eldavido

78 ms·

691.
by eldavido 11y ago
My experience (SF) is more like "don't ask, don't tell" If you do something blatantly competitive, e.g. launch a product that competes with your employer's product, try to use employer's customer relationships,
692.
by eldavido 11y ago
If you won't do it, someone else will. Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.
693.
by eldavido 11y ago
I see a lot of parallels with the political system. If you let the masses take charge, you're going to a get a more wild, dynamic, unpredictable outcome. In the stock market this new "democracy" manifests as extremely short h
694.
by eldavido 11y ago
This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Look at a typical main street business: retailer, car dealership, restaurant, etc. There is no "R&D". Profits scale linearly with revenue; it's not so crazy to jump from "profit
695.
by eldavido 11y ago
Isn't the job of a dev manager to make reasoned judgments about legacy code, tech debt, etc.? Do people really work in environments where "managers" aren't capable of understanding these things? If you do, I'd highl
696.
by eldavido 11y ago
+1. Really can't recommend Feathers enough. Along with "Refactoring" by Fowler, these books have influenced my development style a ton even on non-legacy code, by providing structured approaches to improving code quality, and
697.
by eldavido 11y ago
Two important factors you're leaving out: (1) Does the intermediary add value? Sometimes they do, by facilitating better market functioning. If I sell a house and a real estate agent has access to a better buyer pool than I do -- likel
698.
by eldavido 11y ago
I'm in the middle of redoing the card processing system for a hotel property management system. I'd consider using Stripe and have in the past, but we're doing millions/month USD (less than you'd think with a high-d
699.
by eldavido 11y ago
yeah, we need a different name for these things, like FAM, "flexible asset managers", or AIMs, alternative asset managers. The key point is that they can do whatever they want, not that they "hedge" anything.
700.
by eldavido 11y ago
Except that you'd also get the stock market's volatility. I get your point but you can't really make that argument without considering volatility. Endowments in particular, need fixed income-like payment streams, as they&#x27
701.
by eldavido 11y ago
Social status. Developers don't have high social status in Chicago, whereas in the Bay Area, they do. I don't care what people say, pay is all just social status. Even relatively objective measures like, "I made the company X
702.
by eldavido 11y ago
dang, the variety of behaviors you witness each day would make for a great book in itself. Sign me up, I'll buy the first copy!
703.
by eldavido 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. I can't believe how little support there is for ideas like free trade, where academics of every political stripe agree it's good, but the candidates don't. As a SF tech person, I feel pretty homeless
704.
by eldavido 11y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I think the answer is to become a serial founder. Elon Musk's career is a good model for this. He started with some kind of media/software company and then took on harder and hard
705.
by eldavido 11y ago
I don't buy this; I think starting off in the right market is a huge determinant of success. The reason there's no market is because it takes an idea and a person who can execute -- knowledge, skills, connections, experience, et
706.
by eldavido 11y ago
I think the endgame here is having the business end of your company near capital/partners/customers and the operational/R&D end in a lower-cost area. I'm all for moving to a lower-cost area, but you can't deny t
707.
by eldavido 11y ago
I think 10 yrs of zero interest rate policy by the Fed has as much to do with it as the "financial industry". I, for one, can't wait for a return to a more normal 2-3% fed funds rate. It'll give pensioners a chance at a
708.
by eldavido 11y ago
Interesting. I stand corrected, thanks to HN for teaching me something. Contribution margin is only for variable costs, it doesn't cover fixed costs -- so it doesn't mean positive CM goes to free cash flow, only to fixed cost cove
709.
by eldavido 11y ago
Actually, this is standard finance terminology for "if I add X revenue to the business, how much flows to free cash flow" - what we can reinvest/pay back to shareholders. I, for one, am surprised they shut it down if they in
710.
by eldavido 11y ago
I've actually wanted to do this for a while. I worked in large-scale analytics (Crittercism) and have a friend who does robotics work in Chicago. I see two big problems here. The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? W
711.
by eldavido 11y ago
American academia is the envy of the world. I haven't met a single ambitious person in the US who dreams of teaching in a high school. It's kind of sad that secondary ed isn't high-prestige in today's American culture, b
712.
by eldavido 11y ago
It irritates me that engineers never get laid off. This means companies still view their engineering workforces as "scarce" and hard to get, because they aren't paying market wages. Why is it only sales that gets the ax?
713.
by eldavido 11y ago
IMO the main issue is how far the government can lawfully push a third party to help with an ongoing investigation. Putting aside the technical issues for a minute, let's say everyone agrees Apple ought to help the US government's
714.
by eldavido 11y ago
"To do some work to make it universal" = code change = thrown hash (the signature which requires the Apple key to create, and proves the software hasn't been tampered with, will be broken/no longer valid) Cryptographic h
715.
by eldavido 11y ago
This is true, but I wonder why. Are SF employees simply that much more productive than elsewhere? (Serious question, it might be that for certain types of work, you really do need the talent base here, but a company is certainly paying a pr
716.
by eldavido 11y ago
What goes unspoken is how tiny the overall effect of this will be. Yes, it will bring some concentrated pain to investors, CEOs, and employees of lots of companies. But how many people will be genuinely, life-alteringly affected by this? 10
717.
by eldavido 11y ago
Yep. The lesson I take from this: don't be so quick to denigrate liberal arts and traditional university education. The kind of skills one learns in college, namely, the ability to do independent research, to write well, to think criti
718.
by eldavido 11y ago
True, but that's taking a very "realpolitik" attitude toward it. What about the fact that breaking the law is (often) morally wrong in its own right? Even if you disagree with the law, I don't want to live in a place whe
719.
by eldavido 11y ago
c# is the most under-appreciated language today. It has a lot to love, including async/await, typed generics, good interop with C/C++, type inference, and a strong tendency toward functional style. I think of it a bit like the CLR
720.
by eldavido 11y ago
What we'll do with all the electronics waste we're producing now. Disassemble it? Take it apart with robotics? Is it possible to reuse SMD-soldered components in new things? This problem is only going to get worse with time.

More ›