jparishy

I will sometimes do this when, for whatever reason, I don't want to capitalize that next letter. It's the 'T' in 'That'; too loud!

IMO the best innovations tend to happen when someone has their hands bound and has no other choices but to figure out a new way or die. Now seems like an incredible time for new models and startup paradigms.

To me I think VC's figured out a way to market a very specific way to build companies and convinced a lot of people it's the only way for 20-ish years. Then there was this sort of shift to selling to enterprise, I think because B2C got harder and easy money was the goal. By then a lot of enterprise design makers were probably in the networks of the people selling. There's a meme about YC-of-late being mostly companies that sell shovels to each other.

But when you optimize for enterprise, I think you end up losing a lot of diversity of opinion in where the value comes from, which leads to top-heavy companies.

My main issue is that after the ZIRP era I don't believe the money is gone or unavailable. It just seems to be hoarded for some reason. There is astronomical wealth out there that could be used for trying new economic models that compete with the last generation of VCs. But it isn't happening.

Maybe the next era of VC decision makers, the ones who themselves were funded on big bets, just don't have the same appetite for risk? Or maybe the era of "developing your brand" has made them not want to share their success? I'm not sure but it's weird to me.

Okay friend, I don’t think I’ll continue this but I hope one of us is right and the movie industry flourishes

Then you might be missing it as it’s a huge huge issue for below the line workers (actors are part of the package we’re shipping out to other countries)

my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.

To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.

The "tariff" we're talking about here would be for where the labor comes from. If a EU film company is choosing to film in the US instead of at home for cost reasons, then sure they can put a tariff on that somehow to keep it local. I don't think that's happening in any meaningful way, but it is in the reverse to the detriment of thousands and thousands of local jobs in LA, ATL, NY, etc.

you can see everyone willfully ignoring this here, which makes me nervous about actually solving this problem long term. I used to dream of screenwriting and that dream is almost certainly dead but I'd like to see others have a chance. It looks bleak now

i don't ask ppl who they voted for because i've learned it's not a good signal on whether they are nice or a good person. life is complicated. i didn't vote for trump though, so at least this village idiot has a clean conscience and just isn't interested in reliving 2017

mock the actors and builders and hvac technicians all you'd like, sorta reinforces the overall political landscape. not a great look imo

Who isn't asking for something to bring more production home? Studio execs? People in LA, ATL, etc want to work, and every year there is less and less jobs below the line in the US, even though there's more productions overall paid for by US companies. This sentiment you're talking about is at least not universal

It's about the production of movies, not the distribution of movies. I don't think people in this thread are reading the article. The original title of this submission didn't help.

The filmmaking industry is constantly flying productions all over the world to avoid paying US labor. Waste of time, money, energy. And the saved money isn't given back to the people making the movie, the unions are still constantly fighting with the industry for basic asks.

I don't see a problem here, this is what tariffs are actually for. Broken clock is right twice a day yada yada

eta: one can not like the man and not think this is a bad idea. same as we don't need more dolls from china and it's weird for us to suddenly die on that hill. /shrug

I had not, looks pretty cool but solves the inverse of the problem as I see it. I want a backend agnostic frontend toolset that is a GIS that I can customize to my needs. I don't want to implement the tools myself, that's too low level. I don't want the service to manage, control, or own the data, that's too high level. There's a sweet spot I don't think is being hit yet.

Similarly I see it as it an inevitable that you will deal with a problem related to these issues, then have a massive blocker if you aren't already familiar with the details because debugging requires more than a cursory understanding for hard problems. In the alternative, you don't know the problems exist and the code is broken. I don't think it's as simple as abstracting away the entire concept, which is what I would say is too high level like I mentioned above. I don't know the right answer here honestly, I think it will be disruptive when someone figures it out

I think we're mostly making the same point about complexity, ya.

To me, I think it's mostly a frontend problem stopping the spread of mapping in consumer apps. Backend geo is easy tbh. There is so much good, free tooling. Mapping frontend is hell and there is no good off the shelf solution I've seen. Some too low level, some too high level. I think we need a GIS-lite that is embeddable to hide the complexity and let app developers focus on their value add, and not paying the tax of having frontend developers fix endless issues with maps they don't understand.

edit: to clarify, I think there's a relationship between getting mapping valued by leadership such that the geo work can be even be done by analysts, and having more mapping tools exist in frontend apps such that those leaders see them and understand why geo matters. it needs to be more than just markers on the map, with broad exposure. hence my focus on frontend web. sorry if that felt disjointed

I work on geospatial apps and the software I think I am most excited about is https://felt.com/. I want to see them expand their tooling such that maps and data source authentication/authorization was controllable by the developer, to enable tenant isolation with proprietary data access. They could really disrupt how geospatial tech gets integrated into consumer apps.

This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this stuff is and it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc. I would replace a lot of my custom built mapping tools with Felt if it were possible, so I could focus on our core geospatial processes and not the code to display and play with it in the browser, which is almost as big if not bigger in terms of LOC to maintain.

