strgcmc

It's not like, 100% adopted at literally every single meeting, but it's pretty common across Amazon. Some orgs will do it more religiously than others, but no org will look at you funny if you request for a 5-10 min doc read before you start the rest of the meeting.

Yeah, SV is really just the bubbliest-of-bubbles. It attracts so much talent, and is funneled so aggressively in so localized a market, that your anecdotal observation of "everyone and their mother went to an Ivy League or similar" is probably more true than most people might expect. Such is life, and it ain't fair.

UW is a great school. UW is what most people should realistically aspire to (as that caliber of school). It's upper-middle-class; it will most likely give you a great education and a great life.

UW is not Stanford/MIT/Harvard/etc. though. Those are not upper-middle-class schools; those are upper-upper-class schools. And it's not really the quality of education content either, at least if we're talking about average outcomes (but at the margins, ~2+ standard deviations away from the mean, it's no contest).

If anything, this should signal that SV has gone too far and the labor market is acting irrationally by competing so much for educational branding. However, just like the old adage says, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

A small suggestion then: why not re-apply the same fundamental technologies and techniques, but to targeting public figures who are perhaps deserving of a little more scrutiny and contact than they're getting?

Rather than facilitating cold-calls to startup founders/leaders (which, let's face it, is generally a waste of their time and which they probably don't deserve that kind of punishment), why not expose the emails/contact-info of executives for bad actors in the marketplace, companies that have recently been sued or charged with crimes or civil complaints (by the SEC/FCC/etc.), companies that have had exposes written about them, etc.?

I'm not saying this will be a more profitable service or anything btw; in fact I'm quite certain it will have much less profit opportunity. But maybe this is something you can do to buy back some goodwill, to counterbalance the profit-seeking and cold-call/spam enabling side of this project.

Sounds like a form of (job?) security-through-obscurity, no? The data was always there, but not all managers were savvy enough to process it and weaponize it.

In the end, obscurity is just not a durable defense. Better to earn trust with good managers, and avoid companies that let bad managers flourish. If you don't have the ability to quit a bad manager or bad working environment, then no amount of tooling choices by GitHub/Microsoft was going to save you anyways.

Fair enough (though executive summaries are by nature, lossy contextually).

I don't disagree that InfoSec was a driving force behind the project, and may have given it an unhelpful level of urgency (i.e. pushing for the team to make early decisions/plans too quickly, which anyways resulted in this banned PHP thing lasting 4+ years, seems counterproductive). But even if InfoSec was not a factor, the team knew that staying on MediaWiki was not sustainable, and some kind of migration would've happened eventually.

So I guess what I'm saying is, IMO the perceived pressure from the InfoSec mandate was poorly managed by this team, and ended up exacerbating the problem, but fundamentally the choice to migrate to a different wiki platforms was something the team wanted to do (just maybe on a different schedule or with different plans/priorities, in an alternate universe). Migrating off MediaWiki was not done against their will.

There's a roughly ~12,000-word postmortem document that took an additional 2+ months to produce after the fact, which the OP has lightly quoted or summarized from in his post (including what you quoted). It really is an impressively magnificent failure at scale, but there's nothing really fundamentally earth-shattering about how this project went so far off the rails. Mistakes were made, but IMO nobody was outrageously negligent.

The OP's assertion that it was primarily due to slavish devotion to InfoSec's insistence of getting off PHP-based MediaWiki, is incomplete and misleading. The team itself opted into the migration, and by their own admission in their own postmortem document, they wanted the opportunity to get off MediaWiki (killing two birds with one stone, both as a technology upgrade and as an InfoSec compliance thing), but they fundamentally vastly underappreciated the scale and complexity of the project (some top line #'s: ~4M total documents, 1.7M unique pages visited daily, 600K unique MAU, etc.). What probably doesn't come through in talking about this, is that the wiki is far from just a simple collection of text-based wiki pages in the standard sense; it serves more like something akin to an unholy abomination of a Wordpress-like platform with endless amounts of plugins and macros and templates, and gives you just enough programmability to be dangerous.

The primary reason it took 4+ years, was essentially down to going through multiple rounds of failed migration attempts, including failed attempts at producing automatic translations of wiki's from one platform to another (which proved to be incredibly complex, due to the nature of how customizable MediaWiki was and how many teams had gone and done so many interesting/advanced things with it, which was great... except it made automatic translation/migration near-impossible).

