braza

I had similar experiences seeing WWII artifacts and museums in Romania, Hungary, London, Brussels, and Berlin.

In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on.

Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great.

Those places are to feel and have immersion.

In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only.

However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.

> Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.

I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this.

I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.

In this case, the core issue is still not the privatization intrinsically, but the mechanisms of corruption and competing interests with some other areas.

I'm not a free market absolutist or a privatization zealot, but I'm curious about the fact that England cannot come up with a privatization model that ensures clawback and exit clauses, measurable goals, and a clear investment plan for it.

Even Brazil 5 years ago made a Law for the universalization of water and sewage. The goals are given in a clear-cut way:

> The Sanitation Framework standardizes deadlines and criteria nationwide: by 2033, 99% of the population must have access to water. Today, 30 million Brazilians still lack this service. The country also needs to achieve 90% access to sewage collection and treatment, a service currently not provided to 90 million Brazilians. Furthermore, water losses must be reduced from the current 40% to 25%. [1]

> Since 2020, 59 auctions have been held in 20 states, benefiting 1,529 municipalities and more than 73 million people. The contracts provide for R$178 billion in direct investments and R$56.9 billion in concession fees, totaling more than R$234.9 billion committed to the sector (for the private investment). [2]

There the responsibility for water distribution and sewage is within municipalities, and the biggest issue is that small ones cannot finance such a kind of service that demands high upfront investment and maintenance costs.

The point that I want to make here, is that the biggest issue might be the lack of enforcement and regulatory effectiveness, plus bad legal framework and contracts.

[1] - https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2025/09/04/san....

[2] - https://www.gov.br/cidades/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-1/noticia...

> Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water.

But one can make a very fair argument where you can have a strong regulatory framework to ensure investment goals, exit clauses, and penalties in case of missing goals, no?

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies

An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?

As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.

I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].

[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

Of course, languages always have their pivotal moment when they become a factor widely adopted in the whole world.

I cannot say for the back and general usage, but at least for AI/ML definitely that moment happened between 2014 and 2016 when Theano, Caffe, and later 2015/16 Tensorflow cemented Python as the default for ML applications.

Ferrari F1 internal meme?[1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nCoxNLdUSaE

At least in some sort, this new venture market dynamics in those private markets is looking more similar with the Art market. I remember that J used to follow several private auctions where most of the auctioneers had some sort of ring where in time to time someone needed some liquidity.

Even in some situations where some artworks could have way less value at the public auction houses (Christie’s, Phillips, Sotheby's) their preference was to market between in this circuit of private auctions.

Not a Ponzi, but definitely some markup and valuation engineering.

Let’s say that Databricks has 100B valuation (just for the sake of simplicity).

They do this round, and due to this markup they can do acquisitions via stock option exchange. For instance, let’s say that you’re Neon, and you as a founder wants some sort of exit.

It’s preferable to get acquired for 1B with let’s say, 100Mi in cash and 900Mi in Databricks paper valuation shares; than to wait for a long process for an IPO.

If the mothership company (Databricks) goes public, you have liquidation and a good payday, or in meanwhile you can sell secondaries at a discount.

I know that we're writing on the Y Combinator-sponsored forum, but after the events of the Windsurf/Google fiasco, the exits of Instacart, and how the acquihire is scaling, is there any indication that SO is a really good incentive nowadays?

I think we come from different perspectives; you placed a more individualistic perspective on how things are good for your particular situation, and I am talking about a broader and more absolute part where, whether we like it or not, the whole tech investing and capital allocation makes a difference.

> The European principles that created your social guarantees are largely incompatible with an individual-centric, growth-focused society that would reward certain ambitious individuals much more than others.

I agree in terms of the negative correlation, but I do not think this is related only to this set of synthetic principles but also due to the huge tailwind of the longest peacetimein the continent's history plus all the economic development and prosperity generated during this time.

