spanktheuser

VC is a tricky business. Most operating at scale see more variety in their deal flow than they could hope to understand in any deep way. This is one of the reasons team & traction matters so much more in early funding rounds (1); evaluating product is difficult even for engineers with domain experience (2). Much more so for a finance major with domain experience in private equity & TED Talks. Hype trains give VCs three ways to win: the hype proves real; the hype lasts long enough to WeWork an exit; a portfolio that includes prominent hype sector start-ups helps ensure the VCs next fund is fully subscribed.

Add to that the recognition that all going-somewhere trains were hype trains at one point in time and it’s silly to expect the latest round of fraud and tulip-mania to teach VCs lasting lessons.

1. I’m told biotech/pharma VCs are more product versed and focused.

2. “When this product hockey sticks there won’t be time to rebrand. That’s why we have to change to Meta now. Or maybe X. Whichever has the better bespoke font.”

A quick search suggests there are 335 million Americans but only 37 million Canadians.

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/canada.united-st...

I’m curious whether the government certification / reporting process is punitive in nature and perhaps provides incentives to fabricate compliance. I’ve led a fintech startup through IT security audits mandated by top US banks and found them to be highly collaborative and helpful. Much less of a “pass/fail” judgement and more “you’ve made it to X on your own; here’s some resources on how to hit Y affordably so we can begin to do business.”

I’m curious why you feel the actions of a private group amount to a legal system. To me they seem quite different. In one the punishment amounts to expulsion from the group and damage to reputation. The actual legal system has more consequential punishment (confinement, monetary loss, permanent record as a felon & sexual predator) but also higher standards of evidence, procedure, defendants rights etc.

To me, the “amateur legal system” you identity is closer to a more formalized version of what a friend group might do when they decide to ostracize someone due to boorish, misogynist or similar behavior. Since the chess association size exceeds the Dunbar number a lightweight process is needed to ensure proper function.

> When every personal grievance is seriously launched…

That is quite a statement that I think you need to back up. How about you link to 3 examples. Remember, they have to be personal, and they have to be serious.

I'm a designer & product manager whose taste runs extremely strongly to minimalism, simplicity, and clarity in user interfaces. A late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD revealed why and linked it strongly (in my mind) to my ability to enter a hyper-focus mode when visual distractions are reduced.

Now now. Be fair. Some of us would be quite content with your ongoing persecution.

The trapped individuals are living are living in a location where these sorts of conditions are extreme. Prior to climate change they may have been unthinkable.

People with limited resources don't devote them to mitigating once in a lifetime risks. Their everyday life is constrained: buy a more reliable car vs. save for a child's education. Eat healthier food vs. visit the doctor.

These Native Americans live in a vulnerable location that provides little land-based wealth, isolates them from population centers & thus opportunity, and exposes them to environmental threat.

If you can't see how that impacts their opportunity to "amount to anything," I suggest relocating. Become their neighbors and report back in 10 years whether you think this had any deleterious impact on what your career has amounted to.

I'd love if there was someplace we could go to test this assertion instead of relying on unbacked statements.

I'm not saying it's untrue, but there is a lot of ambiguity in this claim as things stand. Are you referring to abuse of their monopoly power to censor speech? Abuse of same to compromise human rights? Nefarious trickery to subvert their own security model? Use of forced labor to assemble devices? Each is its own form of evil; the evidence for each ranges from beyond doubt to (afaik) non-existent; typing them out every time one wishes to discuss apple is daunting.

Has the causal and temporal relationship between cooking and modern brain development been firmly established? The last time I looked into the literature I could find (a decade ago), there seemed to be a tantalizing correlation but enough noise in the timing of cooking to place it well short of being an well-accepted theory. And the question of what constitutes a "modern brain" and when our ancestors had it was an even fuzzier area.

Rare footage of a 1999 performance:

https://youtu.be/LiXg_70rMeM

And this is why UI design standards are 1) so important, and 2) must include exhaustive examples of how UI elements should and should not be used in every context that it's possible for them to occur.

One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.)

It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.

Dear desert sun,

It's your old neighbor the Midwest. Haven't seen you for a while. Not since you moved out to the sunny desert. Made fun of us for our high taxes and our unions and our dying manufacturing. Har har.

Anyway, how's retirement going? Taken in a lot of Ted talks? Good. For. You. Anyway, enough small talk. We got your letter asking for a favor and here's our reply:

We warned you decades ago not to build large population centers in an arid desert. We warned you to shepherd your meager water resources carefully. To landscape with something other than green lawns. To not build suburbs full of private pools and sprawling, car-dependent development. To not grow alfalfa and other water intensive crops.

