SeanAppleby

35 ms·

31.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Google only uses their patents defensively when sued for patent infringment. A world without patents would result in the same result for them but with less overhead. In this landscape where it's almost impossible to build products with
32.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
A signing bonus generally has a clause that it has to be repaid if leaving within a short time frame, like within a year.
33.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
If you want to move a large amount of money into an asset, you either have to place bids and wait for people to take your order at a particular price, or you have to pay a slight premium to dig into the ask side of the book and pay more mon
34.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I don't think he meant soul-consuming as in difficulty, but soul-consuming as in existentially unfulfilling or disturbing to your ability to sleep at night. There is, in my experience, plenty of appetite for hard, risky, complex, grind
35.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Yeah, as someone who has resisted paying for spotify, I was considering switching when they launched this service. I make music as a hobby, and I only really use soundcloud as a result, since the barrier to entry to posting on spotify is an
36.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Patrick Collison is enormously well read and just generally an interesting thinker. That leads me to be interested in his curation of what books he thinks matter.
37.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Understanding problems in society is relevant in deciding what to hack and how to build a company that fits into that society.
38.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our
39.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
This sounds like a job for Docker to me. Build a container, deploy an image to Kubernetes. Someone else wants to use it, they can get it running wherever they want to run containers without worrying about the runtime environment other than
40.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
You used to be able to buy a half kilo brick of caffeine on prime for like $30. That's enough caffeine to give you a heart attack 100 times over, it would last you forever. It didn't affect the coffee industry because drinking cof
41.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
For startups decisions need to be made quickly and definitively in order to survive. You might reduce entrepreneurial success and make the economy correspondingly more inertial/monopolistic/feudalistic if you raise compliance over
42.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
and Sheets. And Android, Youtube, Doubleclick, etc.
43.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
That is not unambiguously a good thing. That's a bad thing. Think about it. Housing is considered a good investment because it consistently has gone up in cost faster than the rest of the economy. As this continues housing becomes more
44.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Most VCs I've met do have some kind of value system other than making money that permeates their investment decisions, it's just usually one that is easier to align or at least doesn't run contrary to their business interests
45.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Yes, I actually have gotten VC meetings and work at Google without a compsci degree. I said one of the factors, like that it is a big difference in likelihood of getting past filters, not that it's impossible. It's a statistical e
46.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
They're interested in making money, not providing a social service. There's certainly a problem there, but it's not the VCs' responsibility. You are more likely to succeed in your business if you have the experience of b
47.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
For better or for worse, VCs need heuristics to filter the likelihood of you pulling off what you're claiming you can, and prestige and depth of education is one of those factors, as well as employment history which also selects on tho
48.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Hypothetically, what if it was true that wealthy people's exposure to better education over a lifetime, reduced stress distracting them from learning, better and more abundant roll models, etc, meant they would do better on pretty much
49.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
You could do three years at a great school and then cap off with one year at a bad school to grab the diploma.
50.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Even with a major technical advance it's not obvious that they'll have a moat to defend their margins. All of the ride sharing platforms might just end up competing to the death on price without anything else to differentiate on,
51.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I'd recommend reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He argues that getting a high quality education is a good investment on average, but mostly not because it actually makes you better at anything, rather explicitly b
52.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I would argue that there kind of is something inherently wrong with externalizing pride in your race beyond a point, even if it's not belittling another group. It's arbitrary. It's a grouping that was largely invented to divi
53.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
As someone who knows struggling addicts with good housing who would otherwise be homeless, yeah, housing does absolutely not fix the problem. It's so complicated. Nihilism and a lack of a reason to care about getting better. Drugs offe
54.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
There's nothing barring this. Just don't sell any control of your company to anyone who won't agree with this strategy indefinitely, and run a consistently cash flow positive business so you will never be in a position to nee
55.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole. We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filt
56.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I would vote for you to worry about increasing restrictions of freedom by governments outside of the west, since the overton window for acceptable policy proposals will be pushed on by what other nations get away with. If China succeeds in
57.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Yeah, you should work to get onto whatever team you want to be on. People aren't interchangeable pieces, and the system is generally not capable of figuring out where you should actually go. That's in practicality your job. Maybe
58.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Salary advancement primarily based on time is my idea of a nightmare. In an industry primarily constrained by attracting talented people, I can't imagine that not pushing talent out. I know I would leave if that was how it was. If my c
59.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
It could be a nash equilibrium, where everyone's best interest is for everyone to switch to a new platform, but for each individual person leaving Facebook costs them more (since if not enough people leave there's not a big enough
60.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
At one point their T&S explicitly said that tether had no obligation to buy back tether at any price at any time. They then changed it to be more opaque.

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