michaelochurch

Buying at current levels would only make economic sense if you expected rents to keep going up. Right now, buying is a bad move unless you expect the extreme rent situation to worsen (rather than mean reverting) in the long term (20-30 years). Given that it'd take just one genuine progressive mayor to crush the NIMBYs and allow new development, I think that that's a bad bet.

See, that's a problem. That stands out more than any of the good things that he might say. People talk and things come out and shit happens, but deliberately going behind someone's back for back-channel references is just plain unprofessional, if not unethical. This is the kind of behavior that has the rest of the country (in which ethical standards aren't seen as old-fart ideals to be "disrupted" but are actually considered important) thinking that we, in tech, are a bunch of immature psychopaths.

The back-channel reference check is an unprofessional show of power-- like waving a gun around at work-- because it takes social access to get any information out of it (people don't just offer candid opinions up to complete strangers). What's communicated by the back-channel reference check is "your colleagues are more loyal to me than to you". There's a fucking reason why people outside of tech consider it unprofessional and borderline unethical.

Purchase prices of 40+ years' rent signify a mix of speculation, regulatory corruption, trophy buying, and weird beta effects (i.e. amplified correlations with the national market). For example, Manhattan real estate has a beta of about 3.0, which means that a 50% swell in national prices drive Manhattan real estate up by 3.375x.

It's not that "nobody goes" because it's too crowded. It's that the people you want don't go because it's too crowded with people you don't.

It's about 5% the first and 95% the second, sadly. The well-connected VCs pretty much know what the outcomes and the valuations are going to be in advance. The less connected ones get burned by adverse selection and lose money.

So a bootstrapped startup cannot ignore the VC realm regardless, especially once it is time to come to market.

That I'm not as sure about. You just have to bootstrap into something that VCs aren't likely to be interested in, and get enough of an early lead and enough good will that they can't just make a competitor out of nothing should their interests change. It's quite possible, as far as I've seen. Bootstrapping is far harder than it should be (in part, because the American middle class is dying and no one has any fucking money) but I don't think that the VCs are the cause of that.

Personally, I'm finding myself increasingly burned out on "frameworks" that appeal to out-of-touch corporate decision-makers (who are attracted to the idea of a packaged "product" that solves everything) but tend to be overfeatured while under-delivering (especially if time to learn how to use the framework properly is included) when it counts. I'm much more interested in the modularity that you see in, say, the Haskell community where "framework" means something that would be a microframework anywhere else.

I got most of my karma before my account was "moderated", which is California Passive Aggressive for having your posts downplaced into obscurity (also called "rankban" by some) and guaranteeing that you never have the top post, no matter how many upvotes you get (and you won't get many, often, given that your posts are insta-buried). I also deal with a slowban (5-second load times when logged in) and will often get 4-5 downvotes within minutes of each other, for which I don't know who to blame, but it's annoying.

I've kept posting out of a sense of resistance more than anything else. I refuse to be run off the board. The passive-aggressive "moderation" to my account actually backfired and kept me on the board, even as my increasingly justified sense of indignation grew.

This whole culture (and I can't blame TED for this; it would exist with just as much force regardless of whatever TED did or didn't do, because TED really isn't a big deal in any way) castrates the people who are supposed to be "intellectuals" and it often galvanizes the upper-middle-class against truly creative people, who are almost never socially acceptable because those two objectives are often diametrically opposed.

That said, I've been on the pro-distaste vector for years and look where it has got me such as... well, let's start here, on this TED-Junior forum we call Hacker News. Anything I say, 5 people I've never met who've only read the name and not the content come and downvote it to shit. None of that matters in the least (downvotes don't really mean anything when you get them for nothing) but it's worth pointing out. Yes, the world absolutely needs people to express distaste and disgust. We need to stop accepting the monstrous waste of resources and peoples' finite attention when something like Snapchat gets funded and some Joffrey gets to play boy-king. That said, it often leads to some pain for the courageous individual. You don't always make friends being right.

Rant over. Fucking take it away.

It depends on what you want. If you can travel, if you can get out to 3-5 conferences per year, and if you get out to Meetups (or organize a few) in the nearest major city, then you're probably learning just as much as you would if you were in the Valley. You might be learning more, because you're more relaxed.

