somic

Potentially related - "I'd rather read the prompt" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803

The article would be better if the author replaced "smartphone" with "smartphone screen". A ton of activities are made better by smartphones - a walk or a run with podcast or music, a drive or a bike ride with navigation, etc. It's specifically the screen that takes 100% of your attention and prevents you from daydreaming.

Thanks, looking forward! I don't know where most of your users are, but coming up with a safe road bike route in US suburbia is not a trivial problem. Current RWGPS planner routinely wants to take me to very dangerous roads (for a road cyclist). I hope your update will make it better.

I frequently use RWGPS for planning my bike rides but don't pay for it (yet!). Curious - is all routing done by graphhopper or do you have some secret sauce on your end? Also graphhopper web has regular bike mode and "racing bike", they tend to come up with different routes, wondering if it's incorporated on your side somehow or if there is a way to influence RWGPS algorithm to be more "road cycling" vs casual cycling (I think that's what graphhopper means by "racing").

I don't see any mentions of Google but I personally think it's Google that will be the main beneficiary of chaos at OpenAI. After all, weren't they the main competitors? Maybe not in product or business yet but on IP and hiring fronts?

My understanding is that in the US, earned wages (while employees were employed) are indeed employee claims. Not paying these is what YC guidance above says will lead to "very bad things."

After people are let go, severance and continuation of healthcare beyond some term mandated by law (maybe state, maybe federal, maybe varies by state, don't know) are not considered employee claims in this sense.

CEO and the board didn't follow the YC guidance mentioned above, and it's on them.

+1, hoping to somehow fit meditation in my life in 2018

Good article. Bottom line is employees need to be aware what can happen and how future rounds of financing, among other things, could affect their equity comp. The more articles and blog posts about it, the better.

There is no one-size-fits-all recommendation though. Everybody is different, and everybody's situation is different. What works for me won't necessarily work for you.

Equity comp, especially in non-publicly-traded companies, indeed is closer to a lottery than a lot of people think, and articles like this are helpful because they are educating people about it.

I also once wrote a blog post about this topic - http://www.somic.org/2015/12/28/on-employees-investing-in-th...

Participate in 401k plan - yes, 99% people would benefit from starting as early as possible. Max out your per-paycheck 401k contribution (including in order to maximize employer match) - not always. The farther you are from retirement age, the bigger your opportunity cost is going to be (your 401k money is locked-in into retirement account).

There are also certain 401k rules that may play very hard against you. For example, take a look at mandatory withdrawals ("required minimum distribution" - RMD) for some types of retirement accounts in the US at certain age + how your retirement account suffers disproportionately if market is down when you start mandatory withdrawals.

I know the math you are talking about, it does make sense conceptually and that's why it's cited in all 401k materials, real life with its rules and uncertainty is bit more complicated.

My expectation of a typical HN reader is that they are saving for more things/experiences/goals, not just retirement.

"Always be invested in the market" - what does it mean? Always have at least something long in your portfolio? Always be 100% long in your portfolio?

If I have 99% cash and 1% in VTI for 10 years, am I "always invested in the market" during this time?

Whatever you do, if you are a typical HN reader, do NOT invest like Buffet.

Hint: he never sells.

"Your company will probably extend a term saying “We will match your contributions up to N% of your salary.” You should always and under every circumstance invest enough money to max out your employer match. It is free money if you take it."

This is a reasonable default option but not necessarily the best for everyone.

There is a flaw in this statement - you are encouraged to save more today in order to maximize amount of money in your retirement account, with side effect of some immediate tax savings (which btw will not be in absolute figures but will be in rate - if you save more to 401k, your tax rate will be lower but amount of tax you will pay will still be higher).

If you are too far from retirement and have other goals that will come before retirement that could be very important to you, it becomes a decision just like anything else, not a no-brainer.

This is because of tax law - you are very constrained in your ability to take money from 401k before retirement if you need it.

Supply and demand.

Exactly.

Focus on quarterly numbers is a side effect, which is unfortunate. You go public not because you want to report quarterly. You go public because you want public funding and potentially better terms than private funding.

Not entirely true. IPO as a process exists to allow companies to raise money from the public, especially when private funding is not available. Overhead, requirements and legalities are a side effect, and if you have any money in a public market (like 401(k) in US), you absolutely want that. I do.

When private funding is available, IPO is not needed by definition. And since comp structures are set up with the expectation of IPO or exit, it's employees who are affected.

