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aripickar

721 karma · joined October 17, 2018

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aripickar··on Anthropic raises $13B Series F
Tech Companies are valued at a multiple of next 12 months revenue, not last 12 months revenue. Since anthropic grew from $1billion to $5billion in revenue in ~8 months, that means it ~10x'ed revenue y/y off of 1 billion base. If you assume even 60% of that growth is retained (low for traditional saas businesses, but who knows), then anthropic is ~10% of google in terms of revenue in mid ~2027.

Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.

(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).

aripickar··on Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding
I don’t think they were the same difficulty at all as some of the upper divs. Classes like CS 170 (Efficient Algorithms), Cs 189 (ML) and CS 182 (Deep Neural Networks) were all significantly more difficult than any 61 series class.
aripickar··on I lived in LA and commuted to Berkeley by plane to save on rent
For full context, this is someone with a wife and two kids[1] who had a couple of semesters and just needed a temporary solution, not a 20 year old kid. Different then the title might suggest.

[1] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/05/15/uc-berkeley-la-plane...

aripickar··on It Wasn't AI
IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole essays, or if someone is actually typing and revising the essay until it is submitted. Essays that are just turned in in general are probably going to be a thing of the past.
aripickar··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2023)

  Location: San Francisco 
  Remote: Not full time (at least hybrid, no full time remote)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:  Java, Python, Bash, SQL, AWS, Postgres
  Website: https://aripickar.github.io
  Résumé/CV: https://aripickar.github.io/Ari_Resume_Winter_2022.pdf
  Email:ari.pickar@gmail.com

Hi HN! I am a fullstack/backend engineer with 3 years of experience looking for opportunities to work in person in San Francisco (preferred) or the greater bay area. I have previously worked in both the python (django) and java (spring) ecosystem at AWS and Noom. Currently looking for full time opportunities. I'm open for anything from first engineer to larger companies.
aripickar··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2023)

  Location: San Francisco 
  Remote: Not full time (at least hybrid, no full time remote)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:  Java, Python, Bash, SQL, AWS, Postgres
  Website: https://aripickar.github.io
  Résumé/CV: https://aripickar.github.io/Ari_Resume_Winter_2022.pdf
  Email:ari.pickar@gmail.com
Hi HN! I am a fullstack/backend engineer with 3 years of experience looking for opportunities to work in person in San Francisco (preferred) or the greater bay area. I have previously worked in both the python (django) and java (spring) ecosystem at AWS and Noom. Currently looking for full time opportunities.
aripickar··on Report from the California Department of Financial Protection on SVB [pdf]
Yeah, probably the best way to prevent this from happening would be to have the FDIC guarantee up to 40 million for businesses, or something on that level. Going from having >95% of your cash uninsured to even like 30% uninsured (for a huge company) would be a massive change.
aripickar··on Worst Opening Sentences of 2022
That sentence seems enough like some bastardized version of shakespeare[0] and Lisp that I bet you could get it to compile in some dialects.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...

aripickar··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
It's less that it's illegal/impossible and more that it's not in the interests of the company in the long run. Say you do that, then what? If you screw over the seed investors, they are probably are going to tell the series A (and B, C, etc) investors that you screwed them over, and its going to be a lot harder to impossible to raise the next rounds. Plus who would want to invest in a company when the founder already screwed over the last investors. The only way that it could work is if you are able to grow the company indefinitely without raising more money (See Toptal).

Basically, you are exchanging all the goodwill and ability to raise in the future for a small percentage of equity. Not a great trade, if you ask me.

aripickar··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
Not quite. The way that it works is that the 375k is invested now, but at terms that are determined in the next equity round. If the next round values the company at 10 million, then the 375k would be 3.75% of the company.
aripickar··on DMV approves Cruise and Waymo for commercial service in parts of Bay Area
Is there a timeline for when you will be rolling out the availability to ride in one of your vehicles to the general public?
aripickar··on Launch HN: Awesomic (YC S21) – Get design tasks done with 24-hour turnaround
This is something that would have been really useful when I was trying to get a POC out for a startup I was working on, especially at 1/3 of the cost that we ended up paying for an agency with a lot longer turnaround time. Kudos on launching a product that looks really useful!

ps: For some reason the expansions of the FAQ tabs expands really slowly, might want to fix that.

