ITB

Do you remember how bad things were before CloudFlare? You’d get attacked constantly if you ran a large website.

Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.

I can give you a quick and infallible test, but it has to be done live. How do I reach out?

I’m not saying social media is good for children.

I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.

You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.

So what do you want to do about it? It can’t be stopped.

I’m always surprised by how many people on HN have a distaste of free markets. I’ve always associated tech with capitalism-positive vibes.

It’s not because it’s important. It’s because canvas will try to render react so it has to be in a specific format for it to work.

Capitalism is the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It will work out.

Bad place to build successful companies compared to America.

Are you bothered by the fact that software engineers might be easier to automate?

Are you unionized?

That’s fitting because hierarchies would not work if those 52% wanted to be managers.

It’s not about whether an argument can be made where becoming a for profit aligns with goals. The more general issue is whether one should be able to raise money with the pretext of a non-profit, pay no taxes, and later decide to take it all private.

In that case, why shouldn’t original funders be retroactively converted to investors and be given a large part of the ownership?

But it’s also not illegal to get fed up and go above and beyond to automate everyone.

No longer there, but Argentina. The current government is squashing that fortunately.

I don’t understand why all these comments are about who buys or doesn’t buy at Amazon. The article is about unionization and strikes. I expect a conversation about the merits of unions and their negotiation tactics. In my opinion, events like these will just accelerate job elimination. The goal of a logistics company is to be reliable. Humans are unreliable and more so when they are purposely and collectively unreliable. I’ve lived in a country with very powerful unions and it sucks— miss every 5th flight because the union decides to strike.

If a certain arrangement makes it more likely to write bad queries, and it requires extra care to write optimal queries, then it’s a worse interface to a database. I bet for really database intensive applications graphQL adds more work than it saves.

You should maximize your income while minimizing efforts that take you away from living your life

You should maximize long term net worth, which often is in conflict with maximizing near term income. One can argue net worth is also correlated with compounding knowledge which is itself anti-correlated with "minimizing effort".

This whole viewpoint of work as a simple transaction hurts employees' long term prospects.

As someone that has been on the hiring side, I always prefer to build a full time team, even if that means paying for someone in my team to learn something new.

The part that consultants don’t talk about is that you have to pay them to learn your code / company too. Nobody can just jump in and add value immediately. So you’re paying for onboarding hours, you’re paying for other employees to educate the consultant, and so on.

Likewise as an engineer, I think the most interesting projects and companies err towards primarily full time people. So if my goal is to work on the most interesting projects, I’d want to work full time.

A lot of consultants, for example someone helping with SOC2 compliance, is mostly copy pasting a large document with recommendations and moving some paragraphs around based on interviews with the team.

Not different from your average lawyer helping with an estate plan or will. The reality is that for many things you do want the cheapest lawyer, because the project is simple and repetitive. It’s the uneducated that pay more. So yes for a murder trial I want to pay a lot for a lawyer, but for small things I don’t, and you shouldn’t either. I simply don’t buy the analogy.

Finally, while consulting might be good for cash flow to hours-worked efficiency, it’s not clear it will make a person wealthier than other forms of income. I’ve met rich employees, founders, but not so much independent consultants.

It sounds to me like you hate work more than it’s warranted in normal circumstances. Work-life balance aside, there might be something else in there.

If I donate time or things I’m more sure it will be used as I intended.

I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted.

I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable.

I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones.

There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.

More interesting is when we used to run Alexa commercials and it would cause a denial of service attack on ourselves with all the devices being triggered, particularly during the superbowl. In that case, we added some imperceptible noise to the audio stream so that Alexa wouldn’t trigger.

No need for sensing. It’s on the actuarial tables.

Will it work from airplanes?

Because our society believes in property rights. Individuals can have any reason they want to own property and do with it what it pleases them.

It can be helpful for others. There are certain kinds of regrets everyone comes close to experiencing it. And there’s a systemic reason (cultural, psychological, etc) that pushes us near the edge. Hearing someone else’s recount can be helpful in reconsidering.

The causal relationship is that you’re willing to explore more options before you go into full exploit mode, and that allowed you to find a better local maxima. It’s not that hard to follow. But if you frame it as an obviously bad decision having a good eventual outcome, it’s easier to call BS on it.

It might be authentic in this case, but I expect a lot of people will use this story to frame layoffs as positive instead of a sign of weak performance.