nsedlet

As the author says himself, he hasn’t attended in 30 years. I understand some of the things he’s complaining about, but I don’t think that is the dominant experience of being there.

Credit cards also transfer wealth from people who pay interest to people who don’t.

It’s a silly system, where everyone has to invest their time (optimizing for rewards, avoiding interest) in an ultimately negative sum game. I hate it so much.

I also attempted to do real-time audio visualizations with LED strips. What was unsatisfying is that the net effect always seemed to be: the thing would light up with heavy beats and general volume. But otherwise the visual didn't FEEL like the music. This is the same issue I always had with the Winamp visualizations back in the day.

To solve this I tried pre-processing the audio, which only works with recordings obviously. I extract the beats and the chords (using Chordify). I made a basic animation and pulsed the lights to the beat, and mapped the chords to different color palettes.

Some friends and I rushed it to put it together as a Burning Man art project and it wasn't perfect, but by the time we launched it felt a lot closer to what I'd imagined. Here's a grainy video of it working at Burning Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXVZhv_Xi0I

It works pretty well with most songs that you pick. Just saying there's another way to go somewhere between (1) fully reactive to live audio, and (2) hand designed animations.

I don't think there's an easy bridge to make it work with live audio though unfortunately.

Yes, exactly. Not only can you not run CLIs in Chat interfaces, the services that non devs use often don’t even have CLIs to begin with.

Developers have a rich set of CLIs because they live in the terminal and built those tools for themselves.

Agreed. As engineers we build context every time we interact with the codebase. LLMs don't do that.

A good senior engineer has a ton in their head after 6+ months in a codebase. You can spend a lot of time trying to equip Claude Code with the equivalent in the form of CLAUDE.MD, references to docs, etc., but it's a lot of work, and it's not clear that the agents even use it well (yet).

Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.

When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.

That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.

I believe an important reason for why there are no LLM breakthroughs is that humans make progress in their thinking through experimentation, i.e. collecting targeted data, which requires exerting agency on the real world. This isn't just observation, it's the creation of data not already in the training set.

Data labeling has been moving to onshore / higher paid work. There's still a lot offshore, but for LLMs in particular and various specialized models, there's a massive trend toward hiring highly educated, highly paid specialists in the US.

But as other commenters have warned: beware of labor laws, especially in CA/NY/MA.

I've had a front-row seat to this...our company hires + employs contract W2 and 1099 workers for the tech industry. Two years ago we started to get a ton of demand from data labeling companies and more recently foundation model cos who are doing DIY data labeling. Companies are converting 1099 workforces to W2 to avoid misclassification. Or they're trying to button up their use of 1099 to avoid being offside.

This 1967 poem is often mentioned in the context of Solarpunk as having a similar vision https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...

I do agree. But the thing I would add though is that at least when I was there (W2012 - we were in the same batch!) YC and PG in particular were vocal about principles they believed in, especially the idea that naive young founders get kicked around in Silicon Valley and ought to be treated fairly. PG talked about this constantly and of course it’s a big theme of his essays. I remember one particular instance where a potential investor was behaving questionably and PG offered to step in and talk to them if they crossed a certain line (which they did not in the end). He was clear about what he concerned acceptable and unacceptable and why. And we were nowhere near the cool end of the batch.

Yes YC acts in its interests but in my experience they live by good principles and that makes all the difference. The Chaos Monkeys anecdote is an example of that. So I don’t agree with the article’s framing that they throw their weight around to simply exercise whatever power they have over others for financial gain.

Maybe this is a dumb question but I thought valuations had fallen a bunch since mid 2022 and now lots of VC firms are struggling with companies (especially mid-to-late stage) who raised at much higher valuations than they can now get in the market. But this firm is saying that current valuations are too high to make new investments. Would it not be a good time to invest in later stage startups? Or is the issue that the forward growth potential of these companies is lower now for some reason.

I was part of the W12 batch of YC (which was a lot smaller, ~60 companies, back when Paul Graham was still leading YC).

