jpeg_hero

Not a stupid question, it's basically the job of the Investment Bank to help company management, the auditors and company lawyers to pull it all together. It's one of the main things they hang their traditional 7% fee on. I'd say in a good process the company would take a year or two of clean up and positioning of the financials and the corporation and then solid 6 months with the bankers (and accountants and lawyers) of drafting "the story" and getting all the boilerplate together.

how do they do the black?

Genius or madness, not sure which.

Can’t help draw a parallel To Boeing where both used to have a very strong engineering led culture

Its safe to say the unix crowd recreated the Windows Registry. I guess it turns out the Microsoft guys weren't idiots its just a messy problem that requires a messy solution.

As someone who used to make pitch books in investment banking (not GS), I'll tell you some of the awesome things I saw from a user perspective.

-- Funny when they mentioned fitting in a lot of text in a small space. I've never used so much 8-pt font in my life before or since. A lot of the time you are very space constrained in things like detailed footnotes, so you are almost tweet speaking to fit it all in there

-- The number section blew me away, the fact that you are getting fixed width number performance (and capital letter tickers too) in a "normal" font is incredible. There is a lot of focus on perfect number alignment (the dreaded #,##0_);(#,##0) number format in Excel).

Also to address some of the comments why they didn't put a slash through the 0. The audience is financial professionals and the slashed 0 is not used, and would be very distracting and especially so for large round numbers ie

   1,000,000

> “Playing hard to get makes it seem as if you are more in demand—we call that having higher mate value,” says Harry Reis, a professor of psychology and Dean’s Professor in Arts, Sciences & Engineering at Rochester.

>“People who are too easy to attract may be perceived as more desperate,” says coauthor Gurit Birnbaum, a social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the IDC Herzliya.

Thank god for theses scientists undertaking this examination of this curious ritual called “human love”

I heard an interesting theory, I wish I could credit whoever thought it up but I've forgotten. The theory is that the success Dirac had and all of the successes of the other luminaries around the early 1900 - 1930's (essentially everyone in the picture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...) has created the perception that HEP and quantum physics are this dynamic field where the mysteries of the universe are being rapidly discovered. According to this theory, this romantic vision has led kids to get into the field even when real discoveries have actually ground to a halt and what is achievable has shrunk and shrunk. Basically, this area of science is played out or is in a natural ebb causing everyone in the field to have an existential crisis. Interesting theory.

HN discovers the concept of "Press Packet"?

Well said, totally agree with the way you phrased it.

I always see comments like this from individual contributors. I'll give you the managers perspective.

You may be worth $150k, any one individual engineer could be worth multiples of that!

Look at your entire engineering team, from best to worst. Is not there some inflation of salaries in the SF Bay area? The bootcamper that is making $110k out of bootcamp? Are they really 73% as effective as you?

The marketing person down the hall? Do you contribute more then that person today? Yeah, probably. Without marketing to get the word out and sales to actually bring in the cash, how much would your contribution be worth?

You have to look at the whole system as a manager. And yes we pay the bootcamper $110k because we hope they'll grow into be a great engineer like you.

Pretty hilarious that OP goes straight into the collapse of civilization and Linear B after he TLDR’s

Absolutely would not bring it up.

California has "ban the box" and as a practical matter:

1. most "boxes" on employment application ask about Felonies not misdemeanors.

2. I'm not an expert but the few times i've looked into it "criminal background check" is nowhere near as comprehensive as people think. it involves going to each county where you think the person resided and looking up records there. so according to you even if they thought to look in the county where your record is, they wouldn't find anything.

https://www.shouselaw.com/california-ban-the-box-laws

California law still prohibits employers from asking about, or considering, criminal convictions that have been expunged. AB 1008 takes the law a step further. It bars employers from considering any criminal conviction, expunged or not, prior to making a conditional job offer. The law applies to both felony charges and misdemeanor charges in California.

It’s hilarious watching Google trying to be a consumer-focus company. What features do they lead with:

1) end to end encrypted, and

2) we’re constantly making optimizations

3) uses AI to reduce audio interruptions,

4) and Excitingly! Coming Soon! we’re rolling out a new video codec

5) that works with very low bandwidth connections

I dunno I use FaceTime, it “just works”

i feel like the death of third-party cookies is not getting enough attention in the category of "death of the open web." if you are a small website, you "owned" that cookie. now small websites are going to have to strap into the big networks, or fade away like usenet.

did they tell you when they expect to recall you? what is that communication like?

quantum annealing?

> But what does Facebook want, names and addresses?

Uhhhh, to help in the investigation and arrest of the ring of people that are scamming and fishing Facebook customers?

Are we witnessing the start of the combat iPhone? These devices are staggeringly useful, I guess it just makes sense that they find their way into this aspect of human life as well.

> Squad: the #1 small unit combat App

>What's New in 3.14: Enhanced Scout/Recon route setting- select up to 7 types of perimeter security

>In-App Purchase: Unlimited "Friendlies" List - avoid unwanted friendly fire incidents.

I wish they would have sued Spotify.

Spotify frequently aggressively breaks Sonos for what I assume is anti-competitive reasons.

My guess would be along similar lines a sort of always on, low bandwidth, side channel. So activation and a bootstrap for the next generation of weird protocols apple would love to cook up. I don’t know at all how airdrop works, but you could see it brokered through the apple network. Or like you mentioned a find my iPhone(and lock) that works globally without needing the phone to register to wifi/cell network. Or this p2p networking they’ve been talking about, that whole thing is a lot easier with a guaranteed signal to broker the nodes.

I was thinking about this recently: is there ever a reason to put recursion in an everyday “workman” code base?

Seems like it would be so out of place in a real industry code base, like a infinite loop waiting to happen. There are always better more readable and maintainable ways to accomplish the same thing.

Yeah, ads best medium since golden age of tv and it’s not like it’s all strikeouts. They’ve had insanely successful addons:

- maps

- gmail / google domains / docs

- chrome / chrome box / chrome books

- Android

- YouTube

It just seem like the “dream is dead”. Great business though.

Also, I feel like they are in an almost impossible competitive position. Their main competitive tool against aws is further differentiation by ‘moving up the stack” with more and more “do the tough stuff for you” platform services that fewer and fewer people use. It’s getting so baroque with no developer “pull”, people aren’t begging for these services to solve a real problem, more like goog saying “here’s another piece that could be helpful”

Meanwhile, aws’s long history of walking people up the ramp of IAAS makes it more of a fit when they do start adding PAAS service and they fill a real need and get great adoption(for some/a lot of them)

Wow, this is a real indictment of goog’s plan to take the loot from ads and spend to diversify. They basically invented the cloud model, and if they don’t have the culture and the ability to expand to this most naturally of expansion areas.. they are doomed.

There is something seriously broken at google. This puts Larry quitting in more context. He’s lost confidence in google doing this, then there is nothing left for the org to do. Over—compensated, over-entitled, over-talented engineers that, when put together can’t actually accomplish anything.

Maybe gutting the product org all those years ago was a mistake.

I am looking at just this design pattern now (pseudo uuid) can you elaborate on “given good retry logic”?

Yeah, if your company raises $200m and your sell for $100m you don’t make any money.

A true on-tap database. Seems like one of the last true differentiators. That and legit, lights out, load balancing.

Both hard tech problems too.

Agreed, but as OP was alluding to lots of people need solid business logic written that doesn’t have to hyperscale. Just lame that all the shovel-sharing apps interview as if they want to process petabytes of requests :)

Even Facebook does on-call. So money can’t solve it. If you wrote the code and it breaks you’re kinda the only one that can fix it (in a hurry)