sumanthvepa

Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .

Yes. While they may have been justified in firing him for not following policy, they also lost a talented engineer. (I'm sure they don't care) I would have done the intelligent thing here and looked at how the project could have been made official. But that decision would have had to been made at a very high level, maybe even the CEO, because anyone lower down would have made a narrow and parochial decision in favour of the org they were protecting, rather than in the best interests of the company.

But why would ask these people about topics they don't understand? Or they sending you unsolicited responses?

They purchased 129 tons of gold in Europe. Their asset position did not change: they converted cash to gold of the same value.

They then sold the 129 tons gold in the US vaults for $16 billion. That gold was originally purchased I'm guessing many decades ago for $1 billion. The have a book profit of $15 billion and still have 129 tons of gold.

They captured some of the appreciation in gold value as a realised profit on their books.

Their balance sheet did not change, just their income statement

Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

Not true. I'm a really heavy user of AI. And it's improved my productivity dramatically as a developer, but it doesn't work in every situation even in programming. I see it as an indispensible tool, but its not, right now, a tool that will replace me as a programmer or product manager or salesperson, or marketer. or (in my case) an owner and investor.

Will that happen in the future, maybe. but I don't have enough insight into how AI is evolving in the labs to make a judgement on that.

Most VCs can't read markdown.

Interesting. I required all my devs to use local VMs for development. We've saved a fair bit on cloud costs.

Learn for yourself then. I run my own company and learning new stuff so I can use it in my business is one of the few joys of being the owner. No permission required to try the new hotness (And if you screw up -- you have only yourself to blame.)

Code is just ‘compiled’ intelligence.

There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer.

I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them.

I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.

This. Right now the consumer surplus created by improved productivity is being captured by users and to a small extent their employers. But that may not remain the case in future.

What benefit could one possibly get by farming karma on site like hacker news. It's not like one can gather followers or something. I'm always mystified by folks who do this. Would love to understand the motivation.

I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.

The problem with predicting that China won't catch up on GDP per capita with the West is that the West too went through those growth phases about a century or two ago. It will take a 100-200 years, but China, and the rest of world will catch up. Just a matter of time. A long time no doubt. But it will happen.

The Michelson-Morely experiment is probably one of the most famous null result in all of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

I create most of my OpenGraph images using AI. As far as I can tell, there is no copyright on those images. They are in the public domain (I think?)

I've been working full time for myself for the last 13 years. Multiple projects clients etc. It becomes easier in terms of work pressure when you can afford to go full time on your project. (But of course, you have be careful with money)

Currently, I'm working on open-sourcing one of the devtools we built internally. Think of it as a self-hosted version of Vercel.

I struggled with it too, but one solution that works for me is blocking time for specific things. For example I will block 4hrs in the early morning to work on my project 5 days a week. I keep friday evening and Saturdays free for family and Sunday for chores.

You have to accept that it is not possible to be as fast as someone working full time on the same project. But you can get creative about how to build things more efficiently.

The real cost is an opportunity cost. It doesn't show up in the financials. Your ability to react quickly to new business opportunities is hurt. Most CEOs and boards don't notice it, until it's too late.

It's interesting. My closest friends use my last name, while everyone else uses my first name at work. Apparently it was a hangover from the custom at old British public schools that some old Indian schools retained into the 70s/80s. I sort of like it.

They probably mean that they installed the app, used it for a little while, and then, forgot about it.

Here's a neat trick: Section 174 US tax code changes make purchasing a SaaS license a better deal than building in house. So do the R&D in a jurisdiction like India where the you can still deduct 100% of R&D under section 35. And purchase the SaaS in the US. (You have to be a non-US company for this to work and there are more details. Talk to your accountant.) Edit: fixed typos

Those types of card numbers are detectable though.

Getopt and its brethren in other languages are starting to get long in the tooth. Modern CLI tools need more flexible parsing.

This makes me so glad I quit FAANG to run my little lifestyle business. It's so much less stressful.

As opposed to the way SpaceX does it?

Let huge rockets blow up over active airspace?

This looks like a bunch of college kids building small little rockets. I'm probably taking a much bigger risk walking on the street, where I live in India.

It's a little risky. But do the stuff far enough away from people and they'll be fine.

From the blog post: "Pro tip: just take your time and design the O-ring system properly. Trust us — you don’t want to gamble with hot gases and bad seals."

I think NASA may have learnt that lesson in '86.

True. I'm not so sure about this. But the pure imported hardware cost is probably just a few 10s of millions, maybe 100 million or so. For office alone.

It's the cost of setting up and running the data centre that costs money. This is once again has a significant labor component.