mi100hael

There's more detail on the dive in this account: https://cambrianfoundation.org/2000/02/28/1995-expedition/

Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.

When I went to Defcon a few years back, one of the speakers started his talk by saying:

"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."

What's your goal with the project?

I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.

My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.

My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.

I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:

1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.

2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.

3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.

I ended up winding it down and moving on.

I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.

Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.

Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.

Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.

Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.

Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.

+2, and National which is owned by Enterprise and allows you to just walk into the garage, get in a car, and drive out. It's the most painless process in the industry.

Ok great. Now I spend all day wishing I was playing chess instead of working.

Your experience at Amazon probably isn't due to the incompetence of others, but due to a difference in alignment.

In the business world, the time of highly motivated, talented engineers is extremely valuable. It doesn't make sense to dedicate any more of their time than necessary for the average internal webapp. Adding automated builds/tests is usually time that's not being spent on more impactful initiatives for the business.

Amazon will enforce them at the exec level, but courts have ruled they aren't a total blanket ban on employment elsewhere, just a restriction on what you can do for that new employer.

"This past October, a federal judge placed major limitations on his Moyer’s role while also criticizing Amazon’s non-compete policies. Moyer was not allowed to work on any financial services projects, his area of expertise at AWS, for Google Cloud. He was also barred from contacting any AWS customers and any potential financial services customers. The conditions were to stay in place until the lawsuit was fully resolved, or until his non-compete expired in November 2020."

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-settles-non-compete-law...

I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

Intriguing design and it looks like they've sold enough to see some real-world success, but I can't help but think the headset must be under extreme torque with a 150+ lb person sitting on essentially a large lever.

That and the small wheels don't inspire confidence dealing with the typical curbs & potholes that one is likely to encounter in an urban environment.

What's the use-case for folding bikes like this? Is there a pervasive lack of bike racks in certain places that would necessitate stowing a bike in such small quarters?

You know you can make your window narrower than 4000px, right?

I think people have forgotten how easy it is to set up a traditional server-rendered site with Spring Boot or Django or whatever framework. These days I see people adding a SPA as the default starting approach, which adds an entirely separate additional tech stack & deployable to the mix when it's not usually clear why.

Golf is a real-world activity that can be used for comparison here. It's a good candidate because there is a standard handicap rating system issued by a central governing body, and there are a large number of amateur players who play regularly, compared to other sports.

- Roughly 10% of golfers in the US maintain a handicap rating.

- "Today, the 2,417,905 who have a handicap included 2,051,675 “active posters,” meaning they posted at least one score in 2020. However, the average number of posted scores was 38, almost double the average number of rounds played by golfers overall last year—so it’s pretty clear that those who get a handicap are among the game’s most engaged participants." [0]

- "it has been found that on a given day the average golfer would be expected to post a score of approximately 100 strokes when following all the rules of golf" [1] which is 28 strokes over par. A 28 handicap is around the 5%-ile of golfers with a handicap [2]

- As such, those 10% of golfers with a handicap should overlap pretty heavily with the top 10-20% of all golfers. The 50%-ile of golfers with a handicap is 13 [2], so by extrapolation that should be 90-95%-ile of all golfers.

- 13 is still a solid handicap. That's someone who is breaking 90 (better than bogey golf) pretty much every round and likely has years of practice. Saying it "isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do" would be an incorrect statement in my opinion.

- (as a sanity check, the 90%-ile of golfers with a handicap is a handicap of 5. Most D1 golfers will have a handicap right around 0, and D3 will be maybe 2. Given the number of casual golfers, it seems likely that only about 1 or 2 out of 100 are nearing that level.)

[0] https://www.linksmagazine.com/how-do-you-match-up-against-th...

[1] https://golftips.golfweek.usatoday.com/average-golf-handicap...

[2] https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/handicapping/han...

Says the person in the comments of HN...

In this case, the ad network would presumably not know or else they wouldn't keep showing you ads.

But it's worth noting that ad networks are more interconnected than most people realize. You can go to Facebook and see the "off-Facebook activity" they have received about you from partners, many of which are retailers. I imagine purchase-history is part of what's shared if you make purchases with those retailers using a email/phone number that's also associated with your Facebook account.

https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity

Note that 20 other states already have permitless legal carry. Vermont is one of the longest-running states to allow it.

