882 karma · joined May 8, 2017
Because some people - myself included - like the taste of meat, and would only choose the veggie version for environmental (or economic) reasons if the taste were basically the same.
Giving up 80% for the first customer? That's a big ask.
Someone noteworthy said that 50% of building a business is going from 0 to 1 customer. The other half is going from 1 to many customers.
That being said, this person is assuming a lot of risk that the partner is flaky and doesn't follow through, that financing won't be available, etc etc.
In reality, I suspect they're probably building out a 4-6 week MVP, getting a couple of customers, then selling the business as a "turnkey startup" for ~$50k (of which they get 80%/$40k). Not a bad proposition.
Would you mind sharing?
1) As far as I know, the overpaid expat days are over. A lot of Chinese have returned from long stints overseas, and they're bringing that experience back with them. If you want a good position, now you actually need to offer something unique.
2) It's not impossible, but you will struggle if you can't speak Chinese. It's funny how this working generation were all forced to learn English at school, but many of them can barely string a few words together. Depends on your industry, of course.
3) Most of your business interactions will be unpleasant. Chinese companies will lie, cheat, steal, and anything they can to sell you down the river. Most of your time will be spent watching your back and trying not to get screwed. Same goes for employees.
4) The pollution is horrible, and one of the main reasons why so many people left at the same time I did.
5) Managing teams can be a nightmare. Chinese employees love empire building, and their answer to any problem is "you need to give me more people".
6) Decisions are very much top-down, and noone wants to second-guess the boss. This means companies are constantly lurching from long periods of inaction (waiting for the CEO/ Chairman to make a decision) to mad sprints/crunch time (once they make a decision and insist that it be carried out in a ridiculous timeframe).
7) "Face-time" is very much a thing. Many employees are working 12 hour days, but most of that is spent on WeChat/mobile games/etc.
In short, would I recommend someone do it? Yes - if you can speak Chinese, have no kids and can swing a well-paid, time-limited posting (say 2 years) with your existing company.
It's an eye-opening experience and really makes you value things that you take for granted in the West.
In all seriousness, this is cool. Are there any writeups about the state of ASICs for ML? I understand Google TPUs to be the same thing but I have no clue what’s going on under the hood.
But in simple terms - they suck, they're loud, and I'm pretty sure the company will tank in the next few years.
Financially speaking, Fortnite (and its F2P antecedents) have found a business model that's clearly superior to the traditional "boxed release" models (for want of a better description). They've hit upon a formula that makes them some serious cheese, no two ways about it.
But I have to wonder - to what end? Does this actually create a better experience? At some point aren't you just taking your users for suckers, finding more and more ways to squeeze every last dollar out of them?
What happened to the Valve of Half Life, Portal and TF2? What happened to the dedicated band of creatives who just wanted to make awesome games that entertained people? When did they decide "Fuck it, let's throw all that away and just make as much money as possible?"
And now they're suggesting plugging into your brain to find even more ways to stamp out the childlike joy that we all used to have?
I know it's hard to turn away a billion dollar company. But is this kind of success really what they wanted to build when they started? Do they honestly feel they've made the world a more fun place?
To some extent, it has me questioning capitalism's role in the fabric of society. I mean, clearly it is an efficient use of resources - players wouldn't be paying money if they didn't value the experience in some form or another. But that doesn't mean they're enjoying it. Slots players surely aren't having "fun" when they're pumping thousands of dollars through the casinos, but they still do it.
Very meandering rant, I know. But I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way.
The application process requires you to select a Chinese city/postcode.
If your funding arrangement allows a minority investor to veto future fundraising, subordinate liquidation preferences, etc etc, they can kill your company.
Of course, most deals aren't on such onerous terms - but they do happen.
Aren’t these two points contradictory? When acquisition opportunities are plentiful, people are more likely to start/invest in companies, leading to more innovation and development, no?
What I loathe - to my very core - is most of the social networking ecosystem that's developed to support ad delivery.
The constant whinging, outrage, passive-aggressiveness, and superficiality on display via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others is deeply disheartening.
Pre-social media, the internet wasn't this shrieking cacophony that we have now.
I'm on DDG for my primary search engine too, but
(a) I fall back to !G for at least 50% of my queries. (b) You and I are a tiny, tiny minority. DDG users are not even a fraction of a rounding error in the global search userbase.
DDG is nowhere near being a serious threat to Google - it may well in future, but right now, Google still rules the roost (Facebook being the only other equal). You only need to look at their respective financials to confirm it.
That being said, I don't have any personal experience because, well, I don't have AMD GPUs to play around with.
The $64,000 is - would they have reached this position without the initial venture capital?
I assume they burned a lot of money to get initial mindshare/awareness amongst creators.
Without that, they may have died on the vine (or had a competitor swoop in to cut their lunch).
Have you ever tried contacting them? It's all offshored to India/Phillipines. They refused to honour their GSuite free credit offer, then hung up on me when I insisted they escalate the problem. The difference between their outbound sales lines and their inbound support lines are laughable.
