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I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this pattern a couple of times with close friends: they get obsessed with a topic, their sleep falls apart, they seem manic, and eventually they start doing really strange things online and crash and burn. They usually recover, but by then a lot of relationships are damaged and they’re left with a lot of shame.

Now I know these are symptoms of bipolar disorder/psychosis (they both eventually got professional treatment and told me much later), and I wish I’d known at the time so I could’ve helped. He’s bragging about sleeping 4 hours and joking about having cyber psychosis. [0]

Sleeping only 4 hours is a classic mania symptom.

I’m not as close to Garry, so I don’t know for sure, but some of the behavior feels very similar to what I’ve seen in my friends.

I hope Garry has people in his life who can help. At the very least, you have to sleep — poor sleep is strongly correlated with psychiatric conditions.

[0] https://youtu.be/W3YpC4Dvzso?t=929

Don’t mean to pick on you specifically, but this comment feels like a pretty good distillation of a certain mindset you often see in Googlers:

* we know better

* we judge everything against internal big-company standards

* we speak as if we’re setting the bar for “the industry”

Someone is openly pushing on a frontier, sharing rough experiments, and educating a huge number of people in the process — and the response is: “we can do better than this as an industry.”

Can you? When is Google launching something like this?

Could you provide more details? Although I've never had the opportunity to use Datadog at any of my previous positions, I am quite familiar with Grafana and I'm generally pretty happy with it.

What's the TL;DR for why Datadog is better?

I think you're missing the point. The idea is more that avoiding a victim mentality typically leads to better outcomes. This isn't a surefire guarantee, but statistically, it tends to yield more favorable results.

E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.

Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.

Anyone has any info on any specific teams that got cut?

ah, fair point

Genuinely curious — is there some jurisdiction where the law is "if the pedestrian is in the wrong it's fine to go over them"?

Similar story here. Me and my partner befriended another couple through grad school in our early 20s and the next few years were just the best — we would go to bars, movies, horse races, parties, shows — everything together. And we had so much fun. When I look back on that time it almost feels like I'm remembering a movie.

Then covid happened, they had to move. Most of my other friends moved away as well. I switched jobs and the new job is 100% remote. My life is hell right now in terms of human interactions and I don't really know how to fix it. I feel like in order to establish new relationships I'd have to spend a lot of time with other people doing something together. But between my job and my family I feel like I just don't have time for that.

I don't understand why so many people have such a hard time justifying this.

* If the bank collapses then many startups shut down. This is bad, but okay, maybe you think startups are net negative. In addition to that thousands of people will lose jobs — please explain how this is a good thing. Plus there's a potential for ripple effects from people not trusting banks anymore.

* You say it's a bunch of rich people profiting. Who are these rich people you're talking about? Bank management? They went to zero overnight. Shareholders? zero. Who's left? Garry Tan? He has the same incentives as millions of Americans whose retirement savings are parked in VC funds.

I want to say I'm one of those people who's not personally profiting from this, but I acknowledge that's not true — the economy is connected and stable economy is good for everyone and we should celebrate people who push for it.

Startups don’t hire CFOs until the revenue is in 10s of millions of ARR. And most companies don’t ever get there.

So how did you manage your treasury when you were running your businesses? Did you split it 10 ways? Did you buy t bills?

Stock Options?

How is it not? That’s what technological progress has always been doing for ages. That’s why we have all the good things.

I feel similarly. My favorite things about running a business are:

* The variety of problems I get to work on. I write code, I do sales calls, I manage people, I negotiate contracts, I do taxes, you get the idea. I really like learning things and I never get bored.

* I like the intensity. I have to do everything as well as I possibly can, and so I feel like I'm running at close to 100% efficiency at all times. It is very satisfying to feel that you're putting your best work you could.

Both of these things are rare at "normal" jobs. I was lucky enough to have similar experiences when I "worked for the man", but those experiences were never close in terms of quality or intensity.

See, generally speaking I don't think this is a bad deal.

I mean, I don't know the exact numbers / company profile. But I was in a similar situation 8 years ago. I could early exercise and I did. Estimating taxes was a pain (but a fun challenge too, lol). A couple of years ago they finally had a liquidity event and doing all these exercise shenanigans saved me a ton of money, so I'm glad I did that.

The business was doing well and I knew exactly what the risks were and I knew I could afford to lose that money. I joined early so it wasn't that much money to begin with.