Your comment inspired me to do a little reading, since this is an interesting idea (and maybe represents an opportunity in the supply chain... maybe what we need is better/newer technology for long-term storage of grains/flour/etc.).

Apparently, flour can (should?) be frozen for long-term storage, and would keep indefinitely: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/33890/is-it-okay... (unfortunately that link to University of Nebraska is 404 now).

Long-term grain storage concerns: https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/grain-handling-and-equ... ; as a non-expert, this begs the question of why more climate control is not done, to create indefinite/permanent storage (probably just not economical to do so, but given disruptions like COVID-19, maybe this will change?).

Oh, the vast majority of students definitely are well aware. His classes are in high demand and regularly fill up quickly and spill into wait-lists, come registration time.

It's been about a decade since I attended, but IME I felt there were many undergraduate courses that were competently taught by overqualified luminaries in their fields (meaning, for those examples, you could probably get the same quality education from a much cheaper institution), but Prof. Kernighan's classes stood out as among the 2-3 truly unique and special highlights of a Princeton CS education.

OTOH, there's nothing quite like disappointing professors in their own classes while studying their own eponymous algorithms (sorry Prof. Tarjan... it's not you, it's me).

You're in for quite a treat then. It sounds like you might have more of an interest in his technical work and scientific contributions and teaching materials (of which there is plenty, and of high quality), but personally I quite enjoyed this book of his as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

You're in luck my friend, the Wikipedia article does a rather nice job of describing just this "paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

> In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity involving identical twins, one of whom makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find that the twin who remained on Earth has aged more. This result appears puzzling because each twin sees the other twin as moving, and so, according to an incorrect[1][2] and naive[3][4] application of time dilation and the principle of relativity, each should paradoxically find the other to have aged less. However, this scenario can be resolved within the standard framework of special relativity: the travelling twin's trajectory involves two different inertial frames, one for the outbound journey and one for the inbound journey, and so there is no symmetry between the spacetime paths of the twins. Therefore, the twin paradox is not a paradox in the sense of a logical contradiction.

There's multiple explanations included to resolve the "paradox" from different lines of argument; I particularly like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox#A_non_space-time_...

More likely this is a version of the "Eternal September" problem. Early adopters of Airbnb were more likely to be "true believers" of the idealized vision of a kind/generous host matched with adventurous/courteous guests, but this vision gets diluted over time as the userbase grows. Once Airbnb reached true ubiquity, the general user population is just looking for a good deal and isn't nearly as savvy or as committed to the original ideals; this applies to both hosts and guests, of course.

It's impossible to scale a platform to 10s/100s/1000s millions without finding an ever-lowering lowest common denominator.

If we can make 2 billion people 10x richer than they are today, market/economic growth is not necessarily capped at 10x. Systems don't have to be linear.

As a contrived example, I would imagine that folks living on $2/day probably buy on average effectively 0 iPhones/year. If somehow they had 10x the wealth they do now, they wouldn't buy 10x the number of iPhones they could previously buy... they would buy almost-infinity-x the number of iPhones they previously could buy, thanks to division by almost-zero.

BTW, my point is not that this is some kind of arithmetic trick, but that 1000x growth just depends on how low the starting baseline is (which is very low, by almost all measures of baseline economic activity/wealth of the $2/day demographic).

Surely folks on HN understand that, if it was economically feasible to compete on this, then locally sourced flower start-ups would've already become a thing?

Yes shipping and storage seem wasteful, but there are economies of scale involved when centralizing production to areas with the right climate, with desirable soil qualities, with expertise in planting such flowers, etc.

To help local flower growers win out, we would need to increase the cost of shipping/storage/etc. (maybe because we think they are not properly pricing in externalities?). Then we're back in the realm of tariffs and protectionism, which is its own can of worms; personally, I think we can complicate our understanding of free trade, and reasonably choose to impose artificial costs/penalties when it comes to climate protection or environmental goals (as opposed to, propping up certain industries just because they're better at lobbying).

Consider that, it is cheaper/more-efficient for fisherman/crabmen in Alaska or the PNW to send their catch to China for processing (filleting, canning, etc.), before shipping it back to the US for retail. I always found that to be fascinating, that supply chains are such that, it's more economical to outsource the processing of seafood, than for the fisherman to dump their catch to a local processing facility that then sends it out for retail.

As a slightly different kind of counter-example, see this recent post about "hard problems": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425745

IMO, UBI can actually encourage innovation and productive work, on "hard problems" that are not economically viable in a short-enough time-frame or lucrative enough for VCs, but for which society would certainly benefit from.

