bschmidt1

These guys were pioneers who set forth a lot of the patterns used in other PM software (Did they invent "Velocity"?). I hated Pivotal in the early days, but after a couple years on the job I learned to really love it especially as the newer flimsier sprint planning tools were popping up in the early web 2 days.

Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history.

I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP

It's especially rich coming from Facebook who was all for regulating everyone else in social media after they had already captured the market.

Everyone tries this. Apple tried it with lawsuits and patents, Facebook did it under the guise of privacy, OpenAI will do it under the guise of public safety.

There's almost no case where a private company is going to be able to successfully argue "they shouldn't be allowed but we should" I wonder why so many companies these days try. Just hire better people and win outright.

It's somewhat common to open source the core yet still monetize a version (browser vendors, SaaS, games). People will still pay for convenience, reliability, or for the best product.

> Why would I use their API?

To pay 15 cents per million tokens instead of $5.

> license is Apache 2.0

There are browser vendors that use Chromium despite "competing" with Chrome - even though it's the same kind of web browser product, there are some benefits if they allow the other options to exist. The same can be said of open source games and frienemy situations like Uber vs Lyft in the early days - it doesn't necessarily hurt to have others playing your game, especially if you have a common enemy (Firefox, other games, cabs, respectively).

I run mostly Mistral offline in Terminal (via ollama cli) but in the case where I need a text-to-text LLM for an app and users pay for access to the LLM-powered stuff, why not use Mistral's API? Then I could have a super cheap app setup on Vercel or whatever and do everything through an API key. The app would "be AI" and yet it runs on a calculator for cents.

The main thing that comes to mind regarding "just spin it up on AWS" is the considerable backend needs (GPU) and cost to train and run LLMs. In the same way you ask why use the LLM's cloud option when I could use AWS' cloud option? could also ask the inverse (or just host it yourself for free after initial setup if it's cost you're after).

If you need geo located instances and some other specific requirements use IaaS, but otherwise I think IaaS like AWS and GCP are a nightmare to manage - the awful IAM experience, all the vendor-specific jargon, navigating the hell that is Amazon.com. For something like an LLM "just spin it up on AWS" is just funny when you really consider what you're getting yourself into.

> because a hypothetical light particle emitted at A couldn't reach B in time

Fascinating insights - it can be seen as causality, or at scale that there is a multi-dimensional reality where some timelines are inaccessible/impossible to each other (yet exist in their own right).

The whole comment was about how much you love the Discover algorithm because it just shows you "nice things" but ok

Wow, so excited for this.

I had a web app online in 2020-22 called Skim Day that predicted skimboarding conditions on California beaches that was mostly powered by weather APIs. The tide predictions were solid, but the weather itself was almost never right, especially wind speed. Additionally there were some missing metrics like slope of beach which changes significantly throughout the year and is very important for skimboarding.

Basically, I needed AI. And this looks incredible. Love your website and even the name and concept of "Generative Forecasting Transformer (GFT)" - very cool. I imagine the likes of Surfline, The Weather Channel, and NOAA would be interested to say the least.

> LinkedIn is pretty important nowadays when searching for work

I agree with your larger point esp. Gmail - would be quite crippling - but I haven't had LinkedIn for years now, and it hasn't negatively impacted my job or searches. If anything, it helped me be more proactive when I was looking instead of feeling like I was praying to the abyss.

There was a second in ~2020 where LinkedIn was starting to feel like finding work in the Myspace days - people were expressing themselves in more personal ways on their profiles (I guess because of the lockdown) and remote work was just kicking off. It had this glow that reminded me a lot of the early 2000s work scene online.

Soon enough, as LI caught onto the trend those quirky profiles and posts were replaced with branded influencers and "viral posts". The platform quickly became as influencer-focused as Instagram or Twitter, which feels inappropriate for a job site. But it's not a job site they say, it's a career platform... or professional network... or something (of which a huge aspect is uploading your resume and applying to jobs). Anyway, the way the LinkedIn influencer sphere covered layoffs was like an E! television show - they loved it.

Turns out LinkedIn is not an "essential social media" shall we say. It's not the career accessory that my GitHub and a Macbook are, it could have been, but they chose their path.

Breathing is something you can either do or not do, yet it's also something that happens automatically, such as during sleep or when you're not paying attention to it.

When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).

I think there is a way to find the ease and harmony in most things, or, the "automatic modes". You can design your life in such a way that you're essentially doing nothing, but to others you appear to be involved in everything.

I can only imagine what it would be like to stop paddling and see that I am still in motion, to be able to exhale and do nothing.

It went from being a potentially infinite public creative/informational space to a privately owned strip mall with a few boring shops where you have to show your ID to get in. Same thing happens with any neat physical location too - gets commercialized to hell, becomes totally ruined and boring by last-movers, commandeered by academics who act like they invented it, and productized by capitalists who want to turn any/all freely available blessings into expensive yet shoddy products (plus ads).