Not to dismiss your point, but in terms of semantics, we cannot mix general guidance for policies and decisions made based on temporal preferences with a principle, which is a fundamental truth that sets the foundation for something and has axiomatic acceptance.

I acknowledge that for ethno-Europeans the European principles (social guarantees) are a thing (especially for the ones in Central Europe), but as soon as the money flow slows down, we will see those principles being tested, particularly due to the contentious (unfair?) intergenerational social contract.

> And we don't care as much about money.

I think this is a very broad statement that does not reflect the reality on the ground for a significant amout of non-etnical-europeans.

Europe is a very diverse continent culturally speaking and also has a big immigration background, and those blank statements, while they're cool as a counter-narrative to the 'Europoor' memes, lack nuance in terms of the representation of what is going on.

I come from a significantly large cohort of demographics to the EU that was searching for upward mobility from a poverty/middle-class background in South America/India, and on the contrary (maybe our fellow Asians in Central Europe can agree here also), money matters. A lot.

If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.

But for a large part of the cohort that I mentioned, there's no family at max 3h flight, and money matters to help family abroad.

> Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)

This turns me off most of the time, but here we go...

VCs are just the capital allocators; most of the time those people represent family offices, institutional investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds that have some excess capital to allocate in several ways to have positive disproportionate positive returns, where those returns will subsidize the failed ones.

Capital for investment means that an ecosystem can start to work and you can have a flow of talent and capital, and it potentially flows to other parts of society—more explicitly, to the economy—but at the end of the day, it goes back to the public via taxes and public services.

If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.

> Europe does not have that talent pool nor do they actively retain or attract such talents.

Disagree. Not only does Europe have the demographics and educational institutions, but on top of that, it has very high social mobility [1].

I agree 100% related to the retention of talent, but I have a different perspective: I think there exist 2 kinds of retention, (I) environmental and institutional retention and (II) organizational retention.

At the (I), you have all the things that Europeans bring here when such discussions happen: accessibility to public health care, a range of public services, less inequality, access to education, and so on.

At the (II) come the big companies and their perks, mission, compensation, impact on society, organizational culture, rewarding mechanisms for ambition, and allow people work satisfaction. And a market large enough to allow some work mobility (change seats and plenty of opportunities).

Being in Central Europe, I can say we have (I) but are lacking at the (II).

I have been around for almost a decade, and my general impression is that people have some mixture of a bit of professional cope that sublimes to work contentment and, honestly, unless you have a big reason and/or financial offset to stay due to (I) personal circumstances, people that can have options will choose (II).

[1] - https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...

It never gets old "Stop Writing Classes"[1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0

> His meal was not long, for he did not favour elaborate food, saying that such food bothered his stomach and disturbed his memory. He drank clear and simple wine, light in colour, well cut, and not much quantity nor great variety. Like David, to rejoice his spirits, he listened willingly at the end of his meal to stringed instruments playing the sweetest possible music.

For me, the most curious thing here would be to know if a person in today's world in 5th percentile in wealth (i) would have (i) a larger life expectancy than a king in the 15th century, (ii) more food security, and (iii) more life opportunities.

Every time that I hear those stories from medieval times, as soon as I become fascinated by their tales and so on, I imagine how hard it would be to live there, even as a king.

Does someone know any reliable sources about that kind of comparison?

> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers.

I was an inexperienced manager in my late 20s managing a team with a very odd member composition (2 folks with +50 y/o, 3 folks with less than 21 y/o, and 2 apprentices (between 16-18)) and I related with it, but from the part where they became my good acquaintances.

At that time, at the time that some of them had serious problems**, I usually did step in to cover their shoes until their problem was solved. I did it from the outside because I wanted to have things done, but internally I did know that they would work hard for the team when others needed to go.

I got a lot of personal issues along the way (e.g., middle managers wanting to fire me because of their problems, other managers telling me (rightly) that I was wrong, and so on) but we definitely were in the mix for the top teams, and eventually everyone of the team got promoted in the time span that I was manager until 1 year after I left.

