Non24Throw

This is such an accurate and profound statement.

And now that I think about it, one trait that I’ve witnessed in CEOs and successful entrepreneurs again and again is an almost inhuman ease with initiating and engaging in uncomfortable conversations. They don’t hesitate with them either.

I always assumed it was just something they all naturally develop as a consequence of being bombarded and put upon constantly, but maybe there’s more to it than that.

Your perception of the risks associated with providing that feedback isn’t the same as everyone else’s.

When you’re young, and especially if you come from a lower income background (where authority is treated as an absolute, and abuse of authority is generally more common and accepted), it can seem very risky and feel very unacceptable to give this kind of feedback to your manager.

It’s easy for me to agree with you now, but there are very different feelings about this across different backgrounds and cultures, and there are plenty of managers who would react harshly to this.

Early in my career, a manager once had me repeat to him that I would be terminated if I failed to do X, like I was a 5-year-old.

X was referring to a technical implementation detail that he had zero understanding of. He read something in a blog post I guess.

My reaction was to act like it was a fun joke or something. But inside, I absolutely loathed him every second of every day until I quit, and now I take great satisfaction knowing that I’ve surpassed him and would never do a thing to help his stagnating career. (In other words, I’m holding an extremely petty and lasting grudge.)

But my point is, he probably thought I was fine with all his joking. I always laughed.

To expand on the article’s point, I think the biggest thing young managers don’t understand is that people are going to be insincere to you as a basic showing of respect and a basic desire for career preservation. They’re going to smile and appear to enjoy you and laugh at your jokes and seem ok with everything, much moreso than they otherwise would. So don’t make the mistake of using their reactions to define your boundaries of what’s acceptable or what’s funny, because it’s not a typical relationship, and you will invariably believe that you are funnier than you are and that a wider range of unacceptable behaviors are acceptable.

The issue aside, you’re simply chastising a straw man that you’ve constructed by assuming the worst possible interpretation of every aspect of your opponent’s position, seemingly without ever having spoken to one of them. This is not an effective way to communicate.

It’s just sanctimonious grandstanding. This is how you get lots of internet points while even further exacerbating the very same problem you’re railing against.

And that’s coming from someone who agrees with you.

Advertising isn’t just about getting the audience to purchase the product. Convincing young people that a product confers high status will increase the perceived value of that product for every potential buyer whether they listen to rap or not.

And these aren’t impulse purchases. Nobody buys a Lamborghini the same week that they’re playing with Hot Wheels, but many will a few decades later.

There’s also indirect demand through rentals. Anyone with a credit card can rent a Lamborghini for a weekend. Most of the luxury cars you see on the roads in Miami are rentals, for example.

I have a theory about this. I think the song format is conforming to the needs of advertisers.

That’s why every top song is just a person talking over a beat, usually with the same kind of vocal style, usually the same kind of beat.

It’s really hard to sing the word “Lamborghini” and have that fit into the lyrics and be heard clearly and have the brand image positioned correctly.

It’s also a waste of advertising space to have any duration of a song not include clearly spoken lyrics.

Taking this example, DaBaby’s “Rockstar” sounds basically identical to hundreds of other recent songs that follow the same format of a person talking repetitively over a simple beat (every Drake song for example). Five possible instances of integrated advertising in the lyrics: Lamborghini, Chevrolet Suburban, Maybach, Glock, and Apple FaceTime. 2 of them in the chorus.

So what kind of music will people accept, that maximizes spoken word duration, speaks those words clearly, provides brand image maneuverability within the lyrics, doesn’t distract from the lyrics, and won’t have a fatal loss of integrity as a result of obvious product placements?

That list of requirements leaves us with basically one style of one genre, and it’s this style of rap / hip hop. To any extent that a song deviates, it becomes less effective as a channel for advertising.

