seibelj

Yes they can - once the market stops believing them, private equity takes them private, cuts costs massively and streamlines, then gets re-acquired or goes public again much improved - minus the founder.

To everyone reading this - we live in a free country. Nothing stops you from creating a new business as a co-op or employee owned collective or whatever.

So many smart people here who are passionate about labor. Just make that into your company from day 1!

As a business owner I would never do this. But you could do that yourselves without coercing me into them!

I would be interested in something where I'm given a topic and position to argue for, and I argue against another person who has the opposite side, and then other people vote on who did it best. Obviously a lot of details there to work out to avoid sybil attacks but I think that would be stimulating.

"Almost 1/3 of San Francisco charging stations are broken"

https://www.electrive.com/2022/05/13/almost-1-3-of-san-franc...

There are... a lot of problems yet to be solved in the perfect electrified future. I hope it happens, if only to move all the pollution from cars to the power plants far away. I have found it hard to discuss the negative / illogical aspects with true believers, which is normally fine, except now the developed world is paying a shitload of taxes to fund the dreams of true believers - logic and economics be damned.

The “$80 is too expensive” comment is dishonorable. You can choose not to buy something - for books especially considering the library is free.

If you think a corporation is evil, you don’t have to shop there.

There is misunderstanding of profits and software vs. hardware.

During the early computer era, the most difficult and expensive problems to solve were in hardware. The profits flowed there.

In recent years, compute was cheap compared to the value provided by quality software - and the software could run on a variety of hardware systems. So software captured most of the value.

There are some new problems that are difficult and expensive to solve that must be solved in hardware. This is making investment and profits flow back to hardware makers. Furthermore the years of commoditization of hardware resulted in consolidation and survival-mode until there were only a handful of serious players in various layers of the manufacturing stack. This will get resolved but will take a long time (decades).

AI businesses constantly need to improve and retrain models. This is extremely compute intensive and time consuming. Therefore we need hardware that is optimized to this specific type of number crunching. This hardware is novel and needs smart and talented people (therefore investment).

As an investor (both of capital and of your labor) you need to analyze where the expensive problems are, with the highest need to be solved, with those that need it most having the highest ability to pay. If you optimize on that spectrum your investment has a better chance of success.

Computer people are drawn to nostalgia, especially considering the entire history of our craft has been meticulously recorded by enthusiasts. We get drawn to certain types of problems and environments and every 10 years the entire world changes. Our profession is one of constant disruption and change.

What makes me rest easy is that the fundamentals have remained constant since the earliest theoreticians. We must use the best algorithms to reduce compute as much as possible. If you do that you win, at the most fundamental level. It’s another way of saying that you must solve the problem as simply as possible (and no simpler).

As an addendum, I don’t fault any talented and ambitious person who goes into the industry where they can make the most money as fast as possible. Some people lament that the best and brightest don’t go into, say, NASA or public school teaching or some such sacrificial act. The bursting of the tech bubble in 2022 and the drying up of VC capital to dime-a-dozen nonsense startups will help drive talented people back to hard problems.

> Then she handed me a copy of The C Programming Language, which she had just stolen (though at $80, it’s not clear who was robbing whom to begin with).

Code of Dishonor

That is hilarious - “all the problems of Europe are actually the USA’s fault!” Incredible

A firehose of ingestion is a specific problem that can be solved. But basing your entire application on a nosql data store is a mistake - quick and dirty now for pain and tears later.

Europe has many poor countries and even developed ones (UK) are having quality of life decreases due mostly to a lack of private sector success - the government eventually runs out of money without private business to fill its coffers.

Happy to be in the US especially with the global economic recession incoming

I work 70 hours a week and there is 0% chance I would do that without having significant upside in my firm. I get more money and I deserve it, this is a free country and I don’t want anyone’s potential capped (and certainly not my own!).

An underappreciated negative aspect of equality is total lack of enthusiasm and incentive.

As inequality is a guarantee - no two people are alike in any aspect and neither are their abilities as an employee - mandating (either by gun or union contract) lockstep equality in payments and job security, the highest performers are demoralized and put in the bare minimum or quit (if they can). The result is the ever-increasing shitty quality of the firm and its behavior. For modern examples see the NHS (bleeding doctors and nurses to the private sector) and American public schools in inner cities (highest global costs per student yet abysmal results).

There are valid criticisms about inequality but the pros far out way the cons.

> We love PostgreSQL which Supabase utilizes. We plan to do more research on scalability, since column-based databases can’t grow as big as their NoSQL counterparts.

I would argue there are very, very few types of problems NoSQL solves better than relational DB, and the “benefit” of quickly deploying schema changes is actually a nightmare later on. That it took so long for these devs to realize this is… perplexing

The safest play is to create all art as metaphor, just as the writers of great Russian literature did. You can’t be too plain spoken because that opens you up to attack by the mob. Rather, hide your meaning and the censors won’t feel it necessary to ban.

