HN user
The best two books for engineers are
1) “How to win friends and influence people”
2) “Never split the difference”
The first one will teach you how to work with people. The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things.
I don’t recommend many technical books because engineers can find all of that on the internet and are much more at risk of being bad at people stuff.
Not to mention, he was also living in expensive areas. It’s amazing he saved and invested that much.
Man, we’ve built an internet where you literally can’t trust anything.
I ignored it for years and things are still great.
Still running with simple Bootstrap themes, jQuery and mostly server side rendering and have thousands of users on my side project and lots of paying ones too.
Confident I could scale this to hundreds of thousands of users with no issue.
The article is good but it’s missing a big point that equity in startups is tied to risk taken not to contributions.
Many people, including myself, make this mistake the first round at startups. The mistake of believing if you work hard the outcome will be good. I wrote an article a little while back on how this relationship works and how it follows a logarithmic and exponential relationship, risk and equity, and how human minds are terrible at understanding those scales.
For anyone interested: https://louiebacaj.com/equity-and-risk/
Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.
I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.
But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.
The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set.
Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism?
Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country.
Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid to distribute it (pharmacies etc).
Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course.
As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
Full disclosure this dev is actually my brother but still pretty awesome to see.
Edit: also this is the free app in question https://tapex.app/
I know a lot of people make their money on here from these companies. Heck, I interviewed at one of them twice. But my gut says these two are no longer good companies to work for. If you need the money desperately then do what you need to do, but if you can afford to take a role somewhere else you should. Anywhere else is better than these two right now.
I also recognize that they didn’t start the way they are now. Back when they started they represented the very best of our industry and they lured in young ambitious people with the promise of changing the world for the better. They did do that for a little while. The engineering capabilities were and still are world class, they are beacons our industry for that.
But unfortunately a lot has changed. They are absolutely monopolies now, everything in those slides is true. I know because I worked at a startup that relied on both of those companies for its growth. They abused us in the beginning, threatened us with bans and gave us strikes for arbitrary reasons, and then treated us like gold as we spent a lot more with them. On top of how they treat “partners” they now do far more damage to the fabric of society than they add value to it. Again, I recognize that at some point it wasn’t that way and without them tech wouldn’t be what it is now, but they are no longer that and we should all see it for what it is.
I don’t have a solution on how to fix this. I think it’s the business model that’s acidic and broken. I think only disruption can fix this but it’s unclear when and if that will come.
Nearly every system in nature has some slack baked into it.
Take the human brain, pound for pound it packs more neurons in it than any other animals brain on the planet. 20% of the glucose we burn goes to power the brain, in children it’s closer to 50-60%. Yet even though nature powers this incredibly powerful computer, 24/7, we use it’s power, maybe once in a while if we’re lucky. We can’t remember more than 6-7 things at a time, we can never fire every single part at once. You might assume this is a defect, it’s not, it’s a feature.
The brain has so much capacity, they have found people that can literally remember every single thing that happens to them their whole lives. Guess what happened to them? They had no slack for reasoning in abstraction, the things that make us human, they could detail every aspect of a story but couldn’t summarize it, and the list goes on and on. What would happen if we ran our chips at 100% capacity 24/7?
We assume we need to do more, we need more information, we need to squeeze every ounce out of our life and work but in reality this has the opposite of the intended effects.
This article is great because it puts it all into perspective. I recently wrote about the same topic but it’s not as good as this article but still if you are interested:
I have been doing a lot of writing lately, short and longer essays. I have also written on-and-off for the last ten years.
Writing well is not easy.
I used to think I wrote well until I started reading better writers. The whole idea that we will just slap together a bunch of text using some “AI” and it will resonate with people is crazy to me. As an engineer whose dabbled with some AI and ML, and has even seen what GPT3 can do, we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Not saying it will never happen just that nothing we are building right now will be able to do that.
Good writing factors in human culture, sparks emotions in people, tells stories that resonate. I will keep going to sleep at night safely assuming that no AI will out-write humans anytime soon and you should too.
I have found a lot of power in doing a retrospective on my own failures.
