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idoby

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So he gets to take other people's money, invest it and take a cut without actually, like, having to do any actual work, but he's getting ignored at parties?

Damn it, where the hell do I sign up?

Then you were motivated by curiosity, which is great, but what if you weren't curious about the perfect espresso and knew that nobody would drink it. In this case, why make an espresso? You'd probably prefer to spend your time doing something else, right?

I find that internal motivation is mostly a myth, that is, the part where people expect to just have infinite drive out of nowhere.

The cooking analogy is good but here's an IMO better one - would you make a movie if you knew for certain nobody would ever watch it? I wouldn't.

You want to get a PhD - why? Is the PhD a mountain to climb or is it a pair of boots that will let you scale a mountain? Both answers are legit, but I think you do need to agree with yourself on one.

Motivation ex nihilo doesn't exist. Humans are goal-driven and averse to spending time on teleologically neutral things (enjoyment of the activity itself is, of course, a legit end on its own).

Never Hertz to Ask 6 years ago

I don't see you complaining about, for example, brokerages, dealers and exchanges providing liquidity by fulfilling your orders even though the market won't at a given point in time. This can prevent a security from falling or rising in value where it otherwise would have, and directly works against an investor who was hoping for a rise/fall in price.

Regulators don't work "for investors", they work for lobbyists, they want to keep the markets running, and for any given policy, someone will win and someone will lose.

I don't see how the Hertz decision is any different, except I do see how taking the opposite position can hurt the markets, either by creating a chilling effect on low-mktcap companies listing or by creating uncertainty in the legal environment, which investors really don't like.

Just look at the number of Israeli companies who won't list in their home turf, TASE, or companies who have and pulled out. A lot of it has to do with TASE imposing unreasonable requirements. Otherwise raising money domestically would be a no-brainer.

Never Hertz to Ask 6 years ago

You don't know it to be worthless. Hertz proved that, because their stock went up (hence not worthless).

Never Hertz to Ask 6 years ago

Less-than-ethical according to who?

If you're buying indices then you have explicitly given up control of a portion of your portfolio to them, and they can lose money as well as gain. Sounds to me like you're just complaining because you lost money because of this move, but symmetrically speaking, you could have gained.

And to be clear, I'm not long or short Hertz and have never been (unless some index or fund I'm holding happened to buy their stock).

Never Hertz to Ask 6 years ago

Can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to raise funds by selling stock. People are free to buy or not to buy, at their discretion. Govt/courts shouldn't be picking winners and they shouldn't be picking losers either.

"Bad" and "good" are meaningless judgements in this context. You're about to graduate, so you wouldn't be expected to have any real experience, but you do have experience building and running an actual product. Seems to me like you've got the time ahead of you to try running your startup and either succeed or fail, in which case you'd have enough time to restart your career as an employee.

My only advice would be: the founder mindset is very different to the employee mindset, and you'd have to take that into account, and, don't quit your CS degree if you're within 1 year of graduating.

It sure does, but even if you choose not to take advantage of container tech, it's still a very easy way to deploy stuff on a single machine. Not sure why the downvotes.

For all its flaws, Docker does solve a lot of the pain the author mentions. Deploying postgres, for example, with a config file and keeping it running is really very easy with Docker Compose.

Not affiliated with Docker except for using it, and while I do have some thoughts about design choices made by Docker, it's still a very good tool.

I agree, but that's still a form of estimation though, you're just estimating that you'd be able to deliver on your list of features in the time you have. You could be wrong, and then end up with less features, or be forced to spend more time.

TFA uses a lot of words to say very little.

I don't care if your estimate is drawn from the hip or projected using a state of the art Monte Carlo or machine learning model. It's still an estimate. Still, any number of things that weren't in your model could shift the deadline: people getting sick for a long time, people quitting, people getting promoted out of their critical role, organizational dependencies not delivering on time (other dev teams, legal etc), all of these things have happened to me, and when they do, they can throw off your project for months.

No model can take these things into account, and if it does, it will yield an estimate like "three weeks up to a year" which is useless, and I didn't need your SOTA model to get that answer. Unless you're really only doing cookie cutter stuff, the best form of estimate I've seen used is continuous estimation + being willing to cut features to make it to deadlines with something usable, even if incomplete (build a bike, not half a car). This isn't always possible, but when it is, it saves a lot of headache and makes everything run smoother. But it starts with accepting the fact that you don't know everything from the start.

That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.

So much drama. If a manager in your org can fire good-standing employees on a whim without scrutiny from the rest of the org, quit now. In any other org, go ahead and joke with your buddies, people need the icebreakers. Just maybe not more than once.

I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)

They're not in the tech industry, but they are tech companies. Tech companies are companies who believe that in tech innovation is not only possible, but necessary to drive exceptional business success. Those are indeed few and far between.

It's not either/or. Good luck building the next FB/Google/MS/Amazon/Apple without exceptional tech and exceptional tech people. All of those companies had breakthrough tech combined with breakthrough business ideas.

Assuming that everything is just about UX, PM and bizdev nets you the kind of mediocrity the OP is talking about. Sometimes what looks like over-engineering to the mediocre actually enables breaking new grounds in the hands of the excellent.

Shit, are you me?

You're just being over 30, welcome. Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction.

The tech industry is an ad mill. Academia is about innovation killing fiefdoms. What you need to realize is that for an institution, the first priority is maintaining homeostasis, and that means not letting you do something that might risk resources or upsetting the established order.

There's a reason why the hackers on TV were called rebels. They founded new institutions because the incumbents wouldn't let them play.

You want the hacker ethos? Make it yourself, that's what it's about.

If something works in your Android dev environment, it is absolutely not guaranteed to work everywhere, or work the same everywhere. Differences exist between vendors, and every between different models by the same vendor.