jm20

It's so funny. Every single time a company raises a ton of money at a large valuation, the comments are always filled with "how do they justify this valuation" or "they aren't work X...because Y and Z do the same thing".

VC math is pretty simple - at the end of the day, there's a pretty large likelihood that at least 1 AI company is going to reach a trillion dollar valuation. VCs want to find that company.

OpenAI, while definitely not the only player, is the most "mainstream". Your average teacher or mechanic uses "chatgpt" and "AI" interchangeably. There's a ton of value in becoming a vowel, even if other technically superior competitors exist.

Furthermore, the math changes at this level. No investor here is investing at a $300B valuation expecting a 10x. They're probably expecting a 3x or even a 2x. If they put in 300MM, they still end up with 600-900MM.

This isn't math on revenue, it's a bet. And if you think in terms of risk-adjusted bets, hoping the most mainstream AI company today might at least double your money in the next ten years in a red-hot AI market is not as wild as it seems.

The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology.

Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…

Odds are this is a dev shop with more than one person doing at least some things. It would explain how “he” was able to get so many jobs and maintain appearances. And a lot of startups don’t have the best screening processes to begin with (have a beer with a founder, check out their source code, you’re hired!). This is exactly the place where the structure and processes of larger companies can be a benefit. And even then, people work multiple jobs and get away with it. It’s become popular post COVID.

Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.

Student visas tied into tech hiring, so it's at least tangentially related. But I agree, that should've probably been scrubbed as well.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted. It's literally in the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Trump's court battles are hardly a new interesting phenomenon.

Nintendo has never competed on graphics. They compete on having the most fun, accessible, entertaining games as possible. And say what you will about their business practices, they’ve probably done a better job of that than any other gaming company in history. As more devs bundle ever higher quality graphics with ever higher in-app purchases and pay to win schemes, Mario remains…Mario.

I seriously doubt many Switch users would bail on the system because of “fake” HDR. They probably don’t care about HDR at all. As long as Mario remains Mario, they’re happy.

Lol in what world was the US education system the envy of the world? We’ve been routinely clowned for overspending, poor outcomes, university tuition bloat, and everything else under the sun.

There isn’t a single founding engineer at a publicly traded company that regrets their choice to sacrifice salary at a more stable company for 1% of a startup.

Becoming a founding engineer is a wealth-building, passion-for-your-work risk, not a pure salary optimization decision. HN never seems to understand this. If you’re optimizing for stable salary, go for the FAANG position. You’ll be comfortable, but you’ll most likely never be able to fly private, and you’ll have to be OK existing as a cog in a massive machine. Plenty of people are ok with this. These people should not be founding engineers.

The math simply never works out in favor of lower salaries/publicly funded healthcare for high paying US roles like software engineering. Even taking your (high, assuming family of 4) premiums and 0% employer contribution (very uncommon), that’s an additional $43k a year, pretax. US SWE salaries are double, sometimes triple international with absolute numbers at $50k+.

This doesn’t even factor in general higher tax brackets abroad

Never think that pure hard work leads to success, placement, privilege, or anything else. The farmhand in a field works harder than 99.9% of high paid tech employees. Hard work is important, sure, but it’s all about relative value contribution in the market, nothing else.

It’s easy to find another farmhand, it’s hard to find another ML engineer

I don’t understand how Hacker News can simultaneously say creative professions (I.e software engineers) shouldn’t be measured in “hours worked,” talk about maker vs manager schedules, and also be in favor of a 4 day work week.

You simply can’t tack on more hours in a day and get more productivity out of someone in professions that require high levels of creativity. The mind doesn’t work like that, it needs breaks. If anything, it should be more, shorter days (which I understand also has negatives).

I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association

It’ll be a billion dollar business just like Clash of Clans or Candy Crush are. A few whales will account for the vast majority of the spend and the majority of the population won’t even touch it.

I tried to use the Vision Pro for work, and I'm not sure if it was just my eyes or what, but looking at code inside of that thing was just...exhausting. When I took it off, I looked at my regular monitors with a newfound love.

I'd love for this thing to reach it's full potential as this 'work from a mountaintop, but really your garage' device, but I feel like until the resolution gets to the same as existing monitors (no small task, I know) it's just...not as good for the vast majority of use cases.

They sell an online subscription. Some states consider there to be a nexus if you’re selling to residents in the state. NC doesn’t tax digital software, so that would complicate things, but it wouldn’t be as cut and dry as “we don’t have a physical presence there.” Fighting the government, even if you’re right, is very expensive.

This is hilarious coming from a mayor that literally cut funding to schools and police to support all the illegal migrants coming to NYC

Yeah I’m skeptical of the happiness metric. Most people living their day to day lives would say things still feel a lot more “negative” than pre-pandemic

I think you’re right. It’s irresponsible/dangerous for a business not to try to grow as fast as it can, especially in as cutthroat a market as tech can be. Just how the system works, for better or worse.

However the “poor CEO gets fired with only a $10MM golden parachute” angle doesn’t play as well with the average reader

This is easy enough to understand when you decouple “success” vs “VC success”. If you survive as a business long enough you’ll be successful almost by default. It might not be the next Facebook, but it should net you a nice life.

However, a long-lived, yet non-home-run business is actually a negative in a VC portfolio. Because of the nature of VC, they need big wins to give returns to their fund investors. Their model intentionally decreases average success probability for a business as a filtering mechanism to find big wins as quickly as possible, so they can provide those returns to their own investors on an acceptable timeline.

As a policy Southwest is one of (the?) only airline that doesn’t overbook flights. They only sell the seats they have. From a business perspective it would be dumb to not offer all those seats for sale.

This is definitely their fault, but nothing like United pulling the doctor off the plane

Amazon made web-based book selling mainstream. Emphasis on web. Of course it was a tech company.

One thing not getting mentioned here is the outsized influence large districts have on the broader education market. A contract with a huge district like LAUSD or CPS can be worth millions, and often these go to large incumbents because they have the resources to basically lobby these districts to accept them. Their motivations for choosing a product then become largely political as opposed focused on efficacy.

Smaller districts often look (erroneously in my opinion) to these large districts to set an example of the “right” approach and adopt the same products.

This is how you end up with monoliths like Pearson and McGraw Hill making shitty products that teachers hate but schools continue to pay gobs of money for. And innovation is stifled because that money doesn’t go to better products from companies that can’t afford a giant lobbying arm/don’t have a 20yr relationship with the superintendent.

I feel like Hacker News might be the only forum online where you can reliably find ridiculous one-off anecdotes like this on a regular basis.

A therapist once told me: Let your actions dictate your emotions. Don’t let your emotions dictate your actions.

Advice we should all follow more

I agree with you, but that has nothing to do with the city’s management though. SF is a tragedy considering all of its natural gifts.

Thoughts on Firebase vs Playfab?