I think the most convincing piece of evidence in support of this is this lack of differentiation among artists, even in terms of vocal style. In ‘90s hip hop every artist had a completely unique style, all present-day hip hop fans love all of those legendary artists... and yet, every modern artist is just mimicking the exact same cadence as Drake or Kendrick Lamar.

None of this can be reconciled with the notion that songs becomes popular purely because people like them.

It’s amazing to me how different the reality of that era is from depictions of it in entertainment.

For example, I recently read that wars during that time were fought mostly by peasant hordes, and they didn’t have the resources to train and equip them, so mostly they all just beat each other to death with wooden clubs or whatever blunt object happened to be available.

Thousands of starving and diseased peasants covered in dirt and potato sacks clubbing each other to death with sticks isn’t exactly the story we want to see or read about, though.

We want skillful knights with swords, archers and trebuchets, chainmail and plate helmets, etc. But most of the violence was peasants, and most of the wars were won by peasants.

And somewhat ironically, a lot of the shiny equipment and weaponry we love served its most significant role in allowing the ruling class to subjugate their peasant hordes into fighting those wars for them (knowing that an even worse fate awaits them back at home if they refuse to fight)...

Peasants were then mostly written out of history, one common exception being peasant revolts, presumably because stories of revolt are more sympathetic to the ruling class than stories about peasants winning all of their wars for them...

I’m writing this because I think it’s interesting, but also because you seem like you might know whether it’s true or not haha. Do you think what I read is mostly true, or is it more theory/fantasy?

I think this is an overly cynical take on things.

Consider the fact that if Ammon had fully considered this rollout, it would be very obvious to him that this would be the response. The legal ramifications would also have been obvious.

I think the only reasonable explanation is that it wasn’t fully thought through. I think his business being hit hard by the pandemic is a reasonable explanation for that. There’s no way TripleByte isn’t hit hard by this. Rushing a major feature out is exactly the kind of thing he’s supposed to be doing right now. It seems he just thought too much on making the business and tech side of the feature successful, and didn’t give enough time to the human and legal side of it.

Personally I thought his email was way more introspective and revealing than it even needed to be, and I think he’s being genuine.

Succeeding despite a lack of education, or despite significantly disadvantaged birth circumstances, will always be the most impressive quality I find in a young person.

In terms of things you can actually apply without having said disadvantages, I would say anything that displays a kind of economic maturity, or a bias for long-term thinking. These are very rare and valuable qualities in all age groups, but are especially rare in younger people.

You can display that conversationally, by for example asking pointed questions about a company (or any kind of system) and its relevant external factors, and then extrapolating to possible future directions and outcomes. Or you can do any project that interests you for its long-term implications, and talk about future outcomes, anticipated success or failure scenarios, the potential impact of known unknowns, etc.

Not according to your own FAQ[0] on public profiles:

Your public profile includes any badges you've earned, your basic info (current job title and company, current location, and years of experience), and the tech experience & resume section.

This information can very easily be used to identify a person, especially at smaller companies.

... to provide us the canvas to release badges. That’s it.

So before you were taking on LinkedIn, but now it’s just a place to release badges?

[0] https://triplebyte.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004382061...

Unrelated but I really struggle with this kind of double and triple negative wording.

It WOULD seem UNLIKELY that he WOULD NOT have the proper advice to make a deal like this AND NOT be ripped off.

“He probably has good advisors that made sure he wasn’t being ripped off.”

It honestly took me 5 minutes to figure out what you were saying. I feel like I uniquely struggle with this, like I have some kind of undiscovered form of dyslexia. Maybe it’s just late.

Even if this decision is cited as case law in another case (i.e. somebody leverages the precedent) and a judgment is made, that judgment can be appealed arguing that the lower court was wrong in this instance, and then it would be up to the 9th Circuit to decide.

After the 9th Circuit makes their decision, it could still be appealed to the Supreme Court (which I think is the country’s overall direction the root commenter was referring to).

