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factorymoo

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Hi Peter, thanks for doing this AMA!

I’m a cofounder of a startup in the US. Two of us are here on green cards, but our third cofounder is based in Switzerland. He has a PhD from a top university, previously founded a company, and has raised over $30M in the past.

At what stage would it be possible for us to bring him to the US on a visa? Would it be:

- As soon as we incorporate a C Corp?

- After raising funding?

- Once we have revenue?

Are there any specific visa pathways (O-1, L-1, E-2, etc.) that would be most relevant for him, given his background?

Appreciate any guidance on this!

I went to the most prestigious high school in France. The top 2 students in my maths class shared one thing in common: they would study the curriculum the summer before.

I did it one summer, and while I was nowhere near as good as them - something magical happened: even though I hadn't understood all the concepts, my ability to understand the concepts during the class went way up. It was easier to follow what the teacher was saying since no concept was totally new to my mind.

I work in Big Tech. Whenever we open positions both in the Bay and in NYC, we are flooded with applications to NYC with a lot less in the Bay. A good chunk of these come from people in the Bay wanting to move out.

I've been in the Bay for a few years now. I've noticed that a lot of people I talk to don't really like it here. They like their job and the paycheck but they would move out in a heartbeat if they could. As opposed to all the folks I know who live in NYC, most of them really enjoy it.

I wonder if that has something to do with it ["it" being the article]

As someone who has worked at big social media companies, I can say the conventional wisdom about content moderation being a carefully planned process is off-base.

The reality is that moderation relies heavily on imperfect machine learning models and overworked human reviewers making rushed judgments on hundreds of cases per day. There's no meticulous strategy document mapping out the pros and cons before banning accounts that upset the company.

Mistakes inevitably happen when relying on this combination of flawed automation and human reviewers who are stretched too thin. The moderation policies may seem arbitrary or politically motivated from the outside, but much of it comes down to hasty human error and buggy algorithms rather than some malicious scheme.

" with zero ability to think through long-term consequences"

The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1]. You need to say that what you care about is long term, but that's now how we're compensated (read: incentivised). Plus you're not there to see it anyways so there are really very little incentives to think long term.

[1] some googling but couldn't find a great source for this. Though it matches what I've observed in the industry.

Interesting to see the perspectives from early hacking pioneers. Seems like some things haven't changed much - debates over ethics of unauthorized access, whether it's criminal, free speech implications, etc. But more nuance now as hacking's gone more mainstream.

Biggest change is probably threat models. In 1990 main concern was individuals hacking systems for challenge, curiosity, etc. Today it's nation-states and organized crime using hacking for financial gain, espionage, even kinetic attacks.

Other change is commercialization/professionalization of hacking. Now huge industry around cybersecurity, ethical hacking, bug bounties. Hacking skills lead to lucrative careers, not just hobby or activism.

More diversity today too - no longer just male techies. But part of cyberpunk spirit remains, even as hacking's become bigger business and political issue.

I worked for Amazon for two years. They always were very proud of their customer obsession and in some ways it really showed (great customer service, very speedy deliveries).

But what I never understood is how it never seemed to be a problem that over the years, the site is just filled with low quality / alibaba imports / bad products.

On a side note, the number of vendors that offer you to remove a bad review in exchange for a full refund (and you get to keep the product) is also making me lose all trust in their review system.

Product idea: use reddit to obtain 3 price point options for all items deemed of high quality (or at least that people are happy with). Say cordless vacuum cleaners and have an extension in chrome that only displays these 3 options when you look up for this item in Amazon.

"Transformers" and "Attention is All You Need" refer to an important development in machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly in the field of natural language processing (NLP). I'll try to explain them in a simple way.

Think of a conversation you had with a friend. While they were talking, you were probably not just listening to the words they were saying right now, but also remembering what they said a few minutes ago. Your brain was connecting the dots between different parts of the conversation to understand the full meaning. Now, imagine if you could only understand each word in isolation and couldn't remember anything from a few seconds ago. Conversations would be pretty hard to understand, right?

In early NLP models, this was a big problem. They couldn't easily look at the "context" of a conversation or a sentence. They could only look at a few words at a time, so they were a bit like our forgetful person. They were good at understanding the meaning of individual words, but not so good at understanding how those words fit together to create meaning.

Linux n00b over here... apologies for the silly question but I can't seem to make this work

I enter spongebob-cli

Then when it prompts me to enter an episode number, I can't seem to get it to play from within the terminal itself

let's say I want to play episode 1:

1 --mpv --vo=tct --quiet

Doesn't seem to work. Any help to get past this would be greatly appreciated