I think to most reasonable readers of your text, the "it" that you reference multiple times isn't particularly clear (do you mean: it = the trend, it = the project, it = the maintainers?), and also you literally said it "shows a kind of naivete."

Shows naivete on the part of what/who? Surely a trend cannot be naive on its own, so any reasonable reading of this sentence means that you are calling the project and/or maintainer naive. How is that not (a mild form of) ridicule?

I swear I'm not just meme-ing for the sake of it, but this has always seemed like fundamentally a decentralized trust problem, and one that can potentially be solved by some form of social blockchain.

Basically, instead of an economic currency unit being mined, the value being protected is instead some form of reputational trust-token; 30 seconds of Googling leads to articles like this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/08/13/a-decentr...

Thinking about things this way essentially boils the fundamental problem into what IMO is a pretty "general elegant theory", which is simply to construct a properly balanced incentive structure, which asymmetrically disincentivizes "bad" behavior while encouraging "good" behavior, in much the same way that Bitcoin's core ledger-validation/mining abstraction rewards miners for securing the network while also discouraging prohibitively expensive attack scenarios.

I'm not saying it's easy or obvious, but I think this is exactly the sort of decentralized trust problem that blockchains are well-suited for.

A potential poker analogy is probably just getting lost in leveling games.

Level 0: My opponent made a large bet because he has a strong hand. I should fold.

Level 1: My opponent made a large bet because he knows that I will think it looks like he has a strong hand, when in fact he has a weak hand. I should call.

Level 2: My opponent knows that I think his large bets are bluffs, so he is now making a large bet assuming that I will wrongly assume he is bluffing. I should fold.

Level N: (if N is odd, I should call; if N is even, I should fold)

Beginner players will only think at level 0 or 1, but intermediate/advanced players may sometimes end up "leveling" themselves into a bad decision.

Here is an NPR article [1] summarizing US-Russia relations during the GWB era, and describing GWB's attacks during his first campaign, on Bill Clinton for being too chummy with Russia... I think it would be fair to say this represented a general feeling on the right (around the early 2000s), that Democrats under Clinton had been too friendly with Russia (since GWB was able to make this into a campaign issue):

> At the time, George W. Bush was campaigning for the presidency, lambasting President Clinton's chummy relationship with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Bush promised to end personal favoritism and protect American national security. Taking office the following year, he began by expelling 50 Russian diplomats from Washington for alleged spying. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld snubbed the Russian defense minister soon after by refusing to meet him on the sidelines of a NATO conference.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114736...

You may or may not be aware, the parent comment you're replying to, is a reference to a certain President's (idiotic, unhelpful, and uninformed) tweet at the time.

Thanks for providing a real explanation though.

Sergey Aleynikov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

The existing Social Security program costs nearly $1 trillion dollars per year already (okay $900 billion ish) [1].

Sure, Social Security is not like a perfect, shining example, but it can be fixed/improved, and scaling it up by 10x (which is a gross overestimate, as other commenters have pointed out), is nothing to sneeze at. But at the same time, it's not really as ridiculous as your comments wants to paint it (i.e. "omg this is clearly patently absurd, why even entertain this nonsense?").

You've completely glossed over the fact that people generally don't hoard money, especially not those living on $15/hr. People will spend that money, and it could even grow the economy (by GDP). Your little mind experiment is not nearly rigorous enough nor realistic to justify dismissing UBI out of hand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States...

I agree with your main points, but I think it's worth pointing out that even things like 2 + 2 = 4 and X + Y cows in fields A and B, all rest on certain definitions and sets of deductions, many of which go back down to basic axioms which have to be assumed (e.g. for arithmetic, see Peano axioms as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms).

- We have a definition of what a cow is, and we know that cows are discrete/physical objects, and have relatively fixed locations (i.e. that they are not like an electron cloud with a probabilistic location).

- We assume that fields A and B in your hypothetical have clear, non-overlapping boundaries.

- We assume that we are working in a fairly normal universe with a fairly standard model of physics, and that due to the way time works in this universe, a cow cannot simultaneously be located in both fields A and B.

- ...

- (this could get really pedantic and go on forever)

The point is, even the things "we can know with certainty", are only as certain as the framework of observations/deductions/axioms/etc. that they rest upon. Almost nothing is certain on its own, without any further layers of reasoning behind it.