YC funds a lot of companies and has always had super high variance in the companies it funds. Entrepreneurs are a wild bunch of people. There have always been companies where the founders turned out to be BS artists or sociopaths. Companies that folded immediately after the program started. Companies with messy cofounder breakups already brewing at the beginning of the batch. Companies that turned out to be slightly scammy. Some of the founders that were in those companies pivoted and became successful.

Picking on Pear AI (which I don't know anything about) as evidence of YC failing is silly. It's also a super early stage company and you really have no idea what they will do.

The test of YC to me is, can they keep attracting and picking some of the best founders (which you can't really tell for years). And providing the inspiring, warm, but pushy environment that best sets up founders for success, and in turn keeps them coming to YC. I'd apply to YC again in a heartbeat if I were ever starting another company.

It takes time to build a company to significant revenue. I'd be curious to rule that out as the primary explanation before reading too much else into this.

I've been curious what a version of this based on general relativity would be like and whether that would be interesting.

This is great. This is mentioned in the discussion topics section ("modeling randomness in gathering belongings"). But I wonder what the distribution of baggage-gathering time looks like? I'd guess pretty positively skewed, i.e. most people are pretty quick but then a few people take a long time or a really long time. The speed of the flush stage of a particular wave is capped at the slowest person in that wave.

Yeah it feels like there should be a legally enforceable ai.txt

I do think there will/should be a reckoning about the how training data is acquired and attributed. For example, LLMs could attempt to cite sources, or share ad revenue fractionally with all the sources of that inform the response they're presenting.

I think that as the magic wears off it's becoming clearer that LLMs are more like fancy search engine UIs than intelligent agents. They surface, remix, and mash up content that everyone else created, without the permission of the creators.

That doesn't mean there won't be economic fallout. Spotify may have figured out legal streaming - but the music industry is still much smaller than it was in the 90s

Second this. The 32x64 version is what I used to make this digital tide clock as a project with my nephew https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/UzFNawTTWq4h5h6YF9Im. It fetches tide data from NOAA to tell you next high and low tides.

We also made an arcade game with the LED screen.

Not the cheapest route but it’s relatively easy and fun to get it working

The score for Dunkirk includes a piece by Hans Zimmer that adapts one of the Enigma Variations: https://open.spotify.com/track/5eeBoptaR9wfFe5csGjIMP?si=3b5...

One of the most beautiful uses of music in a movie in recent memory, IMO.

By the way, the best New York secret is "Fish Friday", when the Acme factory in Williamsburg sells its stuff directly to the public for pickup, including various experimental things they've come up with. It's easily the freshest, best-tasting smoked salmon I've ever had.

This guy has a great set of examples of rules in English that started as bastardizations, fabrications, arbitrary preferences of some particular writer, etc.: https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444.

Barrett's Privateers is fantastic if you haven't heard it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIwzRkjn86w

I've always thought of it as a good metaphor for joining a doomed startup

I'd suggest Rails. You'll be able build a web app or an API. You'll learn about SQL. (Rails is a framework for web apps - which are generally useful to know about if you're not sure what you might do later). For deployment, I have had a great experience with Heroku, which is probably a bit easier than AWS. I'd suggest ignoring front-end frameworks like React for now - you can pick them up later, if your use case requires it. And you can probably get a decent MVP done without them. At the beginning you want to optimize for speed and simplicity, so that you can iterate quickly.

I agree w/others here that picking a good problem to solve is the MOST important (along with having a decent idea of how you might find customers) - and implementation/selection of technology less important. That said, when I was thinking of starting a company, I learned Rails first (I used DHH's Rails textbook)! For me, it was useful to learn web programming so that I could understand what web apps were even capable of doing. It's really helpful when you're picking a problem to work on to at least have a very vague general idea of how software might solve it! So for me at least, it helped inform & inspire our brainstorming/ideation discussions. And since we did end up using Rails to build our MVP, when my cofounders and I all quit our jobs to work full-time, we could start building right away.

