VexXtreme

> I think this advice is cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Ah, the standard phrase used when people try to get you to work against your interests.

The rest of your post amounts to: "Doing the imprudent thing X worked out for me this one time, so everyone should do it."

> So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value"

Yes, it's called "fraud".

That makes sense if you're a 3rd world immigrant, because the value delta between your old life and your new life is immense. For someone born in a 1st world country, it makes little sense to compare their situation with that of a 3rd world denizen. Reference points are subjective. I take issue with the way my government collects taxes and how it distributes them. I don't care how Africa or India are doing.

You are entitled to your sentiment, but calling people and their approach to life "toxic" is a good way to alienate them and dismiss what you have to say. There are many ways to run a business, and I've run teams that have shipped multi-million dollar software entirely remotely, with minimal face time and non-work related socializing.

There are plenty of companies that manage their work in a way that minimizes the human component and maximizes the technical utility of their engineers (judged on productive output alone), almost in a way that makes the human component and all it brings with it (unreliability, politicking, emotional outbursts, backstabbing, you name it) irrelevant. In fact, my ideal company reduces face time to close to zero, because that's the only reliable way to eliminate politicians, bad actors and people who try to game the system using social skills and emotional manipulation. A nice side effect of remote work is that it automatically creates that sort of environment, unless you go out of your way to change that (but then the remote work model is probably not for you).

>renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

The fact that you don't know how to manage engineers in an entirely meritocratic, non-political environment, says more about your management abilities than anything else.

I've been in a similar situation and all I can say is I feel you. I've become very distrustful and suspicious of people in this industry, especially the fast-talking "we're changing the world" kind.

Ultimately, if people want to renege, they will renege. Unless you have a ton of money and energy to throw at lawsuits, it's better to structure your deals in a way that clips your potential downside (e.g. work on a retainer basis, don't accept stocks in lieu of cash etc).

I don't see it either, but I guess people can justify whatever they want to justify.

And Bitcoin.

> Based on my experience I am 100% convinced that people that can't find joy in the happiness of others should remain single and even more important: never, ever have kids.

As a counterargument, I've seen a few people turn into complete monsters once their kids were born. Their justification was "I have kids now and I'll do literally anything for my family, fuck everyone else and their needs." (paraphrased). It's all fine and dandy until the instinct for survival kicks in.

What if you value your consciousness and the here and now more than the idea of your DNA staying alive well after you're dead?

To me, my consciousness is my identity (myself). The body is just a vessel for it, and once it craps out, and takes the consciousness down with it, I couldn't care less about my DNA (a bit of a tautology, but you get the idea).

A counterargument would be that it's harder for a big government to change direction easily, once decided and set in motion. Wrong decisions can compound because it's easier for a large organization to stay its course, even in the face of increasing harm, as evident by the Vietnam war.

Possibly, due to a lack of long term stability and job security. When every round of financing results in a different VC installing its own people in the company and shaking things up, I don't feel comfortable betting the life and wellbeing of my family on the fact that some 24 year old "product manager" is going to act rational.

In other words, they'd really need to pay me a lot more than an established company in order to offset my risk.

As I'm entering the fourth decade of my life, I have actively started avoiding any company that 1) self identifies as a startup, 2) employs less than 50 people, 3) is VC funded in any capacity. It's not because I have anything against them in particular, it's just that my risk profile has been changing together with my age, and I'm not really willing to put in the same crazy hours as 5-10 years ago in return for the right to participate in a de facto lottery.

Many experienced engineers I know feel the same.

You have fallen victim to the outcome bias. It is a mistake to attribute the quality of a decision to a specific outcome when the correlation between their determinants is low or unknown. In layman's terms, you don't know that it was her joining Google that led to this particular rise in Google's market cap. It could have been any other number of factors. Even simpler, what you said can be analogized to "I won the lottery while wearing this particular shirt, so it must be my lucky shirt".

Furthermore, statistics show that there is a positive correlation between companies rewarding executives in a bull market, and punishing executives holding the exact same positions in a declining market, thereby making luck and timing, not skill, a main determinant of who eventually makes money (the correlation between how well a company performs and the perceived skill of its executives was determined to be around 10-20%).

> I also generally don't like the idea of someone else telling me what my contributions are worth. By putting in all those extra hours, you're basically pinning all of your hopes on someone else's judgment. If they like you, then maybe you'll get that extra money.

He mentioned he works in finance. That whole industry is very hierarchical and based around strict pecking orders (and lots of koolaid drinking to boot). In many firms, you are always just "one project away" from being promoted or made partner.

I think you need to reexamine the meaning of the word "monopolized".

Having a single state-sanctioned business (and therefore backed by the threat of violence) is somehow less monopolistic than having a free market where the best service provider is rewarded by becoming the most popular and profitable one?

And you are ignoring a much bigger issue. For instance, the Fed has expanded the USD monetary base by about 4 trillion in the past six years. So why not take that figure, divide it by the total number of transactions in the past six years and call it "the dollar's cost per transaction"?

Every inflationary currency system suffers from the same problem. At least bitcoin has a hard cap on the total number of units that will ever be available.