Just curious, if you're dissatisfied with NYC and the ~5 established funds you've experienced, have you expanded your search parameters a bit? Meaning, looking around in a bit wider regional area, or looking at little-less-established firms? For example, across the river in Newark, NJ, there's : https://newarkventurepartners.com/ .

This is actually a really great analogy for not the reason you're thinking, because of the fairly common incidence of car accidents.

Sure, the surface of the earth is not crowded due to the volume of cars. But that doesn't mean that car traffic is trivially easy to solve or travel is automagically safe.

Space flight safety should mirror (or be better than) air travel safety (in accidents per mile terms); if space flight becomes more like cars, then space flight is probably screwed.

Because that existing "online market place for funds" is gibberish to most retail customers.

You go to Amazon, you type in "best AA batteries", and what you get back is not a raw list of battery serial numbers or technical specifications about battery performance (which is basically what you get in the existing brokerage experience, describing funds and their performance). What you get on Amazon is plain-english descriptions, reviews and ratings, and a sorted order of relevance or price or whatever. All these things smooth out the buying experience, reducing any possible source of friction for your purchase decision (hell, you can subscribe-and-save for new batteries every 6 months, thereby precluding ever having to make a purchase decision ever again); they want to make it as easy and natural and automatic as possible, for you to click Buy. But for investments, customers face a huge upfront barrier in terms of lack of knowledge and uncertainty, before they can make a purchasing decision; sure, all the raw information is there, but only highly motivated customers (relatively speaking) are going to dig through it or overcome it before transacting.

Now, I'm not saying that Amazon should add customer reviews of ETFs or funds or whatever ("5 stars: I bought VTSAX and made $43.26, and you can too!"), but it can certainly do a whole heck of a lot to reduce the friction of making a transaction. The point is, the customer shouldn't have to do any work (or as little as humanly possible), before clicking the Buy/Sell button.

And sure, the existing financial institutions can work on this same problem, but this is a actually not their biggest problem. Their biggest problem, is convincing customers to even think about them and take a look at their offerings, in the first place. 70+% of American households have Prime; how many have brokerage accounts? Some Googling around puts this at ~14% ([1] DOL 2015 report says 17 million households had brokerage accounts in 2013, DOWN from 19 million in 2001; total there's roughly 120 million total households in America). Also remember, this 14% of households is split amongst all the competing brokerage firms, while the 70% of households is ALL Amazon's.

All the brokerage ads I see, are targeted towards traders or people who want to become traders; this makes sense for those firms, because why would someone who has no interest in trading, ever use their brokerage? But this is narrow-minded and ultimately self-limiting thinking, and this is not at all how Amazon thinks. EVERYONE is an Amazon customer (or potential customer); once you're on the platform, figuring out exactly what to sell and how to sell it to you is easy. Prime is a huge economic engine/pool of consumers, at which Amazon could throw just about any product at, at any time. Some will stick, some will fail, but even those that fail can be recycled and improved and retried.

Everyone else is fighting over their shares of gold, while Amazon is working to create/feed the golden goose instead. Strategy over tactics.

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[1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/ebsa/researchers/ana...

This makes very little sense.

If you are willing to work 90 hrs/wk for $10k salary, why not take a regular 40 hr/wk job for $10k salary (or more even, why limit yourself?), and spend the other 50 hours doing whatever you were going to do?

There are plenty of $10k/yr 40-hour-work-week jobs that don't require any mental load after you clock out, and don't pretend like you won't get anything done in those 50 remaining hours. If you can't build anything with 50 hr/wk to use (which is more than enough for a regular full time job), it seems unreasonable to assume that somehow adding more time would solve the problem.

This assumes we take you at your word that you can be productive for 90 hours, and that you live or are willing to move to a country where $10k/year clock-in-clock-out-and-forget-about-it-work can be found relatively easily.

Where's the logic in this?

- I don't understand thing ABC, therefore I won't form an opinion on it (true fact, by his own admission... conservative and reasonable).

- Thing XYZ is generally acknowledged to be more complex and harder to understand than ABC (debatable, but I'd love to see someone show me how crypto is easier to understand than Google/Facebook/Amazon/Uber/etc.).

- Even though I don't understand ABC and won't form an opinion on it, I will form an opinion on XYZ which I understand even less (... wut? Why would anyone put stock in this statement, given the prior two statements?).

> Of course it's not for everyone but that's not a reason to vilify it.