I assume it's better when you're pumping hundreds of thousands through them every month. Even so, it inspires zero confidence in Google as a customer-facing organization.
As far as I'm concerned, Google gives zero fucks about individual paying customers. It's obvious why this is so - their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors, and it's so dominant that it's a licence to print money. They don't need to offer you good support, because you need them.
It's also why I don't hold out much hope for Stadia - an ecosystem that relies on developer goodwill needs excellent front-facing support, and Google just doesn't do that.
As a side note, I truly believe Amazon is well positioned to invade search and dethrone Google (though it would be a case of "The King is dead. Long live the King!").
Sure, money gets wasted on benefits programs and other government departments.
But - if the article is true - these are dwarfed by the absolutely galactic amounts of money that seemingly disappear into the US military black hole. The amounts are staggering. Any discussion about government waste which does not include wasted defence spending is intellectually hypocritical.
Given how political it is, the problem won't be easily solved. But surely this is the type of challenge that has a technical solution (and no - a military-wide ERP does not qualify). I guess there were some vaguely promising ideas around blockchain-based solutions; presumably these died on the vine for the same political reasons that shared ERP systems wouldn't work - the solution can't assume cooperation between branches/departments.
The endocrinology and psychology of "why do we feel hungry?" and "why do we overeat?" are incredibly important to weight loss.
That's not to say that you can't lose weight with caloric restriction - of course you can. But noone in the CICO* crowd can explain why most people struggle with it. It's easy to chalk it up to "weak-minded fatties". The more interesting question is - could we bolster the weak-minded through nutritional adjustment, supplements or fecal transplants?
* Calories-in, calories-out
For now, I think it's much more important to change your habits and mindset around eating, then see how your body responds.
True, noone can store more energy than you ingest.
But - as the article says - it's very difficult to know exactly how much you're ingesting. The calorimeter is a very blunt way of determining how much energy is "in" food - not only do food labels probably routinely understate how much energy something contains, it has no way of explaining how that energy is actually digested or metabolized by the human body.
Many people calculate their diet based on very slim (~500 kcal) margins. It's conceivable that these are obliterated by these small fluctuations in actual vs labelled calorific content.
That's without getting into issues like insulin sensitivity and so on.
My go-to recommendation for people trying to lose weight is eliminate all sugar and simple/starchy carbohydrates and start a fairly light exercise program. This will have a marked impact on appetite, and most people will naturally start losing weight. If weight loss stalls, start playing around with meal portions and feeding windows.
So far, I haven't heard of anyone who hasn't lose weight with this routine.
But ethics can become a lot more flexible when someone's dangling a few million in stock options in front of your face.
This is just my personal opinion, but I (and my circle) have found Discord to have the worst UI of any mainstream application.
First, there's only a dark theme, which I find much more difficult to read than Slack's default light theme.
Every window (native client) is crammed full of widgets, making it very difficult for fresh users to figure out which button to click to invite people.
It's also constantly firing off unread notifications, adding more and more density to the UI. It makes it very difficult to instantly know where to look.
As another example, I just fired up the desktop client and created a random server - and now I literally have no idea how to delete or disconnect from it.
I'm not a fan of Slack for other reasons, but its UI is far, far superior to Discord.
I take all the internet commentary about low insulin levels (etc) with a grain of salt. I just don't know enough about endocrinology or the current state of research.
That being said, higher carbohydrate intake causes a noticeable spike in how hungry I feel. If I have a moderately carb-heavy dinner (50-100g), I'm ravenous when I wake up, and mentally I'm a lot fuzzier.
Then, like clockwork, they both disappear around 3pm, which I assume coincides with the switch over from metabolizing glycogen to fatty acids.
If I keep carbs under 20g, I'm fine from the moment I wake up. I have mild sensations of hunger later in the day, but nothing like the pangs I get on the higher carb diet.
This seems to be well documented, and most people on the keto diet report similar experiences.
Do you think this hormonal response has no impact on weight loss (or, for that matter, muscle gain)?
You've just proved my point - what I might consider "handling a fragile ego with kid-gloves", you would consider to be "handling professionally with dignity and respect". It's all very subjective.
I think we would agree that a company's leaders need to be consistent and clear where they think the line is, and keep an eye on performance levels to determine if they've made a mistake.
An audio clip of Stephen Wolfram was recently posted on HN, in which he was dealing with a couple of team members on their API documentation.
Some described it as "toxic bullying", but even more said "That is incredibly tame and I take no issue with it". I fell into the latter.
Some people are a whole lot more fragile than others.
That kind of transparency really helps build confidence in Microsoft Store as a platform. It's important to show that the team is accessible (and, frankly, human). It also helps to correct misleading narratives (e.g. "MS Store doesn't Electron apps").
Whenever Atlassian is mentioned on HN, at least 75% of the comments are complaints about the product - it’s crap, it’s slow, buggy, whatever.
But the company behind it has turned into a juggernaut.
Lesson being that - product isn’t nearly as important as distribution and sales strategy - be wary of asking HN for business advice (flashbacks of “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”