sbilstein

Personally I think LLM benchmarks make agents worse. All these companies chase the benchmarks, overfit, and think being able to cheat at the math olympiad is gonna get us to AGI. Instead researchers should peer in and get me an agent that can reliably count the number of "i"'s in mississippi.

The man lived at the same time my great grandfather did, a ww1 Jewish German veteran.

Everyone’s views on their integration into German / Gentiles society were completely upended throughout those years. Einstein wasn’t always an ardent Zionist, he wasn’t always a pacifist, his lived experiences caused changes. Your question compresses 30 years of life, say 1925-1955, into a simple binary to try and drive some nasty conclusion.

You can definitely go to a mall and get ray bans with solid barrel hinges

As a kid I ate this stuff up. In the eighth grade, I defaced my middle school website.

The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days. She pulled me out of class, told me such in the hallway, let me return to class where I held in tears until the end of the day.

Nothing happened and the school year ended a few weeks later. Towards the end of the summer I realized it had been a bluff and I wouldn’t be punished. Took me a few years later to realize how much of a favor that all was! The county school of conduct clearly said cybercrime was punishable by expulsion so she could have absolutely put me in some kind of hell. The fear set me straight hah.

Not in an urban area. E-bikes fly through sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks in NYC. Threatening pets and people at all times. Bikes were already bad, now it’s just more and faster.

Therapy, meds, support groups on Reddit, and exercise are the best thing you can do to deal with childhood trauma. It actually seems to get worse if you don’t manage it, I probably only really started attacking my trauma at 28/29. Made a big difference in personal and professional success.

Yep. I’m personally skeptical of so many other use cases for LLMs but CoPilot is fantastic and basically just autocomplete on rocket fuel. If you can use autocomplete, you can use CoPilot super effectively.

Be nice but remember you have objective skills and you need to suss out the CEOs objective skills.

1) Can they raise money? Proof is good here. Sometimes someone will say "I want you as my co-founder to go and raise my seed round" and you can condition leaving your current job on getting at least some checks in. Remember, this founder _knows_ you can deliver the goods, you are an employed software engineer. Can they?

2) Can they recruit? The process might be a mess but are they treating your time and concerns with respect?

3) Do they view you as an equal partner? Make sure you nail down exactly what they want. If they want a true co-founder, ask for 50%. If they don't, make sure you understand what it means to be an employee to a non-technical founding team.

Well, in this scenario, you are actually the 'former' colleague getting recruited to be a co-founder while the other folks stay stable. You just admitted you would and I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PM or even another engineer who would want to join forces. That's different than a complete stranger recruiting you -- I would be very wary.

Oh absolutely. Twice I made the mistake of coming onto a startup to fix the “mess” the previous dev shop had made.

Both times the founders had developed an incredibly negative relationship with their dev shop. Hell, the company with the Series A was withholding payments, the preseed company at least paid their bills.

I naively thought “of course they hate working with a dev shop, the incentives are wrong. I’m FTE with percentage points equity. I’ll fix it.”

Of course, things got better, but growth stalled or never happened, blame gets shifted, suddenly that founder who was excited to hire top tier talent is very disappointed in the very equity and salary expensive engineer you are. You end up being the new target of their animosity. You start to empathize with the folks in India, China, Ukraine or Argentina whose history lingers in the git blame. They’re not stupid, the incentives were just wrong!

The thing is…the CEO who failed to find a technical co-founder, retain them, or replace them with the same equity agreement has already demonstrated their inability to work with technical people. If they are coming from tech, the fact that they couldn’t convince a former colleague to work with them means they’ll be a terrible manager. If they come from finance, as many founders do, you are a line item.

At the end of this, hopefully sooner than later, you’ll quit, you’ll get fired, or you’ll collect paychecks while looking for the next better thing.

As an engineer, stay away from mediocre CEOs.

The MAGA deadhead crossover vibe is so weird. At least the actual cultural icons they worship seem to have kept their heads on at old age.

