alehul

The best managers I've had, which I've tried to emulate, have been exactly the opposite.

Good managers know enough about their team to create their own "How to work with $coworker" guide for each and every direct report!

People vary (1) in how they best receive feedback, (2) in how much freedom and ambiguity they prefer in projects they're given, (3) in how often they want to meet, so on and so forth.

If you aren't able to adjust your communication and management style to fit the needs of your team members, in most cases you aren't cut out to manage — it'll only become worse as your team grows and becomes more diverse.

Disclaimer: this only applies to smaller companies (<100 employees). The author worked at a very large company, where employees are content to read the manager's 'user guide' to understand them better and try and thrive under them.

The better take here would be to simply call it a ‘right,’ as the actual report does, which colloquially for us generally refers to civil rights.

On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.

By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.

If people truly need to rely on the government for food, it would be absurdly inhumane of a society to let them starve.

Simultaneously, promoting reliance on the government and attempting to make that reliance universal has the potential to take away our freedoms.

Food stamps is an acceptable principle to Americans because it's meant to be temporary and need-based, and if you remove those two characteristics, it isn't just a reductio ad absurdum argument of taking the same concept further; it's entirely different.

If that's the case, then I would personally feel the same way!

What makes TikTok unique beyond growing like wildfire: their monetization strategy will be easier (the social aspect leads to relevant advertising), and their community is more stable!

The stable community is driven in part by their algorithms, which replace Instagram and Facebook's idea of a feed of those you follow. It gives more power to TikTok, in that you won't notice if some members of the community leave, and they can continue showing you content you'll enjoy from millions of other users.

To run through the list of companies you mentioned:

(1) Snapchat has a solid userbase that's likely to stay with it, and they're worth over $30b. They aren't profitable, but they chose that path when they focused on Spectacles above monetization, and paid engineers more than Google. A $50b valuation wouldn't be unheard of if they had 2x time-on-app as TikTok does.

(2) Vine had hundreds of millions of active users when it was shut down by Twitter.

(3) Tumblr is unique; they cut their own head off when they started removing content. They were always a niche service, without the mainstream appeal and without the ability to target their users with relevant advertising.

Instagram, acquired for $1b in 2012, had $0 revenue.

WhatsApp, acquired for $19b in 2014, had $10.2m revenue.

Based on TikTok's usage-per-day and active users being comparable to Instagram, they could presumably generate ~similar revenue if focused on it.

With these types of apps, growth comes first, and profitability comes later (and the profitability step seems to come easily, unless FB cannibalizes you).

If that's the case, do you believe FB is overvalued at $662B? Instagram, as of 2018, was estimated to be worth around $100B on its own (with about 1b MAUs, versus TikTok's 800m).

TikTok seems at least equally addictive, and its algorithm does a fantastic job at quickly showing good content that matches your interests.

It was really interesting to learn that U.S. bonds, which today we view as a low-risk inflation-beating investment, were actually used not just as an investment but as a representation of American pride.

[1] https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=W...

Tesla has made me believe that software 'eating' cars is the future because, by letting software take over capability from hardware, it allows for software updates to improve earlier models of cars, making them a better value long-term. The marginal cost of improving a car with a software update is essentially nil for the manufacturer.

With that low cost per unit to deploy a software update that improves the car, BMW choosing to hold it hostage and demanding a subscription fee is a bad look, even if it's efficient for them. Having the steering wheel already in the car with the necessary hardware (where the unit cost is for BMW) exposes it as being a feature cheap enough that they can throw the necessary hardware into every model.

Even if it made less economic sense, it would appear more valuable if you were able to go to a BMW dealership and have the steering wheel swapped out for one with heating enabled.

It seems disappointing that YC's value is no longer qualitatively good advice for early-stage founders and a close-knit community of hackers.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but it appears increasingly corporatized every year. Sometimes it feels like YC might as well be a certificate — just a stamp of approval that provides access to a network of investors and clout. (I'd love to be wrong on this).

This makes it at odds with Apple’s emphasis on privacy. (See Siri for another example of a service that’s hindered by Apple’s privacy standards).

[1] Many people will argue DuckDuckGo is okay, but by ‘right’ I mean competing with Google for the top slot for the everyday search user.

