repomies69

This assumes the "business-y" type hackathons that are popular these days. Back when I was young, we used to organize hackathons where the point was to hack together something cool, and "winning" was not the point. If you are just making a "clickable prototype UI" that's not cool in my books.

> I have not revealed my preference, one way or another

You have revealed your preference of evaluating morality as a choice.

I think morality is a basic assumption for pretty much all human interaction. If someone chooses to be immoral, then why would I want to interact at all with that person? If being fake and untruthful is a choice for that person, I don't see how any interaction made sense. Just the only sensible choice is to run away from that person and if you have business going on just try to close them as quickly as possible. Even online discussions like these would be totally pointless with a person who has selected to be immoral/fake.

Thanks for your generous advice, sir. Greatly appreciated.

Isn't it quite obvious, don't do stupid contracts.

As a contractor/freelancer you can do any kind of contracts. You can commit to free work for whole year if you want (or are stupid enough to sign a contract that requires you to work for free).

With normal employment there are lots of laws that protect you so you don't have to think about your contractual duties. Just turn up and do what is told and you will get paid. When you do contracting it is quite different game.

Yes, psychopaths can be wildly successful people, I will start to act psychopath right away, sir. Thanks for your advice.

That is true, but I don't see how firing the CEO typically would give gains somewhere else in the portfolio. For example VC's very rarely invest in competing companies.

However what affects the situation is that VC's want a lot of risk, and the risk preferences of the CEO could be considerably lower - eg. the CEO would be fine with moderately profitable company, while the VC wants all or nothing.

I don't think it is common to change CEO's for truly successful companies which actually show good numbers. No one wants to change the CEO, they do it because they think that it clearly increases their possible returns so they basically have to do it because otherwise they would look incompetent as board members.

Though in the business world it is always like that, whatever you do. Whatever kind of deal you are doing you have to be careful and attentive.

Bootstrapping is great, but it also has challenged to overcome. Many fail to do it.

If the company makes money, there is very little reason to fire the CEO. In fact pretty much the opposite, there are probably CEOs that would deserve to be fired for multiple reasons, but because the company makes good money, the board won't care. The board is responsible towards the owners, if they actually fire a CEO of a performant company, they really have to show why it was in the best interest of the owner.

All these stories where the CEOs were fired are from companies that weren't profitable, needed constant funding rounds etc. In the situation where the company is just sucking money from investors the CEO gets changed easily.

Actually, the board has to believe that the replacement CEO they find from the market, will generate better returns than the current CEO. So, it is not that the CEO has to be "the best", it has to be good enough so that if he is fired, the likelihood of the new one succeeding should be lower than with him.

Note that there should be quite many advantages for the current CEO to do the job well compared to some external guy. Typically it might take 2 years from a new CEO to learn the business, etc.

Boards don't fire on a whim, they genuinely have to believe that a replacement will do clearly better job - they don't want to go through all the hassle of finding a replacement just for fun.

There's tons of different companies, VC-funded high-growth startups are just a small subset of all companies. If you want to do programming in your own company you can set up some boutique working on some niche. Absolutely no need to be "a management type person" in my opinion. It certainly is possible to run company where you do up to 80% programming IMO.

But, if you want the big bucks it typicalle makes sense to hire and grow. If you want to stay small and do stuff yourself, it means less money.

If the company makes bucketlots of money, the board isn't going to change the CEO, even if he would be a total arse in board meetings. I think it has to be repeated that investors want returns for their investments. Also, if the company happens to make money despite of lousy CEO, the board will highly probably keep the lousy CEO.

All these founder-centric stories makes it looks like board will fire the CEO just for fun, or just because they happen to get the idea out of the blue. Actually it is a lot of pain and work for the board to try to find a new (better) CEO and they probably realize that they will fail (statistically speaking). So, the board will fire the CEO only in a situation where they genuinely believe that average replacement from the market will do a better job running the company. They don't fire on a whim.

> They don't have a safety net to fall back on if that fails.

However many people also start companies without safety nets. Some of them fail and they might have drastic life moments, but in tech you always find some job, in fact your failed startup might be seen even positive by some employers...

The fact that VC's didn't invest in that single idea doesn't tell anything about them being risk averse or not.

You can be even more happy if you use the money to buy a new yacht.

> HN has a hateboner for cryptos, which most of the time is based on purely illogical assumptions of tech they have no understanding of.

Basically all online communities have hatred towards cryptos. Not because of understanding or assumptions, but because the shill army of shitcoiners that try to pump their shitcoins in every possible community there is. And of course the numerous spampots and scammers who also spread the negative image for cryptocurrencies.

In one company there were quite old linux boxes that were never updated. They never caused any problems, the software in them kept chugging along just nicely.

Selling to someone else with higher price is always part of capitalism, and there's nothing wrong with that. Speculation is good for the economy.

Why I invest in tech stock? Because I believe the current tech companies might be 10x or 20x times the sizes in 20 years, and in 40 years they might be 1000x times the current size. Basically they could own governments and become world rulers. At least in metaverse.

Amazon is the biggest and Bezos has too fancy yacht, thats why they get all the attention. Fair assumption is that amazon is not that different, maybe it is even a bit above average because they get so much attention.

We probably have not heard about their ethical competitors which returned -100% to the investors.

As a BTC holder inflation is great. Prices just go lower. Holiday you were planning will be actually cheaper.

> Isn't a faster boot what everybody wants?

Yes, but glancing quickly at the article some solutions are not generally acceptable, such as moving filesystem processes to the application code. If you have a RPi project where you plan to run a single Qt app then you can do stuff like this, but that is generally speaking not the use case.

> It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things.

If you prefer to hold bitcoin instead of fiat and are willing to spend a little bit effort on that and digest some transaction costs, I think it is very likely you will become wealthier.

However the promise to get rich is something entirely different. Not many people in the world can be rich. You have to take out-of-normal type of risk. The more common bitcoins gets, the more normal it is and less riskier. The later you get into btc, the less likely it is that you will get risk. However it still makes sense financially.

> [0] Scandinavia in general might be amazing for hydro

All the possible rivers are already used, and the plants have killed the fish from the rivers. The effect on wildlife is not that nice.

Dude, many people don't realize this until they're approaching their forties. Including me.

Laundering is the process of making dirty looking money legit. This isn't particularly good way to do that. When the miner sells the $23 million, it isn't hidden to the normal income because the amount is so large. They have explain it to their financial service providers who will request explanations. Their investigative team will easily do blockchain analysis and find the transaction. If the sending address is in any way connected to the miner, the "scheme" will be bust.

I don't think there is any money laundering going here. The point of money laundering is to raise as little attention as you can, and that is not happening here. Weird transactions and income makes you just more suspicious.

Nothing with banking is technically that difficult, it is about licenses and permissions.

> What's to stop a company like that from buying a bank and setting up its own credit card?

They can set up their own credit card network, sure. If they want to issue their own credit card with existing network like visa or mastercard, they need permission from visa or mastercard.

These payment networks have huge network effects. I can't imagine anyone really entering that market.

I don't know about insanity, in Europe it is very clear what the contract and law says, and it is very simple. People usually have the holidays around the same time of the year. Then again the salaries are much, much lower than (some parts) of the US. You could see it as a tradeoff.

However it varies from country to country but in my understanding the difference to US is drastic.

Wow, I didn't know about these. How well do those work? Do payments work automatically? What about reputation system?

Depends on the business case. I don't think this answer can be generalized either way.

You can lose a business because of the heavy costs which add little value, however it is not easily arguable that a specific cost was the deal-breaker.