Oh yes! Extend that to fish and you get Tokyo where you have to work your ass off to get mediocre sushi.

common app is over 20 years old.

everyone, except Reason, knows that scammers descend on disaster areas. who knows if this guy is gonna repair roofs to code? or just rip off desperate families. i lived in florida for 20 years, beware the post-hurricane “helpers”

A large nuclear power plant may use up to 1 billion gallons of water a day and, for this reason, they are often built next to rivers, lakes or oceans to utilise the bodies of water. The water is drawn from these sources and heated to create steam to power the turbine. It then condenses and can be reused in the power generation process. However, it is eventually pumped back into the body of water it originated from, albeit at very high temperatures. This can increase the temperature of the natural water source by up to 30 degrees, posing risks to the aqua life.

from this article:

https://monarchpartnership.co.uk/nuclear-power-water-consump...

the “PC mob” might be new but we’ve had mobs of every political, religious, and cultural motivation pressuring academia since it’s invention.

+1, and how many engineers do they employ? thousands, just like big tech companies.

a friend of mine went from working in oil extraction field engineering to being a patent agent. he does a lot of reviewing applications, finding prior art, and analysis of the inventions.

it’s interesting to him since he is always coming across curious inventions and applications but otherwise it seems like a pretty dead end career. he is particularly unambitious so i think the lack of pressure other than “review this stuff” is pretty nice for him.

I wouldn’t trade being a builder to be a paper pusher.

I suppose when I read Hacker News, I think about the kind of companies that would apply to YC or otherwise compete with SV-ish funded companies.

I kinda agree with you -- half the job as a programmer is being really tedious and paying attention to written text on a screen. If you can't reasonably review your resume and use spell check, it is not a great look.

Take those assumptions and spend a year burning your savings. Once you see that all your competitors raised at least a few hundred k pre-product while you’ve got a hole burning in your pocket, you’ll feel like an idiot.

If you run an already profitable business like a services company, you can get away with bootstrapping. But then it’s not really bootstrapping, it’s a pivot.

Yep....

Bootstrapping is for fools. Virtually no founders out there are pouring their personal savings into their company. The issues with bootstrapping:

1) No one to tell you to give up except your own survival instinct. 2) You've already told yourself to ignore that survival instinct because of the success stories you've heard. 3) Even if your idea is fantastic, there is another group of folks out there who have raised enough money to pay themselves working on the same thing. You are now under-resourced and already losing.

I about 90% regret bootstrapping my first, failed startup. The other 10% I managed to make into a great opportunity to learn a lot and expand my network but I suppose I could have done that much more cheaply.

yea especially when locals do the same shit all over the world: wake up get dressed do a job / raise kids / relax eat maybe do a hobby go to bed

it's not like you get to Mongolia and are like "wow instead of jobs Mongolians just play golf all day"

Same experience as you. I still take psychedelics once in a while but at this point it has become really clear to me that after a few initial epiphanies it can becomes purely recreational. I love taking them recreationally but I am no longer idealistic enough to think I'm really opening the doors of perception.

Talk therapy, becoming estranged from abusers in my family, and SSRIs helped me long term conquer my PTSD and depression.

I agree that both are true but what contributes to loneliness is far more likely to be your own personal choices.

Is challenging your own choices and behavior worth it? The answer to that is subjective.

the inability for self-described rationalists to reason about how their emotions determine what they deem "objective" or significant is the most annoying thing on the planet.

one example where a lot of rationalists stop making sense is blaming challenges with dating on macrotrends and demographics when their own 'microtrends' of personal behavior, manners, and selection bias is the larger contributor to the issue.

No different than a company blaming the macro with 'the market wasn't ready' rather than their failure to bring a compelling product to market. Example: Instacart vs. Webvan.

yea tbh working hard and iterating on skillset to climb the promotion ladder sounds/was much easier for me.

rolling your own auth is underrated.

Public health agencies have been telling people to lose weight for decades.

admittedly a very personal reason but I _don't_ want to be able to log in to facebook. Each property of theirs has it's own flavor but I personally find facebook with its treasure trove of decade old memories and connections to people i haven't seen in ages to be a bit of a despair and depression pit.

I deleted my account specifically cause I felt like "why am I still looking at this stuff?"

I would love to be able to use oculus or instagram (which i can now) without an FB account. Recently I created an account to use ad manager for my job and it's been really annoying how many friends (from the past) I get suggested and how much the algo seems to want to rebuild my old account...