lowkey_

As someone who loved Arc a lot and is still using it, this is sad to see. It also annoys me because they had such a clear path to success with such a huge head start. I was rooting for them. It was obvious there was an opportunity to build a much better browser, but the team couldn't figure out how to bring those changes into a browser we knew and were familiar with.

From my POV, it was mostly a product & design leadership failure. Ironic, because the team had phenomenal design and product work individually. They took a cheap way out with building a second browser, lost most of their userbase, and in doing so, admitted that users didn't want what they were building the way they were building it. It wasn't magical or intuitive, or else it would've been fine to build into Arc.

But instead of doing the hard overarching product & design work and making the tough calls, to build that roadmap step-by-step and add the magic, they decided they couldn't reconcile these two ideas into one, and needed two browsers.

One anecdote: Despite sharing mutual investors and connections with them, I never even heard back on any feature ideas or bug reports sent to the founder.

This is research conducted and published by an executive search firm in London, versus the mountains of actual academic studies somebody else linked on sentencing disparities.

Respectfully, do you think you're shifting goalposts?

Your argument was that women were more punished by law. The studies (as someone else linked) show that women are less punished by law.

You switched your argument to "powerful women," which would require a lot of evidence, because it is contrary to the statistical expectation from the previous data, that women of all kinds would be less punished by law than their male counterparts.

Now, your argument and the study you linked just refers to how many women get promoted and the attention and criticism they get, which is separate from our legal system.

Someone said it would "quickly be illegal to launch satellites without permits", then you/they found out that is already illegal, and you nitpicked about who you need permission from.

It feels like there's no feasible solution here that would please you guys.

Should we all democratically vote on every satellite launched into space individually? It's already our elected representatives that approve it.

Europe is too well-run (even the poorer parts) for Starlink to be as relevant.

Having lived in Central America, imagine all the workers that are laying the internet cables going back at night and digging them up to sell. A government that, 50% of the time, won't actually build anything when given the funding, and usually can't get the funding anyways. Plus, in some parts, weather can result in internet going out and, given the government, staying out for quite a while.

It's a fair point that those in poorer places will have less money, but for instance, Mexico's Starlink pricing is pretty standard, it's like 50-100 EUR per month. They pay it anyways because they need it, and because it's the best option.

Starlink is a great decentralization for anyone living under corrupt dysfunctional governments, where they can't rely on that centralized system.

Looks super cool and love the idea!

I saw Clerk and noticed that it says that they have verified 250 months runway. Maybe true but sounds crazy high.

Maybe if there's a specific article a verification is attributed to, you could add it being cited?

Anyways thanks for making this.

IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.

IANAL but a proud American haha, and we're very specific on not allowing ex post facto laws per our constitution. It would be a huge avenue for abuse of power by the government against the people.

The caveat I added to my initial comment that you also mentioned was that they could try to find a relevant existing law and retrofit it, e.g. general securities laws, and say that this is a securities market and so this has always been illegal — but it's very unlikely and I doubt it would work. Far, far more likely that we pass explicit laws about this.

> “If you commit insider trading on Kalshi, that can and will at some point be a federal crime. It is a federal crime,”

Am I misunderstanding? It seems like two different statements he always conflates.

If it becomes a federal crime at some point, it will become illegal from that point — you can't prosecute people for acts committed before they were crimes.

The only way that this could be a federal crime right now is if the government starts prosecuting it under existing laws without any changes. I don't see that as likely.

I had a pretty poor experience as a startup on Vanta. Maybe this is my own ignorance, but I told them when our contract was to renew that we do NOT want to renew. We were an early-stage startup soon to shut down and didn't need it. We never touched Vanta for 10 months before this, we never got SOC-2 (it was deprioritized). Not a single login in 10 months.

Nevertheless, they said it was: too late to opt out, that it can't be canceled or postponed, and then kept emailing us endlessly and sending to collections to pay them another $10K platform fee for the next year (more than we had in the company bank account).

I understand this with large corporations, but I don't think they're a good fit for startups.

I've put a lot of thought into hiring in this era, and what I've personally found works the best is:

Let them use their preferred setup and AI to the full extent they want, and evaluate their output and their methodology. Ask questions of "why did you choose X over Y", especially if you're skeptical, and see their reasoning. Ask what they'd do next with more time.

It's clear when a candidate can build an entire working product, end-to-end, in <1 day vs. someone who struggles to create a bug-free MVP and would take a week for the product.

In addition to the technical interview, hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible.

Taste and technical understanding of goals and implementation to reach those goals is the biggest differentiator now. AI can handle all the code and syntax, but it's not great at architecture yet - it defaults to what's mid if not otherwise instructed.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.

