pyrrhotech

Time to short Google. It's clear they are out of ideas and their core business is under siege by ad blockers.

Why are you so convinced that terrorism is not a threat to society? Lots of Romans probably thought the Huns were a laughable foe as well.

I think you'd feel differently if you had a loved one in the towers on 9/11

I wouldn't say it's "fine". The well-documented increasing wealth-inequality is going to be a major problem to solve in the next century. As automation becomes more prevalent, it will only get worse with the money ultimately going to fewer and fewer hands.

Agreed, I'd answer $0 because I don't have a savings account. Even if they asked in all bank accounts, it would be about $1500 or less depending on the day of the week. Yet I own a home with 50% equity, a car and have a 6 figure retirement account and separate 6 figure taxable account. What they really should ask is what is your net worth or at least what is your liquid net worth, but I suppose that would be confusing to a lot of Americans.

A great example of why the "number of users" metric is being overvalued. Until there is a solid, proven and scalable business plan to translate usage to revenue the $100 per user standard valuation shouldn't apply.

I'm more successful than 99.9% of people on the planet and 95% in the Bay Area by my current income and net worth, and yes 95% of that success is from pure luck (being born into a wealthy family, having my college paid for, being able to attend elite prep schools, starting life 500k in the black instead of 250k in the hole, and good life skills about how to save and invest instead of spend all my money...). I'm not selfish and I know I don't deserve this, it's just luck of the draw for the most part. I wish we didn't live in this pseudo-aristocratic society, and I want to do everything I can to give back and change so that future generations can be more equal.

I encountered this problem when playing Cities: Skylines. Simple solution: build more crematories

More and more examples of how the money is going to fewer and fewer hands and workers are less and less needed. This is why we need Socialism and a basic income. Kodak's 140k employees vs. Instagram's 30 odd. Snapchat $15B valuation for 330 employees. Now this guy has made (and runs) a $100 million business singlehandedly... What used to take 100s of employees to accomplish can be done with a handful, and it's only going to get worse as tools get more sophisticated and automation more widespread.

It's great for GDP overall, we just need the government to enforce that society's success can be shared among all people and not just a handful of lucky ones.

Definitely a bug in Google domains. The real one expires 9/14/2020. https://who.is/whois/google.com/

As someone who lives in Hayward (and owns real estate there) I hope you are right. Do you know of any companies moving to Hayward?

Yes, I wish more legit companies would move to Oakland

I've never made $1 from anything other than my full time job though I've tried several times. It's much harder than it looks... Then again even lots of successful consumer startups took half a decade or more before they made their first $1 as well

Kickstarter backers are not investors. They don't own any part of the business they are funding. They are essentially buying pre-orders. I would assume that genuine attempts to use the money to produce the pre-sold product should be protected from litigation, but if the Kickstarter owner goes out and parties with it instead, that is fraud. Not saying that happened in this case, but it's up to the plaintiff and defense to prove whether they used the funds appropriately or not.

FWIW Diablo 3 is now a worthy successor. It was terrible at launch, but the devs listened to the community and it's a great game now

It's important to note that the numbers discussed by the New York Times were only of VC-funded tech companies founded this century. There are at least a few thousand private companies in the US worth 1 billion or more. Forbes keeps track of a few hundred here http://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/ with the lowest on the list having over 2 billion in revenue.

It's nearly impossible to start a company and have it worth a billion dollars within a decade. But if you drop the get rich quick thinking of Silicon Valley, it's much more possible if you grow slow and steady over a few decades or generations even. My family has a business started 30 years ago that's now worth in the hundreds of millions for example, and we are ecstatic if it grows 15% per year. In the next 20 years, if we don't fail, we should have a billion dollar business. We don't take excessive risk, so there's a fairly good shot. It's a bank in the South FWIW.

