phphphphp

There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).

If I have the math right, their revenue of $130m is made up of $110m in COGS. If they’re losing $1m/month that means they’re spending roughly $30m/year on running the business. My educated guess is most of that $30m is marketing spend required to secure the $130m revenue and cuttable costs (salaries, office space) are much less than $10m/year.

Sounds like ARR is the wrong term since it’s probably not a business operating on recurring revenue — probably an example of the bananas valuations of the last few years, based on revenue not viability.

So why didn’t he hand himself in? He’s been on the run since last year, he has had numerous opportunities to hand himself in before being arrested in Montenegro.

He’ll be watching his back in prison, he’s got access to billions of dollars — or, at least, is perceived to. He has wronged a lot of people, too. Also, prison is a one way street: if he stays on the run, and some day things do get to the point where he would feel safer in prison, he could hand himself in. Once he’s in prison, he has no choice left.

If verifying people is hard and so a company chooses to take the easy route of not bothering and therefore attract lots of customers who do illegal things, surely in any world that's at the very least knowingly facilitating illegal conduct? There are a lot of platforms that do far more than Block to verify people -- Block absolutely could do the same if they wanted to.

This is what Block do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2uhWTFvug8

bonuses are to banks what stock is to tech startups. A bonus is a part of total compensation.

Posting about your company when relevant is one thing, advertising it another’s launch thread is another, and it’s pretty gauche… especially when, in this very thread, one of your testimonials is saying he doesn’t actually use your product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236557

That’ll be a lot of people who are streamers on twitch with it listed on their LinkedIn profile. I’d ballpark closer to 2,000 actual employees — maybe 1,500 as a conservative estimate.

I disagree with your characterisation, there was a lot of criticism of Collateral Murder from young white liberals! Assange and wikileaks, at the time, were presented as apolitical truth-seekers, not as journalists. Journalism is very different from what Wikileaks claimed to be, and Collateral Murder was not presented as a piece of journalism, it was presented as a leak. You cannot conceivably compare what Wikileaks claimed to be at the time, to what the New York Times claimed to be at the time.

Go back in time to when Assange was first accused of sexual misconduct and you’ll find that a lot of people disliked him: it’s revisionist to claim that he was perceived a noble hero by the left until he was accused of sexual misconduct or until he started his crusade against Hilary Clinton (as if any young white liberal liked Hilary Clinton…)

I make no claim that collateral murder did not represent a war crime, I make no claim that the release of collateral murder was a bad thing, rather, I am claiming that Julian Assange was never a noble person releasing leaked footage to expose the truth, he was a political performer, creating the narrative that he wanted to create, using leaks as props. Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.

You can be glad that collateral murder was released while also being deeply unhappy with Julian Assange’s motives and actions.

From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth.

Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.

Most finance rules are quite reasonable and problems can be fixed retroactively. A serious company should absolutely approach their financial controls with the rigor it deserves but the cost implication of making mistakes early on is overblown.

If a company is turning over tens of millions per year and has missed something as basic as taxes then yes, absolutely, pain is inevitable, but it’s both solvable (after all, they’re doing tens of millions in revenue!) and very different from the type of problem a startup might encounter if they are cavalier with their finances early on.

The OPs post is of great benefit because often the key to avoiding problems is going from oblivious to aware… and so while a post like the OPs may not be exhaustive, it does put people on the right path, as it is heavy on the recommendations of getting a professional involved — and explains how to do that in a very accessible way.

How many startups have died because they didn’t know they had to charge sales tax? How many startups have died because they spent hundreds of hours obsessing over operational minutiae before they earned their first dollar?

(I don’t know the OP, but coincidentally I have worked with one of the companies he recommends, and I was very impressed — it’s clear to me this isn’t just churned out content marketing that uses the first Google result for “accountant”)

Health issues aren’t addressed with accurate information, they’re addressed by understanding the needs of the individual. Even if GPT-4 could guarantee accuracy when discussing self-harm, that would not necessarily be the right answer from the perspective of ensuring GPT-4 does the most amount of good.

If a friend told me that they were suicidal, I could explain to then in great detail about the nuances of depression and medication and suicidal ideation and how to effectively harm themselves if that’s what they want, but I know that is probably not the right answer, and the right answer is actually, “I’m here for you and I will help you get professional help”.

