rargulati

What's going to be the vitess of Postgres? Seems to be the "last" missing piece? Or is that not a focus and fit for PG?

You mentioned your backend being a Rails app + serverless functions, what's the benefit of doing both there? What does your video processing infra look like, is that in one of those systems?

rhinoceraptor gave such a clear explanation of the process, that I'd honestly pay for an entire set of bio and chem mechanic breakdowns prepared by them.

Friction and convenience. Always assume the user will not take the desired action because it most closely models reality.

The comments here are really interesting. What is the equity level where one goes from thinking like an owner to being an employee? At what equity level does one feel the things in this blogpost maybe apply? 5%? 1%? 0.5%? If startup are power-law gambles, then 0.025% can still be a great outcome.

Should a founder mentality be expected amongst early employees at a certain equity level? Why wouldn't someone want to hire someone who had that mindset, and then appropriately compensate someone for that?

Couldn’t his company be worth more than a trillion because it’s...adding far greater value to the ecosystem it exists in? And his share is in the ~100B as he captures the upside through being a founder and taking the early risk?

Aren't there ways of verifying the integrity of the hardware via software on boot?

I do feel like HN is having a rehash of a conversation we've had many times this past month. I'll post my favorite comment [1] on the matter of remote salary adjustment, which captures a key market effect we all seem to forget (Bay Area specific):

-----------------------------------------------------

"Cost of Living" adjustments are a red herring, what they really are is really "competition density". There are plenty of tech companies paying great salaries in the bay because they have to, otherwise they would just go work for someone else. On the other hand, if you lived in Oklahoma you aren't going to say no to $LOCAL_OFFER+10k just because bay area salaries are $LOCAL_OFFER+90k.

As long as this disparity exists, I forsee bay area salaries and CoL still being high. Until companies move headquarters out of the bay, the trend will continue.

-----------------------------------------------------

Similarly, in this thread, Consultant32452 states [2] that the real argument is between those who can demand a high salary regardless of geography, and those who can only demand a high salary _because_ of geography.

The mistake is many people in the latter group think they are in the former.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162855 by hn user nemothekid [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23265158 by hn user Consultant32452

This to me is the real argument: those who can demand a high salary regardless of geography, and those who can only demand a high salary _because_ of geography.

The mistake is many people in the latter group think they are in the former.

Isn’t this because it’s already priced in? The price floor for a world without delivery services isn’t lower than it is now.

Signal has spoken [1] at length about the issues of private contact discovery, and the many [2] solutions they've employed to minimize the amount of information that gets leaked. There's this intractable problem of requiring a social graph for easy discovery and for trust, and Signal's found one of the better solutions (though I'm sure we'll discover better ones yet).

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [2] https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/

In the book "The Elephant in the Brain", there's an interesting observation that increased lying and politicking was necessary selection pressure for increased human intelligence.

Similarly, I wonder if our increasingly low-trust, hyperconnected society will cause us to adapt (evolutionarily) in new and interesting ways. Obviously, all of this happens way faster than we evolve, and we'll need better tooling or cultural norms to deal with this stuff.

This is actually an interesting question, and people are being entirely too dismissive in down-voting you. Everything from "assisted experiences" in VR to Neuralink could offer really interesting options for those going through something so terrible.

This is really interesting to read. I've been writing Go for about ~4 years professionally, and recently (<6 months) jumped into Elixir (and a bit of Rust). They've been nothing but a breath of fresh air, and I can't wait to write more as I'm starting my new thing. I'm definitely more excited about Elixir as it's really, really pleasant to write and in some sense, a major increase in productivity.

Agree about typed parameters + implied returns, but you can get some of that back using guards + dialixer/dialyzer.

For the inexperienced, what are a few key principles that we can take away from your experiences?

From the comments I've read here, I guess a contrarian take:

If the purpose of the decision was to get people to move to wireless headphones, then specifically for myself and my network of folks, this seems to have worked.

Initially I had the Oppo Wired headphones. Soon after removing-3.5mm-gate (and dealing with the adapter), I'm exclusively on wireless: the Airpods and the latest Sony over ear headphones.

Honestly, at the cost of sound quality (which used to be important to me), but gaining noise-cancelling and not having to wrangle with wires, it's such a convenience. Apple was right, and I imagine the trend will largely be towards wireless. That being said, experience still has a ways to go (connect, battery), and die-hard audiophiles will never be satiated.

