Nemi

Slightly off topic, or at least tangential, Zapier has one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces I have seen in a while. When you log in, they have a left hand toolbar that runs down vertically, and it is icon only. I understand why they do this, being on the left hand side you don't want to take up much space. But unlike other user interfaces that employ this type of toolbar, you CAN'T see what each item is by expanding the toolbar or even hovering over the item! The only way to see what each one is is to click on it. This is a pinnacle of terrible UX. I love Zapier, but it makes me question their product offering if they can get this so wrong.

I have this problem selecting Pro, but if I use 2.5 Flash it does a great job at these things. I am not sure why Pro does not work as well.

I feel like I am going crazy or missed something simple but when I use the Gemini app and I ask it to edit a photo that I upload, 2.5 flash works really well but 2.5 pro or 3.0 pro do a very poor job. I uploaded an image of me and asked it to make me bald and flash did a great job of just changing me in the photo but 3.0 pro took me out of the photo completely and just created a headshot of a bald man that only sort of resembled me. Am I missing something or does paying for the pro version not give you anything over the 2.5 flash model?

I don't think it is pedantic at all. A prepared mind is exactly what is needed to take advantage of opportunity. Prepared mentally denotes a state of mind where you are actively looking for opportunities and that allows you to notice them. It is an attitude, really. Not unlike being a Stoic is an attitude on gratefulness of life and acceptance of death.

You see, I disagree. In all fairness, I am not in the health care industry but I have had a lot of bad experiences trying to get subtle health problems diagnosed and have done a ton of personal research that has greatly improved my life, despite the healthcare industry not helping me. Hearing about the research that other smart, determined individuals have done is always interesting to me. As a matter of fact, it was a random comment from someone on HN that pointed me in the right direction to help with my problem.

I have learned that a determined laymen can sometimes outperform an average industry professional in all kinds of areas.

These are all great tips, and mirror my admittedly few attempts at public speaking. But one thing that really must be internalized is that, for an hour presentation, you should spend many many hours preparing. If you do this, you will be engaging, cool and calm, and can easily add in humor. Without the preparation you will be stressed and your audience will be bored, or worse, embarrassed for you.

Worked great for us, but I had to turn it off. Why? Because the IP databases that the two services I was using are not accurate enough and some people in the US were being blocked as if they had a foreign IP address. It happened regularly enough I reluctantly had to turn it off and now I have to deal the non-stop hacking attempts on the website.

For the record, my website is a front end for a local-only business. Absolutely no reason for anyone outside the US to participate.

Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing. The goto solution that most companies use is to remove all privileges for everyone. But really, this is a cultural issue. This is how company culture is lost when a company gets larger.

A better option is for leadership to enforce culture by reinforcing expectations and removing offending employees if need be to make sure that the culture remains intact. This is a time sync, without a doubt. For leadership to take this on it has to believe that the unmeasurable benefit of a good company culture outweighs the drag on leadership's efficiency.

Company culture is will always be actively eroded in any company and part of the job of leadership is to enforce culture so that it can be a defining factor in the company's success for as long as possible.

1.5, where pulling the knife made you run faster. I really missed that when they removed it. Pulling the knife in CQC when you emptied your clip was a valid strategy before they changed it to keep the run speed the same in laster versions.

Is it possible that the reason you can enjoy all the good things that a Mac brings is because of, not despite, the fact that they are "pushy" on those things? Without the income from the pushy stuff, they would have to cut corners on the other stuff. Be careful what you wish for, I think the saying goes…

It is funny, Perplexity seems to work much better in this use case for me. When I want some sort of "conclusive answer", I use Gemini pro (just what I have available). It is good with coding and formulating thoughts, rewriting text, so on.

But when I want to actually search for content on the web for, say, product research or opinions on a topic, Perplexity is so much better than either Gemini or google search AI. It lists reference links for each block of assertions that are EASILY clicked on (unlike Gemini or search AI, where the references are just harder to click on for some reason, not the least of which is that they OPEN IN THE SAME TAB where Perplexity always opens on a new tab). This is often a reddit specific search as I want people's opinions on something.

Perplexity's UI for search specifically is the main thing it does just so much better than google's offering is the one thing going for it. I think there is some irony there.

Full disclosure, I don't use Anthropic or OpenAI, so this may not be the case for those products.

This is so overly simplified. There are many things in life that require you to make decisions with incomplete information. E.g., Business decisions and investment decisions. Not learning how to properly make decisions with incomplete information keeps you relegated to simply being an employee without the opportunity to vastly change one's own circumstances in life.

If you listen to a person describe the way to play as a Tight Aggressive poker player, you will see that the message parallels what Warren Buffett says about Value Investing.

Shareholders of companies are "along for the ride" and simply participate in the decisions of the board. In theory if they fired Zuck and appointed a interim CEO and directed that the company get sold, then it could have happened and Zuck would just be allocated his percentage of the value paid by Yahoo.

In practice I would guess there would be lawsuits filed immediately to hold up any such activity until he had time to exert control of the board, but it would have been interesting nonetheless.

I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.

This… is brilliant. Google and Facebook are highly lucrative because they designed a system where your profit margins (as a business) are largely sucked up by Google and Facebook by making you bid against your competitors at higher and higher values until someone is willing to give up almost all of their margins to be the top bidder for the favored “top spot”.

Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer.

The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins.

Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.

The loan may be tax free, but it is surely not interest free.

10M to 20M in what amount of time? This is not incidental, it is critical to determining IRR (Internal Rate of Return).

