manholio

What happened here is that a 1000 ton gorilla is entrenched in the business operations market and it's irrational for managers to phase them out since it's very risky for their careers. This poisons the field for startups who can't grow to the critical mass to be viable on this market, which in turn lowers competition, witch leads to monopolistic practices, inefficient bad software and broken drop-boxes.

The drop-box looks like it does because it's good enough and there there are no business pressures on the market for SAP to fix it. The manager gets to keep their job by buying SAP and the low level staff needs to deal with such stupidities (and much, much worse ones) ad infinitum.

> It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership.

The point of OP is not that the Borg will assimilate you from day one. Inertia, operational convenience and upper management laziness can delay the implementation of the hegemonic culture - why mess with a division that works? The point was that there should be zero expectation of changing the corporation's culture to match yours, they paid 27 billion so that you no longer have an independent voice on the market and be forced listen to them.

Because of how corporations operate, with strong internal diffusion of management and operational practices, the assimilation will happen, it's just a matter of speed. The old company has ceased to exist.

Sure, it's worth discussing. But it's just a bullet point on a very, very long list of arbitrary things accelerators discriminate for. Just look at those faces. Where are the New York mechanic or soccer mom types, or people with visible tattoos? What in God's name have they done with the elderly, tuned them into Soylent green?

You can see from a glance that is NOT a representative sample of the population, and that's based on looks alone. Let's not even mention things like the way you talk and present yourself, educational and employment background. God forbid you are one of those neurodivergent people - Google even has a cute word for those poor undesirables: lacking googliness.

Bottom line, entrepreneurship is just anohter political occupation that relates to power over other people. It cannot function otherwise than as an extension of power relations in society, because those relationships permeate the market and affect the businesses` ability to make money. Startup survivorship is so low and the pool of qualified applicants so inexhaustible, that an accelerator cannot but work to enforce those stereotypes and power structures: why waste capital on a militant atheist founder in a devout society if there is even the slightest chance some parts of the public will boycott their products?

And having a 80% of a full chance on account of gender is in this context a minor problem compared with a 0% chance of anybody that does not talk the talk investors expect for purely cultural reasons.

If for you "invited to fill a quota" is not [very forcefully] implying systemic misogyny, then you are using the language wrong and will get many more rejections.

Probably flagged by readers who are tired of this drama (not one of the flaggers, btw). In the thread you were saying something like 'you can't find any reason why your ramen profitable start-up received such a tepid response from YC and you got the advice to come back with a co-founder' [other than the implied systemic misogyny].

Sorry, but that just not an acceptable response to a rejection. Startup accelerators do not exist to empower women founders, make the world a better place or other such grand idea, they exists to make money and you failed to convince one such accelerator that you can make money for them. It's as simple as that. Biases might affect their decision process, but that's a problem for their business, not yours.

Edit: here's the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515

> It may be dull, but it’s also anti-Semitic.

Yes, so? That's relevant because antisemitism is wrong? Really, in a thread about banning books you bring up wrong ideas?

> This strikes me as being complete nonsense. Anyway, citation needed.

I could give you a citation, but you banned the source material, remember. That's double plus ironic because Hitler's work is absolutely full with vitriolic ramblings about how the Jewish media is spreading wrong ideas poisonous for the soul of the nation. "The bigger the lie, the most likely it is to be belived", he laments, and explicitly calls for the suppression of such speech. He would get to enact those ideas in a few short years.

Antifascist activists who are looking at book bans as a weapon for their fight should probably take a good hard look in the mirror; they might see some disturbing semblance.

I hate that the immediate reference against which a book ban should be compared is Mein Kampf. The effect will not be to ease those bans, but to ban Mein Kampf too, and that sets an incredibly low standard to book bans - it's a very dull book.

In my university we were able to read and critique Mein Kampf and trace Hitler's intellectual claims into the broader climate of his era. He's a negligible figure in the history of ideas but a good case study for their power. This is more and more risky to do in higher education, as it prompts lynching by a woke mob. Ironically, the hordes requesting banning Mein Kampf are espousing many of its authors convictions.

I always wondered: ok, the US medical system is atrociously expensive and inaccessible, but where does all that money go? Surely a surgery cannot really cost half a million dollars, can it?

Well, when a large number of patients are effectively outbidding each other over an insufficient pool of medical professionals, then yes, it really can cost that much, not necessarily by making doctors absurdly rich (probably some of that too), but in the sense that price gouging structures will surely emerge to capture that surplus.

The point was that you don't need any luck to become an extremely well paid and well regarded specialist, just dedication and time.

If your objective is to become a legend, then by all means avoid specialization, and be prepared to fail with a probability of 99.9%, there can only be so many legends.

