seibelj

It's a free market, someone can create a pro-advertising phone if they think it will be successful. Plenty of Android phones are chock full of terrible adware.

It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.

I work ~70 hours a week with 2 young kids.

- Wife gave up career (for now) and is a stay-at-home-mom

- Remote-only job

- Schedule is 9am-530pm, 9pm-2am, Sunday night through Friday at 530pm. From Friday night through Sunday at 9pm I usually don't work.

My children are home around 530 and asleep before 10, and weekends are all for them, so basically I work most of my free time. I am highly dedicated to my work.

It is a somewhat monastic existence, but things were getting easier until we had the second child. Kids are a sacrifice - view the early years as an investment. Children are the OG startup, after all.

I posted this 2 weeks ago and got downvoted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32827148

Google layoffs incoming next

Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it.

As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want.

Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.

I don't care about the wealth pyramid. I care about freedom. If I have skills and a company wants to pay me $XYZ freely for my skills, the government shouldn't be able to arbitrarily cap what I can be paid. Obviously I dislike income taxes as well, but I would rather an income tax than an income-cap.

The poisonous ideology - punishing success - is your own.

Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.

Using mechanical turk to test consumer purchasing behavior is a meaningless exercise. Consumers care about price and quality, first and foremost. To fully explain the ethical practices of executive pay vs. employee compensation when someone is buying soap or cat food is not easy.

However what I love about the free market is that everyone can experiment. If you can find competent executives willing to work way under market-rates to sell your soap and cat food as a for-profit charity, I welcome it!

Don't get into a bunch of dramatic fights in company slack, don't get on your soap box and post your political opinions, don't publicly endorse politicians or parties. Just work at work and use your own time to be an activist

Just ban political discussion on company communication channels and the problem is solved

The left despises monopolies in business - they constantly hunt it out and pillory businesses that engage in monopoly activity.

The left worships monopolies in education - all education must go through the government and indoctrinate children accordingly.

I am fine with the government investing in education. But the government should give tax money directly to parents to allocate to the schools of their choosing. Otherwise monopoly takes hold

Who is operating the micro service? What are the rate limits? Are there status pages? Who made the code? How secure is it? Can it scale?

Or are we supposed to clone all the repos and host ourselves? Do they all have the same deployment cicds?

A grouping of open source repos is useful. But there is a reason why I pay companies for “freely available” services when I have my own revenue on the line.

This article has nothing to do with crypto. HN never fails to bring up crypto whenever possible.

Stock fraud? Wow should have done crypto. Guy got murdered? I wonder if the hitman was paid in crypto!

The NHS is a disaster and the reason isn't because of "privatization" - it's because on average people don't want to work a job where they need to be a saint. Highly skilled doctors and nurses get paid more, get respected more, and have more agency working outside of government-run agencies. Average people who enjoy cushy, do-nothing government jobs love it when government expands, but unfortunately the work product produced is shoddy, net-negative to the economy, and lights money on fire.

The solution is more privatization, not less. The UK needs to do everything it possibly can to help entrepreneurs - let all the Hong Kong exiles in to start new businesses and move their capital in. Free trade agreements with the US but ultimately as many countries as possible.

You can look to Venezuela and Argentina for the alternative.

You are experiencing the rot of failing economy in real time. The only solution is useful, productive enterprise - this is how functional, successful societies operate. There could be other paths there, but the most sure bet is to unshackle capital and let it invest freely.

USA is a special case, with the dominant global reserve currency and military force, we have the special privilege of printing money that everyone needs. The UK hasn't been that since Bretton Woods

You mean what they enacted in the last week? I don't think a few days of slightly-reduced taxes is going to move the needle

It is true the government can redistribute funds into investment. It’s also true if the citizens don’t make any money, the government will have little to tax and redistribute.

All government revenues are the result of taxing citizens. Citizens only have money to be taxed if they are employed in productive money-generating enterprises.

If the laws and regulations of the nation are such that the citizens can’t make money, then the government has no choice but to cut taxes and regulations until private business can flourish again. Otherwise it’s a never ending strangling of business, lower revenues, lower tax takes, and so on in a downward spiral.

