HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

giansegato

1,317 karma · joined September 30, 2018

data & ai

sometimes blogging giansegato.com/essays

submissionscomments
giansegato··on VC Fund gives money back, says startup market too weak
Important detail is that they're both divesting from later stage deals, and doubling down on early stage ones
giansegato··on Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it
higher ROI than anything else I've ever done for my career, by a long shot

with my website [1] I found investors, I was contacted by a highly sought after silicon valley startup, moved to the US and got my visa sponsored, I even found friends here to get my network going and a professional network much more significant than anything I could ever have on linkedin

the only downside is that writing on your blog takes a long time to become clearly worth it (read: years), so most people don't stick to it and never find out -- do it!

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays

giansegato··on Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization
I don't think there's anything about YC inherently misaligned with the next startup era — in fact, they're adapting their model accordingly, hedging their bets + investing in harder tech with higher capex and longer feedback loops. It's gonna take a while to see the new strategy play out, much longer than before in fact. That said, agreed with the general point that the model is changing and the old playbook is not working anymore. I published 5000 words last month that try to analyze this trend within an economics framework: https://giansegato.com/essays/dawn-new-startup-era
giansegato··on VCs aren’t your friends
VC management fees are typically 2%/y. if a VC fund has $100 million in committed capital, the annual management fees would generally be between $2 million and $2.5 million. it's a lot of money.
giansegato··on California says restaurants must bake all of their add-on fees into menu prices
that's not true. you have it written explicitly in the final check. you just don't have to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out how much you'll pay before ordering, which is absolutely absurd
giansegato··on US opens probe into 130k Ford vehicles over hands-free tech
I don't understand the general tenor and sentiment of the comments here. I've taken dozens of self-driving cars rides in SF in the last few months. They were magical, and _they work_.

It blows my mind that the general defeatist tone is "it can't be done", while it's literally happening right now. It took a bajillion dollars and decades of work, but we're past the tipping point now.

Sure, regulation must happen, it's not like a chat bot where screwing up is worst case scenario being canceled for a week. Lives are on the line. But outright "it's impossible and must be stopped" is literally against progress.

giansegato··on 25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge
that's correct. most beaches in Italy are privately held, with decades-long contracts

it's a huge scandal and yet very hard to solve because of the same dynamics of the bridge above: special interests, and hideous lobbying

giansegato··on Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
Uhm. I don't know. At my company, we're living on Slack (it's remote). There are only few tactical meetings. Coordination happen async on Slack. Worked out pretty well so far, we ship tons of stuff continuously. I agree with some other comments here: how much signal to noise ratio you get out of Slack mostly boils down to the people
giansegato··on Show HN: Have fun betting virtual (not real) money on predictions from HN users
even if it was, everyone would benefit from the information (it being public)
giansegato··on Replit's in-browser coding AI
yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE

iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models

giansegato··on Replit's in-browser coding AI
replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks
giansegato··on An account was suspended
I know reasonably well some ex FB people from the early days (early 2010s, well before IPO). They explicitly defined FB as a 'utility' - based on how users react during outages and usage patterns.

I think that your definition is not only spot on, but actually what social media platforms themselves interpret their role.

giansegato··on On Adobe acquiring Figma
Why would they even want that? They paid 15% of their market cap (30 considering the drop) for a new shiny toy, and now they would just… cash it? Doesn't make any sense, their incentive is to keep it great and working. Whether they can is a completely different matter.
giansegato··on You can watch how much I rewrite here
in replit we just implemented playback mode, it's called history mode, and we do happen to have vi shortcuts (couldn't live without them)

(I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)

giansegato··on Show HN: Lota – An online ePub reader with VS Code style
VSCode is open source. Its underlying editor is too, it's called Monaco: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
giansegato··on Yak Shaving: A Short Lesson on Staying Focused (2018)
What you're saying and what the article is saying are two different things. The whole point of the article is not "Don't refactor code"; it's "Never fix a bug and refactor in the same pull request".

It's a matter of focus and intentionality.

giansegato··on Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
I think surround is so deeply nested in users workflow that it's almost like an official one. It's the only one i'd go as far as to adding it to your course, but potentially you could think of a chapter on vimrc, which skyrockets your productivity (but is also quite advanced)
giansegato··on Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
I see that there's a pretty big miss in the syllabus: surround! yes, true, it's not "official" but rather a plugin, but you can't really do without it, can you?
giansegato··on Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
How could they refuse after being compelled by a court ruling? Did they appeal / sue you back? Can't see how they could simply say... "no".
giansegato··on 700M users and Premium
in Europe it's quite popular and widespread for legit purposes as well
giansegato··on YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
ime mods here tend to actually stay away from negative yc stories, in order to not get into slippery paths. don’t have proof of it, but the simple fact that this is still up with 400 points is a fact.
giansegato··on Why income share agreements did not work out
I'm not following. Afaik Lambda didn't collapse. It recently rebranded due to a trademark conflict, but they're still alive and well from what I gather. Someone be so kind to explain?
giansegato··on Facebook loses users for the first time
> FB have never built a successful product besides Zuck's original.

Can we argue the same point for Google?

Considering their dominant position in digital ads, I wonder what this implies.

giansegato··on I discovered thousands of open databases on AWS
i'm very embarrassed to admit this, but i literally just discovered this. thought ufw was literally last defense. gotta run to fix this

(luckily, all just pet projects with no sensitive stuff - still…)

giansegato··on Google is wrong. Apple’s iMessage is a failure
can confirm for italy: whatsapp is 100% the only expected tool of communication. telegram is making some waves in some circles, but for the most part it's whatsapp only: groups, 1:1, business support, anything

my experience in germany and spain is vastly similar

giansegato··on An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation
so it's a branch, uh. i'll never wrap my head around the complex corp structure of these crypto juggernauts
giansegato··on An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation
they're based in Hong Kong so i'm not sure why US / EU regulation should apply
giansegato··on Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
Congrats for the impressive technical feat!

One (maybe naive) question: at a certain point in the demo, Rainbow wallet forecasts a 400$ gas fee. Does this mean that in order to play this game, I need to spend hundreds of dollars for each round? I know that there are many other chains that are vastly more efficient, plus all the L2 optimizations and all. I was just wondering if this is actually the case in this particular instance or I'm missing something important.

giansegato··on Ten Years of Logging My Life
I did the same, but with a far less complex system. It's a markdown file synced using iCloud, where input happens using Apple Shortcut. Works quite well. Screenshots here [1].

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/giansegato/status/146896340342311...

giansegato··on Apple removes references to CSAM from its child safety webpage
They've been already doing server side CSAM, for a while, on iCloud pics. Their issue was targeting all media that wasn't uploaded.
Page 1 of 4Next →