Considering the pay-over-time model that SolarCity implemented, should we not expect the same here? Assuming the user antenna can be removed, it can be rented, just like a modem or router.

Relying on the antennas having a long ‘useful life’, it may not be too prohibitive if rented out.

Per part 4 in the thread above, more military-style equipment appears to lead to a significant increase in police violence.

It's also worth reading for the rest of what does (and doesn't) work.

Link to full study on militarization and police violence: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

From my limited knowledge, the government of Hong Kong was quite liberal, which created its large economic inequality, low literacy rate, and high spot in the freedom index today. Many would argue it was too liberal in some senses.

Also, the lack of cooperation in poorer neighborhoods is largely due to respect for, or fear of, the criminals.

There's a lot more layers here - this 'shift' would require tons of slain officers, a lack of respect for the law, so on and so forth.

While I agree officers should do their best to serve the community, disarming them in dangerous areas isn't necessary to accomplish it.

In the UK, the criminals ~never have a gun (and less crime occurs), so it makes sense that the police wouldn't need guns either.

In the US, normal citizens are often legally armed, and criminals are very often illegally armed.

It would make no sense to tell an officer "you can't carry a gun" when both average citizens and the criminals have guns. While the UK undoubtedly has a fine model for itself, it can't be extrapolated to a country where gun ownership is so common.

Would that line apply when playing your young child in a game?

While warehouse workers could file suit under the National Labor Relations Act if fired for speaking publicly of their own working conditions, I'm not sure that Amazon's UX team would qualify (but again, IANAL).

To draw an analogy: Would a DoorDash engineer be safe speaking out against the working conditions of DoorDash drivers?

If you were employed by a company and disparaged them publicly, breaking company policy, would you believe that your employment with them is in any way protected?

Citizens being armed would both change the calculus of a genocide, making it harder to execute and possibly preventing it.

If attempted anyway, it would be much messier for the Nazis.

Also, to talk about how it’s hopeless to have a gun versus a drone — there aren’t enough drones, and Vietnam is a great counter-example for “tech always wins.”

What concerns me about whether Quill could succeed is: why would I choose this over Slack?

The whole 'threading' part could be accomplished via better onboarding and policy around Slack usage, and at the last startup I worked on, we were diligent about threading conversations on different topics already.

Is this a bet that tailoring the app around that 'threading' use-case and further encouraging its enforcement will be enough of a marginal improvement to take some market share, or is there more that's new here?

Also, what about those fun channels where you just chat and ramble with your colleagues about stuff outside of work hours? Would someone still need Slack for that, or would you have very large groups of DMs?

This is technically true and often-cited, but it's really misleading. Its 'creation' was more of a restructuring.

When ICE was created in 2003, it absorbed many parts of the United States Customs Service (founded 1789), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (founded 1933), and the Federal Protective Service (founded 1971).

Before ICE, the INS was responsible for arresting and deporting those who violated immigration laws.

All this aside, I'm sure we can agree:

(1) there's a correlation between (A) willingness to illegally immigrate and (B) the risk of deportation after crossing the border.

(2) that an increase in illegal immigration without governmental response would more closely resemble the concept of open borders.

I'm not commenting on whether that's right or wrong, but it certainly suggests that the left favors open borders.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/11/immigration-ice-ab...

Jack Welch was the child of a railroad conductor, born and raised outside Boston. He worked as a golf caddie, newspaper delivery boy, shoe salesman, and drill press operator, throughout middle school and high school.

Welch joined GE in 1960 as a junior engineer after his PhD in Chemical Engineering. He was frustrated with the bureaucracy, and planned on leaving, but decided to stay after an executive insisted he'd work on creating a small-company atmosphere.

In 1981 at the age of 45, he became the youngest-ever chairman & CEO of General Electric. He dismantled many layers of management, finally fulfilling his wish that nearly led to him leaving GE to begin with.

In his 20 years as CEO, he grew the company from $12 billion to $410 billion in market cap. Fortune magazine named him "Manager of the Century."

He fiercely believed in free markets. Even despite the comments in this thread on his anti-Climate Change perspective, he believed that "every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business", as that's what the people, and thus the markets, wanted.

Another interesting note: "Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

This would be half of Facebook's net income for an entire year, which is substantial. It's a big deal to them.

Who decides that your decision has been proven impaired, and how?