This post is very well written and I completely agree with the author that we should hear more about failure from others but I also think too many of us go through our day to days and rarely do a proper retro on where we failed. If only so we could get better.
You really believe the government will do a better job?
This was just posted and already there are two types of comments:
1. Most devs don’t need this, it’s not so helpful to know etc.
2. These are critical numbers to know and in the very least devs should know these numbers.
This sort of disagreement is common in our industry, it’s not just this it’s also Big O, algorithms and data structures, and even OS fundamental people disagree on.
I’d love to take both groups of devs commenting and give each group a set of programming tasks to complete. Judge them based on correctness, speed of development, speed the tasks run, the quality of the code etc, etc.
I think the results would be profound.
I think a huge reason, I didn’t see in the article, that TikTok is able to train their ML to be far more effective than any other video platform out there has to do with the size of those clips and how easy it is to flip through them.
If we are watching 30 second clips, flipping through them quickly, that’s 2 signals a minute and 20 signals every 10 minutes (the average size of a YouTube video) and that is assuming we watched 20 videos, we might have flipped through 60 in 10 minutes.
That’s 60 signals where YouTube would’ve gotten 1 signal. Whose ML will be better trained with your preferences? Obviously TikTok, I don’t think there is anything special about their algorithms it’s just a function of their product and the type of content.
I thought about that believe me, it would keep things simple for sure.
There are a lot of features to consider these days though, such as a newsletter and building an audience, the editing process, etc.
You can basically have the power of the NY times with your publishing platform today (paywalls, payments, newsletters) for free using open source software.
As someone who currently works in healthcare tech I can tell you that taking on health records is one of the riskiest things any company could ever do. In fact we try to keep health records as isolated as technically, and humanly, possible.
For each HIPAA violation a company will be fined $10,000 dollars per customer. If ten million records on a database are part of a breach the company can be out of business.
It boggles the mind that anyone would want to take on that liability.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/guidance-materials...
I’m mostly mad your getting way more Karma than me right now.
I disagree with this, like anything else it’s going to depend on the person. It’s really hard to generalize when it comes to people’s ambitions.
There are so many examples of serial entrepreneurs doing it over and over. Likewise of employees of startups going on to do even better in the next startup they join.
Serial entrepreneurs do get to raise more money, markets reward success, and I am with you that it’s not always deservingly. I also think many startups can and do pivot and serial founders aren’t more likely to pivot than the non serial kind.
I would bet on Justin Khan finding a way to success, much more so than not.
Reading this thing is an incredible downer and it makes everything sound black and white. It is literally poo-pooing on everything. Life is never this black and white, although the thesis make for a good read it is still an inaccurate model of the real world.
Moreover, increasing numbers of engineers, even at the most prestigious companies, are hired on temporary contracts. When the artificial growth model stalls, employees can expect mass layoffs, “anti-hierarchy” propaganda notwithstanding.
As an example, I dont find this to be true at all especially for great engineers. Our company is trying to move completely away from contractors.
I was pretty good at Chess myself growing up, consistently got trophies in tournaments. Ranked in the top 5 nationally (within the US) for my age group, the trophy I earned for that was bigger than me (I was 12 at the time).
Still though being top 5 in the US for that age group dosent mean very much, the US is one country out of many others. On top of that as you stack against other ages especially say when I became an Adult there is no guarantee I would have even made it to the top 10000, never-mind the top 5, because far more Adults play chess.
I dont think the author is discouraging people from doing that if thats what they are passionate about.
Far more importantly I think he is giving "regular" people who arent gifted a path to massive success by being "pretty good" at a few different things. He is mathematically trying to prove that it will lead to great results, perhaps maybe even better results, than being the absolute best at one thing.
There are diminishing returns to pushing yourself if you arent gifted, you may try your heart out and never ever get to be the very best at Chess. Let's say you hypothetically committed large chunks of your life to it, dont have any other skills, and now are broke and cant live a good meaningful life because you dont earn much for being great at Chess, you only earn if you are the very best.
His path is safer for most of us.