If you are negotiating an offer with a private company, you should attempt to price the risk of having to forfeit your stock comp. This risk has increased recently (that's what this story is about) but most people still under-negotiate it in their offers.

I hope you are right and I hope it works out but I am skeptical.

I will give you a simple example. If you get a random sample of people in the US, I am afraid more than 90% of them won't even understand that investing 5K in a neighbor's kid's shiny new startup is not a binary proposition (invest or don't invest); one actually is buying N of something (shares, options, warrants, etc) for those 5K, with all sorts of properties like seniority, etc, etc, etc.

Regular people can understand a loan - I give a neighbor's kid 5K and get back 5K+3% in 1 year. But equity-based investment is significantly harder to grasp.

FWIW, personally I am not optimistic about this but would love to be proven wrong.

Information asymmetry, risk mismanagement, chasing quick riches, etc - too many reasons imho why startups are not a viable asset class for most people.

As usual, their summaries leave me with more questions than answers.

A maintenance process whose purpose in life is to delete data from ELB backend database (if it were not the case, you'd see "maint process didn't work right") in such a weird way that it would cause such chaos? Why on earth would such a maint process exist in the first place? I can imagine some possibilities here of course but it feels to me there is more to it than what they've chosen to disclose.

Next. So they lose config data but data path for now not impacted. Fine, makes sense. But then backend, with only partial data, attempts to reconfig running LBs, doesn't fail completely (as in it was able to connect and do at least something but not all actions it was supposed to do) thus forcing otherwise good but impaired LBs into a completely bad state. Sunds suspicious to me.

And then the biggest question - why did they choose to attempt to restore entire backend database when only 6.8% of LBs were impacted?

I also have no idea how a CM process can protect against making a mistake - mistakes happen when somebody is at the controls with or without prior coordination.

All in all, their backend systems are so sophisticated and precisely engineered that any unforeseen/unexpected abnormality caused by manual intervention (be it inadvertent run of a maint script or fat fingered traffic re-routing from primary to backup network) inevitably lead to overwhelming reaction of their automation that makes the problem even worse and extremely hard to recover from.

Very tough position to be in - during these outages, they are essentially fighting the skynet that they themselves created and at their scale there is no way around it.

So hats off to those who've been working on this and good luck taming the beast.

Until this announcement, trading (buying and selling) of any EC2 entity was theoretically impossible.

Many companies claim to be working on things like marketplaces etc, but unless you can sell (buying is always trivial) and further unless you can sell to not just AWS but to a pool of other users, it ain't no marketplace.

I don't think RI is a bond. Bond is a debt instrument and you don't loan anything to AWS when you purchase an RI. RI is a hedging instrument instead - you think that if you end up running an instance non-stop or near-non-stop, you are hedging against paying a full price. Hence, RI is more like an option.

Further parallels with options are: 1) your upfront payment is option premium; 2) your RI has time value which is always declining as time passes; 3) RI gives you a right, not obligation, to do something; 4) RIs have many series, each expiring at the same time, just like exchange-traded options that expire at predetermined times.

All in all, this is huge. Or even bigger than huge. It can enable certain things that were not possible before, and personally I am very excited about opportunities it will present and how it will re-shape public IaaS.

The post was not directed at AWS. A "normal accident" (one that can't be foreseen, usually due to confluence of factors and bad luck) happened and they are dealing with it.

My post was directed at folks who said "web sites that went down as a result of such unprecedented EC2 problem made an engineering mistake by not building to be able to withstand."

Again - I am emphasizing "engineering mistake", not business mistake or funding mistake or resource allocation mistake.

My point is there are things you rationally protect against. But at some point, putting up defenses against more and more bad things stops being rational.

For different systems this point (where it stops being rational) is different.

Nothing against SpotCloud team, but here is my blog post about why I think the idea will not work any time soon:

http://somic.org/2011/01/19/my-doubts-about-idea-behind-spot...

The complexity of a system probably in use by Netflix comes from the number of instances and - most importantly - probably the number of accounts that they have. I strongly doubt all those instances they have are running on a single AWS account.

Agree that implementing similar system for a single AWS account is not going to be very difficult.

This talk by @adrianco may address the points you were looking for - http://www.blip.tv/file/4252897

To sum up, Netflix's strategy is to go with the best and biggest in each category, and AWS is obviously the biggest as of now.

This is indeed an interesting post but it doesn't answer the question why they chose Amazon. It focuses on why they chose not to expand within their own datacenter.