moosebear847

I was on a small team at an early-stage startup, and felt forced to do 7+ hours of good work every day due to pace and visibility.

As a self-proclaimed productive dev, it was pretty obvious who was slacking or incompetent, and I definitely had some dislike of them for that. It felt unfair that others could coast, or create buggy code and then spend time fixing it, while my higher quality output wasn't rewarded in a way I cared about ($$$). Knowing this was going on did also contribute in some way to demotivating me and maybe deciding to leave.

In the end, we are victims or volunteers. I volunteered for the position, I volunteered to stay to earn equity.

If we don't like something, we can always volunteer to fix our current situation, whether by negotiating or finding a better-suited role etc.

Why I am not religous:

1. Leap of faith is risky, while science is based on repeatable experiments. Kind of like when you're building a house, instead of hoping and praying the foundation is stable, test it to be certain.

2. Who knows who made these stories up? Could have been some guy high on mushrooms. I'd rather decide what's right for myself than blindly follow some unknown-source, unchanging-with-the-world and unexplained statements some dude probably made up.

I do agree with most of the ethics and morals of Christianity and similar religions. Society would probably be better if everyone abided by it.

But if they abide through religion then people would also be a little crazy because they're willing to believe things without proper supporting evidence.

What if the leader of the church says, "Yo God hit me up and said if we drown all non-believers in the holy pool tonight, we'll be chilling in heaven by this time tomorrow." I would want to know that my friends would act rationally and not do crazy things.

Playing a game like LoL is like being in a battle or war.

Would you watch anime and shoot your gun with 'muscle memory' while fighting 5 ruthless, intelligent opponents?

A fight requires constant reevaluation of the situation and planning to win the game. If you play by "muscle memory" and win, you are playing against weak unthinking opponents or getting carried by your team.

If you played against good players, trust me you won't win thinking about anime and chilling. And it's very stressful because you're constantly on guard.

Does this mean the dealership thinks they can sell it for $10K+ more now even used?

This was fun to read.

Dam that's brutal, to think that slavery can still happen here and now via essentially blackmail.

Faangs always seem to be hiring, not sure but having a LinkedIn seems to get inbound Faang recruiters, at least for me as a US dev. And startups, YC who's hiring has worked for friends, I'm sure grinding applications on aggregators like indeed, stackoverflow, angelist etc has some chance of working.

I think there are many straightforward answers. Try to get the $500k jobs. If that doesn't work and you don't want to grind LC for 6 months, go for $150-200k jobs like startups. If you are as good as you say you are, you could probably study/talk your way into a job or at least figure out what you need after applying to 100 startups.

I like this viewpoint, it strikes me as mature, realistic and customer-focused. I think I'll learn a lot from your book, thanks!

As an author of the book that's summarized, how do you feel about in-depth summaries of your book in terms of it affecting sales and providing publicity? I've always wondered how authors feel about it.

As an iOS dev who's had to deal with Apple's lovely rules, could you go more into this part? I'd like to hear more.

'... why "the market" hadn't already corrected [Apple's ability to cut people off], and why regulators hadn't.

Well expressed on cash applying barriers.

This hit in a different way

As a dog food lover (product dev, not Purina), I found this very insightful. I may frame it on my wall.

TurboTax recently tricked me using some dark UI patterns into spending 30+ minutes painstakingly filling out my tax forms in a way that made it seem like it was for the free filing.

Only at the very end, did they reveal that it was in fact for the paid version, with no way to change it to the free version and also keep the work. Essentially holding my work hostage.

So I had to redo it again in the hard-to-find free version. I am now anti-TurboTax for life.

The thought experiment is meant to take the situtation to the logical extreme, something that is unlikely to happen yet still realistically possible, in order to more clearly understand the effects of the behavior.

E.g. one guy littering isn't so big a deal, but it's clearer that littering is bad if everyone does it because the planet will get filthy fast.

It just seems like addressing the symptom, rather than the cause - that you shouldn't instantly whip out your big $20m legal stick to threaten someone.

Using a PR firm might result in him just having some nice sounding text, instead of understanding the error of his ways and fixing it.

That legal threat was not a good response. I think both sides messed up here.

It seems like the ex-intern made an honest mistake especially given his age. This isn't exactly the same but Helen Keller messed up and plagiarised when she was young before. People do dumb things, especially when they're young.