I guess my point is that I wouldn't be too dismissive of early exercise / RSAs / etc — for the right kind of person / company it could be a great tool.

> I cannot with good conscience continue to support the Russian regime in any way, shape or form. People that are getting angry need to point that at the cause, their own government

I understand you have a lot of employees in Ukraine and you have to show support. Your heart is in the right place. I empathize and would try to do the same if I was in your shoes. But you didn't do a good job here, unfortunately.

When gitlab had to make a similar move [0] at least they had a good excuse — security of their customers' data.

Your message does not make any excuses like that. You straight up equate being russian / living in russia / whatever it is with supporting the war. You fell victim to the same primitive xenophobic thinking you're claiming to condemn.

This is a bad decision. Being a CEO is a tough job, but I think you could do better. I wish you luck.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437334

I'm having a hard time parsing why he would post this. Did he think he'd get customers? I doubt it. Investors? They already raised hundreds of millions.

To me it seems like the only thing he's going to get out of this is twitter followers. But at what cost? Are twitter followers that valuable? Why do some CEOs spend so much time growing their twitter audiences? Do they do it for recruiting? Is this really the best way for them to spend their time? Or is it just an ego thing?

Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.

Is there any good books for people new to ADHD diagnosis?

What kind of doctor do you go to with this? I’ve never gone to anyone other than my primary care doctor and the spectrum of titles mental health professionals have makes it all very confusing to me.

Yeah, but how are you going to get likes on those tweets?

I like the people I follow but they get like 5 likes on interesting things they have to say, and 500 likes on depressing takes like "computers were a mistake", or "everything is bad because capitalism" or fake uplifting content like "my title is senior engineer and I googled a thing today, normalize failure". I think twitter algorithm promotes that kind of content and I guess they have to adopt if they want their follower count to go up.

step 3 — quit reading twitter

Tell us about your first enterprise sale. How far along were you? How did you find the customer? How long was the process?

Also, congrats!

I don't know the whole story so maybe there is something more to your argument, but on face value this doesn't sound like a strong argument. Early stage investing is high volume, low involvement, low due diligence kind of thing.

I would be a lot more embarrassed if I invested 100M into a 10 years old company that turned out to be a fraud vs 500K into a brand new pre-product team.

Y Combinator.

I don't think it's the craziest idea, and in some circumstances I would probably do that, e.g if I had an extra house or two.

But even in that case I would try to take advantage of the frothy market before selling a house. Raising money is hard and takes a lot of effort even for people with connections and good credentials. But if you succeed it's probably going to be more money and much less financial risk for you.

The best advice I can give to you is try to join a startup accelerator. It sounds like I used to be in the same position as you are (no FAANG, no fancy degrees, not knowing any founders / investors, also a foreigner. I didn't have a house to sell though, lol). Joining a startup accelerator changed that very quickly for me and helped me raise money.

I've never worked at a big company and my immediate reaction is that I don't like this. It feels like most HN commentators share this kind of sentiment.

I'm genuinely wondering what people on the other side of this debate think about this. If you like having systems like this in your organization, what is it that you like about it?

I feel like in my case it would totally discourage me from actually trying to make the company do better and instead would make me focus too much on trying to please people who rate me on these criteria. But I guess maybe that happens in a large organization anyways. And I guess in that case it's nice to have at least some (albeit not perfect) set of rules. Is that kind of the idea for having these?

Thanks for the detailed response, this makes a lot of sense!

Some of these books are indeed trash, many have advice that's inapplicable to most people, a lot are based on anecdotal evidence, but some of them are alright and I read them and every once in a while I get something valuable out of it.

I think if you set your expectations right (e.g no book will make you happy / rich / whatever) they can be quite useful.

I'm not an expert in this field so maybe I'm missing some important context here, but this idea of preventing people from porting your software seems odd. Who cares if people make shitty ports? If they're not good then no one will use them. The whole thing also reads a little bit condescending.

Any time there's some popular public API, people will copy other people's projects built around this API and make them "better". I don't think Daniel Stenberg (author of cURL) is upset that there's HTTPie. I don't think it hurts cURL and I don't think it hurts the developer community as a whole.

I guess one could argue it would make life easier if there was just one HTTP library (or one eBPF library I guess). But that's just unrealistic, that's not how people work. Plus it removes the competition aspect which is nice to have for any project.

Is there any examples of open source projects that died because people were making too many ports?