If the company goes to 20M in 10 years, that sounds great, but is only a 7% compound rate of growth. I can get that with much less risk by investing in the S&P 500. And don’t discount the risk. It is critical. A small business has a very large chance of 100% total loss. Compare that to the 500 index, which has a very small chance of a 50% loss, max.

To count for risk, I would look for a doubling (10M to 20M) in at least 2-3 years, min.

You also have to think about liquidity. If you want to cash out, who is going to buy your shares at the price you want? This might not be as easy as you might think. I can liquidate 500 index shares in seconds. It might take a year or more to find a buyer for your 10% at the price you want.

I’ll play.

Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?

What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car?

Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.

How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?

I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.

I hate ads as much as anyone (full disclosure, I use an ad blocker), but with all due respect, the reason there is no “practical” alternative to a service displaying ads is – someone has to pay for it. And before you say “I am paying or I am willing to pay”, it often costs more than you are willing to pay to run these services.

When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.

And you trust that you will ALWAYS have the awareness of intervening if and when FSD does something life threatening? You are braver than I am.

I am willing to experiment in many ways with things in my life, but not WITH my life.

I don’t do much development anymore, but this is always how I felt when ORM’s like Hibernate came out. At first they were amazing and were used for everything. Eventually it became obvious that as the complexity of the code went up linearly, the difficulty of troubleshooting and optimizing the code went up exponentially.

I learned to only used ORM’s for basic stuff, which they are very much useful, but when things got a little bit complicated to drop back to hand coding SQL.

It varies greatly per company and industry. You are talking about Net Margin and it can vary a lot.

A company like google has a 28% net margin. That means that after paying all expenses for employees and rent and everything, they have 28% left over from revenue as profit. This is very good.

Amazon (being a hybrid retailer/tech company) has 9.29% net margin.

Target has a net margin of 3.84%.

Believe it or not, many public companies have a negative net margin, meaning they spend more than they bring in. Lyft had a negative net margin until just this year. A few years ago, they had a negative net margin of -70%! That means if someone didn’t keep putting money into the company they would have “ceased as a going concern”, as they say. Their most recent year they had a 0.39% net margin. Go Lyft!

This is true, and what Machiavelli was talking about in his book The Prince. He is not talking about HOW to be an asshole ruler, he was talking about what other asshole rulers WILL DO, and how you will need to deal with that (as a ruler that does not wish to be a tyrant).

As it should be. I am not begrudging anyone of that. As a matter of fact, I often mentor employees on treating their career as a business, and build it accordingly. Just like a strong business, you should be selling your services for as much as reasonable, and if your employer is not paying the appropriate price then find another “buyer”.

To maximize the price you can sell your ‘product’ (you), you should be making career decisions that strengthen your offering. This can be taken too far (those that only look for promotions at the expense of real work), but it can be done ethically very easily.

This is overly simplistic. I don’t fault you for it, but it shows a lack of understanding how a business functions.

There is a lot of overhead that goes into running a business, as others have mentioned. Taxes. Rent. Utilities. Licenses. Certifications. HR, testers, project managers, product managers, people managers, directors, marketing, customer service, sales, C suite, and on and on.

I know right now you might be saying “those people don’t even do anything! Developers are the only people making the damn product!”. Again, a business is kind of like a product of its own. It takes many moving parts to take a usable product and get it to market, fight off competition, work with government for regulations (or keep from getting regulated), find and get customers, etc.

Once you try and “go it alone” you will realize that creating the product is only one small part of making a functional and profitable business.

I run a small business. I don’t use half of those roles I mentioned and there is still a lot of overhead. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of extra work involved.

I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on.

If you hire for identity rather than skillset, you don’t have to manage people. They self-manage. My best managers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity. How it worked. How reliable it was. They weren’t always the smartest people. It often took them longer to solve problems. BUT, they solved them on their own, without me having to supervise. Because they would not give up on the problem until it was solved. To give up would be to admit that their identity was flawed, and that just was not an option.

When you hire people like this effectively as a leader you must really allow them to own it. They must have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions, even when those decisions differ from what decision you would make. Results are what matters.

Steve understood this.

The article posits that the beatles and the nineties were BAD for artists, ruining careers and making them one-hit-wonders (where presumably they would have had more than one hit?).

I would argue that it was GREAT for artists and the reason there are so many one hit wonders is that those times opened up and created public appetite for new music. Those artists (who he argues would have had more than one hit) I argue would not have had ANY hits as they never would have gotten airplay to begin with.

How many artists did the Beatles kill? Maybe a better question is – How many artists did the Beatles help produce?

Just some input on Magnesium Chloride for me. I have found it is the best for me as Chloride has no “effects” of its own, unlike things like Glycinate. Glycinate is good if it works for you, but I get wired and can’t sleep. I take citrate-based supplements for Calcium and Potassium, but mag citrate causes a lot of GI distress for me. None with chloride.

The bad thing? Mag Chloride is highly hydroscopic. You really can’t make it into a pill or they get all weird and goopy. So to get Mag Chloride you have to get it in a liquid form and it is moderately expensive. Worse than the expense, it tastes positively horrid. Still, it has the best impact on my sleep than other forms, so take that for what it is worth.

Pivoting means you are solving a new core problem. Adding features keeps the core problem intact.

I see the parent commenters point as being more of the “can’t see the forest for the trees” type of uncertain requirements.

To go into more detail, it is the type of uncertainty about whether you are actually solving the right problem or if it really is a problem. While what you suggest does help ferret this out, what you are suggesting can also prolong the process of getting the code in front of a real end user to see if they use or adopt it the way you are expecting. It allows you to quickly throw away ALL the code and get to solving the right problem.

Another way to put it, the more the problem space is unknown, the faster you should get the code in front of someone and delay the edge-case discoveries.