As an engineer in love with Crypto I figured I would try to build something with it so I put a little side project together, something easy and simple a way you could earn cashback in the form of crypto for shopping online. I went ahead did the integrations with the major affiliate networks, built the whole backend, built the infrastructure for the crypto side. Including creating temporary wallets that people could chose to move their crypto off of etc, ultimately it would cost something like 5 dollars to issue someone 5 dollars. It might be different now but basically most folks pushing the technology have never actually tried to do anything with it.
I came to realize that this whole thing is only useful for one or two use cases maximum. It's terrible for micro transactions, terrible for any sort of scale, and while we all love the idea of it this is like trying to do the iPhone in the 1980's... we are at least 20-30 years a way from something useful.
It’s not so easy, how do you prove this?
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
To me Amazon feels far more predatory than the other tech giants. I read the arguments being made on HN about this all being fair game but it’s really not ok, none of it is.
1. Amazon takes from open source just as much if not more than any of the other tech giants, in fact the vast majority of managed services on AWS are open source projects with DevOps from amazon.. which by itself is fine but when you consider how much they give back? Fuck all. They haven’t contributed any major framework, system, project, or library that I use. I use things from Google every single day, from Kubernetes to Flutter, to Tensorflow the list goes on and on. I use things from Microsoft every single day in my development from Visual Studio Code, to .net core. I use things like react from Facebook every day. Maybe I’m living in a bubble but Man, this feels like theft these guys take everything to make Bezos richer and give us shit.
2. Although not directly related to Open Source, it reinforces the predatory tactics, Take a look at what they do to Brands on their market place. Any well selling product becomes an Amazon basics, generic, of which they make lots of money and shut you out using Sales data and other predatory practices.
3. You have a streaming service on AWS, an e-commerce shop, any other number of SaaS services? No problem as soon as it’s proven Amazon will launch its own product to compete with you. Everyone told Netflix it was a terrible idea to enrich Amazon but they did it anyway now they have original shows on Amazon video to contend with and I bet you they wish they didn’t.
The list just goes on and on and on. Not saying the other tech giants are angels but man these guys are egregious in the way they take. I don’t blame these companies for crying foul none of this behavior is Moral, it might be legal for now but even that time is coming.
Anyway I know I’m coming off as harsh and you don’t have to agree with me but this is just my two cents. I believe Amazon is the most predatory, largest, capitalist company in America today.
I am 100% with you on the ads model, I think the internet would be a better place without all of the unnecessary tracking and crazyness used to make ads more effective.
I love the trend toward premium versions of things that are ads free, if I don’t want to be tracked and have annoying ads I should have that option. I think the internet overall would be a much better place if every service offered this.. pay for the service and escape the ads madness.
Totally agree on the rev share as well and I think that should be democratized much more so.. it should be possible for things to remain open as well as for creators to get paid
Technically speaking the way Podcasts work is a fascinating thing.
Most on HN May be familiar with this already but Podcasts are completely open and a creator simply publishes an RSS that they then provide to a podcast App such as iTunes so it can appear on the Apple podcast app. In exchange most of these podcast apps share any listen counts and analytics with the owner of the Podcast. However, almost always the files are hosted by the owner so the plays could also likely be counted that way. Even the artwork and everything is provided with this RSS that is completely open.
More and more platforms are popping up creating “exclusive” podcasts and trying to close the ecosystem down. Not sure if that’s what is happening here, it’s unclear from the article, but just think Podcasts are one of those last few technically open things on the internet and that’s great.
They are so open in fact I was planning on adding them to my audio App I’ve been building which lets people listen to any article right now. The more this closes up the less of an opportunity for people to create useful things and for people to find new ways to stay informed.
As a shameless self promotion if your interested in having articles read to you on the go try my app https://articulu.com
Nice, good find.
Totally agree with PG on this.
This isn’t the first time he says this obviously and has put a lot of thought into this. The quote I really like from him on this topic is:
“A startup worrying about competitors is like a fat guy smoking a cigarette as he worries about contracting West Nile Virus.”
I like to remind my two friends helping me build our side project right now of this reality all the time. There are so many things that could kill us at this stage, a competitor is the least likely.
Thank you for that, early with everything so will optimize as I get the feedback.