This kind of issue will come up very frequently in court because everyone has a phone, and it’s very easy for a lock screen to contain incriminating notifications. That kind of evidence is often decisive in court, which makes it an attractive/persuasive argument for appeals. Very likely this will end up in Supreme Court, which means decisions in lower courts are less consequential. The lower courts aren’t going to get to decide this one.

Nice to see a comment like this, I feel the same way. Google is the exception to all these other comments. The tools available to Google engineers make working outside Google feel painful and inefficient by comparison even with their unfettered access to all the third-party tooling.

It’s so good that it would actually be a factor if I were ever considering working somewhere else. Getting to work with Google’s in-house dev tooling is probably worth 15-20k to me. A lot more than 20k if the other company has a reputation for horrible tooling.

Control+N a new window for each mode is what I currently do. Then Super+<backtick> to cycle through them (if you’re on a Mac)

It’s not perfect though. If you accidentally open a few tabs in the wrong mode there’s no easy way to transfer them. And I’ll often forget that another window is open in the background

I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think.

I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them

Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end

Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root

The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it

Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top

It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature

I think GrubHub’s partnership and tie-in with Yelp makes this a very apples-to-oranges comparison. Food delivery apps operate with or without the restaurant’s approval and aren’t able to reach into the restaurant’s pocket the way Yelp and GrubHub can (and boy do they).

Also this is anecdotal, but I’m way more likely to place a pickup order through GrubHub than any of the other apps (if they even offer that). I think it might have to do with the Yelp integration, and me associating that experience with in-person dining... so maybe I’m just naturally in a “find a place to physically go to” mode when browsing Yelp?

The takeout side of this business would obviously have no issues being profitable.

Bingo.

Subsidized not only by VCs, but also by gig economy workers who genuinely don’t understand how little they’re being paid because their liabilities are complicated and often hidden/deferred.

This seems to happen a lot especially with food service startups, because of how price-sensitive that market is. Selling anything below cost or undercutting the competition by even a little bit in that industry will give you exponential growth for as long as you can sustain it, but the instant you want to turn a profit the market will turn their back on you and go somewhere else.

If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand.

No need to reach for an analogy here, you could just say “if you are an engineer.”

In my experience what you’re saying is rarely true at the top tech companies, the managers there generally either come from a tech background themselves or they show an unexpectedly strong understanding of technical aspects of the product anyway, and typically have strong organizational and people skills that clearly stand on their own as rare and valuable.

What you’re saying is almost always the case at small- to mid-size tech companies (which is most of them), and I think it’s because they’re perpetually unable to attract and retain top tech talent... so anybody that can code is de facto placed and kept in a role where they’re coding, and ideally only coding.

A side effect of that is the pool of candidates for promotions and managerial positions is reduced to “only people who can’t code.”

It creates this bizarre situation where the company is looking to its least talented people and least impressive outside candidates to fill the management positions, and actively trying not to promote or give any credit to its most impressive and productive people (because then they might realize their value and demand something the company can’t give them).

These are also the companies most likely to be running against deadlines and having people work evenings and weekends, because again, they can’t attract or retain enough talent to comfortably hit those deadlines. They’re always able to create those deadlines though, because as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sell software than it is to make software.

Then at 5pm on Friday when all the engineers are looking forward to another 4 hours of coding, all the managers get to throw up their hands and go “I’m useless anyway, I guess I get to go home now!”

And they might as well.

(If you’re an engineer and this sounds familiar to you, go apply to 50 tech companies right now because you’re way more valuable than you realize)

... as far as the app-like school of thought goes, the new facebook.com is a pretty remarkable achievement.

I agree, they’ve done a fantastic job. Not only that, but as far as corporate engineering blogs go, this article is one of the best I’ve ever read.

Usually I either know the subject too well to learn anything, or I don’t know the subject well enough to understand what they’re saying in the amount of time it takes to read an article.

In this case, they found the perfect depth, they had great judgment on when and how to use visuals, and what they’re conveying is so clearly valuable.

If you usually skip the article and just go straight to comments, consider actually reading this one!

I'm happy to answer more questions.

