I thought "High Level Assembly" was a joke about getting the GDC or LLVM to run but, found out it's actually a language.
807 karma · joined December 29, 2010
THIS. So loudly this. Any kind of climate where asking the wrong question or expecting evidence for a claim automatically makes you a villain. And not a whimsical, comical fictional villain but, where people actively seek you out and try to get you fired for asking questions isn't something that people want to engage. There is too much risk and too little reward.
Speak out and you could lose your job, do the right thing and people will say "This is how it should have been the whole time". Even taking credit for a win in this area incorrectly will lead to villainy.
What I would love to see a case study company in tech that "spent 25% of their time on diversity and inclusion efforts" and did not just better than the baseline in tech but, made up for the opportunity cost.
That separation did good things like give people a reasonable expectation that what was presented was more or less unbiased facts. Now more than ever, we don't have that. If one is smart and looking for the truth, you have to cross-check with other sources.
One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect. I don't mean that conspiratorially, I mean I have to think, "Could someone profit from me thinking this is true?"
For everything. I wouldn't be surprised if someone manipulated the weather reports slightly to raise sales of coats and umbrellas. It'd be so easy and could make a significant difference. "Your Weather Report is brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory"
Brilliant programming that creates even billions of dollars of value for one of those companies isn't even going to net the engineer 1% of the value they create.
Per engineer, Google, Facebook, Apple make multiple millions of dollars in profit per fiscal year and yet very, very few engineers make $1m+. Even $500k is out of reach of most non-managerial engineers.
So, no if Google made 2x or 4x the profit with the same engineers, they company would pay them the same exact rate if they could. Often times they do.
The only way to really gain serious income is ownership of a technology that you can sell either directly to the market or to another company.
No matter how much you make, as an employee you are always trading lower risk for lower or linear rewards. The company compensates you for your years of experience at a market rate but, retains the fullest share of the profits that they can. They also own the code of your labor after you leave the company so there's that. You work (especially as a developer) makes the company money even after you've left.
If code wasn't so complex and hard to maintain, there would be even lower salaries (compared to profits) at software-based companies.
The idea that all will be hired or none will be hired is kinda odd as well. You are ceeding your career to bunch of other people in a non-entrepreneurial way. You are doing more work, giving more to Stripe than you are getting back. You are lowering their risk and not being compensated for that. Neither as a team nor as individuals.
It'd be interesting if you could collaborate and bid for your salaries as a group and/or make sure everyone got at least a minimum. It would be a failure if everyone in the group got the same amount.
The collective bargaining that would go on would be force multiplied in either direction. Either people wouldn't negotiate and companies like Stripe would get a great bargain of a team that already works together or they would get reamed as the team realizes that together they are more valuable than what they could bargain for individually.
Lastly, it's probably a risky move in that if a group leaves one company together successfully, they are more likely to move on from the second company together as well. If they are all working on the same project, you could have a disastrous and instantaneous brain-drain.
It's like building in a massive artificial bus factor into your company.
If people took an adversarial or merely valued their small in-group more than the company, they could get hired as a group, build an important system for Stripe and then en-masse, quit to create a consultancy and have Stripe as their first (reluctant) customer because they have knowledge of an important subsystem. In fact, this would be an excellent way to launch a consultancy.
Stripe, you may have opened a can of worms with this move. Teams hopping from startup to startup like individual employees do now would make startups even more chaotic.
Maybe they are banking on the downturn and think they can get high quality teams on the cheap. Seems like a way to open the business to alot of risk.
More people will use ride services when they are cheaper. Rides are a commodity. You will get there just as much with Uber as with Lyft. It doesn't make that big of a difference to most people. It's like the level of luxury in a car. I'm sure it's rare to find people not taking a Lyft or an Uber because the car didn't have leather seats.
I'm a daily user (to and from work, carless for over 18 months now) and I use the cheapest option. Historically it was Uber. Checked and for the past 4 months or so, it's be Lyft so I switched. Now it's back to Uber because of one reason, price.
The drivers on Lyft seem a bit happier and nicer but, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I'm not using a car service for the quality of a 10 minute conversation with a random stranger that I'll never see again.
