DowagerDave

I worked in Ecommerce with a company that built sophisticated subscription solutions well before Shopify had a real offering. We took significant VC money, then watched Shopify build out their own solution to service the now proven market. I'd expect them or Stripe to do the same thing here; it's way more common than buying the first mover or hiring them to build it, plus YC has no interest in this sort of business model.

burning garbage doesn't create any waste? You could just put it in your organics/composting...

it's hard to reconcile a menu like this with statements like "Gen-z will never be able to afford a house"

what will "kill" us faster: buying local, or deeply-involved research projects to buy $600 waffle makers that are shipped across the globe?

you're only focusing on the immediate, literal replacement cost though; what if (and there are as credible papers as this one, stating so) using a metal spatula on my teflon pan causes it to get into my food and that's what will kill me? Or various metals are an even bigger health risk?

> should be pretty obvious even before this study that plastic, heat, and ingesting the result do not go together.

I don't think this is true.

Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.

Combined with the massive popularity of private equity in so many business areas now we're unlikely to see 100-year companies again.

I would describe Shopify, even with it's huge ecosystem, as laser-focused in this area, when compared to Salesforce. Thinking of using SF for your enterprise ecommerce solution? Why not go with the agile, startup competition, SAP? </s>

maybe a counter-example? Zoho doesn't have one product that does everything but does seem to have A product for everything. None of them are fantastic, but many are decent or good enough, and they are cheap. I've been pleasantly surprised with the experience, as I thought it would be similar to the GoDaddy or AWS perpetual dark-pattern upsell.

I've worked in Ecommerce, but SF was not a concern, especially compared to how big a deal Shopify was for us. Now In EdTech we need to interface with SF for the bigger clients and it is a wild, painful ride. They have their own tooling/language/architecture for EVERYTHING. Oh, and good luck doing SF development locally. To (mis)quote Homer Simpson, there's the right way, the wrong way and the Salesforce way - which is the wrong way but way slower and more complex.

Atari HATED to share anything with people outside the company. The couldn't even help developers build software for their machines, let alone let someone copy & commoditize their hardware. The Apple II was incredibly open and extensible, and successful. Macs where not and never more than a minor player until computers shifted to a mobile, general consumer product and Apple out executed and leveraged their single ecosystem.

it's pretty hard to unpublish something on the internet though. How many system do you think are consuming HN content? how many consume those? You can't un-ring a bell, so a simple social post is almost always discoverable in the future.

you still need the resources to go through the courts though. This closes out the option for almost all.

> I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers).

This is one of the saddest aspects: so much high-value effort and skill towards an end that, in the whole, I view as a massive drain and retardant on human development.

Most of this isn't even necessary; just look for passion and <anything> that gets them excited from a relevant technology area, then probe for legitimacy and learn about their interests. Being a jr. is all about the individual learning and skilling up, you really shouldn't be looking for existing expertise.

IME: 1. build a co-op/intern program and hire out of that exclusively for junior. It's like an extended, two-way interview or try before you buy for both sides.

2. screen for passion and general technical competency above all else. You're going to make arbitrary decisions & restrictions (ex: we're only hiring from these 3 schools) which is fine, then work within those constraints. Ask about favorite classes (and why), what they've done lately or are excited about, side projects, OS contributions, building/reading/playing. The best intern I've hired lately answered some high-level questions about performance by building a simple PoC to demo some of their ideas, with React - a technology they didn't know but that we use.

3. recognize some things on the hiring side that from the hunting side don't make sense or are really annoying: you're playing a numbers game, hiring is a funnel, it's better to miss a great hire than go with a poor candidate (i.e. very risk averse), most hiring companies are at the mercy of the market; they hire poorer candidates and pay more, then get very picky and pay less. In a tight market you can't do much internally to stand out, and when lots of people are looking you don't have to.

you don't need to release to production for real value. I'm under intense pressure to scope out frothy AI features because just discussing them with prospects has a material impact on the costs of the sales funnel.

30 kids in a class... what, did you attend private school?

so many rich (mostly white) kids!

> “Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me.

So if he keeps making the financial benefit of leaving more attractive, we should see significant uptick in people who accept? If you support Matt, Automattic is probably becoming an increasingly awesome place to work!

every single time you buy something it's a minefield to avoid subscribing to prime.

you're describing virtual credit cards with controls, like amount, vendor, time of month, etc. it's an awesome service that limits your widespread exposure to one company vs. everyone you've every bought anything from.

you're describing a startup with no business model.

In my current environment there's the opaque and not really shared dental "fee guide" by the regulatory body, the actual fees each dentist charges, and then the % of the guide that the insurance pays, so if the insurance company keeps pressure on the governing body they don't really care what any dentist actually charges you.

this is an upsell? My dentist pokes around a bit and checks for lumps in my tongue (like I wouldn't notice that?) but that's about it. Is there something more I missing? Going to the dentist tomorrow and would love to ask for optional high-margin upsells! /s

do you think your sample size of one could be attributed to any of the many other aspects, most outside the control of the owner?

Not my experience in Canada. I went around to dentists and asked for their rates and none of them gave me the equivalent of a take-out menu for basic procedures. Why not?

I just can't reconcile this with my experience. The most charitable I can be is that these vets care deeply about the animals but treat cost as no obstacle or don't even recognize the cost.

> If pet owners are inclined to take the "do anything" route it can open a lot of doors. I don't see anything wrong with that.

How about just like people-medicine: diagnostic tests when there is no likely treatment should not be proposed. Or charging 20-50x the generic cost for the same drugs humans use? The fact that some people will "do anything" when there's nothing that can be done is prone to abuse.

so we take fluoride out of the water, where the poorest people can get it regularly and then we're supposed to believe if I pay for 2 applications a year were all good?

last time I shopped for a new dentist he looked at me like a shark sizing up his next meal. "How much can I take him for?" was painted clearly on his face - maybe that's why they keep the masks on?