freshfunk

FWIW, I just heard this guy (Head of Growth) on Lenny's podcast a few days ago and one of the things he explicitly mentioned was creating intentional friction for growth. This seems to be one of those tests.

In periods of massive inflation, only the most wealthy survive.

But there's competition out there -- the open-source chinese models. In their current form, I assume that will turn off many people but new models -- based on those -- are likely to appear. Also, OAI and Google will release new models and pick up the lost customers.

Yeah, that's completely unbelievable. You don't just accidentally call Trump a "dictator" or go on an extended tirade about Sam Altman. Clearly, he was speaking how he truly felt and how he's doing damage control.

Whether you align or don't align with these politics, I find it generally distasteful when private chats are leaked. There's clearly some expectations of privacy (using Signal with expiring messages) and someone leaking this really destroys trust and open communication. It causes people to not engage in open dialog and to move to even smaller and smaller circles. This ends up stifling open and honest debate and results in more narrow, provincial views of the world.

And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.

For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.

Generally this is unlikely the happen (obviously will depend on which EV and which ICE). The reason being is that consumers have generally accepted the cost for cars at a certain level. Rather than dropping the price for cars, they add more features or improve quality to justify a certain price point.

The average ICE engine hasn't changed, from a technology standpoint, has not changed in decades. What's changed is all the internal technology (entertainment systems, parking cameras) as well as trim that's become standard (power everything). These standards are defined by the market. Case in point: see what the standard for cars (both quality and price) are for a given market like US vs India.

It's unlikely they will lower margins so much as to make less money from EV's than from ICE cars. An analogous model are iPhones. The old iPhones could be sold today at a fraction of the price but instead they release new models with better features to justify the higher price point.

(This is all with a caveat that I'm talking about sticker price. Given that EV maintenance should generally be cheaper, without a doubt the target is to have the total cost of ownership be lower than an ICE car as that's how EV's are being positioned today.)

Will people be able to build on the engine like the original? I used to love playing the Day of Defeat mod (ww2 themed) and could definitely see mass appeal for that on top of this new engine.

Not OP but first off I'd say that while some things feel similar, I don't think we're close to how bad it was back then if you look at the magnitude of the fall out. So take these answers understanding that things were worse back then.

1. It felt like a nuclear winter for tech jobs between 2000/2001 and 2004/2005. Jobs were available but it was way more competitive to get them and you were a lot less likely to get that dream job. You either settled for a crappier job or you changed directions. Many younger people just went back to school (get the master, law degree, etc.) as an alternative.

It felt like the party was over. All the great company perks disappeared. Traffic on freeways disappeared. The mood was very flat. It wasn't sexy being in tech like it is today. Nowadays people just talk about TC or stock. That kind of talk disappears.

2. Like I mentioned above, it was about a 3-5 year period. Again, not all situations are the same. But whenever you have large macroeconomic problems, they take time to sort out. It also depends on how quickly the downside factors resolve themselves. The longer it takes to solve those, the longer a recovery is dragged out.

It also depends on what the growth engine is for pulling things back up. Back then, there was a resurgence in internet business starting around 2005 when "web 2.0" got popular and many new businesses came on the scene. This includes social networking, ecommerce, web publishing.

When you want to do broad company-wide layoffs, you have to adopt some broad strategies, otherwise it'll be way too much work to find 15% of the company. It's like trying to do surgery with a scalpel when you really need a saw to amputate an arm.

Imagine the mechanics if they involved every single low-level manager in decision making. You'd never find 15%. Everyone would justify where a person on their team or their team as a whole deserves to be saved. So you apply broader rules (eg certain products, certain types of jobs, performance based). The upside is that you can avoid people-specific favoritism. The downside is that you lose good people in those areas as you're not distinguishing good from bad.

You can check what permissions are granted to any app if your settings.

I was a big fan of the NYT. I’ve always considered them a trustworthy source of news.

However, their coverage of Facebook since the election has showed me how much bias there is in the media as well as how much an entity can serve their own agenda.

Unfortunately the truth behind these integrations are beyond what your average person can understand. Your average person doesn’t understand how OAuth and user consent / permissioning works. And so media can prey on the ignorance of people to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. NYTimes comes off just as bad as Fox News.

I bet you none of the authors have ever implemented 3rd party auth. I doubt any engineers were consulted. Instead they quote so called “media experts” that are just professors at universities who again know nothing about the technical integration and how it works.

I’ve seen some people who understand how OAuth works but these are clearly engineers. NYTimes could’ve used the opportunity to explain how people gave consent but instead chooses a different narrative in order to 1) get page views; 2) attack an arguably competitor in the media space and 3) blame FB for getting Trump elected.

Fear Uncertainty Doubt

In the beginning, Facebook was, to some extent, private. I'm thinking back to the days when they were rolled out college by college. Even after then, mostly people of a certain generation were on FB.

Since then, their reach has gone global and it reached the late adopters: parent, grandparents, uncles and aunts. As that circle became larger, Facebook felt less private.

What the article seems to have missed is that the popularity around other sharing models is actually relatively new. 1-1 messaging, at least on mobile, really only got huge within the last 2-4 years. How old is Snapchat? < 3 years? And it's been mainstream-ish for less than that. Secret, Whisper, Kik... all of these apps with different sharing models are a pretty recent phenomenon.