Harm reduction often involves helping people do dangerous things more safely (like safe drug injection) but that’s one component of helping people, the key to harm reduction is the long term investment in addressing the problem. Safe injection, for example, is often married with further healthcare. GPT-4 can’t do that and so telling you to go to a healthcare professional instead is going to have a much better outcome.

The majority of work we do now, even in skilled professions, is busy work. How much of the work you do each day is unique and novel? How much of your work could have either been automated or made unnecessary long before ChatGPT? Probably most of it. We’ve long since been able to do less work and yet we continue to do the same things over and over again. Even if ChatGPT can magically do everything for us, what evidence is there that we would take advantage of it? World hunger is a trivial problem to solve given the resources we have today and yet we apparently can’t be bothered to fix that extremely low hanging fruit — why would we buck that trend by radically rethinking knowledge work… because of an LLM?

If LLMs were enough to radically change knowledge work, we already wouldn’t be wasting our lives grinding out 40 hours a week so we can retire at 65.

The 2% they’re referring to are businesses that are using Docker’s hosted services for free. The majority of the outrage was from people thinking about the non-business users, that is, open source projects, which Docker unintentionally implied would be impacted by this change. Docker are apologising for their poor communication which made people think this change applied to more than just a tiny portion of the user base (who are probably happy to pay). They’re not apologising for the change.

Most React codebases benefit from the simplicity of functional components, because they fit into the model most people have of websites + web apps. If you’re doing anything complex, you’re in a very small group.

Pretty much nobody has enough cash held in a bank account for this to be a concern. People were worried about SVB because it was so overrepresented with accounts of more than the insured limit because it was used by cash-rich technology companies. A normal person, even if they’re rich, probably has most of their net worth in assets (real estate, investments) and is not holding cash.

Just don’t exceed the insured amount in a single bank, and if you do need to have more than $250k in cash… either open a second account at a different bank or donate it.

The original comment I replied to is scared for the future because GPT-4 passed the LSAT and other standardised tests — they described it as “terrifying”. The point I am making is that standardised tests are an invention to measure how people learn through our best attempt at a metric: information retention. You cannot measure technology in the same way because it’s an area where technology has been beating humans for decades — a spreadsheet will perform better than a human on information retention. If you want to beat the LSAT with technology you can use any number of solutions, an LLM is not required. I could score 100% on the LSAT today if I was allowed to use my computer.

What’s interesting about LLMs is their ability to do things that aren’t standardised. The ability for an LLM to pass the LSAT is orders of magnitude less interesting than its ability to respond to new and novel questions, or appear to engage in logical reasoning.

If you set aside the arbitrary meaning we’ve ascribed to “passing the LSAT” then all the LSAT is, is a list of questions… that are some of the most practiced and most answered in the world. More people have written and read about the LSAT than most other subjects, because there’s an entire industry dedicated to producing the perfect answers. It’s like celebrating Google’s ability to provide a result for “movies” — completely meaningless in 2023.

Standardised tests are the most uninteresting and uninspiring aspect of LLMs.

Anyway good joke ha ha ha I’m stupid ha ha ha. At least you’re not at risk of an LLM ever being able to author such a clever joke :)

If a person with zero legal training was to sit down in front of the LSAT, with all of the prep material and no time limit, are you saying that they wouldn’t pass?

The comment I replied to suggested that the author was fearful of what LLMs meant for the future because they can pass standardised tests. The point I’m making is that standardised tests are literally standardised for a reason: to test information retention in a standard way, they do not test intelligence.

Information retention and retrieval is a long solved problem in technology, you could pass a standardised test using technology in dozens of different ways, from a lookup table to Google searches.

The fact that LLMs can complete a standardised test is interesting because it’s a demonstration of what they can do but it has not one iota of impact on standardised testing! Standardised tests have been “broken” for decades, the tests and answers are often kept under lock and key because simply having access to the test in advance can make it trivial to pass. A standardised test is literally an arbitrary list of questions.

You’re arguing a completely different point.