The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.

The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.

While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.

Not the OP but curious why you think so?

If this gives an extra 1% per se, I imagine that is more worth it to a company fresh off a large fundraise with a ton of cash in the bank.

Startups otherwise are lean and won't hold enough cash to get a meaningful return from the 1%.

I'd challenge that if you think they're fearmongering but don't see what they can gain from it (I agree it shows no obvious benefit for them), there's a pretty high probability they're not fearmongering.

A movement is better terminology than an organization, fair.

But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.

This is the one response here so far I agree with — I should've said movement to be more accurate.

Google "Antifa silences speaker," and you'll find literally hundreds of cases of exactly that (I just did to verify).

Definitely agree on which is worse! To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with the French raid. Just that statements about severe crimes (child sexual abuse for the above poster - not AI-generated content) being "lesser problems" compared to politics is a concerning measure of how people are thinking.

> The child abuse feels like a smaller problem compared to that risk.

I think we can and should all agree that child sexual abuse is a much larger and more serious problem than political leanings.

It's ironic as you're commenting about a social media platform, but I think it's frightening what social media has done to us with misinformation, vilification, and echo chambers, to think political leanings are worse than murder, rape, or child sexual abuse.

> Where I think we can legitimately say this is MAGA versus Republicans is in the reverse brain drain. America in the 1950s was a destination for top minds. Ameirca in the 2020s is not.

I do think it's counter-productive for America to make it harder for legal and talented immigrants, and we should fix that - but what's your evidence that America isn't still the world capital for the ambitious?

Statistically: The close competitors (e.g. Western Europe, Canada) are looking pretty dire economically compared to the US.

Anecdotally: I have friends from Estonia, Canada, the UK, and France that are all clamoring to be in America for the opportunity.

Historically: Post-WWII in the 1950s, 6.9% of the population was foreign-born. It's now 15.8%. So are we really more closed-off than we were then? Or is this just the response to the ever-increasing interest in immigrating because of the US being as compelling as it is?

You're just asking for the opposite of what AI does.

90-99% of an engineer's work isn't entirely novel coding that has never existed before, so by succeeding at what "already exists", it can take us to 10x-100x productivity.

The automation of all that work is groundbreaking in and of itself.

I think that, for a while into the future at least, humans will be relegated to generating that groundbreaking work, and the AI will increasingly handle the rest.

If I compared HN today and Reddit 5 years ago, I'd agree, but I'm still extremely grateful for HN as I tried looking at Reddit this year and it actually made me feel like there's an extremely misinformed, radical, brainwashing happening there. I've never seen so much misinformation and negativity in one place aside from Truth Social or Threads.

HN today is equivalent to Reddit 5 years ago: not as great as it was when smaller 10 years ago, but still better than Reddit today.

1) Years ago for work, I went deep investigating these; some of the team actually flew to China to see it all first-hand and verify the data. This is not a bunk narrative.

2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.

If I can ask on business model, as I have a friend with a similar predicament — what percent of the time do you find vulnerabilities in those audits? Do companies push back if you don't find vulnerabilities?

(1) Are you saying it's bad if they're upping engineer pay to be more competitive, or you're just skeptical that they will?

(2) I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best, rather than those desiring a stable, low-paying bureaucracy — I don't think that attracts the best people.

(3) On talent and recruiting: This is being done by the National Design Studio, it says at the bottom. That's led by a cofounder of Airbnb - I know one person who works at the National Design Studio and he's a phenomenal engineer. The administration also has the involvement of David Sacks, who founded Craft Ventures and is pretty well-known in SV. I think this is probably the most tech-competent the government will have been in a long time. I'm not crediting Trump at all for that, to be clear - just pointing out that tech talent in government seems to be getting better, not worse.

I didn't read it that way because Boom went through YC while Sam was president of YC. The connection makes a lot of sense, and dates back to pre-OpenAI days.

I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.

The above commenter's point was actually drawing a distinction between these, and "one-upping" by saying there was a difference, or worse one, out of these extremist ideologies.

I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.

Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.

Not the above poster, but:

OpenAI went closed (despite open literally being in the name) once they had the advantage. Meta also is going closed now that they've caught up.

Open-source makes sense to accelerate to catch up, but once ahead, closed will come back to retain advantage.

> In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.

I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.

Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].

In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.

In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).

[1] https://paulgraham.com/cities.html

Mamdani has said that (1) they'll open government-run stores, and (2) the government will seize buildings from bad landlords.

My family is from a communist country and I can assure you, that is communistic.