Can you give more information on why this is? Any recommended reading to better understand where and why the costs increase?

I'd love to see data on the average on-call incidents for an application written in language X (say Go) vs those written in Elixir.

Concretely, its it the case, for an application where Elixir/Erlang/Beam are a great choice, but also, another language would be fine, that the equivalent Elixir application results in less downtime/pages than the alternative. Anything from the perfect app to something with a ton of races/leaks.

Is this a fair question (maybe I'm presuming too much of BEAM/supervisor pattern, I zero experience with it)?

Anecdotal: we're counting at 7 hours since any availability, SouthEast US, and limited availability on the West Coast, US.

Sounds like a good problem to have.

That’s not stopping projects from working on it.

To support that...

Grin contains a phenomenal amount of cryptography: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin

Bulletproofs implementation in rust (small proof sizes): https://github.com/dalek-cryptography/bulletproofs

...with tons of really well done cryptography by that group (dalek): https://github.com/dalek-cryptography

Pairing based crypto library used in the second largest distribution of Ethereum (and maybe zcash?): https://github.com/paritytech/bn

These libraries have prompted me to start learning rust (albeit slowly as I'm using Go and C at work).

winning bidder wished to be kept anonymous

I wonder if this is a marketing stunt, or an effort to increase the visibility and legitimacy of AI generated art.

It's more like the creator and distributor of a popular opioid turning around and selling the drugs that help you wean off.

Oh wait...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/t...

This is probably the best job posting I’ve ever read (not that I read many or think deeply about them, though).

Thanks for writing it - folks, take note.

I’m really surprised at the limited scope through which the hacker news crowd is looking.

Good news: your centralized pie where you’ve put in tons of time, and built up a huge amount of credibility is safe!

Cryptocurrencies/blockchain shouldn’t, and likely can’t, “disrupt” most of those industries. A glance through some of the industry reports in the comments shows an immense amount of work done in these respective industries. The value is in the edges.

The important thing to think through, critically, is how we’ve organized ourselves as a species, and how that orientation has changed over time. Do cryptocurrencies / blockchain offer a superior way for individuals to organize themselves around a specific network? There are some interesting questions there, and I think if we can answer those questions, the interesting applications will emerge. Right now we’re thinking of how to slap Web 2.0 onto blockchains, which, though interesting, isn’t going to bode well for anyone. Because the status-quo is superior (from performance and pricing perspective), and works well for most.

Store of Value, currencies, and financial instruments are appealing; those are applications in which humans have to orient themselves around a centralized power structure and believe. Switching the focal point of trust from a large institution (or government) to a decentralized network is an interesting thought exercise. Also think DRM.

Folks are comparing things to the 90s, but that’s a tired dog. You’ve really gotta look before that. We’re still in the installation phase, and I don’t think we’ve quite gotten to the dot com phase of this journey. That level of frenzy is yet to come.

Outside of raw experience, what can you do, read, or learn to build the intuition for formulating and answering the above questions?

I can answer the above for systems I've built, but I've spent quite a bit of time with those systems. How do I get better at doing this during the planning phases, or even better, for a system I'm unfamiliar with (ie. are there tools you lean on here)?

What alternatives to Mailchimp would folks recommend? The ideal alternative would have the following desirable components:

- A reasonable to use API

- A transactional component (or integrations with Sendgrid/other provider)

- Not painful to use

It's hard to say, but likely no. Radar Relay is a decentralized exchange. Coinbase is a centralized exchange. They're competing for mostly different sets of folks. If Coinbase actually releases ERC20 token trading, it would have more of an impact on exchanges such as Kraken, Binance, and Pol.

For those interested, here's the paper: https://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/projects/eclipseEth.pdf

Here's the partial-implementation of Countermeasure 2 in geth: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/16069

Of note, this fix is still susceptible to attacks, though still an improvement:

Since geth v1.8.0 still allows the attacker to freely craft node IDs that land in specific buckets, the partial implementation of Countermeasure 2 in geth v1.8.0 means that for a given victim’s table, there can be at most 10 attacker node IDs associated with each attacker IP address. While this improves on the situation prior to geth v1.8.0 (where we could eclipse our victim using just one or two IP addresses), it does not raise the bar for attackers quite as high as we had hoped.

Still making my way through the paper and the PR to identify other things fixed. Here's the entire 1.8 release: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.8.0

Others in this space: Sprig (failed) and Munchery (still around) come to mind.