You ignored us and you prospered. Until now when you hit the brick wall we told you was coming. We even told you when it was coming. You have been greedy and you have been arrogant. And so we quietly protected our water with laws. As one does from fools.

If you want us to share it, we are happy to. All you have to do is move here. I took the liberty of pricing some flights. Turns out it's a lot easier to ship you here than to ship water to you. I know it's gonna be rough starting over after losing all the equity in your house. Hope you see the humor in so many mortgages underwater as the result of a drought. It's important to laugh in tough times.

I bet you are ready for some good news? There are tons of jobs available here. Turns out all the businesses you created when you disrupted Midwest industry & Midwest labor are hiring. You can work at an Amazon warehouse. Or drive a car for Uber. Have your tips stolen by Instacart. The opportunities are as endless as the medical debt you'll be in should you ever become sick.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing you at a cookout real soon. Hope you remember how to make potato salad. Or figure out how to make desalinization work on a massive scale. 'Cause no moving back if you don't bring potato salad. The spicy kind with the miracle whip please.

Sincerely, The Great Lakes basin and Missouri / Mississipi watershed.

> knowing what they are getting themselves into

I've noticed a real hesitancy to ascribe such complex reasoning to cetaceans. But these are thoughtful animals that in one instance led the creation of a complex and astonishingly cooperative co-hunting relationship with human whalers. They clearly understand humans are able to kill baleen whales even orcas can't handle (adult humpbacks, for example). It seems obvious that they also understand the potential consequences of competing with / preying upon a highly social alpha predator.

This certainly would seem to be the next logical move for the prestige journals. However, in the long term I think this decision to provide open access to the research allows new journals to compete on a more even footing, especially with the emergence of publishing and peer review services like Scholastica. Over time, a thoughtfully curated journal with advantages in speed, cost, editorial focus, peer review process, etc. may be able to overcome the journals whose advantage lie primarily in prestige & gate-keeping.

As a teen I once demolished a single story 10'x30' wood frame building with one of these and a sledgehammer. Took less than half a day at a leisurely pace.

If it wasn't for having to haul the debris away I would have done it for free. Demo is so satisfying.

Plus you gotta factor in Gen Z's love of all things boomer. Legendary take.

Google is also responsible for the Android and Chrome platforms. In both cases, my impression is that they have long tolerated, if not promoted, ecosystems open to third party data collection of the more abusive sort. While Google may protect data gathered through maps, mail and their many other properties, their stewardship of Android / Chrome greatly diminishes my trust in their organization.

Mass digitization would seem to have a considerable survivability advantage over paper storage. Fire, Russian artillery, flood etc could readily destroy this information. It's fairly common to have this happen throughout history - we lost the Universal Music Library in a fire a little more than a decade ago.

I mean, that's a good thing, right?

I used this technique to teach my children about politics, business and governance. Essentially any domain characterized by imperfect information, imperiled by cognitive bias, or containing incentive for deceit. The larger lesson I hoped to convey was a healthy skepticism of purported statements of truth, including mine. But much as in the article, the greatest value lay in the boost to engagement and interaction with the material. My kids loved finding the lie almost as much as I loved planning them.

Where did you live? Right now I'm in the middle of Chicago with my elementary aged children sleeping peacefully. I don't live in the wealthiest neighborhood. I don't live in the poorest. It's pretty diverse (by the standards of Chicago).

I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).

Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.

Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?

The podcast is one of my absolute favorites.

It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.

Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?

I don't have an asshole test, but I do have a collaboration test I use when hiring for design or product roles. I match the candidate with the hiring manager and two peers. And essentially mimic the rapid sketching exercise from a design sprint for a very simple and broadly understood feature. For example: editing tweets. I'm less interested in the quality of the candidates work than how they work. Are the comfortable working out in the open? How do they accept feedback? Are they generous with their own criticism and praise? Will they iterate on ideas they didn't originate? Will they react well to someone else incorporating their best idea into their own designs? I'll also produce a few concepts that are flat out terrible and see how their feedback changes when coming from a supervisor.

Of all the interview techniques I've used over the years, this had been the most predictive and the best recruiting tool. When the right candidate is in there with us we all end up having a great time.

I do also wonder what people consider modern. As I sit in my flat-roofed 1880’s Chicago home. Surrounding block after block of flat-roofed residential buildings housing millions of people, largely constructed between 1872 and 1930.

Why? Do you feel humans should be born with a natural instinct for Mediterranean architecture, much as they are for the supremacy of iterative software development?

> The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend.

This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?

The trend is created by a lack of government regulation of corporations in the United States. Europe controls the negative externalities of capitalism with powerful regulatory agencies; I've noticed an antipathy towards their activity on HN as well. That said, it appears clear to me we need one system or the other.