HireArt | Senior Fullstack Engineer | New York + remote | Full time

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We've already helped build teams at hundreds of companies, including, Facebook, Google, and Airbnb, and helped hundreds of thousands of applicants in their job searches. You would help build pieces of the employer- and job seeker-facing apps, as well as internal tools we use in our back-end operation. You would also contribute to our R&D effort, working with domain experts to incorporate their knowledge and experience into our web application.

Our technology stack includes React, Rails, Postgres, Git, and Heroku. We each own specific product verticals and enlist each other’s help to get things shipped. We like to have thoughtful discussions together on a range of topics, from software architecture to company strategy. We make sure every voice is heard and every opinion is considered.

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Yes! It's so infuriating. I usually go to Chinatown where they will sell you contacts without an exam or prescription.

I asked my optometrist once why a prescription was necessary to buy glasses or contacts, and why prescriptions expire so quickly, and she gave me the reason offered in the article: that it forces people to be screened early for treatable eye diseases. But I can't think of any other area in healthcare where your care is held hostage unless you pay them for some unrelated diagnostics you don't want. It's hard to see it as anything other than a cynical ploy to extract money from people.

I wonder why companies prefer to use a corporate credit card over debit cards (which are very easy to get)? Do they just like having the line of credit? Is it really worth the extra complication/hassle/thing to worry about just to push off payments by ~15 days (Stripe seems to require that the balance be paid off each month)? I also wonder how that is enforced (by reducing credit limits as a company's bank balance starts to decrease, or by charging interest, or by just eating the defaults)?

Or is it about managing/reporting expenses better across groups an organization? Or do companies just like the rewards?

I understand that interchange fees are higher for credit cards - so are corporate credit cards basically a way to extract additional fees from merchants and distribute them in the form of rewards/cash back to the cardholders?

I’m no expert but I think it’s a combination of:

- gatekeeping. Agents help studios/producers make sure they’re only talking to people suited for projects. Every project has super specific needs in terms of actors and writers. Agents stake their reputations on putting good choices in front of the decision-makers. Hollywood has tons of ambitious people vying for opportunities. Entry-level folks have an especially tough time breaking in, without having an agent vouch for them

- gig-like nature of Hollywood. Writing a movie or a TV season only takes a few months. Writers and actors are always hustling for the next gig. Agents help bear some of the workload so that writers can focus on writing, not scheduling meetings, negotiating contracts, searching for the niche opportunities that suit them, etc.

- bespoke nature of the contracts. The split depends on a lot of factors: how famous the actors are, how accomplished the writers are, etc. That means every project requires negotiation, and it’s nice to have someone in your corner who’s a pro at that.

- difficulty of closing a deal and the low close rate. Even for accomplished writers, it’s a long road to getting something actually made, punctuated by periods of waiting. It means that there are lots of business-related decision points where agents can be helpful, and it means that writers try to keep multiple irons in the fire -contributing to more work on the business side.

- relatively large amounts of money involved. Obviously there’s a lot of money in Hollywood for talent, relatively to most industries, so there’s room for agents to carve out livings

I also wonder if a preference for secrecy plays a role? e.g. as a writer, you need information about projects to make decisions, to craft a pitch, etc., and agents help mediate the flow of information.

We use Goodly at HireArt. There is no tax benefit - you are right that it has the same net effect as adding to the employee's salary for them to use to pay off their loan directly.

We see it as a nice way to encourage good financial behavior (not unlike how many companies have default retirement contributions). And the fees are small enough to not make a big difference.

I think we'd also be interested in a program that took the money out of people's paychecks for repayment - especially if the issuers would give the employees a discount in exchange for getting a reliable paycheck-backed repayment.

Ah, I'm wrong, sorry.

I'd been inspecting the image elements to see why they were fuzzy on my retina screen, and didn't see those params - it's in the docs right there on the page though. In that case I'd just update the marketing site to fetch larger images so they look good on retina.

This is a fantastic project, by the way. The need for this comes up all the time for us (e.g. charts for emails).

It looks like the charts default to 500x300. It would be nice to be able to pass a parameter specifying the size of the image returned. Then I could set the width of the <img/> to be half of that to get it to show properly on retina at an arbitrary size