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fishcakes

95 karma · joined July 5, 2011

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fishcakes··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
Strongly recommend tiger21 - which is an amazing community of people dealing with the positives and negatives of wealth. I have found it immensely helpful.

Message me if you are interested.

Tiger21.com

fishcakes··on Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?
We are building a new kind of venture capital investment firm - Empros Capital.

We are hiring for two roles:

1. People that have a technical background and want to become investors.

2. People that have an extraordinary background outside of technology (especially in writing or other liberal arts) and a deep interest in technology and want to become investors.

Please get in touch if interested! My email is alex at …

fishcakes··on Automated Data Wrangling
This is a terrific idea!
fishcakes··on Liquidity Is Coming
You said it perfectly. Agree 100%
fishcakes··on Steve Jobs at MIT Sloan School of Management (1992) [video]
Interesting to think about why this reality didn’t come to pass. Ben was clearly right about the opportunity market being huge and i think it’s timing. Without having thought too much about I think he underestimated or couldn’t compete with Microsoft. Having cheap wintel PCs everywhere made next irrelevant.
fishcakes··on Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens
That is like asking everything Oracle or Postgresql knows about you. It doesn't make sense.

Palantir is software deployed for specific customers. The customers then use Palantir against their data and publicly available data.

fishcakes··on Best Wifi Mesh Network Kits
I agree completely. I went all in and I have 7x UniFi ap AC in my house (2 per floor over 3 floors and one in the guest house). They are all powered by the switch (power over Ethernet) making it super clean.

The software is fine by the big advantage is that it has meraki reliability without the licensing.

fishcakes··on Hedging Against Getting Paid in Stock
I think the spirit of this is misguided and goes against the spirit of the compensation. The stock based compensation is designed to align everyone's incentives as well as filter for individuals who believe in the prospects of the company.

Hedging out your stock based compensation goes directly against this, and misaligns you with the rest of your company. I think if you don't believe in the companies prospects it is best to take another job or ask for more cash and less equity.

fishcakes··on Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
Yeah :)
fishcakes··on Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
Here are a few ideas:

- Selling enterprise software (you can make 10%-20% of an 8 or 9 figure deal)

- Selling securities in some form or another (you make ~5% of deals worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)

- high leverage consulting (solving very hard tech problems for lots of people. for example: I have a friend who helps a whole bunch of computer vision companies and makes a ton. Another friend is an SEO expert.)

- Patenting core technologies and selling those patents (A buddy of mine sold his patent for $10M)

- "platform based land grabs". Think of the people who bought tons of domains early in the Web's history. Or the first guy to make an emoji app on iOS. These are different than "starting a company" as you really only need a product and can pull it all off on your own. I suspect there will be more of these in the future.

All of these require creatively navigating business as well as being an awesome dev.

fishcakes··on Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients
On one hand, it is true they deploy people to implement the software.

On the other hand, the customer has results after 6-8 weeks. How much software can really be built in that sort of time frame? Not much...

In my opinion Palantir is a product company, but the product is deeply integrated in to an enterprise. And doing that takes time and people.

fishcakes··on Ask HN: Where to find great web developers
No engineers in our network are excited about working on the web. Everyone is either mobile or backend focussed.
fishcakes··on Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
fishcakes··on Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
The alternative to Palantir - an alternative enterprise bespoke system or one built by the companies' or Gov's IT department - costs a whole lot more (25x) and often doesn't work! Palantir is a great value.
fishcakes··on Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
Pretty affordable considering many other things on the GSA don't work once you buy them!
fishcakes··on Microsoft CEO Search: Stalemate
They should make David Sacks CEO.
fishcakes··on The unprofitable SaaS business model trap
Any SaaS B2B company with network effects does this easily because the revenue from each customer is a function of the value they derive from the software, which increases with the square of the number of customers.

Think Excel (network effects derived from its communication properties), CoreLogic (derived from having all the data), Addepar, etc.

These companies also typically have high fixed costs across all of their customers once they are at scale.

fishcakes··on Why is Larry Lessig plugging Palantir?
Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.

These features are a deep part of the platform (i.e. they can't be turned off) that powers a lot of the other features (entity resolution / de-resolution, for example). Say what you want about the people collecting the data and the data they are collecting, but civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir.

fishcakes··on Room 641A
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_de...
fishcakes··on The Cyprus bail-out: Unfair, short-sighted and self-defeating
German bankers sending a message to people to move their money to Germany because it isn't safe elsewhere
fishcakes··on Show HN: Tiled Text – a Different Approach to Editing Text
using the syntax tree for navigation was a brilliant insight. really nicely done.
fishcakes··on Ask HN: Anyone do SEO projects (one off) for local businesses?
Word, thanks! I am really looking for one person though who can see this project through to completion...
fishcakes··on Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac
if you haven't tried using 💰 as the name of a branch in git well then you haven't lived.
fishcakes··on Google to buy Frommer's
Vertical integration. Those who own content distribution (I.e. search) buy up the content. This solidifies / extends their unique ability to deliver relevant content.

A good analogy would be Comcast buying NBC. Of course google is at a higher scale than any previous distributor, so they can easily buy up lots of small but very valuable comtent producers.

Scary.

fishcakes··on Prepaid Cellphones Are Cheaper. Why Aren't They Popular?
if you take the (low) depreciation rate of the phone into account its probably even more true. the resell rates on iPhones is quite high. used iPhone 4's are going for apprx $250. you could think of it as a lease.
fishcakes··on OpenStates.org in public beta
Bravo sunlight
fishcakes··on AppFog Pricing Released
What about reliability. A multi-az paas would dominate heroku at any price.

Anyone know about reliability?

fishcakes··on Greplin becomes Cue - Intelligent "Snapshot" of your Day
The "get this app" link is broken
fishcakes··on Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say
non-state actor
fishcakes··on Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say
Isreal
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