In finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have…
I used to work in this field myself long ago (academically and practically). The difficulty that OP didn't suggest much appreciation for is that the interesting spaces for automated verification -- especially of…
Yes, it's never a trivial process, so a lot of work is certainly being performed by that "relatively": I have extensive personal experience with the UK immigration process and know of the US equivalent through the…
Generally continental Europe -- except the Scandinavian countries -- makes it relatively easy to get long-term residency and even a passport. The UK is considerably more difficult, but very easy to work in for an…
If you're living and working in California or New York, as I suspect a large number of hacker news readers are, EU taxes on income are generally not prohibitively more expensive, especially relative to increase in…
In my niece's (relatively rural) US high school class several students decided to attend university in Europe with no family ties to the countries in question. It was pretty common in my generation to see, as you note,…
I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future…
Amazon's free cash flow rises year over year (apart from the post-COVID period) [0] while Walmart's doesn't [1] and price multiples are largely determined by expected FCF over time not directly revenue/EBITDA. FCF rain…
Yeah, this is certainly the correct take. There's an alternate timeline where the Scala community focused during the peak on making it a better language for numeric computing/ML rather than the Nth category theoretic…
Honestly, I don't think it's irrational: the car industry is just horrible from a business perspective, which is why Tesla had to be financed for so long by crypto scams and most investors wouldn't touch it.…
I don't know what it looks like on the ground now, but Scala was the defacto language of data infrastructure across the post-Twitter world of SV late stage/growth startups. In large part, this was because these…
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to…
Yeah, that's the bull case for sure. Chinese firms might not accept training setbacks even given CCP regulations that they dogfood X homegrown chip.
Most of my use cases these days are for hobby projects, which I would bucket into the "data science"/"data journalism" category. I think this is the easiest audience to develop for, since people usually don't have any…
It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out…
I agree with you as an adult with aphantasia, but I think it's a relatively common experience as an undiagnosed kid in grade school etc.
I hear your argument, but short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon. Of course I could easily be wrong, but regardless I think the most predictable…
I definitely agree on the importance of personalized benchmarks for really feeling when, where and how much progress is occurring. The standard benchmarks are important, but it’s hard to really feel what a 5%…
Yes, it’s a very narrow-minded perspective that cannot understand the second-order implications of this development beyond their own experience as an experienced developer. For argument, let’s imagine that the quality…
I didn’t say to use ChatGPT as a therapist——I said don’t use a human therapist who is worse than it.
As long as their service offering is better than me typing the question into my phone I’m fine with it.
Indeed. Similarly, I like now having ChatGPT as the absolute lowest bar of service I’m willing to accept. If you aren’t a better therapist, lawyer or programmer than it then why would I think about paying you.
I agree with your point about the Heculaneum, but my understanding is we're far enough with research into the form of the Quipus to know that they aren't simply either a linear script or merely accounting data. For a…
For this reason, one of the most fascinating historical relics to me are the Incan Quipu [0]. Not only because their logic appears to be 'proto-computational' (at the very least a very complex system of encoding numeric…
I bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s…
In finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have…
I used to work in this field myself long ago (academically and practically). The difficulty that OP didn't suggest much appreciation for is that the interesting spaces for automated verification -- especially of…
Yes, it's never a trivial process, so a lot of work is certainly being performed by that "relatively": I have extensive personal experience with the UK immigration process and know of the US equivalent through the…
Generally continental Europe -- except the Scandinavian countries -- makes it relatively easy to get long-term residency and even a passport. The UK is considerably more difficult, but very easy to work in for an…
If you're living and working in California or New York, as I suspect a large number of hacker news readers are, EU taxes on income are generally not prohibitively more expensive, especially relative to increase in…
In my niece's (relatively rural) US high school class several students decided to attend university in Europe with no family ties to the countries in question. It was pretty common in my generation to see, as you note,…
I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future…
Amazon's free cash flow rises year over year (apart from the post-COVID period) [0] while Walmart's doesn't [1] and price multiples are largely determined by expected FCF over time not directly revenue/EBITDA. FCF rain…
Yeah, this is certainly the correct take. There's an alternate timeline where the Scala community focused during the peak on making it a better language for numeric computing/ML rather than the Nth category theoretic…
Honestly, I don't think it's irrational: the car industry is just horrible from a business perspective, which is why Tesla had to be financed for so long by crypto scams and most investors wouldn't touch it.…
I don't know what it looks like on the ground now, but Scala was the defacto language of data infrastructure across the post-Twitter world of SV late stage/growth startups. In large part, this was because these…
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to…
Yeah, that's the bull case for sure. Chinese firms might not accept training setbacks even given CCP regulations that they dogfood X homegrown chip.
Most of my use cases these days are for hobby projects, which I would bucket into the "data science"/"data journalism" category. I think this is the easiest audience to develop for, since people usually don't have any…
It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out…
I agree with you as an adult with aphantasia, but I think it's a relatively common experience as an undiagnosed kid in grade school etc.
I hear your argument, but short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon. Of course I could easily be wrong, but regardless I think the most predictable…
I definitely agree on the importance of personalized benchmarks for really feeling when, where and how much progress is occurring. The standard benchmarks are important, but it’s hard to really feel what a 5%…
Yes, it’s a very narrow-minded perspective that cannot understand the second-order implications of this development beyond their own experience as an experienced developer. For argument, let’s imagine that the quality…
I didn’t say to use ChatGPT as a therapist——I said don’t use a human therapist who is worse than it.
As long as their service offering is better than me typing the question into my phone I’m fine with it.
Indeed. Similarly, I like now having ChatGPT as the absolute lowest bar of service I’m willing to accept. If you aren’t a better therapist, lawyer or programmer than it then why would I think about paying you.
I agree with your point about the Heculaneum, but my understanding is we're far enough with research into the form of the Quipus to know that they aren't simply either a linear script or merely accounting data. For a…
For this reason, one of the most fascinating historical relics to me are the Incan Quipu [0]. Not only because their logic appears to be 'proto-computational' (at the very least a very complex system of encoding numeric…
I bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s…