What once presented a true and superior alternative to the mainstream firehose of advertising and propaganda became "Fox News Presents The Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign Show (Sponsored by SquareSpace), With Your Hosts Kim Kardashian and Jake Paul!" just like the radio, film, etc. - it gets commercialized/ruined.

We need a new thing, bsky aint it.

> the folks running it care about making a nice place for people to hang out

This is actually what I didn't like about bsky. I don't want the developer of software to inject their personal social biases into the platform, and thought one of the main points of decentralization was to mitigate this.

> if we're gonna all be terminally online, we might as well at least bring as much of the human experience back into it as we can

So Myspace, Foursquare? (Not being witty, I loved that era)

> founders get common stock

Not any company I found. The only "founders" who totally give their company to investors are kids who just graduated who get to raise a huge seed round because of family connections, and half the time it's not even their idea nor their company really.

My wife and I run a local business here in SF that does well on its own, but if at any point we wanted to take on VC funding, we would never in a million years do a deal where we give up the board and all the actual ownership of the business we started and grew ourselves.

"IRL social" in SF hahah

Some good photography profiles:

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/phlezk

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/ritaskitchen

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/autumnal

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/explorenorcal

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/somedude

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/topcats

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/chelsea

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/allcats

- https://wave-social.vercel.app/nicewaves

Confirms my suspicion that the most active HN users are in Canada/East Coast/Europe.

When I first discovered HN I thought it was a small Stanford thing, but over time realized it's mostly a Canada/Europe crowd (even most of the YC founders that come to San Francisco for their startup are from those places).

Yeah, just not sure what to do about it though. They are based here in SF but the founder was in Toronto when I took the call, he probably is not an American citizen.

Helps at least just sharing it here and having people like you echo that it's not legal and founders should stop asking.

Ultimately it's not worth it, which is why I left. Sucks though because I have to find another startup in town and hope it's not basically the same thing.

1. I'm asking a question "Is this the new norm?" not drawing conclusions.

2. I'm asking it after 2 consecutive experiences with YC founders, after 15+ years of working in a software developer role in this city and having never been asked to work 7 days a week as baseline.

Maybe they should recruit founders out of prison, surely they're angrier. I still don't see a correlation to a lucrative exit.

> the first employees are excited about working 7 days a week

> the new guy sucks. Just gets everything done slower

You made 2 mistakes here.

1. The first employees were not excited, they were all on paid trial periods and have no equity.

2. The other developer who quit and myself by far did all the work. Staying all night does not mean you get the most work done. Actually, the founders played basketball most of the time and got no work done. Over the years I've learned to become increasingly productive during the day (with the help of coffee, eating right/being active) and I effectively built most of their product even though I would "sneak out" at 7 at times. Staying late at night or going in on weekends never advanced the product. Most nights would end in the VP Eng. and founders drinking wine and whiskey (this is a YC startup mind you). They didn't do anything despite being there all the time.

We were all on long term paid trials. (I assume we were all being paid, maybe not). Besides that, what employee has preferred stock or any other provisions that would prevent their equity from being simply diluted the moment the preferred stock owners wanted more (e.g. in the case of raising another round)?

I've never heard of any employee who has "founder equity" (AKA preferred stock), but I guess I wouldn't know, people don't really share. Are there any famous examples?

> the human body simply can't do productive work in that type of environment

investor appears

Investor: "But 10x'ers can"

/cape

investor disappears

Founders: "Whoa"

> emergency mode

Founder mode. :cool:

^/s I agree with all of your thoughts, especially:

> great when voluntary and self-driven and terrible if mandated

It's an interesting psychological thing: No matter how easy or even comfortable a job is, if you have to be there at X time for Y hours it's now work. It's the scheduling that kills all the joy.

Even if it's your favorite hobby that you do everyday anyway, but now you have to do it for someone at a specific time, even if they agree to pay you for it. Why does it now suck? Add in other layers like: Do it this specific way, do it in a group of others with competing opinions, do it in a distracting office 1 hour away, etc. and it quickly becomes the polar opposite of what you previously considered to be a rewarding hobby or skill.

On the flip side it can be the hardest work in the world but if I do it on my own terms when I feel like it (sometimes I really want to fix something) - then you don't even have to pay me! It's my pleasure. Glad I could help.

Funny how that works. To truly "love what you do" in a career sense is trickier than it seems, because it often involves tolerating a lot of peripheral stuff that everyone naturally hates like commuting or having a bad manager (among other things). For the capable, it takes changing things at your job to get as close to imitating the fun hobby as possible (tech, meeting schedule, hours, flex time) - so that you can actually think and perform from a place of comfort and well-being (why every manager is not perfecting this art is beyond me).

It sounded like glamorizing because of:

> YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot.

Equating the success metric to people who have anger problems from the perspective of YC.

