eldavido

66 ms·

601.
by eldavido 10y ago
Risk aversion or maybe laziness. I've had a similar line of thinking recently. Sure, average investors lose money on active trading. Well, let me tell you what an average investor looks like. They have little to no accounting backgroun
602.
by eldavido 10y ago
I guess the situation is different for an existing holder of common vs. someone who's buying at the IPO. Thanks for pointing that out...I've spent too much time inside trying to figure out what my options are worth (SV in general,
603.
by eldavido 10y ago
Yeah, they just might. I was thinking about how to value companies like this over the weekend: fast growth, huge revenue, where it all gets eaten by opex. In a normal business you just look at gross profitability and assume a lot of opex wi
604.
by eldavido 10y ago
Yeah. I remember thinking a few years ago that it tries to be three totally different products at the same time: a straight NoSQL k-v store like S3, a SQL-like OLTP relational thing ("rows are sorta like documents, right") and an
605.
by eldavido 10y ago
Couldn't agree more. We had more problems with sharding over the years than you could imagine...the distributed locking mechanism didn't work a lot of the time, the balancer didn't work, weird consistency issues between the c
606.
by eldavido 10y ago
Yeah, maybe. But there's a bigger point here and that's that software engineering is starting to become more of a "there's a way we do things" craft profession (like medicine, law, or architecture) vs. a "every
607.
by eldavido 10y ago
You have to separate between "Mongo the database" and "Mongo as it's used by companies"; the latter causes far more problems than the former. I last used MongoDB seriously in 2012-2015. We had myriad operations prob
608.
by eldavido 10y ago
Anyone have any sense of their financials? Revenue, cost, etc? Would love to take a stab at valuing their equity although I'm sure their cap structure is a wedding cake of preferences on top of ratchets on top of pro ratas and pari pas
609.
by eldavido 10y ago
So much this. I saw facebook's earnings last quarter and my jaw dropped. 40% increase in revenue since same quarter last year. Then I took a look at their quarterly report, and the entire thing -- and I mean, like 99% of it -- is about
610.
by eldavido 10y ago
Having thought about this a bit, I actually come to the opposite conclusion. I think a lot of companies who might have previously hired devs would be better off trying not to anymore, with what devs cost today. This is going to mean all sor
611.
by eldavido 10y ago
I agree with your explanation but I'd suggest a slightly different way of explaining it. Labor's price is set in a competitive factor market, just like land or capital. It gets bid up and down by supply and demand. Let's call
612.
by eldavido 10y ago
I always find it instructive to look at how the economics of an employer/client align with the economics of the contractor. Example: at mass-market product development/distribution companies (Google, Apple, etc.), the big money wi
613.
by eldavido 10y ago
Where do you live? In SF, it seems most freelancers are in it for the lifestyle benefits, rather than the pay. When you factor in the lack of vacation time, no benefits, often worse career development and networking vs. working at a proper
614.
by eldavido 10y ago
I know a few guys making $300K+ at Apple. I think a lot of people paid that much are reaping the benefits of strategic and tactical decisions made over decades -- they just happen to be there when it's all paying off and things are goi
615.
by eldavido 10y ago
Also, separately, you need to consider BATNA [1] If 10 guys all showed up on your door with a magic box that would give your business $100k in added shareholder value, you'd be rational to pay somewhere between 0 and $100k for it. The
616.
by eldavido 10y ago
"Who brings the most value to the company" is the most utterly loaded question ever. Companies are complex systems with many moving parts and team dynamics. If a new feature gets released, do you attribute incremental revenue to t
617.
by eldavido 10y ago
I'm going to have to invoke the Munger test [1] on this: rather than imagining an ideal regulatory body that works perfectly, talk to people in regulated professional fields (law, architecture, medicine) and see what they think about t
618.
by eldavido 10y ago
Couldn't agree more. I've been noticing this a lot recently, where I and others get downvoted for earnest, articulate comments that do nothing but express a dissenting opinion. I think HN needs to explain that downvoting isn'
619.
by eldavido 10y ago
I know I might come off as trolling, but try to get out of the business of managing servers. I've done it, it sucks, and I don't ever want to do it again. Get everything containerized and use a container runtime like ECS, unless y
620.
by eldavido 10y ago
What will cause the cheap money to end? From where I'm sitting, I see zero inflation, a federal reserve that's happy to keep buying assets to stimulate growth, a sluggish economic recovery that's led to 1-2% growth in the US,
621.
by eldavido 10y ago
The worst thing is that I see myself falling into this trap. I get dismissive of people without the right "pedigree", but then I realize it's the worst form of mental laziness. I wonder whether truly great companies are diffe
622.
by eldavido 10y ago
There's a much bigger insight here. High-flying companies in SV have become another form of cover-your-ass pedigree that allows the entire management chain to pass the buck on hiring decisions. I see this at the lowest level from IC en
623.
by eldavido 10y ago
I think it's the sales mentality - you work with the product you have, today, to get the deal done today/this quarter. Not great for the ten-year plan, but those are a luxury of companies with lots of products selling today .
624.
by eldavido 10y ago
Fellow SF renter here. I've also done the DCF analysis and found that it's about a wash assuming a 10% discount rate and 10-year rent vs. buy-then-sell-with-payoff. One problem with your analysis is that I think anti-rent control
625.
by eldavido 10y ago
Again, I guess just a matter of perspective. My parents house was 2200 sqft (2 siblings and 2 parents) and the Zestimate on it is like 140K. Believe me, not a day goes by where I don't think about moving. But right now, as long as you
626.
by eldavido 10y ago
On the other hand, oil boom towns don't _move_. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know are leaving SF. I imagine the next 20-30 years will look like any other industry, where a clear center emerged, but then it diffused outward into the b
627.
by eldavido 10y ago
You know, it might just be a matter of perspective. Thank you for this. I grew up in a small but nice suburban town about 20 miles outside of Chicago. Plenty of my friends are buying 3-4br houses in decent parts of Chicago for 250-350k. So
628.
by eldavido 10y ago
I currently pay $1100 for a single room in a 4-bedroom quad. I just got engaged last week and am planning to move in with my girlfriend of five years (now fiancee) into a 1br in Oakland for 2200/month. The apartment is about 1100 squar
629.
by eldavido 10y ago
My friends and I talk about this a lot. We aren't living in the 1880s anymore. For one, we value life, health, and safety much more than they did back then, with things like OSHA, much more stringent labor laws (overtime, child labor),
630.
by eldavido 10y ago
Because housing in California is just different than the rest of the US; there's really no other way to describe it (Illinois born and raised, now living in SF). A lot of CA people explicitly treat their home equity as their retireme

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