It seems pretty silly to call this an "about face" considering the span of time considered. Opinions always evolve over time. Look at Steve Jobs: Famously known for saying that Apple would "never" make a tablet smaller than the original iPad. Lo and behold, they did.

Products and the philosophy around them change over time, especially in an area like tech which is quick moving and ever-changing.

Having worked for a number of years in the Valley, I can say that the salary part is true. However, now that I work at a large tech company that's public, the big thing that's missing from this is stock / RSUs. After doing my taxes, I realized how much of my compensation came from them and it makes a difference in a couple percentage points for base salary look small. On top of that, companies give refresher stock so that you accrue more of it the longer you stay.

After 4 years and earned all of that initial grant, it probably will make more financial sense to move on as the refresher grants don't come close to the initial grant. It also is a point where salary disparity might be significantly different (depending on economic conditions).

Yup. This, to me, is a partial admission of guilt. Why else would they take such harsh, immediate action to throw him under the bus?

Hogwash. Companies always say they will open an investigation. In the least, it buys a little time for the story to die down and the next big stories to hit the media cycle.

Same. This just makes it look like she's overly sensitive and perceiving things in a very skewed and unfair light.

LOL @ "victimless-crime-contraband." What a joke. Where do you think the majority of drugs come from? Some hippie's backyard? See the world's stop producers of drugs and you'll find violent, broken countries many of whom are run by drug cartels.

There's no freedom of information in the country. They subverted this by cleverly sending technology and information by using low-tech means. Sounds like a hack to me.

Game developers can just use cross-platform games engines (like Unity) that support Windows, Mac and Linux.

My theory with content apps (I've seen this elsewhere) is that the majority of money comes from a small percentage of users (1-10%).

These users are what typically is referred to as whales. The biggest obstacle to monetizing whales is new content. Also, whales tend to be less price-sensitive. That is, they will buy what content you have at a reasonable price, and that price should be based on what those (paying) users will pay.

I don't really buy the convenience argument. It's unclear whether they released 10 books and users were still only buying 2. That is, they were unable to test whether convenience or the lack of new content was the gating factor. I suspect it was the latter.

Arbitrary list? Why not use Google, Apple, Intel?

Great so now we're forced to use the Gmail app?

Incredibly insightful comment!

I see your point and do feel the same way. The problem (industry-wide) is that the process only allows for a glimpse of a candidate. Even if you're interviewing all day, you're probably only talking to each interviewer for 1 hr (or less) and evaluating many different aspects of them (technical, personality, motivation, etc). And this is supposed to speak for your whole career.

I do think there are false negatives through this process but that's the trade off, I believe, for efficiency. Considering how time consuming interviews are (for the interviewer), there has to be some ways of reducing the wheat from the chaff.

After all, many use a university degree (from a prestigious university) as an initial filter. However, I'm sure there are many talented people who don't have degrees. But when looking at the probabilities, your chances of finding a great candidate are significantly higher if you filtered on that degree.

At the larger tech companies, many of their problems typically are an issue of scale. They are dealing with large datasets, massive numbers of users, terabytes of data, etc.

When dealing with scale, its important to have efficient solutions. They may need to be time efficient or space efficient due to constraints. Even though space is cheap and hardware is fast, inefficient algos may never work or be very high cost.

Maybe you won't be the one implementing this infrastructure but you may be implementing code on top of this infrastructure and it matters that you understand (at least the basics) the consequences of designing things a certain way.

From the post: "Good coding problems are fractal in nature. They can be extended arbitrarily to gauge the depth of your knowledge. For example, you might be asked to solve a problem any way you want. Then you'll be asked to solve it again in constant space or sub-linear time."

You could prepare for months but if you don't understand the core CS concepts then it's difficult to hack these kinds of interview problems. Having a solution is one thing, but coming up with 3 different solutions to the same problem based on various constraints (preprocessing, space/time constraints) requires understanding.

If they "hacked" this, then thru likely understand the concepts well enough such that its sufficient for the job.

Also, interviewers should ask if they interviewee has seen the coding problem before and come prepared with a backup. Interviewers are also looking to see if the interviewee derives the answer too easily. Usually scraping the surface reveals whether the person really knows what they're talking about or not.

Facebook is a one trick pony as much as Google is a one trick pony (search).

cough AppGratis cough

Most of what was written here is true of all platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, iOS and Android.

- In the beginning, there are few rules and so it's the wild west. Developers see what they can get away with.

- As time goes on, platforms look at what uses of it pose a key threat to their core product (e.g. social graph, twitter client, payment platform, third-party engines, etc.) Those threats will be extinguished. Developers dependent on those key threats will be burned as they get shut down.

- Ad rates when the market is empty will always be cheaper than when the market becomes crowded.

- Competition makes it harder for smaller devs to survive. Remember the days when you could be an indie developer and have a chance at succeeding on iOS? Now all the big guys chart and the small guys don't make squat.

- The part about mobile is true but this is affecting ALL web platforms, not just FB.

Yes, Supercell got a huge investment but they are the exception, not the rule. They are the "Zynga of iOS" if you will (in the context of success/investment). The question is whether we'll see more of these kind of investments. Given that games is a hits-based business, I'm guessing it'll still be pretty rare.

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