kcorbitt

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301.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
I worked at Google for a year, and am currently at a much smaller company in San Francisco. There's plenty of alcohol consumption at semi-official work social events, and I've seen some recreational marijuana use as well and nobod
302.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
I suspect the fact that Amazon is so good at food delivery is exactly why Instacart has been able to raise at such a high valuation. Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods, their Amazon Go store, and generally competent execution of grocer
303.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
In high-cost-of-living areas, there are two other major costs worth considering. First is the cost of daycare (or equivalently the opportunity cost of having a stay-at-home parent). My wife watches our son, and we're glad that she can
304.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> I see all these dudes, who after having kids, love kids. I thought that might happen to me, but no, the thought of having another kid makes my skin crawl. I have a 20-month-old. Honestly, for the first ~14 months of my son's life
305.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> (Similarly, you can almost always get a suite upgrade by being nice to the front desk agent checking you in and by slipping a $20 when you first walk up. This also works for rental cars - I got a $30/day mustang once by giving the
306.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
I'm 100% with you, but unfortunately residential property taxes aren't going to be able to cover necessary municipal infrastructure in California until we get Prop 13[0] repealed. It may have been passed with noble intentions (alt
307.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> They really do want computer scientists. The ability to figure out what to build isn’t valued all that highly, because that’s not fundamentally the responsibility of the software engineer As a former Googler myself, I 100% endorse this
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
Only if you could get permission to build on it. And if permission were easy to come by, a developer would have already bid $5M+ for the lot.
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
In a sane world, the Bay Area would have the highest new-construction numbers of any metro area in the USA, and probably the developed world. Unfortunately, the market is so distorted that I'm only aware of one potential large-scale bu
310.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
This is why when I need to enter a lane of traffic on my bike, I make sure I'm right in the middle of it. I'd rather stay to one side so cars (or other two-wheeled commuters) don't have to fully change lanes to get around me,
311.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
I know it isn't directly about cycling, but this story reminds me of the parody article I saw in The Onion: "Study: 90% Of Bike Accidents Preventable By Buying Car Like A Normal Person" [1]. I commute 30 miles each day on an
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
> Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment Probably the most important implication of this undeniable truth is that it's a ready-made justification for liberal governments to ban Bitcoin if it becomes sufficiently disagree
313.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> A tween's underdeveloped frontal cortex can’t manage the distraction nor the temptations that come with social media use. Can any of us? Personally, I have to resort to all sorts of tricks to keep myself from spending far too long
314.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> Video encoding is 70% of Netflix’s computing needs, running on 300,000 CPUs in over 1000 different autoscaling groups. This feels crazy to me. They'll have to encode all their content into 15-20 different formats for various devic
315.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
License plates are already tied to the class of vehicle. This regulatory regime would make it easier to implement what you're proposing, not harder.
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
It would make good economic sense to switch to a utilization tariff for basically all road usage, instead of the current gas tax. The technology is there, with license plate readers and/or RFID toll meters. In practice this would proba
317.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
Here are some thoughts I wrote up recently comparing my previous work at Google to my current role at YC, written from the perspective of an individual-contributor software developer: https://corbt.com/posts/2017/1
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
Does anyone have a good feel for what real compensation/career trajectory looks like for a software developer at Two Sigma? I always hear about how great the compensation is in finance, but it doesn't look like that extends to sof
319.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
IANAL, but I assume a competently-written contract would have explicitly listed the cash 500 Startups was supposed to invest as consideration for its equity share, so if the money never shows up the contract is void. Incidentally, this is o
320.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
Devil's advocate: sometimes, knowing the author of a work really can allow a reviewer/reader to make a more accurate assessment of its value. As an extreme example, if Stephen Hawking submits a paper that calls into question the
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
The type checker is capable of disallowing `float + int` while still allowing `int + int` and `float + float`, which is what I want.
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
If ReasonML is able to form a real community, I have high hopes for its long-term prospects. Such an enjoyable language to use! I think their general approach of bootstrapping a community by lowering impedance with the JS ecosystem is a dec
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
Submitted this because I feel like the prediction is at least directionally accurate, and it's worth keeping in mind.
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McKinsey: One-third of US workers could be jobless by 2030 due to automation(cnbc.com)
5 points by kcorbitt 9y ago|1 comments
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
I see one 2-3 times a week as I commute by bike up/down Bayshore Blvd.
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
I knew I'd get this objection. :) It's true that to some degree Silicon Valley's loss is the rest of the world's gain, and I'm totally cool with that. But I worry that to a perhaps larger degree companies that would
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
I realize that the housing market isn't the only thing keeping startups and talented, ambitious people out of the Bay Area, but it's probably the biggest one. If the Bay Area can't get its act together and start permitting
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
For whatever reason, the culture in Silicon Valley has evolved to be relatively open about ideas and business plans. As you've discovered, this is a stark contrast with the norms in lots of other industries/parts of the world. Thi
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by kcorbitt 9y ago
Totally. As the father of an 18-month-old, as soon as I saw the baby bidet idea I really wished it existed!
330.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
80,000 hours is a great resource. My personal opinion is that the YC motto of "making something people want" (and will pay for) is mostly a subset of "making the world a better place." It's not a true subset -- th

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