The only way quants can make money is from active traders on the other side. It's impossible for quants to make money off buy and hold index investors. If everyone took your advice (and I do), there'd be no such thing as quants

I like Sam, and I even agree with him in this post. However, I don't think everything he blogs about needs to shoot straight to the number one spot on HN. I'm not sure if this is the community's voting or the YC algorithm's bias, but it would benefit the community if we could stop the fawning and treat his posts like we would anyone else's.

this is pretty terrible compensation for such high impact work in such a high cost of living area. 150k is less than many Bart workers make a by the time they are senior level (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2014). Many of these companies are making billions, further increasing the wealth gap of the founders vs. the ones who create their fortunes on the ground level.

The companies have even been proven to collude to suppress wages. Software engineers are in desperate need of unions

Most academics disagree that there is such a thing as "Wall Street delusion". TWTR was and is accurately priced at all times. In the past, it was more valuable as investors had larger reason to believe in the future growth prospects of the company. Now it is less valuable because we have seen that the company has failed to live up to those expectations.

I live in Hayward

I really loved the idea, and maybe I'm just being cheap, but no way I was going to pay $250+ a month to have my 1296 sq ft house cleaned. That's a $150/month value at market rates in my area. $100/month for a bit of convenience was not worth it at all to me.

You won't be able to have a large impact as just a software engineer, but you can do a little bit. If you really want to change the world in a big way, you have to be a businessman and leverage the power of others' efforts.

His first one zip2 was mostly luck. After that, he had massive amounts of capital and connections which greatly enhanced his chances for future success. The snowball effect.

how is this different from just running `lynx https://news.ycombinator.com`?

No, bonds are the last place you want to be right now. That potentially sharp rise in longterm rates is highly dangerous for the bond market. If rates go up, bond prices go down. I'd stay in safe stocks or cash

Equity is not a huge motivator but it's necessary in the current market because of the relative lack of cash and focus on future growth instead of present value of startups. An average engineer's long term value is easily 250k+ but most startups simply can't afford to pay that amount because a lot of that value the engineer is building won't be realized until a few years later. So a startup may instead offer $150k salary and 100k equity. No engineer in his right mind should take a $150k total comp job in Silicon Valley--to get full value (which is only fair to yourself), you can either work for a large corporation that will pay you $250k yearly income between RSU and salary or work for a startup that will pay you a smaller salary plus presumably the difference in equity.

I would much rather just take a 250k salary than a 150k plus equity if available, but I'll settle for 150k salary and 100k equity (per year) if I believe in the company and it has other appealing non-financial rewards for my service compared with megacorp.

fair enough--your numbers are well documented and are a better representation of the "average" big law firm. I was more pointing to the best of the best. I believe the top firms produce about 6MM profits per partner, though the profits aren't equally distributed among the partners

This just reality for many of us. Find something besides work to focus on, save as much as you can, and look forward to the day that you have the FU money to wake up every day thereafter to do whatever you please. Check out mrmoneymustache.com

A lot of the points can be boiled down to "work very hard". But what if you simply are the type of person who doesn't like working? Another point is do what makes you happy. For some lucky folks, work makes them happy, but there's a lot of us who don't like it. And no, it's not just a specific job. A lot of us are just kinda lazy to be perfectly honest. The things I enjoy most are running, eating fine meals, quality times having beers with friends, traveling, reading and playing video games. I do work so I can support myself so that I can do those other things, but I certainly wouldn't work if I didn't have to (and I've worked and saved long enough that I'm fairly wealthy and won't have to for very much longer).

I think one of the reasons is that I don't care about social status or material possessions or competing at who can make the best chat app or anything like that, and work just feels like a grind to me. Sure, some of it is better than other parts, but in the end, I'd always rather be doing something else. I also am not usually impressed with other peoples' career achievements, and getting a promotion or a better job doesn't give me any sort of feeling of accomplishment or 'high', just, well I guess I'm a few years closer to being wealthy enough to get out of this bullshit.

A lot of people will look down on me for this, but I'm ok with that as I'm not trying to win a popularity contest. I just don't think "work hard" is necessarily the best advice to all people. I do think work is important as it's a means of contributing to society, and in the end, I'm glad I did my part, but after I have enough to "get out", I'll have satisfied my conscience to spend the rest of my days having good times and doing things that really make me happy.