> industry legends like Jeff Dean or John Carmack

Those are very bad examples that prove the gp's point. Sure, flexible and multitalented people are a huge asset IF they get their big break, if they get involved in a startup at the right time in the right industry, if they are lucky to not get crushed by abusive players etc. etc.

But the chances of success are very slim, you likely won't be John Carmack. For every Carmack there are thousands of failed game developers who never got their break. Starting a tech company in 2022 is very different from 1992 even if you get to Carmack's skill level. Meanwhile, holding a job is something that always works and being a specialist in a high demand area is strongly correlated with financial returns.

I write this as somewhat of a "renaissance man" interested in everything from engineering to coding, to economics, to political science, to philosophy - and even holding advanced degrees in these topics. Sure, I can make my paycheck in tech, but without a managerial track record and access to the upper echelons of capital and corporate power I won't be recognized as a critical asset for an organization nor will make "Kubernetes expert" money.

> specific patterns and integrating acceleration to get position and velocity history in order to match situations that look like car crashes

And that's a fundamentally stupid idea.

> is it actually impacting emergency services?

Yes, but that's an externality, so don't worry about it.

It's a fundamentally stupid idea, the sensors in the watch are woefully insufficient to detect such an event with any reasonable amount of precision. Bumping your watch into a tree would generate massive G forces, hitting your head while your arms are flailing would barely register.

At minimum, it would require biosensors that detect the owner is still wearing the watch yet his life signs are significantly perturbed from the norm: irregular heart beat and oxygen saturation, hypothermia, AI-informed sound interpretation for things like gasping for air etc.

For many people the "free" price of piracy still will not justify the hassle of finding torrent sites, going through fake releases and warez. They would just pay some number of dollars if that process is frictionless and gets them what they want.

But when paying for it and maintaining access for what you paid becomes more complex than pirating, then you have a service problem that can't be solved by pricing.

> The issue here isn't that it's Google, it's that Google is doing what they're told to do.

Nice try. One of the largest tech companies of the world, which in most countries other than USA holds basically a monopoly on mobile computing, is not being pushed around by the creative industries. Remember when Youtube became a thing and the media companies wanted it gone? Google fought with them and created a technology stack that almost any media company today uses, because it was in their interest to do so.

No, it's Google all the way down alright. They can force creative industries to accept real ownership of the media by the users, but this time it's just not in their interest to do so.

The fact that you lump together invasions and wars of choice, like the Iraq war, with wars of necessity like the Ukrainian resistance against such an invasion, and prescribe that same cure against "warmongers" - when I was clearly talking in context only about the second case - should probably be a cue I need to stop entertaining this conversation.

I know you are well intentioned and believe in the things you say, but you should probably think this stance more thoroughly.

That's an insanely naive form of pacifism justifying acceptable genocide. If killing 0.99% of the population for geopolitical goals is acceptable, then 0.99% of the population of all states will get will get killed, currently roughly 80 million people. Because any country has at least one enemy with some geopolitical goal.

I cannot put into words how revolting this idea of yours is, and it's exactly people like you that need to be silenced in times of war for any chance of durable peace.

War is always and everywhere a result of insufficient deterrence - the enemy will only be dissuaded if they are guaranteed a response that far outweighs any potential wins.

You don't matter for Google and creating HN spam threads won't change that. At worst, it will solve your particular problem and invite similar spam threads from other victims of faceless corporations.

> I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons

I love advocates of democracy and freedom of speech always taking up the time, in the middle of a brutal war no less, to show us the righteous path.

Well guess what: war is the absolute worst enemy of democracy, there can be no polite debate and pluralism while the enemy is blowing your children up. A country defending from a aggression is a fascist state where everybody has an assigned post and maintaining the chain of command is an existential duty. Democratic armies do not exist.

It's no coincidence that all authoritarians and fascist tend to start wars or invent enemies, they long for this state of total control where the whole nation is forced to rally behind them. For Ukraine, that enemy is very much real and the resulting fascism is the only way forward as an independent nation. There is nothing "questionable" about it.

As for advocating for freedom of speech, yes, there is place for that after the Russian aggression ends. Or one could try to setup a booth in the Kremlin square and promote those ideas into a country that, allegedly, is not at war with anybody.

The insane thing are the second order effects, people are actively tuning their content for maximum toxicity because they know the algorithm will reward them with likes, followers and perhaps real life clout, votes, money etc.

So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.

It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.

I think listening to an entire song of some unknown artist is a great sign that more tracks should be queued up.

Essentially, that artist generated traffic for Spotify, and Spotify channels that traffic to more known tracks that are more likely to generate conversions to paying customers.

Hey, I'm your age and just having my first child, we just weren't ready before. "The prime of your life" is still ahead of you - the next decades will be what you make of them.