Texas is actually not one of the more permissive states when it comes to firearm laws. Everyone just thinks it is because of the "don't mess with texas," "wild west" image they like to maintain.

I remember seeing your comment on that previous post. I enjoy seeing those sorts of "behind the curtain" details that break down stack & cost of applicaitons.

I'm curious if you've tested what it would cost to just host on EC2 (or something potentially even cheaper in AWS like ECS Fargate) with a savings plan. At a glance, it looks like AWS would be cheaper than DO if you can commit to 1-yr reserved instances.

That would seem like an easier (and possibly more effective) way to get around costly AWS outbound data costs compared to running a separate cache and sending data across the internet between cloud providers just to save $200/mo.

That's basically an anarchist point of view. If you can't outlaw anything no matter the harm it causes, then what's left for the role of government? "At least it's an ethos" and all, but that's not how any modern society operates.

This is changing in the next release of Safari. They will support the standard WebExtensions API so Firefox/Chrome extensions will be easily portable.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/apple-will-let-you-port-go...

NASWA is good at facilitating knowledge-sharing, but they are no better equipped to build a software product than any state IT department. Each state is still ultimately handling "modernization" in their own way. There's very little appetite for COTS for whatever reason, and little sharing of technical components between states.

Biggest question in my mind is why state bureaucrats are given the latitude to think it's a good idea to build their own one-off solutions. There are 50+ markets for these sorts of systems. It makes absolutely zero sense for them each to build & maintain their own software products. Of course big consulting firms are going to _leap_ at the opportunity to bill $50M per state and then throw together products as cheaply as possible.

States need to start working together on these platforms with in-house technical teams that can actually own the systems long-term. Or we need to make it far easier for them to purchase SaaS products like any sane private market.

I don't think it's typically that partisan.

I have an insider's perspective on one of the systems mentioned in the article, and from what I could see, politics played no part until everything went off the rails and they started flinging shit in the media.

Things start out with a few in-house sysadmins hacking together some scripts to start batch loading records into a database or whatever. At some point they get far enough along to decide to bring in an external consulting firm to build out a more fully-featured solution.

At that point, it becomes a very ironic situation. The meat of the requirements are laid out by career bureaucrats who work in state government agencies (unemployment, in this case). They are extremely risk-averse because their jobs are typically very secure and, barring any criminal activity, the only thing that can sink a career is some sort of publicized failure involving taxpayer dollars.

So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large, established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty. Furthermore, they want to go from 0-100 right away and convert an old manual paper process to a fully-featured SaaS-style product in one go with a bunch of different feature requests coming from different people.

Thus they ironically end up with a massive risk of failure precisely because of the steps they took to mitigate risk in their minds. They have no prior experience developing software and are usually lacking in overall technical expertise. Really they have no business designing any sort of software solution or negotiating a contract to build one. It's doomed to fail simply based on the premise.

The best outcome would be for a dedicated SaaS company to build something that could be purchased by multiple states. I actually briefly explored starting something like this but couldn't make the numbers work. These departments have very little discretionary budget. Selling to each state would require a literal act of congress, and your TAM is only 53 distinct customers. And because of the inability to quickly make a purchase, they all seem to start out with that in-house hacked approach which naturally leads to paying for consultants to "improve" it, not starting over with a product purchase.

Blind[0] is a message board with a lot of content focused on FAANG interviewing.

https://www.teamblind.com/

IIRC the authorities did something similar to bust one of the LulzSec members in Chicago. Once they identified a suspect, they surveilled his residence and correlated his physical presence with online chat logs despite his use of tor.

Typical VC terms give them veto rights over future deals even though they are minority stakeholders.

Conventional wisdom is 4% withdrawal for year 1, and then inflationary adjustments after [0].

So for $50k, that's $1.25M principal. If you can wait and supplement with social security or part time work so you only need to withdraw about $35k, then it's $875k principal.

[0]: https://www.fool.com/retirement/what-is-a-safe-withdrawal-ra...

Two of the three dramatically upward trending lines in the chart are labeled "with intervention," implying they took those social distancing measures into account.

So while the measures have no doubt had an impact on slowing the spread, the models predicting dire outcomes were also quite clearly inaccurate, in some cases by at least an order of magnitude.

Neat project.

For something more detailed with top headlines, big movers, earnings highlights, etc. I really recommend the "Wall Street Breakfast" newsletter from seekingalpha.com.