How much are you willing to tell us about the income source?

I’m finding it difficult to think of anything that generates a small but consistent revenue stream with no babysitting, that is also completely unresponsive to low-effort attempts at scaling it.

Usually if there’s no babysitting, that means low-effort scale. Or if it is hands-free but still can’t scale, it’s because you’ve found the boundaries of the market opportunity (but when is that ever just 1k?)

I guess my question is what niche product/service did you find that the entire world only wants $1000/mo of??

You’re right! I would never have guessed that. Learn something new every day.

I don’t write JavaScript or have a strong opinion about it.

The widespread prevalence of JS transpilers and everyone’s apparent unwillingness to write pure JS makes me think it probably isn’t such a great language. It probably never had a chance given its history with browsers.

Just using it to make the point that every language has valid expressions that make no sense. You can find similar examples in every language. All you have to do to find them is start writing code in a way that no person ever would or should write it.

Especially in the case of dynamically typed languages, throwing an exception sometimes but not always based on the “human intuitiveness” of any given type inference would make the language even more unpredictable. It’s just instead of asking why expression a evaluates to x, we would all be asking why expression a evaluates to x but similar expression b throws an exception.

If you ask me, the latter is even more arbitrary.

These aren’t useful criticisms. The only reason these kind of critiques even get so much attention is because people reading the headline think: “I wonder how the hell that would be evaluated?” And so they click.

The headline is only interesting to begin with because nobody ever writes that, and nobody should ever write that.

If nobody would ever write it or have any expectations about its evaluation, then how is it even significant that the language will interpret it one way vs another?

I think these criticisms are a good springboard to have the debate about static vs dynamic typing, but arguing over whether True == False is False should be evaluated one way vs another is kind of pointless. If the result of that argument is agreement, then we might end up with people actually writing this, which should be the last thing any of us want.

I think in language design there’s an expectation that if an expression or statement doesn’t make any sense, then people won’t write it that way.

I think that’s a pretty reasonable expectation, too.

In JavaScript, {} + [] evaluates to integer 0. That doesn’t make any sense, but it makes more sense after reading the ES spec for the addition operator.

There are many expressions you can write in dynamically typed languages that don’t make any sense, probably most of them actually, but they have to be considered valid because it’s a dynamically typed language. So they’re valid, they will evaluate to something.

The language designers aren’t so concerned with identifying every possible combination that makes no human-intuitive sense. The important part is that when it seems like types should be inferred and coerced in a particular way, then that’s how it should work. It should match human intuition.

I don’t have any intuition or opinion about how True == False is False should be evaluated, this kind of thing is going to receive superfluous parentheses from me every time for the benefit of the reader, and if someone else wrote it this way I’m always going to look it up or test it in a REPL...

10 < x <= 100 though, if that’s considered a valid expression and it doesn’t evaluate to true for numbers in the range (10,100], I’m going to stop using that language...

their prices aren't competitive anymore...

What do you mean by this?

Amazon has had the lowest price for basically everything I’ve shopped for in the last 4 years. When it is higher on Amazon, it’s by pennies (because algorithms) and not for very long.

At home there’s a grocery store at the bottom of my elevator. It costs less money for me to buy groceries on Amazon Fresh with same-day delivery, than it does for me to go downstairs and buy my own groceries. Not a little bit less either, like 20% less. Same products!

I don’t even have to be home, the groceries just materialize at my front door whenever I schedule them to.

I think HN just gets on a negativity roll sometimes, and the most extreme or exaggerated comments float to the top.

I’m sure there are plenty of externalities, probably moreso with Amazon than most any other company... but let’s not pretend that Amazon isn’t doing amazing things for their customers. The efficiencies they’ve added to my life have saved me hundreds of hours.

They’ve done that with a business model that (allegedly) monetizes the widespread violation of all kinds of regulations while (allegedly) externalizing all of the liability, and it’s devastating hundreds of businesses, and a million other things ... but on the other end of all of that is a very happy customer.