I know what an LLM is. My point is that “doesn’t have the data in memory” is a completely meaningless and arbitrary constraint when considering the ability to use technology to pass a standardised test. If you can explain why weights in a network is a unique threat to standardised tests, compared to, say, a spreadsheet, please share.

Send me the answer key and I’ll write you the necessary =VLOOKUP().

You’ve added a technical constraint. I didn’t say arbitrary. Standardised tests are standard. The point is that a simple lookup is all you need. There’s lots of interesting aspects to LLMs but their ability to pass standardised tests means nothing for standardised tests.

Passing the LSAT with no time limit and a copy of the training material in front of you is not an achievement. Anybody here could have written code to pass the LSAT. Standardised tests are only hard to solve with technology if you add a bunch of constraints! Standardised tests are not a test of intelligence, they’re a test of information retention — something that technology has been able to out perform humans on for decades. LLMs are a bridge between human-like behaviour and long established technology.

If you sincerely believe that you’re a shining star being dragged down by your co-workers, get a new job. A software engineer who sincerely cares about the impact of their work on the customer is very valuable and you’ll find happy, positive, kind co-workers at lots of companies who will value you every single day. Don’t waste your life being miserable surrounded by people who drag you down.

The cashier would rather you leave them in peace than hit them with the same tiresome self-congratulatory remark they hear day in day out. Please use the self checkouts instead.

I’d normally agree — if you ignore an important email, the consequences are on you — but the Google verification process is very hostile and Google do constantly send emails about “important” but actually innocuous things which trains users to consider these emails as unimportant.

The OP certainly has some culpability but having bad experience of this process myself multiple times, it does feel as if Google designed it to be hostile — the emails being just one part of it.

Google Cloud is great in many ways, I love the product, but the billing is such a pain, top to bottom.

The reason employees are anxious about their next pay checks is because of the VC-induced panic which is entirely self-serving and has not one iota to do with making payroll — that’s just a palatable hand-wavey justification for demanding government intervention because their precious points are at risk.

I have a great deal of empathy for the workers anxious about being paid, but that goes without saying, there’s nothing to discuss there. Workers are victims of the VCs who rightly deserve to be derided for their behaviour, both in this incident and more broadly in squeezing every last drop of profit from normal people.

I don’t understand what you’re asking of people on HN. Are you asking us to preface all our comments with “…not all SVB customers are leeches…”?

I’ll start out by making my position clear: I have a strong aversion to software engineers like you, and I consider software engineers like you to be toxic people who are a drain on organisations. Anyway…

If you approach work as a zero sum game that you’re participating in against your co-workers then you’ll be deeply unhappy wherever you go, and you’ll be a toxic force in the workplace. Work is collaborative, work has a purpose, work is about contributing to the greater good, work is more than the sum of its parts, work is about creating value.

There’s no shame in being someone who doesn’t work well with others, and you’re under no obligation to change, but it’s your responsibility to find an environment where you’re either a positive or at worst, a neutral force. Choosing to work in jobs that make you deeply unhappy is irresponsible and unfair on those around you. If you find working with product managers to be a miserable experience filled with frustration and resentment, then the responsible thing to do is to remove yourself from that situation. Find a job within a company that uses a structure that’s a better fit for you, don’t drag people down.

I won’t preach to you about how important collaboration is, or how much you’re missing out on by operating with this toxic attitude, but I will say that the problems you’re facing have nothing to do with software engineering or product management, they’re human problems.

Running your own software consultancy can be an amazing and rewarding experience that presents new opportunities for growth and new intellectually-stimulating challenges, it’s an experience you may love, but it’s absolutely crucial to understand that human interaction scales with responsibility, and running your own company (even with just yourself) has a lot of responsibility.

I think your final paragraph shows that deep down you know that you’re the cause of these challenges at work. Maybe the problem isn’t work related at all, maybe the frustration at work is a symptom of the real problem, like being unhappy in yourself, maybe the solution is actually therapy or maybe you’re burned out and need a break.

Ultimately, as software engineers, we are very privileged to earn great money and have far more respect / autonomy / trust than most others in the workplace, and so the ball is in your court. If you think your co-workers are the problem, quit. Don’t waste your life stewing in misery, you’re better than that.