Knitting is not for everyone, but by choosing not to be a knitter, I'm generally not missing out on social/career advancement opportunities (e.g. I apply for a job but I'm not in a frat, I'm more qualified than the next guy, but the next guy was a frat brother of the hiring manager, so guess who wins?).

Even if I do choose to be a knitter, I'm generally not putting myself at higher risk of death, such as by being forced to drink toxic amounts of alcohol and then having my supposed "brothers" abandon me after I fall down the stairs and lie there bleeding to death.

There's a huge logical gap inside the statement, "not everyone has to like thing XYZ, q.e.d. there can be no criticism of thing XYZ".

Chiming in with some 2011-2012 perspective for you, which is kinda-but-not-really-all-that-early. IMO you are wildly overblowing the "success" and apparent foreknowledge of early miners (i.e. you're displaying classic results-oriented thinking, because hindsight is 20-20 ofc). Anyways, anecdote != data, blah blah blah, make your own conclusions, blah blah.

I worked at Microsoft, and one of my coworkers started talking about Bitcoin. He was always one of the more cutting-edge, cyberphunk type of people, and he said he got a group of his tech friends to agree to build a "mining farm" in their closet basically, mostly as an expensive hobby of sorts (he was a motorcycle guy, so he had no problem spending money on expensive hobbies).

They spent around $25k-$30k buying GPUs overall; they had great difficulty acquiring their GPUs, as by the time they had decided to start this venture and went to the local Best Buys and Fry's and whatnot, all the good high-end GPUs were sold out already (meaning there was ample competition in the Seattle area already, as they talked to the Best Buy guys who were also puzzled by the sudden increase in demand for high-end GPUs).

Eventually by late 2012, with the increasing competition for mining, the rise of ASICs, high volatility, and no way to foresee the future, last I heard they eventually liquidated everything, sold their hardware and their BTC, and had recouped their costs and made a small profit, but not much more than anyone with $25k-$30k could've made just gambling on some regular stock picks. In other words, they bought in at or around the bubble to ~$30 in mid-2011, and didn't hold out long enough to see the growth to $100-$200 in 2013.

Myself, I dabbled with pool mining using just the single GPU in my own gaming PC for 3 months in the summer. I told my roommates and voluntarily increased my share of the electric bill (which went up by about $80-100/month, iirc). I received ~5 BTC, which at the then exchange rates, meant that I made like $50 or something silly after paying for electricity (but not counting the $2.5K gaming PC, which I bought earlier and without knowing about cryptocurrency).

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The point of this story is to say that, even fairly sophisticated and "hardcore" hobbyists, i.e. those willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to dabble in Bitcoin, were by and large not minting millions and millions. Most people sold their coins along the way, either in the rise and falls between $0 to $1, or between $1 to $30, or between $30 to $1000, or between $1000 to $4000+. There was no grand conspiracy, and certainly no way to know that Bitcoin would actually survive (would you call this thriving?) to where it is today. Almost universally, unless you were on the cutting edge of the ASIC race for a long long time, for every old miner out there who spent thousands (millions?) on hardware, they would've been better off simply buying and holding bitcoin the whole time instead.

As a HYP alum (don't want to be more specific than that), this jives with my own experiences, both at college and in high school (where some students kept their heads down and worked for their grades, and others worked but also had the temerity/privilege to go ahead and ask for a better grade).

In some sense, you can't really blame the students for asking. The system allows for it (may even encourage it), so from a game-theory perspective, the better strategy is to exploit all the advantages you can.

The unfairness comes from the way such things are handled unevenly. Student A who's richer/better connected/more famous/etc. will get better outcomes from asking, compared to student B who's maybe just a regular smart person who went to public school and managed to squeeze past admissions but isn't connected to anybody important. Just regular old privilege, pure and simple.

For the record, I graduated with a 3.2 GPA that probably would've been lower at somewhere that somehow magically didn't have "grade inflation" problems... and that was after my school went through implementing a controversial "grade deflation" policy. I feel like I benefitted from being part of a system that was afraid to harshly grade its students, but I also never asked any professors directly to revise my grade higher.

I did receive indirect/unsolicited help, such as a dean who showed concern after I failed some midterms the semester I broke my ankle and missed weeks of class and became depressed and unable to socialize, or a professor who graded a senior project much more generously than I felt the work deserved (a B+ for something I crammed together in the last 4 weeks, when my roommate who did something much more involved and much better researched, also got the same B+).