Now, I work a job were I can easily get 8 hours of sleep a night. Sleep isn't everything but, if you can achieve 8 hours then you are headed in the right direction.
What helps me is taking time to listen to music. Not having in the background while doing other things, just sitting down and listening to your favorite album front to back. Finding times to slow down enough to do these things will help.
Also, I find that yoga is great but, don't get competitive with yourself. Actually just folding into childs pose or something else simple and easy to actively rest your body does wonders.
Lastly, we all work in an industry where there are many options, alot of flexability, alot of understanding of people not performing at 100%. Talk to people. So many of us have been there and yet we stay silent because we only see others' success and hide the struggle.
If you need to, change what you are doing. Change jobs, talk to co-founders, talk to your partner about figuring things out. Burn out can kill you.
Living in SOMA requires $120k/yr minimum to responsibly afford renting a 1 bdrm. Getting paid 20% less but, having housing costing 1/4 of what it is in SF is a win overall. And this is coming from someone who loves the tech scene in SF. So many smart people, so many great ideas, so much energy. But, to move there, I'd have to make at least $35k/yr more just to break even and that's living in a hovel in comparison to where I live now.
Some are worse than others but, all need to be fixed.
It also illustrates the complexity of security. The smallest decisions (a wordpress plugin), hosting your own wordpress web servers, using wordpress, can have on your security.
Whether you have an open door, an open window or an inside man to unlock it from the inside, they all leave you exposed.
In other words, in this future poor neighbourhoods would collapse like 3rd world countries while rich neighbourhoods would get hairline cracks in the drywall.
The non-profit should use a large, well known commercial bank for their business account, cut the students checks from there and give them a ride down to the local branch.
Bank of America for instance would take a BofA check, cash it for the full amount in cash the same day without taking a cut. It's what checks were originally designed to do.
I've been unbanked before and it sucks but, it's not impossible to overcome. Also, why are they give young people such large checks and/or money orders?
If it's a money order, you can get cashed at various places for free. All you need is legal government ID. The whole point of a money order is that it's pre-secured. The money is already set aside for it. The only thing to be done is to validate that it hasn't been cashed previously. In theory this is near zero-risk for the cash issuer.
It's not so much that we need to create more options, those exist. We need to educate people on this so that you aren't taken for a ride of 10%+ off of giving out cash for a money order.
People need to be more informed of the market options and understand how the market works. What the difference between a check and a money order is.
I grew up poor and had to educate myself on these matters. It's incredible that there aren't even basic financial literacy classes in middle school and high school.
These ideas contribute greatly to society in helping people become and stay financially stable which leads to a great number of social outcomes.
10% for cashing your paycheck is a hell of a hidden tax. Taking that 10% and using it wisely will in aggregate keep people out of poverty longer, let families be more stable, food secure, etc.
Software is a tool. The idea that hammer is imbued with the political views of the person who crafted it is a bit of romantic mysticism. The political actor is the person using the software.
To put it another way, if my software cared what my political opinions were, it wouldn't be used. One of the greatest freedoms afforded me by Free Software is freedom from others' political opinions on how to use said software.
If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust.
Nothing it trust-worthy any more. Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. Buzzfeed actually makes money by ignoring any idea of objectiveness or the separation between editorial and advertising.
I was all about it until I saw the price. Elevated for no reason. They sell it a premium price point to just give the illusion of extreme quality. It's made just like any other linen bed sheets you can buy with a few buttons to connect the top sheet to the duvet.
Someone could make a duvet with some buttons and sell it at 1/10th the price.
Soundcloud is awesome. It's needed, it's culturally important but, it doesn't make money. We should stop thinking of things like Soundcloud like business but, more like museums with infinite square footage.
We can pay the artists as patrons directly, we can pay tour guides who show us interesting and amazing things. We have decent micropayments. What's left is the thing that hackers aren't great at, the cultural work of changing public perception.
Most artists just want to eat, pay rent and live well enough to create more art. I love that Soundcloud allowed people to experiment, get good enough to book gigs and then I could see them live.
What we need is a system that does that efficiently. We need a better managerial structure than VCs + Founders. Soundcloud is a pretty solved problem, both technology wise and UI wise. What isn't solved is funding and management.
