arohner

At the end of the day, this is all the LP's money, and this comes down to how much the LPs pay the VCs for their service.

Leaving aside bloat in lawyer rates because the VC doesn't care about price, the total cost to do the deal is basically unchanged though.

> why is it even the case in the first place?

1) Because VCs were working on 'fixed income' 2) because they could. The standard deal historically is "2 and 20", i.e. the VCs get paid 2% of the fund raised per year, and the first 20% of the profit. That 2% is used to pay for salary and office space, and doesn't increase until you raise a new fund, and the 20% isn't realized until the fund ends in 10 years. So pushing the cost onto the startup saves them a decent amount of money when you're doing dozens of deals a year.

Medicine and vaccines are science, socialism is ideology.

I type at least that fast, and the keyboard is still a bottleneck for me sometimes.

When using emacs/vim and primarily using the keyboard, there are extra gains to be had by typing faster, because you can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate, find text, etc.

Unless you're playing a videogame, it's unlikely that you'll practice or improve on your mouse coordination and make significant gains there.

In a quiz with multiple security questions, I'd give bonus points to an applicant who found security problems.

The quiz wouldn't pass security review, FWIW. The answers are shipped with the javascript, and validation is done client side, so they're just an 'inspect element' away.

Agreed. I've been a professional developer for nearly 20 years. I've shipped kernel C, windows C++, java,python, ruby, clojure to production, but the last time I wrote python was nearly a decade ago. Since then, I've been firmly in the Clojure community, with no intention of leaving.

I know I'm a good programmer, and I got nearly every python-specific question wrong. I understand closures and call-by-reference tyvm, but I don't remember or care about the quirks of python.

Triplebyte in particular seems to not care about the difference between "good at programming" and "good at programming in python". The skillset needed for C, python, clojure and JS are wildly different. They do a disservice to their users by pretending otherwise.

Yes, but that doesn't deal with authentication. My problem was getting the JWT stuff working. The solution ended up being: https://gist.github.com/arohner/8d94ee5704b1c0c1b206186525d9...

Step 1) document the endpoints enough that outside developers can write their own clients.

It took quite a bit of work for me to get a native Clojure client working to connect to the google cloud SDK. That was after wrestling with jar-hell around gRPC and calling the Java client from clojure, which is decidedly not pretty.

Agreed, I was just showing my work.

That analysis makes sense, if you leave out the VCs. They would also like a return on their investment, and if they thought going public would be profitable, you can be sure it would have already happened.

Most of the blame for this can be placed on Sarbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act), and other regulations imposed by the SEC.

Believe me, if you're a founder, you want to exit as well. The problem is, the cost for being a public company has gone up dramatically, due to increased regulatory compliance costs.

Quick back of the envelope: let's define angel as someone who can write 10, $25k checks a year. Let's say they have a yearly lifestyle expense of $250k, so they need to make $500k/year off their wealth. Then, assume they make between 4-8%/year on their investments. so that's $6-12M in the bank.

> If the increased cost is due to government inefficiency, there is opportunity for for-profit businesses to provide the same service at lower cost, and either capture the difference as profit or compete on cost for more business. However, in practice, for-profit hospitals and schools operate at similar cost.

One possible cause here is government regulation causes increased costs, which all (legal) private companies can't avoid.

> However, US costs are much higher and have increased much faster than in other developed countries, despite the US system being the most privatised by far.

Which industry are you talking about here? The US does not have privatized medicine at all.

> how will stuff even remotely work when we are a interplanetary species

IPFS or similar. Basically, make all public content content-addressed (give me the article with SHA 0xabcdef) rather than connection oriented (give me the bytestream that comes from http://news.ycombinator.com/foo/bar)

Yes, but Mars is easier to live on than the moon, because it has an atmosphere, it's a lot warmer and terraform-able.

> There are so, so many reasons for space migration that have nothing to do with earth's environmental problems. Asteroid. Super volcano. Gamma ray burst. Magnetic field reversal. Pandemic. Super fungus. Artificial super intelligence. Nuclear war.

I understand everything on that list with the exception of magnetic field reversal. Can you explain why it's so bad?

You are literally creating a monopoly (one hospital) to justify that will produce lower prices.

Please give me one other example in an unregulated market where your MRI machine example makes sense. It sounds good on paper, but that doesn't happen in any other market in the western world.

