yetanotherforg

After my first burn-out, I spent a year building bikes, going to frame welding classes. Then went back to software.

Are you saying there is a moral equivalence equivalence between killing terrorists in military operations .. and going to another country to behead a journalist who said mean things about you?

Yes, and between the terroristic birth of communism, and 9/11, protection from russia's annexation of dozens of countries and their sociopathic disregard for life was as the primary motivation of Europe and America's defense research. Now they are also helping get the contrarians behind green power. It will also the lazy oil-bearing gulf states hang themselves.

Yes the germans created rocketry and the first jet engines, which they created as weapons against the communists. In cooperation with Europe, the United States of America annexed hitler's scientists and technologies, and used them to help defend ourselves from the communist plague. We also quite successfully commercialized these technologies.

Fear of being a communist slave by a country which has no problems working or starving its captives to death in the name of the state ideoloy, well, it's a hell of a motivator. I remember my great grandmothers' stories about the russian pogroms very well.

That's the thing. In the middle-east there are no repercussions or consequences for the 1%. They can literally cut off the arms of house cleaners who quit, or behead journalists, without anything more than harsh words by b-rate American and German politicians.

They are above all laws, and we fight each other to suck their ... wallets.

Fear of russian aggression gave us the internet, nuclear weaponry, jet engines and the space program.

russia's genocide in Ukraine is proving to be a huge catalyst for green energy and drone technology. Those of us whose ancestry include refugees from russia's Pogroms are very happy to see a future with an impotent russia.

This is how it's done in the third world. They do this in Turkiey a lot. First they build, then they pay a fine. Sometimes they have to knock down the entire building, or take 3-4 floors off, if they don't' offer to pay a fine big enough to the taste of the judge. Really, almost everywhere in the Balkans/Trayka/Middle-East runs this way.

Of course, real estate is the only profitable industry in Turkiye, environment, safety regulations, and human rights be damned.

This is Hacker News, a social network for people who fetishize Ayn Rand, after all.

Not surprising at all. mohammed bin salman personally ordered a journalist beheaded in the Istanbul consulate a few years ago. Why not poison a journalist at the World Cup?

royal families can commit genocide, and still have no legal financial or personal recourse.

To them, he was just a worker and workers are garbage in the Middle East.

I feel like you're making fun of Riak :)

> Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces.

Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.

It's just business in the USA, that's all.

> Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?

Did you read the tweets, or just the headline?

> You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.

I have helped start 4 companies with 1 gracefully neutral exits, 1 sold, 1 gracefully neutral, and 2 nose dives. After every exit I walked into a job making more $$ than at the job I worked at before the previous startup. The only "risk" a startup founder takes is the potential for a below-market salary for a short period of time.

~20 years ago I failed at a music start-up, royally failed. We burned through $2.5m in about 11 months with nothing of value having been produced, then the dot bomb exploded while we were raising our A round. The same investors funded my next failed startup and offered to fund the one after that.

Once you get to say "I'm a founder and names you might know from vc insider have given me amounts of $$" you have a golden ticket.

Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.

Wasn't his work funded by the government?

This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.

Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir.

I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.

Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".

Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.

Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context?

I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers.

I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut).

(edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)

Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.

Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers.

In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.

His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed.

1920s robber baron bs.

Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.

Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation.

The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda.

Paul, employees do the automation, not the founders.

Very good point. Know your limits, and do things like only keep your hotel room key, phone, and a half empty wallet (keep money in your pocket as well as your wallet).. but don't let fear get in the way. We only live once.

Personally two things come to mind: Hedonistic or Noble

Hedonistic: Fly to Amsterdam one way, buy a few doses of truffles, smoke some weed, see some boobs or whatever floats your boat I dunno. Then go to centraal station, buy the first train ticket and keep traveling. Stay in hostels, be open to meeting people. Every hostel will point you to walking tours in the morning, and usually a group will go together. Just join that group.

Saying "Hey, I've got some mushrooms, why don't we all go find somewhere to do them and hike" is actually a great icebreaker at a hostel. It's how I met my (sober) wife. Making friends at hostels throughout Europe was how I rebuilt my life after burning out on my 100% tech social network.

--

Nobel: Call up Habitat for Humanity, tell them you have 2 weeks free and want to help out on a build if they have any open in the country. I did this as well, it's how I learned carpentry.