** - In that time there were some things like a DBA that ended up in jail, our trainee that had miscarriages a couple of times, an SWE that got hijacked in Colombia, and one apprentice whose parents divorced and she cannot work with us due to the custody agreement between her parents.

> The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions.

I had the experience to work in a scale up like Carta couple years ago where the company stoped to hire in NYC/Berlin and as far as I know they shifted their hiring to Philippines.

Fair play, the end of the day the company had their incentive structures to support this decision.

However, after that and other events I just started to do career movements towards companies that I know that I would bring unique features in my position (eg language skills, legal settings, specific regulatory knowledge, local compliance) to be more not entrenched but in a non-constant second thoughts professional relationships in a good sense or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).

I say that because I really do not like of this “Employee as a Service” where line an AWS console you just change the region and spin up labor like some EC2 machine; where in this scenario, you are seen as some expensive spot instance in us-east-1.

Maybe I am being highly defensive, but I do not see hereafter anything I that regard getting better since we have remote work and talent everywhere.

> Maybe it was all VC funded solutions looking for problems?

Remember, from 2020-2023 we had an entire movement to push a thing called "Modern data stack (MDS)" with big actors like a16z lecturing the market about it [1].

I am originally from Data. Never worked with anything out of the Data: DS, MLE, DE, MLOps and so on. One thing that I envy from other developer careers is to have bosses/leaders that had battle-tested knowledge around delivering things using pragmatic technologies.

Most of the "AI/Data Leaders" have at maximum 15-17 years of career dealing with those tools (and I am talking about some dinosaurs in a good sense that saw the DWH or Data Mining).

After 2018 we had an explosion of people working in PoCs or small projects at best, trying to mimic what the latest blog post from some big tech company pushed.

A lot of those guys are the bosses/leaders today, and worse, they were formed during a 0% interest environment, tons of hype around the technology, little to no scrutiny or business necessity for impact, upper management that did not understand really what those guys were doing, and in a space that wasn't easy for guys from other parts of tech to join easily and call it out (e.g., SRE, Backend, Design, Front-end, Systems Engineering, etc.).

In other words, it's quite simple to sell complexity or obscure technology for most of these people, and the current moment in tech is great because we have more guys from other disciplines chime in and share their knowledge on how to assess and implement technology.

[1] - https://a16z.com/emerging-architectures-for-modern-data-infr...

> History is full of “what if”s, what if something like DuckDB had existed in 2012? The main ingredients were there, vectorized query processing had already been invented in 2005. Would the now somewhat-silly-looking move to distributed systems for data analysis have ever happened?

I like the gist of the article, but the conclusion sounds like 20/20 hindsight.

All the elements were there, and the author nails it, but maybe the right incentive structure wasn't there to create the conditions to make it able to be done.

Between 2010 and 2015, there was a genuine feeling from almost all industry that we would converge to massive amounts of data, because until this time, the industry had never faced a time with so much abundance of data in terms of data capture and ease of placing sensors everywhere.

The natural step in this scenario won't be, most of the time, something like "let's find efficient ways to do it with the same capacity" but instead "let's invest to be able to process this in a distributed manner independent of the volume that we can have."

It's the same thing between OpenAI/ChatGPT and DeepSeek, where one can say that the math was always there, but the first runner was OpenAI with something less efficient but with a different set of incentive structures.

This has the same energy of this article named "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster" [1]

[1] - https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

I don't think this is adequately addressed by the "complicated vs. complex" framing—especially not when the distinction is made using reductive examples like taxes (structured, bureaucratic, highly formalized) versus climate change (broad, urgent, signaling-heavy).

That doesn’t feel right.

Let me bring a non-trivial, concrete example—something mundane: “ePOD,” which refers to Electronic Proof of Delivery.

ePOD, in terms of technical implementation, can be complex to design for all logistics companies out there like Flexport, Amazon, DHL, UPS, and so on.