There would be no point to playing so dirty if there was nothing in it for the customer. It wouldn’t even work, we would all just go back to K-Mart.

Again not speaking for Google and only speculating without any inside information on the details of this subject, but:

If Google didn’t exist because only customer-paid business models were permitted for the services they provide, you would be cutting the vast majority of humanity off from essential communications and information services, and they would only be available to the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nations

People in the Philippines for example have the same access to Google that you have (assuming they’ve paid to load enough data onto their phone that week, which some of them can’t afford, or they have access to wifi, which most of them don’t), and I think that isn’t just amazing but is one of the greatest boons to humanity that we’ve ever seen

That would never have happened if Google was required to provide human customer support to every user, and if that changed today Google would very likely have no choice but to scale their entire business back to only being accessible to the top n% wealthiest people (or go out of business)

There are a few billion people in less-wealthy nations who wouldn’t even be capable of paying Google, not only because of poverty but also for simple lack of the required financial infrastructure that you and I take for granted

I’m not speaking on behalf of Google and I’m only speculating, but I think what you’re proposing could increase the per-user cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate their entire revenue model and put them out of business

If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months because their Wifi is down and they think it’s Google’s problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue)

Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a paying relationship directly with the customer, so it’s trivial to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a minor and unarticulated fee

You’re solving the wrong problem

Getting what you just proposed (or any of the many other obvious ways to prevent insider trading) through a senate full of insider traders is the problem

Solve that one

You’re touching on what this whole thing is.

It’s rushed and woefully incomplete data enabling media companies to write apocalyptic headlines without exposing themselves to any legal liability. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, so that’s what they’re doing.

I think to most people with a background in statistics it’s very easy to tell how bad the data is at a glance. It’s downright blatant. They don’t have a platform though, because in this media climate your platform is only as big as your level of sensationalism and hysteria.

There are multiple factors skewing the data toward coronavirus appearing more deadly than it actually is. It’s new and sudden, so there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for testing. It’s causing a rush on hospitals. Combine those and you have one massive shortage of testing. You obviously want to care for the most critically ill first, so globally, only the most sick get tested, and only the cases most likely to be fatal are even represented in these numbers everyone is seeing.

Then they take wildly differing medical, economic and political environments all over the world, and merge all the data as if it’s equal. In many cases, in addition to the inadequate testing, that data is only as accurate as their governing bodies want it to be.

Do we really believe there are 5x as many cases in the US as in China?

Do we really believe there were only 5,000 cases in India?

Do we really believe the virus is 10x as likely to be fatal in Italy as compared to Germany?

Take the “confirmed cases” number and just add a zero, and you might be closer to the reality of what’s going on out there.

People are simply blind to the difference between “confirmed cases” and “cases”.

It’s very unfortunate that this nomenclature has a natural tendency to make “confirmed cases” feel like it must be more accurate, and also unfortunate that the term “cases” could only ever be an approximation. But those labels were chosen carefully and for a good reason, and they represent very, very different things.

It’s a throwaway, I’ve been using HN for close to a decade. I’ve worked with multiple YC companies and currently work at Google on a team with multiple YC alumni. Refusing to acknowledge facts or listen to reason, becoming insecure and digging in on a completely irrational argument, then digging through my profile in an attempt to turn it into a pointless pissing match is all you’ve done here, and I think that describes discourse on reddit pretty well.

Didn’t mean to hurt your pride, just trying to share some rational ideas in a time of unprecedented hysteria. Think what you want.

They’re overwhelmed because the media is deliberately creating mass hysteria over what would have otherwise been rightly responded to as if it were just another random cold. Everyone with the sniffles thinks they’re going to die and wants to get tested for COVID-19. Of course they’re overwhelmed.

If you want to argue at least stay logically consistent with your own argument. Say that everyone should work from home from October to February.

Every argument you’re making applies even moreso to influenza. So, should we all work from home from October to February ???