It's not uncommon for potential acquirers to feign interest in a purchase so they can derail your business for months while your competition (their actual investments) pull ahead.
6,947 karma · joined February 24, 2011
Hey now, let's not discount the rise and fall of NoSQL, reinventing of data analysis except using python and spark cause SQL is too boring, or discovering linear regressions using a fleet of GPUs under the banner of Machine Learning!
It'll be nice when people get back to solving real business problems.
You shouldn't, you should always maximize your income. That wasn't my point. My point was the guy shouldn't interview at a 5-person bootstrapped startup and act bewildered when they cannot offer Facebook level comp packages.
> oligopoly
It's absolutely an oligopoly. There are a small number of firms who possess the capital to compete on salary and that creates a extremely high barrier to entry. It's not a bad thing, it's just the reality of the situation. There's plenty of options though, e.g. don't decide your HQ must be in San Francisco.
No, that's simply unfair to the companies who don't have billions of dollars in free cash flow or effectively infinite amounts of VC money.
The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war which has a side effect of creating an oligopoly on talent, as it's simply unrealistic to impossible for many firms to compete. Not to mention they apparently pay many people these sort of salaries to do basically nothing [1]: they've decided it's better to simply retain talent than risk them going to a competitor, regardless if they provide any value or not.
That all said, as an employee in whole debacle, you should simply focus your interviews on firms willing to pay these levels and maximize your income while you can.
Unfortunately we're still on the rise of the current hype cycle around Machine Learning, and prescriptive solutions are precisely what nearly every company who use the phrase "machine learning" are promising.
What is it? Because I highly doubt that statement. Ajax, DHTML, ActiveX, and Java Applets offered effectively the same solutions in the late 90s.
It's my view that Amazon themselves should be taking action on behalf of both consumers and sellers to ensure that: 1) products are authentic, and 2) consumers can get the best prices possible even if that's from an "unauthorized reseller"
But the story above is about actual counterfeit goods. Not people reselling wholesale goods for below MAPs to retail customers.
[1] https://pdfhost.io/v/zU6v@9u0_Microsoft_Word_TSI_complaint6d...
Based on what? Why would your gut reaction to this entire story be "I'm suspicious of that dollar amount" [1]?. The fact that it's revenue and not sales doesn't somehow make the headline false. It's still a loss of revenue.
The broader point of this story and others is that Amazon has a rampant counterfeit goods problem and they do little to nothing to ensure authenticity for consumers.
> where OP ironically appears to be ripping off from
It's a local news station. Watch the video. They interviewed the manufacturer. They likely read the original story and decided to bring additional attention to a local business.
So he spent $1k to learn GCP and K8s. That seems like money well spent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler%E2%80%93Noll%E2%80%93Vo...
[2] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4955...
If you already know programming and you're confident in your ability to continue self-teaching, I'd suggest you actually do a different route. MBA, Finance, Accounting, Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, etc. e.g. A good programmer who has a strong understanding of finance will do significantly better in FinTech than the programmer who has spent 4 years practicing CS theory.
If you want to make a real difference, learn a specific field and then use your technical skills to help them solve problems in ways they never imagined possible.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/case-studies/di-fm-eliminates-egr...
10 Gbps fully saturated delivers about 3300TB for that $1-2k/mo, versus the $22k/mo you'd pay AWS for the same.
I'm absolutely not talking about the "unlimited bandwdith" bullshit that discount hosts offer.
popular unmetered options: he.net, ovh, hetzner - You generally lose a lot of the "cloud" capability with these options however.
cloud options: digital ocean egress is $0.01/GB ($0.005/GB if you buy it via droplets), linode is $0.02/GB, vultr is $0.01/GB, etc.
[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=...
I have no affiliation with plaid, I've honestly only heard negative things about those guys, I was only empathizing with the difficulties in maintaining thousands of different scrapers and why I felt a scripting language provided far more latitude to get things done.
You would have a really difficult life in web scraping. You do not have the guarantees of well-formed data. Instead you get HTML with mismatched tags, JSON with newlines in the middle of strings, content that claims it's UTF-8 but upon closer inspection is actually GB2312, pagination endpoints with off-by-one errors, etc. It's an absolute mess and taking the stance of "well, they didn't encode their JSON correctly, so we're not going to operate on their data" isn't a very effective strategy.
> Which is especially bad when you're dealing with money transfers
Afaik Plaid is read-only. They fetch information from financial institutions and make it available through an API.
Plaid's use case here is automating logins, responding to captchas, manipulating those on-screen virtual keypads to respond to security questions, chaining together multiple HTTP requests, and then parsing out frequently invalid, rapidly changing, and just plain broken content from a wide multitude of banking websites.
> Your share ownership consists of just a number in a database on Schwab’s computers, and if Schwab wants to make that number floating-point that’s Schwab’s business.
But let's not act like Robinhood is doing anything new, innovative or difficult here. Numerous other brokerages have offered fractional shares for the past decade.
I first tried using pip under a venv to install it, and I ran into dependency hell. I needed various dev libs and build-essential on my ubuntu box and I ultimately couldn't get it to compile llvmlite correctly (linker issuers and way too many LLVM versions).
I finally gave up and tried miniconda on a fresh box per some advice here on HN. I simply installed it, ran "conda create -n myenv fastparquet" and it just worked first try. No extra effort involved.
I disagree. WeWork has 836 locations and 12.5k (now 10k) employees, or ~12-15 employees per location. Regus/IWG has 3,306 locations and 9.6k employees, or ~3 employees per location.
How is 4-5x the number of employees for a comparable non-tech company appropriate?