The interview I just had (with the YC founder that inspired this post) also asked "Do you have kids?" point blank as one of his first questions - seconds after I met him on the video call. Should have mentioned that in the post as it's also pretty inappropriate. This was before he asked if I was okay working 7 days a week.

> work hard and intensely during business hours but take it easy outside of that mindset

I am all for a work hard/play hard mentality, and I embody that truly, even moreso in my 30s. I don't have a lot of family commitments and often work longish hours anyway (~8-7) but even in a 9-5 context there's something rewarding about seeing how much I can possibly get done before some milestone like lunch or the end of the day. I optimize the entire morning around time spent coding and in my head I've already solved the problem the night before, and am optimizing on my commute after sleeping on the solution. By the time I get there I jam through the code, hit a stopping point at PR or something else, and it's usually only early afternoon. Hit a second wind around 3-4, ending around 7. Meanwhile I'll see founders do nothing until 5, then half-work from 5-9 and pat themselves on the back for "staying late", and go so far as to ask why I'm not staying later than 7 like them (despite me building most of the product).

Even more than a 9-5, I love environments where I can say "waves are good this week, won't be at standups" and nobody cares because the work will still be done, and it will be higher quality work with better documentation and presentation because my lifestyle is still in tact - I'm happy - and you see it in my work. When founders focus intensely on breaking their employees' lifestyles, they're almost asking for lower quality work from less happy employees. Something only an inexperienced founder who doesn't care about financial success would be involved in.

> To proverbially prove all the haters wrong

I disagree on both points 1) that only young, inexperienced founders have this mindset and 2) that this mindset is somehow better than other forms of inspiration/opportunity.

No amount of "being angry" equals having the skill, finesse, or revenues to see a successful exit. I recently read the avg. age of a founder who exits (acquisition or IPO) was age 45. The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.

Creating a company to "prove the haters wrong" seems misguided and actually far less potent than doing it out of survival, or because there is an incredible financial opportunity in front of you.

> Is it sustainable?

An adjacent question, but the answer is an obvious "No" right? Anyway I was really getting at the question: Is this what to expect from YC founders in 2024+? Context being I've never been asked to work weekends as a normal schedule in 15+ years of working at startups in San Francisco, but recently got asked twice in a row, both from YC.

> Why are you focused on YC/startups?

I've worked at a couple of large, well-known companies too but I like startups because there's usually more of a focus on building a product, and usually everyone on the team is interested in the space. In some cases there are early customers with requests/feedback/needs that the iterations are centered around and it's interesting to be close to that, especially when I genuinely care about the problem space.

In most startups I'm also working in an ideal or nearly ideal tech stack - either something I don't mind learning or something I'm already using in my personal stuff. Where at a big corporation it's often a painful tech stack unique to their predicament with devops processes that are outdated and complex. It's also hard to change anything, or introduce new tech which can be much easier at a startup with only a few developers. We can be like "this looks sick let's try it" vs "this looks sick I'm gonna go to Google Docs and create a Request-For-Comment, submit it to my engineering manager for approval, which after some debate he will send to the DofE for approval, which will be mulled over (?) for 6 weeks before being mentioned to the CTO who asks his friend/developer his thoughts who suggests an alternative which sparks a debate in the Google Docs comment section about the time complexity of a click handler".

Why YC: The startups in their directory tend to be more aligned with the problems I care about in tech, and are often quite cutting-edge in terms of mission and tech stack. I used a lot of AngelList in their heyday as well for similar reasons. It felt like a curated list of the startups who were: In SF, have a budget/runway, use modern tech, founders are (ideally) technical themselves or at least passionate about a space and have serious drive.

> Are you curious why the founders of a company spend 24/7 working it

If you read the post I said they were not there 24/7 working, they're often doing other things. Maybe this is the image put forth by YC and maybe it was once the truth, but I'm seeing the opposite now where founders expect 24/7 workers but they themselves are not so passionate and engaged.

> If you make $1mil/year plus bonus, 80 hrs a week seems more reasonable.

Nowhere near that of course, just google market rate salaries in San Francisco (don't forget to adjust for cost of living).

The T Bell in Pacifica might be a little pricey but has the best views and serves margaritas!

I imagined if it was proof-of-work the mining would actually be the compute work requested. Everyone is racing to solve the problem just like in Bitcoin, except the problem is the requested GPU task. The fastest/first one to provide a result gets to update the ledger (and receives the reward).

Maybe you run a private platform too like git/GitHub if there are real world payments and user accounts, but I wonder why couldn't that technology be used? Does "blockchain" just have an irreparably bad name at this point?

That's actually interesting. While crypto GPU mining is "purposeless" or arbitrary, would be way cooler if to GPU mine meant to chunk through computing tasks in a free/open queue (blockchain).

Eventually there could be some tipping point where networks are fast enough and there are enough hosting participants it could be like a worldwide/free computing platform - not just for AI for anything.