Even if you lose all your property and declare bankruptcy, you can still drive a car, you can still work in food service, you can still drag yourself out of the hole. I hesitate to bring up religion here, but even if you are not religious then philosophies like stoicism can bring you peace. And also look into psychiatric drugs like anti-depressants, they do work for many people. Good luck and don't give up hope

I went to the one in JP a lot before it closed. Our main issue was that the produce was often rotten / moldy and there were flies inside a lot. It's hard to justify higher fees and being "more healthy" when all your food is spoiled. We went because it was a 5 minute walk but now we use Whole Foods for everything.

My sincere belief is that there are a large number of employees whose total comp is over $400k and they provide far less value than that. But the arms race between FAANG drove up salaries to illogical levels. As people are pushed out they will not be able to hop to another FAANG. While total comp at startups might be similar but the equity isn’t liquid like FAANG is.

Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup. It will be a psychological shock to go from a FAANG environment to a small company.

In summary I think there will be some hard life lessons for some previously extremely well compensated tech folks. I hope they saved a lot of their past salaries.

It’s sort of non-shitty which is a glaring indictment of the difficulty of solving problems with AI. Languages are a closed system, the cars have no chance

The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size and we are doing much better than the UK. Jobs are plentiful and our corporate titans continue to dominate global equities.

Maybe the issue in the UK isn’t as simple as tax rates. But you can always try to pivot hard left, maybe it will work this time. Capital does tend to flee when serious attempts to expropriate it occur…

I think if it was Donald Jr's laptop rather than Hunter Biden's the mainstream media would be going bananas over it.

How will this work when reality is partisan? The Hunter Biden laptop story was a debunked conspiracy by the “experts” until it wasn’t, and the recent Chinese election data stolen “conspiracy” (as declared by the NYT) turned out to be true. Yet day after day the stories about Trump and Russia were blasted by major media… until that was totally debunked.

It’s like one side decides what is true and the other side is conspiracy until the facts come out, then it’s forgotten completely into the memory hole.

That's what everyone says until the government defaults on its debt. The US is a special case because of our unique situation as the military superpower and reserve currency, but look at Argentina, Venezuela, and the UK for a counterpoint.

Only a fool thinks the ability to get a loan is equivalent to living within one’s means

Unfortunately we are constantly issuing new debt to pay back the old debt because the government spends far beyond its means. So it doesn’t help.

It's about averages. For certain groups of people, for certain amounts of time, people are willing to starve / freeze / have poorer conditions voluntarily. Under the threat of a gun they can accept it for much longer periods.

But on average, people want to live in comfort and have their needs met. It's even worse because leaders very rarely struggle under the same hardships, and when they do it's a PR stunt.

It's like Brexit - people voted for it (just barely) but now are hating the consequences. The only option is increased trade and commerce, the UK government simply can't socialism / money print their way out of the mess. Only productive enterprise will save them, meaning a freer market, freer trade, lower taxes, etc. but this will take a decade:

- Conservative government falls

- Leftists take over

- Leftists destroy everything and make stuff worse for a few years

- People give up hope

- Thatcher-like figure emerges, cuts taxes, promotes business, free trade

- People get comfortable and start thinking socialism can work again

- Go back to the beginning

Highly exaggerated outcomes. But you can ameliorate increased heat, flooding, and pollution. You can’t fix freezing and starving to death. I’ll take the latter over letting humanity wither over some insane concept of “Mother Earth” as if a non-living planet cares or has thoughts and feelings. Earth will be fine - it is a rock. We only care about earth insofar it suits us. I don’t want humanity to die out and I don’t see humans as a cancer. We must thrive and grow and flourish and that requires energy.

There is energy everywhere. There isn’t a lack of energy. Energy shortages are political issues. If you want energy fast then coal plants are cookie cutter and coal is easy to store and ship. If you have more time then nuclear can go anywhere.

Humanity needs more energy, not less. I’m tired of so-called “progressives” who are against the progress of the human species. Go suicide yourselves if that’s what you want but leave me alone, I don’t want to freeze.

Totally agree - never received a good candidate from here so I stopped trying a while ago. Maybe once and a while I post. Hiring good people is always hard, it’s a full time job for a full time recruiter.

This is pretty neat. You write a function and then a library automatically creates wrapper libs to be called in a browser as if it’s a function call. A variety of frameworks have done similar - SOAP auto-generated Java libs come to mind - but this looks very clean and minimal.

I have kept a 70 hour schedule for over 10 years now, it works for me. I am CTO of a fairly large startup I created and I love my work.