plank_time

My family came from a war-torn country. My father grew up very poor. My mom grew up poor. Both escaped poverty by studying and getting scholarships for grad school to come to the US.

I’ve never been poor, but we were lower middle class early on and middle middle class by the time I reached high school. My parents always scrimped and saved. The cars my family owned were all one step before the junkyard. I never got Christmas presents except for 3 years that I can remember. It was disappointing but not soul crushing. We never felt poor but we never ate out ever and never went on vacation ever. Getting Kentucky Fried Chicken was a luxury.

When I graduated from college, I was unemployed for the first few months and needed to stay with friends. After I got my first job, I was the lowest paid person I knew. I also scrimped and saved like my parents, but I never felt poor. I would track all my spending to the penny, until I had saved enough such that I could forget about the change in my pocket.

I’m now a low-single digit millionaire which isn’t that much in Silicon Valley but good enough for me. At one point a few years ago my wife and I were earning over $1M/year. My wife is now C-suite and I’m essentially retired. We have two multi-week trips a year and my kids have never sat in economy. I haven’t had to think about what the price of things were in 15 years now. I just buy whatever I want, which is frankly not much besides computer equipment for myself. Most money I spend is on the kids. I drive a 10 year old Toyota but my wife drives a Porsche.

There’s the old saying that sticks with me. “My father rode a camel, I rode a Mercedes Benz, my son will ride a Lamborghini, my grandson will ride a camel.” My kids are hard workers at school and we try to keep them grounded but their privilege really shows through in ways that I never expected. They really don’t know the value of money or how much things cost. We don’t really spoil them with toys and such but if there’s something educational like a set of books or lego, I will get it for them without thinking. I need to figure out a way to get them to understand the value of money but it’s very hard. Granted they are still young but it’s an important topic that I need to know they understand because I don’t want my grandchildren to suffer because I spoiled my kids now.

Is it not a “fact”? If they say that the video breaks their rules on abusing content, it goes away from opinion and more into fact.

Facebook deliberately created a set of rules/measures to determine abusive content, specifically such that they couldn’t be accused of being arbitrary, or opinion-driven. So their rules specifically ensure that their determinations are fact-based not opinion-based. If they determine that content has broken their rules on “abusive content” it seems pretty fact-based.

So labeling content as having broken their rules on abusive content is literally making a fact claim.

Is this not libel? Labeling his videos as “abusive” sounds like it is tarnishing his reputation and denying him any ad revenue he could get. It seems like it could be pursued via a law suit.

I don’t know what your point is then. I said I don’t have sympathy for guilty people because I reserve my sympathy for the innocent people that are caught up in our current “justice” system. That doesn’t seem very controversial but what you are saying is so far off from that I don’t know what your point is.

SB-82 for California would make your crime a misdemeanor, so even more of a slap in the face to you. The cops wouldn’t even bother responding to it if you reported it, it’s sickening.

This is wrong in practice. This is the theory put forth by Chesa Boudin and it has been an utter failure in SF. Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences. Victims get victimized twice, once by the criminal and another by the “justice” system and the taxpayers end holding the bag in terms of cost with no real benefit because the criminals will continue to commit worse and worse crimes, leaving a trail of victims with no justice.

This idea of restorative justice is an abject failure. It might work for first time offenders, which I’m okay with trying on, but once criminals commit crimes multiple times, we need to protect society from them. Locking them up is the best way to do this.

The tides are turning against the idea that criminals shouldn’t see jails, because of how much of a failure it has been. I used to think maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on crime, but after not only being the victim but seeing what it had done to SF, I’m firmly in the camp of throwing criminals in jail. Mainly moderates like myself feel the exact same way in the last 2-3 years and it will show more and more in voting, especially in SF.

Punishing criminals is more important than saving money.

Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.

Was your relative a multiple-time offender? If so, maybe stronger punishment earlier would have put him on the right path sooner.

Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time.

In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse.

So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.

A close family member almost went to jail because they committed theft over $25,000. Had they gone to jail, I think it would have been easily deserved. I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for them either, and they are like a sibling to me. If you knowingly commit a crime, why exactly should one deserve sympathy when they did it with full knowledge of the consequences?

GP did not strongly imply it was possession. They said the guy “definitely did something bad”. So it sounds like to me it’s something more than just simple possession. That’s what I’m going with.

There needs to be accountability. If a dog is poor at sniffing drugs, it needs to be taken out of service. I don’t know what anyone hasn’t thought about that except because everyone who decides on these processes don’t care.

I don’t have much sympathy for people that commit actual crimes. There are too many innocent people being arrested to worry about the guilty ones.

They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.

There’s a difference between obviously absurd ideas and those that someone can go off and try in their own codebase. Giving some breathing room so people can experiment and try things on their own without disrupting the product is being supportive, in my opinion. It doesn’t mean everything should go in. But I give the person the opportunity to sell their idea. Maybe it’s better than I think, or maybe others on the team will support the idea. Unless you’re the only competent person on the team, if the team thinks its a good idea then why not? If you’re the only competent person on the team however, you should really leave the company.

It’s the same thing with code reviews. I make a distinction between issues of opinion vs issues of correctness. I will never let incorrect code get checked in, but if it’s a matter of opinion, then I’m more lenient to let things in.