That said, if you want to work for one of the giant tech companies, the main office usually gets the most interesting projects. If you decide to work for Google, try to get them to relocate you to Mountain View. The imperial culture is strong in Bay Area tech giants and in venture capital.

In general, though, the Valley sucks (unless you're trying to raise money). Under 30, you suffer a bad dating scene if you're a heterosexual male (and I've heard that it's unpleasant more generally). After 30, you're too old for the nonsense and, if you're thinking about having a family, forget it. San Francisco is half-decent and has a lot of natural beauty, but it's dysfunctional and shockingly expensive (worse than New York, and you get a lot less!) There are a lot of great jobs in the Valley that I'd say you should take if you're a typical person, but you'd take them in spite of their location, not because of it.

2. Feel free to ignore #1, it's your life, but don't hire employees if your "funding" is a personal credit card. Really, don't. You're all kinds of not ready to be responsible for other peoples' income.

3. If you really can't afford a 6-month severance, then pull connections and give an amazing reference so he'll take that as his severance. Let him represent himself as employed, pay him during the gap, and have him line up a better job than the one he has already. Don't have the connections to place someone out on terms that he'll accept? Then how the fuck are you ever going to get funding or a first client? Take the message and hang up the phone.

Speaking for my fellow Americans, we're as terrified of being broke as anyone else. (In fact, we have more to fear, because we don't have universal health care.) That said, these kids who become founders straight out of Stanford aren't taking any real risk. They say they are, to justify getting 100 times more equity than their employees, but their backers have enough pull to ensure a "managed outcome" (acqui-hire into a middle-management role) even if the worst should happen.

We are just as risk-averse as Europeans. On both sides of the Atlantic, there are a few people who naturally tend toward creative risk (who are usually socially rejected, there and here) and a much larger set of people who climb the ladder that's put in front of them, follow the rules, and get into positions of power or influence the old-fashioned way (two parts schmoozing, one part birth, two parts luck). The major difference is in the window dressing. In Europe or New York, that ladder tends to be banking or consulting. In Palo Alto, it's programmer or PM to executive to founder to angel investor to VC... but if you go to the right schools, you can skip a couple of the bottom rungs. The actual willingness of the people to take risks isn't any different in one place or the other.

Of course, when it comes to risk attitudes around capital, it's a different environment entirely. Europe is too conservative and cynical for its own good, and California is too optimistic (and thus prone to "capital evaporation" by socially well connected types) and far too trusting of the wrong sorts of people.

I came up with this card game (Ambition) out there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...

Also, the sleazy tech company alternative (to severance) of PIPing the employee for 2-3 months is more expensive than severance, because of the effects on morale to force the manager to run a kangaroo court and the team to deal with a walking-dead employee who's probably pissing on morale intentionally (I would).

France (and, more generally, Europe) has its problems but that is not even on the top 20. Social class fatalism is more of a problem, and that's reinforced by the fact that (unlike in the U.S.) it's very hard to get even moderately wealthy by working. Programmers and lawyers and doctors make less than here, and costs of living are higher, which means that born social class imposes a ceiling. European countries are far better places than the U.S. for the poor and working class, but the middle-class people who want to rise further tend to come here. This is even worse in parts of Asia, where the idea that you can get rich by working is laughable.

I find it possible that they are, and that the work done by the non-elite is largely unused in practical applications, but they're still encouraged to do it for two reasons: (1) it gives them something to do, and (2) the competitions (Olympics) give a model for elite human performance that the upper-class technicians and academics then automate.

While it's not strictly answered as to why these competitions are called "Olympics", the general sense of sport is an activity from a previous time. We don't need archers to defend castles or hunt boars, or runners to carry messages at 8 miles per hour when we have cell phones, but there's something innate about the sports that makes us enjoy partaking and (for some) competing and spectating.

The activity of the other 99.999% isn't needed on the front lines, but it's important for keeping human skills and knowledge sharp and so the 0.001% (assuming that the reveal at the end is a reliable source, and it may or may not be) who can be original thinkers have some basis for what to improve and what behaviors the machines need to replicate.

That said, I agree that PIPs are the worst. They're a way for scummy managers in scummy companies to... well, the common explanation is that they're a lawsuit shield, but that's not really true because it's actually harder to run a lawsuit-proof PIP than to just fire someone. The real purpose of the PIP is less documented and more insidious.

