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priv_acyon The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

In the eighth grade I had an english teacher who challenged us to write either a serious essay or a piece of satire, with the goal of getting half the class to believe it was satire and the other half to think it was serious.

I do believe this would have won.

priv_acyon “Just remove the duck” (2013)

Put more simply, sometimes you are the idiot. Don't make it worse for everyone by acting like it.

Edit: that's a generic 'you', in case it's not obvious, not a reference to the parent.

priv_acyon MBA builds app in less than 2 months

which I think is a little ironic because the overwhelming mentality on tech forums is that MBAs are idiots with more money than brains that get paid absurd amounts of money to play golf and talk about synergy who could never do what we do.

We've all seen this, of course. As an MBA, it makes me chuckle. As an engineer it makes me sad. If there's one mindset that could be stand to be purged from the development world it is that developers are so damn smart.

The insecurity over intellectual capability is so strong in the software engineering profession that it's debilitating. Developers - get over yourselves. There are lots of smart people out there and they don't all look like you. Embrace this fact and you will be freed. Once you recognize that you cannot even define "smart", constructing your identity around being smart loses its luster.

priv_acyon Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

In the aerospace business there is a guy known as the Mass Properties Engineer who gets to rule the project with an iron fist. He is responsible for knowing the estimated, calculated or measured weight of every part on the spacecraft from concept through to launch. It's not a very fun job, but it's very important. Some people actually made careers out of it. You simply cannot get this stuff wrong and not pay dearly for it later. There are reviews, arguments, dealings, and handwringing over all of this.

Now, I have no idea if the Spanish sub business runs anything like that, but it surprises me that it apparently doesn't or didn't in this case. It's not like you just let some engineer in the corner calculate the weight and then go build it. This is a systemic fuckup, not a shifted decimal point.

priv_acyon Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator?

That's what I meant by "status and allure". We're defining "money" differently.

priv_acyon Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

I was under the impression that putting out the first number anchors the negotiation around that number, not necessarily in one's favor. For example, if you think you want to earn 100k, and they were hoping to keep you under 125k, throwing out a number of $110k is not giving you the advantage, as they may have thrown out a first number of $115k if you had let them.

priv_acyon Nassim Taleb: End Bonuses For Bankers

Nobody wants to ruin the party. You're asking someone to stand up and say "stop making so much money, this isn't sustainable" when EVERYONE is making money hand over fist. Sure, it may be the right thing to do depending on your point of view, but nobody will do it because they will be laughed out of the room and cast aside.

Retail share holders are ignorant, so they don't matter. Big share holders know that there is a time frame that they care about that is as short as they want it to be. They don't care about the long term. The board of directors (in theory) should, but even they are short-timers. Asking them to stop making money in the short term to help the long term is counter to their personal interests. It's just a flaw in the system, and a major argument against going public.

Interestingly, the handful of folks I know who have served as directors for public companies all share certain personality trais: A strong extroversion (in that they seem to care a lot about what others think of them), a tendency towards overconfidence, and an aloof demeanor. Not sure if that's universal, but it's something I've noticed. It probably doesn't help.

priv_acyon Ask HN: What about a Google buy out of Amazon?

Amazon has a $90B market cap. Google's is $173B. Google can't afford it without taking on LOTS of debt, which ain't going to happen (note that neither company currently has any significant debt).

priv_acyon Please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder.

You could flip it and it would be just as true (that is, not at all):

Speaking as a business guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a technical guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a business co-founder.

I just wish more technical guys realized their code isn't that special, isn't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the implementation doesn't entitle you to 75% of a two-man venture. It doesn't even really entitle you to an extra 10%.

In the beginning, your job is probably going to be to find a place to host, writing alpha CRUD apps, buying computers, buying food, buying and assembling furniture and generally just making things work. That's all very unglamorous work but, depending on the venture, it's quite likely your (alleged) coding skills will be of very little value (until you've found a market).

I don't think I'm alone (as a business guy) in generally finding technical guys to have an inflated sense of self-importance who often want to treat business people as an exchangeable/replaceable commodity.

priv_acyon Ask HN: Soon to be high school graduate with two full time job offers. Help?

Interesting. I'm obviously American. I guess the larger point is that the period in your life from the age of 17-18 to about 21-22 is pretty important (or is that just my American showing again?)

priv_acyon Ask HN: Soon to be high school graduate with two full time job offers. Help?

Good god, go to college. Jobs will be there. And be there. And be there. Forever. Getting a job offer is the exact opposite of a once in a lifetime event. Going to college is a once (maybe twice if you do it right) in a lifetime opportunity - don't waste it working as a jr developer.

This is not a close call.

priv_acyon Spend $120K in angel investing instead of MBA studies

I had two of the best years of my life at B School. I met lifelong friends, learned a ton, and got to push the reset button on my life.

But business school is a bit of a scam, and the willing victims are the students. They sell glamor and wealth on Wall Street and throughout corporate America. "You'll be making half a mil in 5 years, what's $160k in debt?" Everyone is going to be a master of the universe. Except it doesn't work that way, even if you play by all the rules. Even at Harvard, Stanford, and Penn. Correlation is not causation.

Would I do it again? Hell yeah. But I was fortunate enough to go to a highly ranked public school for a fraction of that. I find it incredibly hard to believe that Stanford is worth 3-4x what I paid at Texas.

BUT... blowing $120k on angel investments seems like a very, very poor substitute for the B School experience. Yes, spend a crap ton of money educating yourself outside of school, but don't piss it away on angel investments. Spend it trying to do something.

priv_acyon Ask HN: What is a good espresso machine?

I've got both - I need something that can make espresso.