As mentioned by another commenter, this DuckDB DX as described is basically the same as PostGIS too.

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other.

pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

Generally I agree with you, but I think MLB has actually been pretty responsive to the modern-era dynamic nature of the game. Love them or hate them, they're trying rule changes in the minor leagues and bringing up the ones that work. To me in particular I found the shift frustrating as a fan, and was glad to see a game rule to address it. I also like that they are willing to admit they're wrong, like with the juiced balls. MLB has lots of issues but I think they're doing a pretty good job keeping the sport alive given all the circumstances.

Very true. I dream to be able to hit off one of the fancy ones the players have at the facilities

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan)

Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings.

If the few players who are using this bat tend to hit that spot naturally, it makes a lot of sense to modify the bat to accommodate it, within the rules like they've done here. Hitting is super, super difficult especially today with how far we're pushing pitchers. Love seeing them try to innovate.

Plus, reminder, most of the team isn't using it. Judge clobbered the ball that day with his normal bat. Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game.

Very cool. I love these feeds.

A very common flow for me when I see something weird on adsb or fr24 is to grab the ICAO address of the plane and search it on https://app.airframes.io/ to see if it was sending out any ACARS messages so I can... see what the drama was ha!

It's a really fun hobby if you find this stuff interesting. You can pick up an SDR online for like $30 USD and be able to do all this without Internet, above your own home.

More and more I think these types of problems come down to (a) smaller attention spans, married with (b) dimensionality reduction, and (c) advertising optimization techniques.

Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z.

This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status.

So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression.

Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?".

This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words.

There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

Really cool. I've considered doing something similar for alerting me of things seen in the air but without a transponder turned on. Good tip about the birds, I wouldn't have anticipated that ha.

Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.

I guess I just don't think that's true when it comes to China? The VP attended the inauguration yesterday. But I could be naive, we'll see

Right, but they've been doing that for a while, to everyone. The US is much quieter about it, right? But you can twist this move and see how the gov would not want to display that level of investment within itself as it could be interpreted as a sign of aggression. but it makes sense to me that they'd have no issue working through corporations to achieve the same ends but now able to deny direct involvement

I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms

I think by biz heroes I mean people who I believe I can emulate and therefore want to be around more, which creates a feedback loop that makes me excited to start companies— which happened to me. I know they’re still amazing folks here, but is the feedback loop?

With the passage of time I’m not who they want in the big end of that funnel anymore anyway, so maybe I just don’t see it. But the founder class back then had an appeal that they don’t today to me. I’m sure it’s naïveté but I believed people wanted to change the world back then (while making money) and it was inspiring. Now I only believe people are in it for money, which is the opposite of inspiring

FWIW on HN circa 2012 when I joined, there were people I thought were biz heroes who posted here and that made the place feel smaller, and that dynamic is gone I think. I’m not sure it can be manufactured again either, in the age of personal brands

Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?

all the cloud vendors will work with you if you can potentially bring them business or make connections, and selling cloud to biz/gov is lucrative

then there's the bigger resellers like cdw or insight and companies like carahsoft and similar

some research firms looking at grants will work with you if you offer something innovative to add to their application

it's just making as many connections as possible, everyone wants to make money so just be honest with people and usually they're open to it

*fixed a typo

(opinions) picked up from doing enterprise/gov sales as a startup founder, relevant to early days of a saas mostly

- you can't outsource sales before pmf, and you probably don't have pmf yet

- talk to (at least) a potential customer every day, keep track of what you said and how they responded

- make and give your leads materials they can use to sell internally, figure out who makes decisions (probably not who you talked to first) and make sure it's relevant to them; you may need multiple versions

- aggressively think about pmf, don't worry too much about official definitions here. just ask yourself: "if i took a month long vacation, could sales ostensibly be on autopilot?" if no, you don't have it yet. if yes, take the vacation you're doing great

- look for pmf by making your idea smaller, not bigger, or you will waste money and time

- when you can make a product idea really tiny in scope, and someone will still pay for it, you've identified a strong pain point you can exploit (aka charge for). Build the product/platform around that, not the other way around. Never convince yourself you have to build a huge thing before you can sell it, you're most likely wrong. optimize for finding that tiny scope early on

- when i say look for or find or think about pmf i mean come up with a way to pitch your product, and then pitch it to someone new. then compare that to the last times you did it. you have to talk to a lot of people for this to work, way more than you think. your product will not sell itself, you will have to talk to a lot of people. as many as physically possible to get the feedback you need to create a sales cycle that runs without you i.e. pmf. this is something that took me multiple years to internalize. you're just never talking to enough potential customers

- don't ignore seo, and pick names that are easy to say and read; figure out where your customers consume media and get your content there. every business will be different here, and you gotta get creative

- something i saw on reddit that stuck with me: first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution. i operationalize this as: do not begin engineering a product until you're clear on how it will be marketed and sold, bonus points if you can convince someone to sign a contract saying they want it-- and remember in B2B/gov this can (should?) be a sales channel partner not just an end-user