Hacker News Reader

lquiston A PhD state of mind (2018)

This study does not seem very robust. How do we know that folks that enroll into PhD programs are not just more likely to have mental health issues? There is a positive correlation between IQ and mental health issues at least at the higher end of the scale and this could be a manifestation of that.

lquiston Redis Labs Raises a $60M Series E Round

This. The only exception being if the round is measured in billions. Cf Uber, etc.

lquiston Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

On the one hand I applaud KPCB for giving up their interest in a founder friendly way, but this also leaves a bad taste in my mouth and seems a bit “Heads I win, Tails you lose” from Sahil’s pov. The VC investment let him build a fully fledged product capable of breaking out. But it didn’t and he still got to keep the company without much liquidation preference. This is an example of a true VC subsidy.

lquiston Ask HN: If my company bills me out at $165/hr what should my salary be?

Based on financials I've seen of consultancies, staff are ~33% of revenue. Given a 70% utilization, that gives a salary of $80k fwiw

lquiston A Waymo One Rider’s Experiences Highlight Autonomous Rideshare’s Shortcomings

Blame the fact that people will pay for very few media sites. Realistically, Futurism’s choice is have ad supported content or don’t exist

lquiston Things we've learned about Series As

Is the YCA program available to non-YC companies?

lquiston Facebook to Invest $300m in Supporting Local News

Ah yes the bastion of journalistic quality that is local news...wait...what?

FB gets a lot of flak for fake news and then decides to invest in local news? Why not in institutions that set the standard for journalism and bring accountability such as Pro Publica?

lquiston Show HN: Squally – A Game to Teach Low Level Computer Science

Honest question: why? Why is low level computing the right thing to teach kids? Most people take the exact opposite approach to the extent they create very high level languages

lquiston SoftBank’s debt obsession

It's a risky structure but Softbank continues to hit it out of the park with bets at a size that nobody else can match. Also the positions can be liquidated it just takes time

lquiston Twilio to Acquire Sendgrid

Makes a lot of sense, and really smart to do it all-stock even if they're paying a premium to do so. This late into a bull market it offers Twilio significant downside protection on the deal.

lquiston Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

Link for this?

lquiston Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

Is severance normal at a startup or a game studio? I would think first priority would be contractual obligations (payroll, contractual severance, vendors, etc.) and then only then severance.

lquiston Cluep, a Canadian startup that raised just $500K, acquired for $40M

But bootstrapping has a binary definition. You have either raised money or you haven't. And there is a huge difference between $500k and $0. And I don't say that in the theoretical sense. I currently run a bootstrapped company that does $10m+ in revenue and $500k is still a huge amount of cash for us that would change the way that we conduct business. I can't imagine how big a difference it would have been in the early years of the business.

lquiston Cluep, a Canadian startup that raised just $500K, acquired for $40M

“Everyone loves a tale of a bootstrapped startup founder’s journey to an eight-figure exit.”

How is raising $500,000 bootstrapping?

lquiston Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?

Posted a Show HN about 6 years ago. On the front page for about half a day. We hold our cards close to our chest because ours is a competitive industry, so pardon the anonymity, but we are bootstrapped and did $10m+ in revenue last year with a healthy profit. Much love, HN :)

lquiston WeWork Backs Down on Employee Noncompete Requirements

This may not be representative of the average WeWork employee? A 3.5 Glassdoor rating (https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/WeWork-Reviews-E661275.htm) is pretty low

lquiston Groq, a Stealthy Startup Founded by Google’s TPU Team, Is Raising $60M

Is this competitive to NVIDIA's chips? How worried should they be?

lquiston Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

I’ve been a long time user of Evernote and have a love/hate relationship with the product. It really doesn’t know how to handle merge conflicts. I’ve been too lazy to switch but I’m starting to feel enough pain that I may make the leap. Edit:typos

lquiston Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?

I'm not an expert here, so pardon my ignorance, but isn't SV helping in a pretty big way just by open sourcing a lot of the tech?

lquiston Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

Congrats on the HN launch.

I remember you used to have more detailed nutritional information on your website. I recall this specifically because of noticing how much sodium is in the product. Am I misremembering? I guess a visit wayback machine would sort this out but thought I’d ask here first.

lquiston Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing

Interesting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?

lquiston Opera Limited files for a $115M US IPO

Also just a note that the IPO is to sell a fraction of the company, not the whole thing. So this allows the investors to monetize part of their investment, while retaining some.

lquiston AI Can Detect Illnesses in Human Breath

It will be more than a few months, but my understanding is that the FDA is now one of the fastest agencies to give approval in the world. See: https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-repays-industry-by-ru...

lquiston Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

$10bn in revenue and growing at a healthy clip

lquiston Bird is the fastest startup ever to reach a $1B valuation

That’s fair but if I may use some heuristics here if they are able to get investors like Sequoia and Accel the round is almost definitely competitive enough that they can dictate terms and get clean term sheets

lquiston Guide to Angel Investing

Entrepreneur has the best idea ever! He needs funds to build the product.

I believe it's best practice these days to use "they" as a neutral pronoun. It seems like a small thing, but these little things add up.

lquiston Remote Only

Came to the thread to say this. The site loses a lot of legitimacy by glossing over very real tradeoffs to having a fully remote team.

lquiston Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

An opposing viewpoint from Andy Grove's High Output Management:

Let's talk about surprises. If you have discharged supervisory responsibilities adequately throughout the year, holding regular one- on-one meetings and providing guidance when needed, there should never be surprises at a performance, right? Wrong. When you are using the worksheet, sometimes you come up with a message that will startle you. So what do you do? You're faced with either delivering the message or not, but if the purpose of the review is to improve your subordinate's performance, you must deliver it. Preferably, a review should not contain any surprises, but if you uncover one, swallow hard and bring it up.

lquiston Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

CLI tools also have the advantage that their developers don't have to waste their time building and maintaining a useless GUI, but can instead use the time to improve the tool itself

Maybe it's just me, but I stopped reading here b/c this language struck me as unnecessarily antagonistic. Just some feedback.

lquiston Diamonds Are Bullshit

Priceonomics is a YC company and I believe that posts by YC companies are highlighted to other YC founders, so that might be what leads to this article being upvoted on HN. I agree that it doesn’t make much sense when this is essentially content marketing that repackages a single, superior, primary source.

Edit/Update: I was incorrect here. Please see children comments