The implementation itself—e.g., the box with a signature open-drawing field and a "confirm" button—can be as complex as they want from a pure technical perspective.

Now comes, for me at least, the complex part: in some logistics companies, the ePOD adoption rate is circa 46%. In other words, in 54% of all deliveries, you do not have a real-time (not before 36–48 hours) way to know and track whether the person received the goods or not. Unsurprisingly, most of those are still done on paper. And we have:

- Truck drivers are often independent contractors.

- Rural or low-tech regions lack infrastructure.

- Incentive structures don’t align.

- Digitization workflows involve physical paper handoffs, WhatsApp messages, or third-party scans.

So the real complexity isn't only "technical implementation of ePOD" but; "having the ePOD, how to maximize it's adoption/coverage with a lot uncertainty, fragmentation, and human unpredictability on the ground?".

That’s not just complicated, it’s complex 'cause we have: - Socio-technical constraints,

- Behavioral incentives,

- Operational logistics,

- Fragmented accountability,

- And incomplete or delayed data.

We went off the highly controlled scenario (arbitrarily bounded technical implementation) that could be considered complicated (if we want to be reductionist, as the OP has done), and now we’re navigating uncertainty and N amount of issues that can go wrong.

One of my pet peeves with the usage of complex(ity) out of the traditional time/space in computer science is that most of the time the OPs of several articles over the internet do not make the distinction between boundaried/arbitrary complexity, where most of the time the person has most of the control of what is being implemented, and domain/accidental/environmental complexity, which is wide open and carries a lot of intrinsic and most of the time unsolvable constraints.

Yes, they are Google; yes, they have a great pool of talent around; yes, they do a lot of hard stuff; but most of the time when I read those articles, I miss those kinds of distinctions.

Not lowballing the guys at Google, they do amazing stuff, but in some domains of domain/accidental/environmental complexity (e.g. sea logistics, manufacturing, industry, etc.) where most of the time you do not have the data, I believe that they are way more complex/harder than most of the problems that the ones that they deal with.

If there’s one place in the internet that people can be sincere, probably it will be here in a YC Combinator forum.

Said that… There’s a lot of interesting perspectives:

From YC: it’s a logical and quite unique business decision. YC can capitalize on a very weak moment of a gigantic moment from government support and general public sentiment.

At the end we’re in an all knives out and YC is taking the opportunistic route because it has economic interest in the Google break down.

From Google: I think we can think that the era of “cool monopoly” is officially over and Microsoft was right all the time. Be boring, be ruthless, be the only one. No amount of public good press for more than 1 decade will save your nice monopoly to fall from grace.

From the USA: will be interesting to see if the administration will celebrate it, since Google whether we like it or not, is one instrument I of soft power and influence of the American interest around the work. How the tradeoff of limit its reach due new foreign players or how pulverised market will help their policies its something to wait and see.

Form a personal perspective: as a consumer, and future candidate for a YC founding company I think have Google broke down to have 50 new SaaS selling their services for 9,99 per month, won’t be a net benefit.

Being completely honest: I prefer that the Google shareholders thar contains big billionaires and pension funds tied with retirements plus public regulatory and scrutiny it’s a way better alternative than 60 new SaaS tied with all private interests of Paul Graham VC family office or David Sachs/Chammath offices.

> Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.

Hard to agree on this one.

Most of the time when I’m the country side of Hungary and some Nordic countries Google Translator it’s essential for communication of foreigners that lives I those places. I can tell several anecdotes of international people being able to communicate with their local in-laws via Google Translator conversational feature; or even cases of people being able to read after a mechanical translation.

+1.

Someone nailed it in the thread above related to the -time/+money, but after a couple of years working on it, I realized that the people that use those services are not the public that would go to a restaurant for a gastronomic experience, and that's ok.

At least for me, the biggest 3rd or maybe 4th order effect of the food delivery industry and their dark/gray kitchens is that the concept of having a nice cooked meal locally is almost over, with some exceptions.

