eldavido

93 ms·

361.
by eldavido 8y ago
Somewhat cynical but true answer: Because practicality is not a priority with SF politics. You can understand quite a lot about this place if you really internalize that realization.
362.
by eldavido 8y ago
I live in Oakland Chinatown. Too many car break-ins on the back side of Potrero Hill eventually got me down. I'm really thinking about leaving. Not, as perhaps the other 95% of people do, for economic reasons, but just because I'm
363.
by eldavido 8y ago
I actually don't think it is. A lot of SF's homeless population comes here from other places on trains or buses because the city has a reputation for tolerance and supportive social services. Some cities/states even bus peopl
364.
by eldavido 8y ago
I've written a lot on this thread. I think the linchpin of this entire thing is how much salaries for technical people have lifted. If you can get a qualified dev/dc engineer for 50 or 60K maybe you rack your own. But when faceboo
365.
by eldavido 8y ago
My experience was a little different. Power is the dominant cost in datacenters unless you have very, very expensive switches. Power drives direct electricity consumption, the need for backup batteries and UPSes, cooling, and fans. You can
366.
by eldavido 8y ago
OK then. What are you doing with 40 racks of hardware? Serious question. That's A LOT of computers! I assume you mean 40 42 racks? That's like, 800-1000 computers depending on whether you do 1 vs. 2u machines, or use blades, how d
367.
by eldavido 8y ago
I think this is a really illustrative example of how business strategy can influence decision-making. "Paying AWS's profit margin" assumes you can get access to their cost structure. You can't. In order to get AWS's
368.
by eldavido 8y ago
If you're truly spending "a few million dollars"/year, then MAYBE. 200k/month would get you there. My personal breakpoints are 50k/mo PaaS->EC2/IaaS and then something like 100k or 150k start thinking a
369.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is terrible advice for all but the largest of organizations. Running your own hardware is AWFUL. Get ready to dedicate an entire team to network engineering, fixing broken hard disks, patching operating systems, screwing around with RA
370.
by eldavido 8y ago
Totally. Switched my website to pure static pages about 3 years ago and haven't looked back. Good riddance.
371.
by eldavido 8y ago
I agree and to refine a bit, I think it depends on the type of business. The Internet was wide open 10-15 years ago. Today, not so much. A CEO of anything in healthcare, especially something like this, had better have a lot of domain expert
372.
by eldavido 8y ago
It's ironic, I actually like peanut butter a lot too and just tried making a smoothie with it yesterday, it worked very well.
373.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is a really important lesson to internalize (the first one). In order to change peoples' minds, they have to want to see that they're wrong. I think certain personality types are innately more disposed to the sort of introspe
374.
by eldavido 8y ago
This phenomenon is a close cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy but it's not quite the same thing. I'm talking about rationally assessing that the value of an asset has fallen, vs. sunk cost's "we've come this far...&quo
375.
by eldavido 8y ago
How important it is to be proactive about career management - don't always take the easy path, even if it pays well. Doctors are exorbitantly overpaid relative to the value they provide. How little money matters once you have a few hun
376.
by eldavido 8y ago
The entire industry has FOMO. Look at valuations. The top investors will be fine because they get right of first refusal on all good deals. It's the lower ranks of angel investing/VC that's going to suffer. I think to be a gr
377.
by eldavido 8y ago
I think it depends on the culture of the area. For places where people are basically law-abiding, that might happen. Where I live in Oakland, CA, there's not a chance. I get run over by cyclists on the sidewalk almost daily and the sco
378.
by eldavido 8y ago
I think this is a general phenomenon in finance/valuation and I'm sure someone has studied it. Even when the value of something has fallen (as measured by market comparables, ability to generate incomes like rent, etc) people beco
379.
by eldavido 8y ago
I really don't understand why there's this huge presumption of ill will toward Amazon. HQ2 is a project that will involve hundreds of thousands/millions of people when you add up the employees, contractors who will build it,
380.
What do you live for?
4 points by eldavido 8y ago|3 comments
381.
by eldavido 8y ago
There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd recommend on this topic. Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for
382.
by eldavido 8y ago
This is such a stupid and uninsightful analysis. You can tell just by the terms they use. A company that isn't profitable isn't necessarily "losing money". Sure the amount of cash on hand can be declining, but if the bus
383.
by eldavido 8y ago
I would go farther and say that rates are uncorrelated to skill. Like actually zero. Rates have much more to do with how in-demand the provider is relative to their ability to deliver. And a big part of "in-demand" has to do with
384.
by eldavido 8y ago
I've been building something similar to this for a while called Interval - it's a plain booking engine for small businesses. Obviously nowhere near as good of speech recognition, but it's also not tied to Google, or their bag
385.
by eldavido 8y ago
Typical collective action problem. Everybody wants to move here but nobody wants to house them. At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, by
386.
by eldavido 8y ago
Only when it has to. Nobody likes change. Apple's going to be here for a while, they can afford the salaries people are demanding to be here. The trend is already clear and accelerating for smaller firms. No startups can afford to hire
387.
by eldavido 8y ago
The top five US public companies are Apple, Google, facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Three of them are HQ'd here. Netflix isn't top-5 by market cap but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there before long, maybe displacing Mi
388.
by eldavido 8y ago
Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree. Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs
389.
by eldavido 8y ago
Observation: security really does happen in low-level code quality like this. This is a hard notion to accept because it has to be built into the organization. No silver bullet, no consultant, no five-step methodology. Just rigorous softwar
390.
by eldavido 8y ago
I also live in Oakland. It's interesting to think that if prop 13 was repealed, it would cause a ton of supply to come to market. So it wouldn't necessary "change anything" except all that supply might depress prices a b

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