One of my mentors at the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley never said “no” to one of my ideas. He said “okay, we’ll try it out and see what happens.” He was inherently supportive of new ideas and as a junior engineer it felt very refreshing to not have to argue my way into a feature that I felt strongly about. I’ve carried that same mentality throughout my career.

My worst colleagues were the exact opposite. They didn’t listen to anything that they were advised and then when the project failed they tried to pin the blame on me. Luckily the rest of the team vouched for me so nothing happened but it left a bad taste in my mouth. There really isn’t much to learn from scumbags since it’s obvious you shouldn’t be a scumbag.

Bitcoin is something that was created out of thin air. There’s nothing backing it except what people believe it’s worth. There’s no inherent value.

Even baseball cards have an inherent value, ie, the cost of the paper that the card was created from. You can eat the card or you can burn it as tinder in the worst case. With a tulip bulb at least you can grow them and look at them You can also eat tulip bulbs.

With Bitcoin you literally have nothing because it’s completely virtual. So people are speculating over the value of something that is just a mathematical calculation.

Anything like that can change in a heartbeat. People can collectively decide that it has no worth and then you’re stuck with nothing. That’s what happened with tulip bulbs overnight. One week, people were buying houses with tulip bulbs and the next week they were worthless.

And yes, I know the argument behind USD and it being a fiat currency. But I don’t subscribe to it because it has critical mass.

We have seen the same thing over and over again in history with stuff like Bitcoin. Dotcom bust, housing bust, etc. I don’t believe Bitcoin will be anything different.

When Bitcoin is actively being used as a currency and not speculation then that’s when I will change my mind. Until then it’s a fad that will eventually go to zero. I believe the US government and other governments around the world will ban its use and use terrorism and money laundering as the key reason. It will go to zero soon afterwards in my opinion.

Either the founder stole the money himself, or the NSA showed the world just how powerful they are when they flex. If it’s the latter, I’m really impressed by their skills.

It’s not new at all. It’s the exact equivalent of tulip bulbs in the 1600s. We’ve totally seen this before.

You are definitely on the wrong end. HN is for any articles that are interesting, with a bias towards tech but not exclusively about it. This is a fascinating article and I’m glad that it was posted.

How desperate is Facebook for this data that they are willing to ignore governments? Is their business not viable with this information? If it is then maybe Andrew Yang is right and we should be paid for this data too

In hindsight not investing in a FAANG was a huge mistake.

In fact I just sold my house in SF Bay Area last month for $500k above listing price, all cash no contingencies. We are now renting in hopes that the market cools down but we are worried that this housing mania won’t stop and we will get priced out of the market. But for 500k above list, I couldn’t say no.

Dogecoin is at $0.60. This cryptocurrency was made as a joke. That’s really all you need to know about it.

The Fed and SEC etc all claim they want to make things safe for retail investors, but we are seeing the manifestation of a malicious bubble right before our eyes and they are all doing nothing. Zero. Zilch.

Lots of people are going to lose a lot of money when this is over. And please remember that the government agencies that are supposed to be helping us are doing absolutely nothing.

And then, once the dust settles, just like after the dotcom bust, you will see a ton of regulations coming down like SOX to “protect” investors when we could have been protected RIGHT NOW, May 2021. It’s utter bullshit.

When people say conspiracies like the government is using covid to control us and try to take away our freedom, I would normally laugh. But after 9-11 and the “Patriot” act, the dotcom bust and SOX, and whatever regulations come from the fallout of crypto, I’m starting to wonder if they have a point.

As more and more people convert to solar, PG&E will make less money, and consequently charge more for electricity in order to pay for their costs.

The next house I buy, I intend to fully move to solar and battery backup. Maybe rely only on late night charging for my non-Tesla EV.

Uber had/has unlimited vacation time. When I worked there I took no less than 6 weeks a year and one year took 8 weeks. The formula is one week every quarter and then 2 weeks at Christmas. That already brings you to 6 weeks.

But that’s life. I have 2 friends that died in a car accident. They were in their mid-20s. A split second accident. If they didn’t drive that night, they probably would never get as close to death as they did that night. But it happened and all their efforts were erased in a second. It’s not just war that causes that.

Stop making excuses for why you need a smartphone and smash your phone right now.

You will survive without it.

Everything you need can be done from your computer.

Everything else is just an excuse. I made several excuses why I needed Facebook app, but ultimately I just impulsively deleted it and have felt so free from it since then.

Reddit and HN are next...

I worked at Yahoo during this time. I said at the time it was so dumb for Microsoft to be wasting so much money on Yahoo and instead they should have bought massive holdings in almost every Silicon Valley company for that money, including Facebook (I think they did invest a little in Facebook). Had they done that instead they would have been worth multiple trillions now.

They really avoided a huge disaster by walking away from Yahoo, so I applaud them.

If someone could create a cryptocurrency using proof that require people to pick up garbage, the world would be garbage-free in a month.

Is there systemic racism in the NBA?

Do you mean after he left Google? He left Google to form Otto which Uber bought. Frankly it’s the biggest mistake of TK’s career and caused the downfall in my opinion. He went against the advice of Emil and Salle, which was a huge mistake, and there were totally right.