If there are two competing gas stations, prices get cheaper. Two competing airlines, prices get cheaper.

I see the /snark, but I'll answer seriously.

Most JS code assumes it's targeting either a browser or node.js. Nashorn is very barebones, and can't pass for either. trying to run core.async on Nashorn didn't work for me because it expects either Window.setTimeout (which browsers use) or whatever-node-js uses for timers. I expect a large percentage of the libraries you'd want to use will be similarly affected.

One counter argument to the author's point is that there were many not-very-popular 2WB frameworks, until React and Angular came along. 1-way, top down clearly outcompeted 2WB.

In my own experience, I worked on an app that migrated from a 2WB (forgot the name, sorry) to React, and it was night-and-day difference.

> static types can enforce things that contracts cannot

Example, please?

Clojure programmers use it everywhere. I suspect almost nobody else does though.

I'm aware of that legally the distinction is relevant, but in the realm of public discourse, it isn't. YC could also e.g. cut ties with Thiel because he's gay, but of course HN would crucify them.

Based on reading your comments for several years, I presume you are very much in favor of protecting employees from various kinds of discrimination(as you should!). Advocating firing Thiel seems to be counter to that.

- If YC severed ties w/ Thiel, as people are recommending, should YC also divest itself of companies with founders who support Trump?

- Should YC-invested companies fire employees who support Trump?

- Imagine the shitstorm if a right-leaning YC founder fired an employee for working in the HRC or Stein campaign. The no-discrimination at any cost crowd is going to howl with rage the first time "their" person gets fired by "the other" camp, solely for political affiliation.

- Ok, we could pass some employment law: "firing employees over political beliefs is not OK, unless it's an existential threat". Who gets to decide what is an existential threat?

This is a very dangerous weapon, and your eagerness to use it now makes me think you haven't considered what will happen when it's used against your political tribe.

"In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked [US Admiral Hyman Rickover] how long American carriers would survive in an actual war." his response? “Forty-eight hours”.

https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-...

What you've described looks more like Amazon's strategy. It's probably more correct to say Google & Facebook are copying Amazon rather than BH.

The core of BH has ~20 employees. Warren Buffet always calls out his subsidiary CEOs for doing a great job, because BH couldn't exist in its current format if he had to manage day-to-day operations in any subsidiary.

The steps in Buffet's algorithm are the same, but the emphasis is different. Amazon builds moats and cashflow, while BH buys stable companies that already produce cashflow. BH doesn't need moats, only profit. Amazon, Google, FB need both moats and profit.

Buffet's algorithm looks more like:

  - (1) Identify stable, profitable businesses that WB understands
  - (2) if they're a good bargain, and it moves the needle on BH stock, buy
  - (3) goto (1)

Great article. I really appreciate that the OP describes a more closed-form solution to what makes a senior engineer, rather than platitudes like "learn 5 languages".

One nit I'd pick with it though is that many large and bureaucratic companies won't appreciate an engineer who decides it on them to fix hiring, culture, product marketing fit and marketing. If you find yourself in this position, it's time to move on to somewhere else that will. Typically, those companies are startups.

Your clarifications help, thanks.

> I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that.

Yes, if you're not at product/market fit, then as a business getting to product/market fit is probably the most important thing. However, people problems always crop up when you have people involved, and your people problems will be largely uncorrelated to whether the business has product/market fit. (It's not likely that you will have fewer people problems because the business doesn't have PMF).

The article could probably be made more clear that this isn't a 'list of things to do after you're successful', it's more a 'common failure patterns we see in companies with headcount > X'. And of course, there's the unstated advice, which is 'try to avoid having large headcount until after PMF'.

> There are probably less than 20 YC companies that have reached the point where this advice is valid. Zenefits, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe etc.

This advice is useful to basically every startup that has raised an A round, or is >= 10 people. That list is significantly larger than 20.

Management and HR problems start significantly earlier than Stripe size (200? 300?). They start at around 10 people, and this article matches my own experiences with useful advice to founders.

> most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.

Which part, precisely is flawed? Frequent, clear communication and proper delegation are almost so true as to be tautological. Most founders don't go wrong because they don't agree that these are valuable, they go wrong by forgetting to do them.

Then it's not working. There are console commands that will print your toxicity metric. I routinely score ~9800 out of 10,000, i.e. friendly, and several times a week am matched with very toxic players.