Companies don't actually fear lawsuits that much. They're a black-swan risk, but less than 1% of people fired will ever litigate. They're much more worried about disparagement and impaired relationships. You write a generous severance and give a good reference (which you should, in most cases) when things don't work out because, if you do things right, the odds are good that the person's career will go unimpeded, and this pays off for you because they're likely to feel good about that episode in their careers and say good things about you in the future.

The purpose of a generous severance and positive reference is to make the fired employee feel good about the company, preventing any sort of moral indignation. The purpose of a PIP is to make the employee feel bad about himself (under a parallel theory that a humiliated employee will feel weak, not morally superior, and therefore not disparage or litigate). It has almost no legal value, because wrongful PIPs are just as common as wrongful terminations. Its purpose is to shame the employee into silence. Of course, it often doesn't work, but that's a discussion for another time.

PIPs (which, considering morale, are far more expensive than severance payments) are also a common way for HR offices to claim they "saved money" on severance payments when they're actually externalizing the costs to the manager, who has to conduct a kangaroo court, and the team, which has to deal with an already-fired employee coming into work for 2 months.

I mean, I wouldn't advocate a generous severance for someone who just stops showing up, or who punches a co-worker in the face. You can cold-fire them. Programmers who do their jobs in good faith, on the other hand, belong in the "treat him well even if we don't need him" status bucket.

Psychiatry is still trying to understand why some people are bad. Psychopathy is some attempt at a post facto analysis. Personally, I'm not convinced that a biological "bad person" gene or experience pattern exists. I think that free will exists and that some people (some with mental illness, most without, and those we call "psychopaths" being typically in the latter category) are just rotten.

I had substantive basis: the history of how he ran his business is fairly public.

You have every right not to like what I say. You have every right to say that you don't like what I say. But your high horse posturing is tedious, counter-productive, and, because you are HN's moderator, it does more damage to this place than I ever could.

I wish there a way to make everyone realize this at once, so we can abandon this mess wholesale and come up with something else.

The reputation factors dominate in light of the realization that the current Bay Area "tech" scene is built on taking behaviors (insider trading, market manipulation) that would lead directly to jail if done on public markets, and applying them to unregulated private equities. Since the people getting burned the hardest on the investment are young employees, no one seems to care, though.

This is also why there will probably never be a competing VC-driven tech hub, and why VC will always be extremely local. The VC business is that way because so much of the note-sharing and market/reputation manipulation is borderline unethical and it would be suicide to put too many of the conversations that actually matter in writing.

How've you been? I've been well.

It does not establish that no helmet is better, but only that helmets might be improved by technology into a form that is more like an airbag (there when you need it) and less like a traditional helmet.

Oddly enough, I love biking, work out every day, avoid car commutes, and don't use drugs. I can't stand self-righteous assholes who think their choices make them superior, though, so that might be a problem.

I think that it's real.

That said, the part about "explicit lyrics" made me laugh. Programmers like for things (at least, code and documentation) to be explicit (in the original, non-euphemistic, correct meaning of the word) and generally have no use for the implicit use of "explicit" to mean "vulgar".

In real life, we prefer to avoid things that can kill us, for obvious reasons. In video games, the effect of death is to keep people playing, not just in an abstract "making things interesting" sense, but in a measurable Skinnerian sort of way.

Also, one of the reasons why 1980s arcade and NES games were so brutally, unforgivingly difficult (with "no continues" the norm rather than exception) was to keep people playing. The oldest games weren't actually very big: the original Dragon Quest 1 was under 64 kB. Constantly killing the player (with no continues) allowed a game that might take 30 minutes for a skilled player to take 20-40 hours for a beginner. By the time someone could actually win one of these games, they had a deep expertise and that shared knowledge was enough to create cultures around these games, which made them both "viral" in their time and lasting into ours.

It's odd to think that something we aggressively avoid in real life was, in no uncertain terms, a killer (pun not intended) feature for video games.

In perma-Scrum terminology, though, the end of one sprint leads straight into the next. This is the core problem with Agile/Scrum as it's sold: it takes behaviors that are known to be unsustainable and encourages people to carry them permanently, and then says they're not doing them right (No True Scrumsmen) if the arrangement deteriorates. It can't be sold truthfully, as a short-term fix that does a lot of damage if it stays in place for too long-- no one would buy it if it were advertised as something that only works for 6 weeks, max, out of a given year-- so the Agilemongers present it as a permanent arrangement.