I can’t think of any other way out of the problem except enhanced productivity and trade. The government can’t tax what the citizens don’t make. Post-brexit and at the total end of the empire, Britain needs to become something like Singapore or Dubai - a hyper-capitalist free-trade haven.

Of course this will only happen after 10+ years of failure, leading to an erosion of living standards and endless finger pointing and blame. You are already seeing the collapse of the NHS and the FTSE lacking any global relevance.

To work in crypto at a sophisticated firm like Coinbase, Gemini, Circle (my former company) or my own co, it would be a given you believe in markets and the experimental nature of digital assets given… that is the whole reason to work here!

I am a libertarian, free thinker, capitalist, etc. which is the standard profile in this industry. I have recruited engineers out of Amazon and Google who said they needed a change of pace from the “moralizing” (use your own judgement). It is a very open discussion, open inquiry industry.

So if working for a Cohen company is against your morals, easy to ignore. If that doesn’t bother you, then you passed the first question! Steve is a genius - but not everyone likes Wall Street.

Totally fair - my company has high revenues (unlike 99% of crypto) and we are essentially a digital Pokémon card company, and we resell our Pokémon card factory to others white label. It is a very straight forwards and logical business model.

HN is the absolute worst place to recruit given the bias against crypto here. But I’ll flip it around and say many startups in all manner of verticals are shaky - Fast.com, innumerable food delivery and fintech, “AI for XYZ” etc. etc.

One thing you can use to differentiate firms is the team, the founders, the funders. My company is backed by Point72 / Steve Cohen which does a lot more due diligence than most other firms. YMMV however - I myself would never work for adtech given my distaste. But a lot of HNers love certain FAANGs that data mine you and your children to sell you crap you don’t need. But many choose to disregard their morals and dismount their high horse when $$$ is involved.

No you just use any number of mobile crypto wallets, many of which are open source. You don’t need any permission to receive USDC

There was a belief for a time that consumers no longer cared about privacy, that the millennial generation preferred to share everything, and harvesting data was fine because the concept of privacy was antiquated.

What surprised a lot of tech execs was that when people understood how much data was collected they got creeped out and when given the option to opt-out of data collection they agreed at very high rates.

Apple's move to limit in-app tracking was genius because any lawsuit from FB or similar is counter-productive - consumers are given the option and they opt out at 99%. Suing Apple to force them to let FB track consumers would be a PR disaster.

So many people working in VC went straight into it after Stanford without ever starting a company, like it’s investment banking or something. Maybe the VC industry will shrink along with the startups, or at least the unhelpful partners.

They have much better insight than the rosy numbers put forth in their quarterly earnings. I think they are sensing rough waves ahead.

Sure but many laws are ridiculous and immoral. See slavery segregation anti-women laws etc. etc. People love to get in their moral high horse when it suits them (“Business bad!”) but conveniently ignore it in other cases.

There is criminal and there is civil. Just because something is illegal (speeding, jay walk-ing) doesn’t mean I’m some sort of psychopath for ignoring those laws - I make a calculation about how likely it is I’ll be caught vs. time saved.

Similarly a business looks at a penalty and makes a judgement. This isn’t some insane immoral concept.

If you believe successful startup founders "won the lottery" (I don't), at least it's an accomplishment that required building and managing a productive enterprise. Lottery winners rolled the dice. Very different skillsets.

An under-appreciated consequence of the self-made rich is that they passed enormous filters to acquire their wealth. They surpassed crazy odds and - even if you claim it was all survivorship bias and luck - they still succeeded through very difficult odds in very difficult circumstances.

I much prefer the early people at PayPal having billions to invest as they see fit than the government, which is full of politicians and their lackeys, whose primary skill is glad-handing and playing politics (something tech people say they hate).

The US government spent trillions on various permutations of bailouts, and now is spending hundreds of billions forgiving student debt and picking winners in the electric vehicle and battery space.

Let’s let the tech founders and their inner circle keep their (vastly smaller) riches and see what they come up with. I’d bet on them investing much more carefully than whatever pork the government passes next. At least with them my tax dollars aren’t funding their shenanigans (unless they are launching the next EV startup).

All the trinkets that could be offshored were done already. What the US manufactures now is high-end (chips) or protected by tariffs (cars). A lot of virtual stuff like software and call centers. I think we've hollowed out so much there isn't really much left to offshore.