enough context to vet the plausibility of ideas, and give you the ability to articulate them in terms that might interest an engineer, as opposed to just saying "An app for investing in real estate."

Both of these points are correct, but I'd point out one nuance.

The first point gets used a lot to support a narrative that all a startup needs to do is say "ML" in their pitch deck and secure funding. The reality is, almost all investors are aware of the prevalence of AI snake oil, and the good ones are pretty sophisticated when it comes to vetting it.

There is an also an attitude, related to this point, that startups who use ML in ways that aren't "new"—as in, finetuning a state of the art model, using well-known techniques, or otherwise "simply doing things with data"—aren't doing something worthwhile. I actually think the opposite is true. These startups represent the most exciting change in ML, in my opinion, in a very long time: They're actually building things with it.

We have a tendency to judge all ML announcements relative to our most extreme projections (autonomous vehicles, AGI, etc.) In that sense, yeah, nothing measures up right now. But lost in the back forth over the hype is the fact that there are a ton of companies building really cool, valuable products that couldn't exist without ML. Recommendation engines, speech-to-text, real-time prediction services (think Uber's ETA prediction), image analyzers, etc. Many of these are built by startups who aren't doing anything fundamentally new on the data science side, but I'm fine with that. Most SaaS companies aren't pushing basic technical boundaries either, and we find them pretty valuable.

I am no defender of Western media, but this is a textbook false equivalency. There is massive material and theoretical difference between corporate spin and government propaganda. Corporate dishonesty is possible in the US precisely because we protect the press's freedom. China, on the other hand, jails jails more journalists than any other nation. Sure, they're both "bad," but fundamentally different.

As someone who grew up in different debate-club-esque environments, I agree wholeheartedly. I had to unlearn quite a few patterns of thinking and behavior—patterns that had been positively reinforced by most adults in my life—when I grew up.

For me, the most damaging effect was the separation of debate and decision making. In real life, if I advocate for a position—be it where we eat dinner or where my child goes to school—and I'm convincing, things actually happen. We have to go to that restaurant and my kid has to attend that school. Debates happen to inform a decision all parties are trying to make together.

As a kid, the opposite was true. Debate was about proving my intelligence in exchange for praise from my teachers, parents, and peers. It was an athletic competition in which our positions were our jerseys, in that we took them off after and went home.

I was reflexively argumentative for a decent period of time as a young adult before I realized the damage it caused to my relationships and how unproductive and dishonest it was.

This is the core of the whole debate, in my experience:

"When it comes to build versus buy, the frequently repeated but rarely followed wisdom is good advice: if you're a technology company, vendors usually generate significant value if they're outside your company's core competency; within your core competency, they generally slow you down."

Every startup I've ever worked with has had engineers who advocated "build" for tooling that fell both outside the eng team's workflow and our company's core competencies.

I think part of it is that things like marketing automation or customer support software—things that are vital for most teams past a certain scale—don't seem technically "hard" enough to justify the price-tags, particularly to engineers who've been isolated from other parts of the business.

Without fail, every time I've been part of a team building an internal tool that we/another engineering team won't use, it goes poorly. I've spent way too long learning about the ins and outs of email deliverability so that I could fix a bug in a hacky email platform, when we could have just bought a platform that works.

This is a pretty common pushback on marketplaces in general, but in my experience working on several, this only happens in specific situations. I doubt it would be much of a problem for Art in Res, namely because:

1. With higher price points, the security and financial services of the platform become more valuable. Installment payments, for instance, would likely be beyond the abilities of many artists to orchestrate. The platform also likely provides some guarantee on the buyer side that all that money won't go missing and that the product will be delivered as expected.

2. The platform will usually have some language in their agreement that makes off-platform contracts with people you discovered in-platform punishable. If you've ever used a hiring platform like Hired or A-List, you'll know that these fees are persuasive.

With cheaper platforms like UpWork, I'm sure this kind of thing is common, but on more expensive market places it isn't as pervasive as one might think.

HN doesn't get enough credit for the tight rope they walk maintaining this community. I see some people post that HN should expand to other topics a la Reddit, but the team does a great job of maintaining focus.

It's not just HN's aesthetic that is minimal and no-nonsense, it's their moderation policies and the tone they set for the community. There is perfect alignment between their approach to content, community, and UX—no fluff, no nonsense, no manipulation, just the simplest, most valuable material possible.

If they expand the scope of acceptable content, it will be really hard not to tweak moderation policies, and eventually you end up with something like reddit, each subreddit might as well be its own (typically under-staffed) site.

EDIT: This is not critical of any post on this thread, just seeing the above comment about old-school reddit got me thinking.

I don't know if this is still case, but a good friend of mine used to be a designer at Meetup. They had a decent size team on design/brand, from the way he talks about it.

Without taking any due praise away from Iceland's efforts, it's disingenious to compare Iceland's testing to other countries as a pure percentage of population. Iceland has a population of roughly 364,000. South Korea, for comparison, has over 51,000,000. 3% of one is not comparable to 3% of the other.

Our common idea of burnout largely comes from Christina Maslach—the Maslach Burnout Inventory is more or less the standard tool that psychologists use to score and diagnose burnout now—and interestingly, it diagnoses burnout as three related but independent subscales:

Exhaustion - somewhat self-explanatory

Professional Efficacy - your view of your performance

Cynicism - a distancing of yourself from your job

Though you may come across different names in different writings. It's interesting how the subscales impact each other.

I don't know if I fully buy into the framework 100%, but it makes for interesting research nonetheless.

Discussing sources is tricky business for journalists, but given the pushback, it seems like at the very least Bloomberg should have conducted some follow-up investigations.

I think this is a major reason you often see such a stark personality split between cofounders—one being more freewheeling when generating ideas, and the other being deeply pragmatic.

I think I generally agree with this, but that the bigger data point in any "build vs buy" debate is around the expertise/time available on the team vs the scale of the project.

For example, I worked at a 30ish person startup that was a little less than half engineers. Our product had a ton of traffic, and our growth/sales teams had outgrown the small bundle of cheap/free marketing tools we'd cobbled together. But marketing automation is expensive—so a couple engineers spent time trying to build our own version, insisting it was doable and that it would fit our use cases much better because it was built for them.

The reality is they spent two months working on a marketing automation solution that kind of worked, but was missing the robustness of a normal product that had been built by a dedicated team of engineers over years. The other issue was that those engineers now owned their solution—bugs, feature requests, etc. they were essentially running a second product now.

Eventually, for the sake of their time and our productivity, we just bought software. We could have done it months earlier and saved everyone time and frustration.

I realize this post is specifically about dev tools, but I think the logic is more or less transferrable.

These chemicals are still used in the countries they're shipped to. If there was no revenue in cannabis, it would only change the fact that people are clandestinely growing it in American forests—tons of agriculture worldwide would still be impacted.

It also looks like the last release for the Clojure library was in 2017

HN mods do a fantastic job with moderating. I don't pretend to know how any of it works, but I consistently enjoy content on the front page of HN, which I can't say about subreddits, even my favorites.

Besides HN, a handful of subreddits (r/MachineLearning in particular), and I used to spend a decent amount of time on Product Hunt.

I do miss the hell out of forums though. I feel like i "knew" everyone on a better level and could burn through hours talking.

I'm having art school flashbacks please stop hurting me.

I think this is the key point that gets lost in these discussions. Legalization, or decriminalization, does not equal an abdication of responsibility by the state—it can actually mean the opposite.