aripickar··on Launch HN: Emerge (YC W21) – Monitor and reduce iOS app size
There are limits based on the size of the binary that apple will allow on the app store. In addition, here's a really interesting story about how uber had to fight to downsize the app cause they realized that staying under the cellular data limit made people able to download the app when they were on the go: https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845
aripickar··on Sci-Founder Fellowship: Helping scientists to start companies
Early stage startup valuations are more or less worth the paper that they're printed on. Probably more cost effective to hard-code the valuation to the same number than to try and determine the value for each startup applying.
aripickar··on Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience
Its not one console held in a single repository. AWS has teams built around individual features, and each individual team is responsible for creating its own UI, which is why its not a particularly coherent standard. Open-Sourcing it would involve releasing thousands of repositories built on many different types of internal architectures, and would be largely infeasible to change/build upon without a solution like Vantage that sets up it's own IAM role.
aripickar··on Ask HN: Why are there no M1 Macs in Bay Area?
I got one from the Costco in SoMa with no wait, that’s probably the best bet for immediate availability.
aripickar··on The accidental genius of Yo
Ooh I did a similar thing at in college where I used a raspberry pie to hook up the door handle to speakers to play “The Boys are Back in Town” whenever someone opened up our front door at the beginning of the semester.
aripickar··on You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
That’s an interesting question. I think I would. But at the same time, I think that I would be more interested in building the next spacex than working at the current one.
aripickar··on You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
I think that’s the crux of it. It’s hard to give a shit about making someone else’s product. I like what I’m working on, think it’ll help people at scale, but it’s not my product, so I’m long term ambivalent
aripickar··on You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
I’ll push back on that.

I currently work as an SDE at a FAANG company known for being pretty demanding. My boss is phenomenal, pretty much everything you could ask for. Shielding us from other teams requesting stuff in an unreasonable time frame, not putting too much pressure to get things done in an unreasonable way, setting us up with mentors in different areas, building out explicit plans to grow to the next level, helping people plan breaks in the day to mentally recoup, the whole nine yards.

Despite all that, I still am looking to leave and start my own thing. And it’s mainly because that “I want to be my own boss mentality”. I don’t think that I’m alone in that.

aripickar··on [dead]
People who invest in stock have more money when stocks go up. News at 10
aripickar··on Building new Social Stock app and wanna hear you guys rip my idea
Having had a similar idea and decided against it after a lot of research, there’s a lot of thought that you would have to do as to how to position yourself. There’s already a number of players in the space. Want to talk about stocks while seeing what others hold? There’s the app public. Want to do it for crypto? There’s E-toro. Want to do it anonymously? /r/wallstreetbets.

You are also very at the whim of the robinhood api. If that changes, which it has, you can potentially be broken until you update it.

Finally, you have to have a lot of legal protection, especially if you allow follow on trades from smart money. That can get you in some shit with FINRA real quick.

Admittedly, I like this idea more than most. I think that people would use it, but I think that getting opinions from people would be better on WSB than HN, as dumb as that sounds

aripickar··on Pricing Low-Touch SaaS
I love pretty much everything that Patrick McKenzie writes, but for some reason, my default internal monologue for his writing makes reading everything that he writes sound like an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Makes reading his pieces a very interesting experience.
aripickar··on Silicon Valley’s Vast Data Collection Should Worry You More Than TikTok
Google’s customers want to serve you ads so they could buy your products. There’s nothing that they could do to you that is remotely on the scale of what Data Collection in China is capable of doing to you.
aripickar··on The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions
True, I was pleasantly surprised at those questions.
aripickar··on The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions
Hint: They're not.
aripickar··on The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions
People have a very optimistic view of what this hearing is going to reveal, and think that it is going to accomplish anything. But it’s largely gonna be republicans performance vomiting rhetoric about tech companies censoring conservative voices with no evidence, and democrats wanting to discuss everything but what the hearing is actually about, anti-trust. I expect a few democrats to make some interesting queries, and the tech news media to report minor stories that are unknown as breaking news.

Full disclosure: I work at a subsidiary of Amazon

aripickar··on When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]
Apple doesn’t take a cut from advertising, which funds the vast majority of apps.
aripickar··on Ask HN: What is the purpose of mobile applications?
Sometimes you want apps that are silo'd off and are not connected to the entire web. Mobile apps can provide users with a better experience since they are more locked down in terms of permissions
aripickar··on Designing a scalable API on AWS spot instances
I disagree. Once you increase your knowledge of AWS and associated systems, you can decrease cost of what you are doing through tips like what you see in this article. I don't quite get the point about optimizing cloud costs solely by switching to self hosted? Like of course you could do that, but you could also optimize costs by doing what the article says.

Full Disclosure: I work at AWS building tools to help customers do cost optimization.

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