> A bitcoin's value is 100% based on what the public values it at.

So just like any other currency and commodity then? Intrinsic value doesn't exist. Everything is relative to where you are and what you're trying to achieve.

Since the concept of "culture" is so vague and no one using it seems to be able to describe what exact set of criteria it represents, it appears to be whatever a hiring manager wants it to be. If you don't like someone's skin color, religion, cultural background, the fact that they don't like drinking or going to team-building trips every weekend, or you just don't like the color of their shirt, it's easy to reject them on the grounds of not being a "culture fit". Who cares about their professional skillset when you're obviously looking for a paid buddy.

Curb your hubris and start treating people like human beings. I've worked for a number of "world changing" startups managed by 20-something year olds like you and the fact that it always devolved into a high school popularity contest made me sick to my stomach.

I think you'll find that most people will "get along" with you just fine if you're a decent person, pay well and don't ask them to sacrifice a too big portion of their life. If they're competent and willing to work hard, everything else is noise and bullshit.

I understand the individual words in your post but have no idea what you're actually trying to say. Have you thought about running for congress?

The whole "culture fit" concept is a direct result of corporate hubris. When a company mentions "culture", I don't walk, I run for my sanity.

Your argument is completely disingenuous - same as the people who are nitpicking and torturing the language in the constitution in order to get what they want.

When people are using the internet, in some contexts there is a certain expectation of privacy, and in others, there is none. If I upload pictures to a public Facebook profile or a hosting website (such as imgur), I certainly don't expect that to be private. It's there and available for everyone to see/observe/collect/record/download/analyze/whatever. However, if I connect to a search provider using HTTPS, and the search provider vehemently claims they do not hand my data over to the government, I certainly don't expect the said provider to hand my data over to the government, or the government to try to subvert and crack the encryption between me and the website.

I think it's high time people stop trying to get what's unfair and immoral by trying to subvert the language. While you may eventually get what you want, it is corrupt and evil. No amount of legal "reinterpreting" changes that.

You didn't really address anything he said; instead you resorted to name-calling and disengaging from the conversation. I always see this from religious people when their beliefs are challenged in a coherent, logical manner. You can't logically reconcile the truth about the nature of this universe with your irrational belief system, so you typically just say the other party is wrong and either attack them or completely disengage. I guess you really cannot prove to an irrational person that they are being irrational and deluded.

Normally I'd just tell you that I don't subscribe to moral and philosophical relativism, but for the sake of this discussion, I will oblige in explaining further.

First off, what is the definition of valid and correct? What is the metric that makes a certain belief more "valid" than some other belief? Well, over the millennia, we humans have arrived to certain definitions of what's good and what's bad in the context of preserving life, civilization, society and liberty. In that sense, things that harm those concepts can be defined as bad and those that further those goals are good. History has shown, time and again, that empowering one person with a lot of executive power inevitably leads to tyranny, oppression, genocide, slavery and other completely horrible things that we seem to have been able to get rid of (more or less).

So when someone rejects thousands of years of historical evidence as to what happens with such regimes and where they eventually lead, and proposes instating one again, I can only call it either asinine (if the author is well-intentioned) or evil (if they simply want power over others).

In more practical terms, liberty, self-determination and self-ownership are sacrosanct to a lot of people. In order to take those things away, you will need a lot of people, guns and body bags.

I mean look, I understand what the philosophy is about, and I think it would never work in the real world. We've learned time and again that entrusting a lot of executive power to one person is a horrible idea - extremely exploitable and subject to corruption.

Looks almost like a product of a deranged autistic mind. I have no interest in such asinine "philosophies".

They even seem to have a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/

The whole "ideology" is basically just fascism and institutional racism dressed up as something else. Despicable. I would never use any software from some Hitler-reboot type of person. Don't empower and feed such people. They are usually narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they are fit to rule and tyrannize others.

Yes, I agree with everything you said. When I said VPN, I actually meant Tor (and even mentioned it in my original post), because the concept seems to go over some people's heads.

That's a very good point. Perhaps being overseas is not an option. In that case, I guess the best she could do is use a disposable OS (Tails) and VPN at the time of posting sensitive information online, and never use her whistleblower identity/handle outside that very narrow context.

Some newspapers (correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was NY Times) have even started running an .onion website where people can leave so called "dead drops".

I did, and it clearly says that other citizens were sending her information to post online. I don't know much about her situation, but presumably that wouldn't require her to be in the country.

And even if that's not the case, using Tor and not linking your online vigilante identity to your real identity (e.g. by having your whistleblower twitter account linked to your personal phone) is a very basic precaution.

I REALLY don't want to sound insensitive, but if people are going to use technology to fight people who wield the power of physical violence, they DO need to learn how to apply it properly.

If you're going to whistleblow on your local government online (be that a legitimate government, or a violent drug cartel), the only reasonably safe way to do it is from outside the country AND using Tor. It amazes me that people don't take these basic precautions.

Mexican cartels are known to have infiltrated ISPs, where they were able to tie IP addresses to identities. Using encryption is the only way.

EDIT: may I ask why the downvotes? Did I say something offensive or break the HN rules?