Due to the over-optimization of the kitchens and the offset in terms of revenue that restaurants can have (i.e., orders without increasing the real estate), we have a bunch of pre-set mounted meals in almost all restaurants, and the probability of eating something tasty and unique is very low due to that.

The irony is that, at least in my experience, the best non-chain and/or fine restaurants that I found were the ones in some shopping centers in the Nordics for a simple accidental association: none of those has any possibility to have food delivery due to hard physical constraints, and my assumption is that, since they do not have this possibility, they have to deliver the best meal possible to have people return and build a positive reputation.

> What is the incentive really? > I would maybe understand, but they aren't even available in a wider than a small radius around your house, so it is always more convenient to walk/cycle/drive to wherever you would order that food anyway.

I know that you mentioned the incentive from the customer perspective, but since I've worked in 2 of the top 5 world food delivery companies, I can have some insights about it beyond people's laziness.

1) Availability of different cuisines regardless of distance: If you're talking about a bikeable, small-sized European capital or city with a limited number of restaurants, yes—you can place your order in person without any issue. But if you're in a mid-sized city with a high variety of restaurants, like Berlin, that’s not feasible. Most of the time, people don't use the app to order from the local pizza place; they use it to get a nice Indian, Japanese, Nepalese, or Thai dish from a restaurant 6 to 10 km away, especially on a rainy Friday.

2) It’s hard for restaurants to coordinate table bookings with walk-ins: Many restaurants join the platform because, while they can manage bookings and some fixed demand, they also risk losing walk-in customers (dynamic demand) when there's no space available. What restaurants do now is manage both bookings and walk-ins without worrying about losing revenue—because delivery can make up for no-shows or frustrated walk-ins.

3) Food delivery removes waiting logistics: If you walk, cycle, or drive, you incur the full logistics cost plus the opportunity cost (e.g., if you're organizing an event and need to set aside an hour for food). With delivery platforms, you can "actively wait"—you place the order through the app and do other things while waiting. You’re paying for both the logistics and the saved opportunity cost.

4) Restaurants can optimize menus and kitchen efficiency instead of real estate: This relates to point 2. In my experience, restaurants are becoming more like a front-end experience for dine-in customers, but many are transforming into what could be called "kitchens as a service." Customers order remotely, and a highly optimized kitchen, in terms of logistics and execution, prepares a specific dish. One thing I've noticed—and personally feel conflicted about—is that restaurants are betting on hyper-optimization by selling more of what I call "pre-mounted standardized dishes." In other words, instead of restaurants thinking about increasing their space to accommodate potential walk-ins, they will move towards maximizing kitchen efficiency.

Example: In Brazilian food restaurants, they have preset portions of rice, beans, French fries, and salad, and just reheat pre-cooked steak. For Thai food, they keep cold dressings in containers, and all noodles are pre-cooked and stored in warmers, and so on.

> As you can imagine, this is highly unattractive to skilled engineers who know their worth. No one sane wants to leave a high-paying cushy job to work for (not with) a bossy guy while battling the already intense stressors of Entrepreneurship.

I can relate to that. I am creating a small product and more than the salary, I want to escape 9-5 because I want to exercise product and technical agency that I do not have in my current job, and going from that to not have an increased level of agency working for someone, especially for a co-founder.

> AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0. > But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself.

I would be the first to pay if we have a GenAI that does that.

For a long time I had a issue with a thing that I found out that was normal for other people that is the concept of dreaming.

For years I did not know what was about, or how looks like during the night have dreams about anything due to a light CWS and I really would love to have something in that regard that I could visualise some kind of hyper personalized move that I could watch in some virtual reality setting to help me to know how looks like to dream, even in some kind of awake mode.

Honest question: what does it mean this new pricing that every product has today in terms of “credits”.

Sounds quite apache given the fact that you will need to track utilisation all the time for something like prompting.

Does someone has any insight on why the old flat pricing or utilisation prices are not in those new AI products where we have this abstract concept as credit?