There is a small (to your point, pretty small) risk that it could be used in place of repl.it or inspire other competitors. If this was done by an outsider, this would be totally fine and healthy for consumers.

However, this is someone that the business helped out. One would hope that the person would reciprocate with positive value for the business, rather than negative value in the form of risk.

If you are interested I wrote another response alluding to the golden rule in a reply close by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431326

Rather than looking at it from the view of an employee or founder with power, I am attempting to view it through the lens of a good relationship between two people, with this being mainly defined through the golden rule - treating others as one wants to be treated.

It would seem to me that if I hadn't chosen to train and work with this person, he probably wouldn't have chosen this exact product to release out of all the possibilities in the world.

Let's say that he had an innate inclination for this exact product and would have done it even if he hadn't worked for me. Even then, he wouldn't have been privvy to the various and more detailed information that you are exposed to as an insider.

Going forward, I would be wary of any information I share with this person, given that it could work against me. This would definitely harm our relationship, and I would wish that this person would not do this to me.

If this were a fishing village, and the main thing to do around here was fishing, I would understand. There's not much choice there. But given that there are many different things this person could have worked on besides my exact product, my reaction would be, 'really man?'

As a thought experiment, if you ran a business, and all your ex-employees released a free version of the same product, would you be cool with this? Could you hang out with them, smile and say everything is totally cool?

Or would you want to ask them to not release free versions of your paid product?

Would this be considered product thread hijacking? The 'compliment' could also be interpreted as a disguised subtle diss (7wk product vs 2yr one)..

I really enjoyed this!

There does seem to be strong market pressure to have no more than 2 major platforms to support, and understandably so due to the amount of work.

Linux never became mainstream because of how poor the user experience was, not necessarily because there’s only room for 2 at the top. Even technically experienced people don’t want to muck around with drivers and deep-dive into configuration. Since few used linux, few apps were written for it.

I think there is usually room for new players, whether they have to usurp an existing one or have compatibility with others to do it.

All those companies were around before and during the existence of the iPhone. At least some had apps, and had an equal or better chance at having all those apps, so I wonder why they weren’t successful.

You have to start somewhere. If there were a good alternative, then adoption of it would drive gradual availability of these apps.

Sucks that I have to worry while reading their technical blog post that it's pretty likely that Facebook is tracking the fact that I'm reading their article.

I still haven't come across a convincing argument why Apple should be compelled by regulation to open up the iPhone and let anyone do anything they want with it, ie be a general purpose mobile computer.

It sucks that they simultaneously have (1) such restrictive policies on what you can do with your device and (2) a well-designed hardware and software ecosystem that serves as a foundation that's hard to move away from.

However, what's stopping others from coming out with a better, less restrictive alternative that benefits from the publicly visible work and lessons that Apple has done/taught us to get us to the great products we have today?

This would be a lot of work. It would require lots of investment of resources. But there's nothing explicitly stopping anyone else from doing this. With global hardware and software advances, and the mobile ecosystem becoming more mature and less changing, the technical moat between only Apple being able to make a good phone vs others doing the same is decreasing.

If Apple's behavior is unacceptable, we should move on to an alternative even if we have to create one to do so. An analogy of a relationship seems fitting. At the start of the relationship, it was all love, roses and fun dates. Now, years into the relationship, we are seeing that Apple is actually kind of a control freak and maybe not so good for us after all. Instead of futilely fighting with someone who won't change after so many fights, maybe we should use the free market to move on to a healthier relationship. There is no gun to our head forcing us to stay with Apple.

I personally dislike the fact that we aren't free to do what we want on our iPhones. But instead of being obsessed with Apple, maybe we should let Apple be Apple, and appreciate what they have contributed to the world. And then create the change in the world that we would like to see.

If you sold ice cream on the street and needed to figure out how to become profitable, would you be so opposed to trying out selling at $5 one day and $7 the next? Or would this be too unfair to the people that paid $5?

It's the intent I guess. The bartender story seems to imply a bad reason for the discrepancy (some type of unfair discrimination), while in this case it's to find out if you can charge more to eg capture back more of the value people are getting from you. Which doesn't seem so bad.

Most ICO money has already been spent in the bahamas. This is probably less of a joke than it appears :)

Atomic operations are made up of multiple instructions, but the atomic in the CS sense means that they need to be done together. This is a different concept from being made up of subatomic parts.