Buy nice clothes, find a woman willing to settle down - this will be much easier in your home country, where you are still likely a catch. In parallel, get up to date to some programming language/tech stack. Work 6 months on these issues using the money you have, then take your new wife to USA if she wants it and get a well paid tech job.

You need to put in the work for all of these issues to get solved. Grind, improve yourself, and you will be tired and eventually happy. The goals you set - wife, kids, basic life - are easy to achieve if only you are in the right state of mind. Conversely, if you practice self-defeating thinking, they will seem impossible.

> rather than the previous "we have no idea if we'll ever be able to engineer this thing".

We still have no idea if we'll ever be able to engineer this thing to produce commercially useful energy. And we probably never will, for all interesting values of "never", the challenges are simply so massive.

You might have missed the part where I write: "as long as we as a society make no public concerted effort to cure these people and leave them to the mercy of the markets...". Everything follows.

Flawless in principle, but harmful slogans in practice because it fails to develop those ideas for the particular situation at hand.

Sure, medical regulation should exist - I specifically mentioned the "primum non nocere" principle as the basis for that protection. Things like access to source code and right to repair, some guarantee the device can be removed and won't become actively harmful etc.

But some of the specific kind of regulation this article argues for are unreasonable to the point of killing the prospect of a cure.

The point of the crypto example is not that regulation is harmful, but that people respond to incentives - exactly the same investors have a choice between some sort of a MMORPG poker that is crypto versus a medical start-up. And guess what, they choose the "investment" where money is moved around and they have the chance to earn something at the loss of others, as opposed to the medical startup that could cure people but is - due to dumb regulations - more likely to lose money in the average/EV case. It's not me who brings the crypto madnesses into the medical field, it's whomever bombastically claims some irrational behavior from investors, while expecting them to foot the bill for medical innovation - that was the premiss of the comment you replied to.

I strongly doubt the issue preventing support for these patients is the intelectual property in general. Source code, I agree, but things like medical patents are irrelevant if you have to replace a battery cell in a custom form factor or chemistry that is no longer manufactured, per the article. The insurers actively fought the patient changing his own battery.

You also diminish the expected value of the startup because the ability to liquidate IP after comercial bankruptcy is a factor reducing risk - investors get at least something back. If you dictate confiscation of that IP, you also reduce the willingness to invest in what already is a very risky proposition. And that's how you get to a 3 trillion ponzi bubble in crypto that solves no problem, while similar investment into medical startups would create thousands of products, treatments and long term wealth.

Sorry, but no amount of downvotes will make me accept a clearly populist and virtue signaling approach that will actively harm patients and discourage investment in medical innovation.

> may I suggest expanding your other credit facilities such as lines of credit and loans, to allow you to navigate these sorts of situations, especially during Q4.

The story state of credit card payments forces this solution. Card payments are not your money, it's a statement of intention that someone wants to receive your product, try it out, and then pay for it only when they have found it completely satisfactory.

Your processor cannot simply launder that to hard cash and be on the hook when a large wave of chargebacks comes crushing in.

Surely there should be a way to do consumer protection better and more granular, with an actual dispute resolution system.

> I would have eventually signed up.

You could have signed up only if excessive regulatory burden wouldn't have killed or prevented the startup from existing.

I find the whole "medical startups should support their patients post bankruptcy" train of thought very disingenuous: as long as we as a society make no public concerted effort to cure these people and leave them to the mercy of the markets, then surely some relief from their problems, even if temporary, is better than none, especially if it provides valuable experience that other more successful companies can use in the future for many more patients.

In view of these future possible patients, it would be downright imoral to burden such startups, which already take enormous risks, with unreasonable costs such as ensuring their devices function into perpetuity.

Yes, they should be regulated to not make the problem worse after they inevitably fail - primum non nocere. But most of the other ideas proposed in the article have a toxic effect on the business viability of medical startups, possibly preventing them altogether.

> and I've never heard of anyone referencing blue chat bubbles that wasn't using it derogatorily like you are)

there is a reference to this in TFA, it's a real phenomenon

Surely there can't be a microsecond to second ratio between the two steps, because then they would never be able to crawl the hundreds of billions of documents the model is trained on. Once the model is built, sure, the front end is irrelevant.

My grandmother had one of these combs, made from plastic or some kind of hard resin. It was used for the exact same purpose and had the same basic design, fine teeth on one side and coarser teeth on the reverse. Here is an example: https://www.3p.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/SB424.jpg

It's interesting to think humans used and evolved these objects for millennia before they got rich enough to practice modern hygiene. Worldwide prevalence of lice infestation can still exceed 60% of the population in some regions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2603110/