There are so many services that would be wonderful to have but, will never be $1bn+ exits for anyone.
Twitter should be. IMHO I think it will be eventually.
Every social network gets abandoned once people put up ads. It's pretty crazy that we live in a world where conversation, speech both personal and public are strip-mined for profit.
People will eventually realize that freedom costs something. Thankfully, technology should make that cost in dollars very cheap.
A Facebook scale social network could charge $1/yr and pull in $1.5bn/yr. A decentralized FB-scale network isn't trivial both technically and socially but, it's something that we as hackers should figure out.
A decentralized social network would be a huge win for freedom of speech, thought and information. Facebook already filters everything that people see. It's a centralized, easily subpoena-able entity.
The larger, much harder problem is how do you convince teenage girls to join a service. They are both the heavy users and set the communication norms for the next generation.
The next problem is how do you build something that is wanted by society but, don't do it by setting up a relationship with a VC looking to exit for 100X what they put in.
Once we solve those two issues, social and funding then the world will very quickly become a place where we can build things that are self-sustaining, less link rot, less invasion of privacy, less filtering of thought and speech by centralized powers.
A by-product of this might be an airline level of safety and after the accident investigation. There certainly would be the financial benefit for it. Once the autonomous car comes it will be safer than humans to start with and only become safer and safer with time. It might get to the point where we regularly travel at 90+ mph on the highway with barely a care in the world.
Ann is paid $170,000 in the Bay Area because that what all the other developers of her caliber are willing to exchange their time and expertise for.
A company would pay Ann $50,000 if it could. They only hire people who they think they will eventually make more from their labor than they will pay the person.
If you are Google, you will make roughly $1M per employee currently. For Software Developers that number is even higher, for Sr. Software Developers that number is even higher. The fact that how you get paid and how much value you generate don't have much of an effect on each other is basic capitalism.
What's smart is to be Ann, get a $170k salary and move to Costa Rica and keep the $170k because at the end of the day, she wouldn't have been hired if she didn't make more than $170k of value for the company.
Seems like another group of front-end developers who had too much time on their hands and instead of just writing a style guide on top of Bootstrap or Foundation, decided to rewrite the CSS styles below it as well.
Welcome to maintaining a separate status quo.
Let me know if they want to give contractual guarantees that certain APIs will be available.
Even if I'm wrong and they take off, condom delivery as a service isn't much of a service in itself. Anyone of the multiple alcohol delivery services would just add this as an item. How do people like this make it into Y-Combinator? Are the VCs trying to get laid? Or is this one of those uncomfortable risks that they keep talking about? Either way, I expect this to run out of runway soon or pivot to something completely different. The founder is a photo-journalist so I don't expect much.
One last thing is the importance of writing code in a static/typed language. It allows you to write and build things in a different style. It changed how I looked at programming and once I had learned another paradigm, I became far more interested in others. It led me to functional programming which in turn led me back to Object Oriented Programming and reading a bit more deeply about the theory of architecture. It made realize that most of my career, I was either using someone else's architecture or just hacking together the bare minimum for the task at hand without any thought of how the system could change and grow over time.
Home cleaning is a well established business. The market is well served by multiple traditional companies. A Bootstrap 3.0 website and mobile app aren't really going to change that much. It's an uphill battle and trying to take the Uber model of skirting worker protection laws is your only real source of competitive advantage over time.
The Verge is the same tech reporting that I can find elsewhere with better graphic design and an editorial style that trys to look a bit further than 5 inches past their nose.
In other words, The Verge has a low hurdle to jump over to be better than most tech writing. They are far from the best. Their coverage isn't very deep and their technologists aren't very insightful nor very good at predicting what's next. I find Ars Technica and Anandtech to be far better technically while not being nearly so smug and self-important as the Verge. Their greatest contribution so far has been their 10 minute wrapup of "All the things you need to know about tech conference X". That is merely the blog post of the youtube generation. Not insignificant but, nothing really groundbreaking nor the best of their industry.
While I haven't read nearly as much of the Awl, I have stumbled upon a few of their articles over the years and nothing has struck me as profoundly better than the rest. Just filled with the thought that they are.