Readit Newscyrusshepard commented on The Final Chapter of My First Startup sparktoro.com/blog/the-fi... · Posted by u/cyrusshepard
This is a pretty good illustration of the impact of raising capital. Building a company making $50M arr is really difficult and requires skill, hardwork and a lot of things breaking right for you. While it seems he got a good exit, it seems much less than the wild payout one might have thought would be the case in a scenario like this. Capital isn't free. If you raise money, you should understand the implications for what you have to deliver in order to have meaningful outcomes.
Right. And his new, non-venture capital model for raising money for his next company seemed to work pretty well: https://sparktoro.com/blog/raised-a-very-unusual-round-of-fu...
> We have normalised firing of people. I don't know about the "developed" countries where people have social security, but for countries like India where there is no social security and stigma is associated with being laid off, it is a very difficult situation.
Not to sound crass here but it seems like you're fishing for virtue. Hiring and firing are normal. A company of 20,000 firing 20% of it's workforce sounds major but that's the industry. It's normalized because it is normal. The field of software engineering is so fungible 20% of employees losing their job is nearly meaningless in the current job market because you can throw and rock and find another seat to warm the next day. It's not like Ford closing a factory.
In other words, you need to relax and get out of your head a little. This industry is nothing like the factories. When 20% of factory workers lose their jobs everyone rightfully panics because it's not as easy to get another factory job (at least anymore...here in the west). 20% of tech employees getting laid off from a company is a nothingburger. 99% of these people will be able to take two weeks of free time and find another job for the same (or often better) pay. This is the definition of trivial.
Your comment seems to assume that 1) employment levels for software engineers is the same in India 2) that the OP has overstated the social stigma of layoffs in India, and finally 3) the current employment landscape that you find yourself in will last indefinitely.
Based on this, I suspect it's highly likely the hubris in this comment will not age well.
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cyrusshepard commented on Google rewrites many page titles zyppy.com/blog/google-tit... · Posted by u/cyrusshepard
Why was the title edited here on HN? The original title is much better, and had more information. A bit ironic given the subject matter.
Dang, was this your doing? If so, can we please have an open discussion on this? It's happened a few times and it's annoying and seemingly randomly enforced. The guidelines state not to editorialize headers but this rule gets ignored a lot. What was deficient about the original title?
My guess is because it was self-submitted, it was held to a higher standard. Fair enough.
And in some universes the title could be considered click bait, although it is accurate in this case.
Moderation is a tough job. You never win.
That said, the revised HN title seems like it was written by bad AI. The point seemed to be to drive it off the homepage. In that, the HN title succeeded.
Regardless, I'm happy the article generated a lot of interesting discussion before manually being deemed unfit.
It is curious how at the same time the title changed, all the top comments (which were generally supportive) got pushed to the bottom. And now, including yours. Assuming this article touched a nerve at the same time someone was having a bad day.
cyrusshepard commented on Google rewrites many page titles zyppy.com/blog/google-tit... · Posted by u/cyrusshepard
I had this problem recently, was hoping there was a reasonable fix but it appears not... (the H1 already contains the title)
I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy .
But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the key words "Platform Democracy" — so that if I was a random person aiming to learn about the concept, I would likely skip over the result! (I almost did even though I wrote the piece!) This seems not ideal for either users or Google, and also an interesting exploration of AI/NLP impacts, so I tried to dig a bit deeper.
I had a brief exchange with Danny Sullivan, Google's public @searchliaison on it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413) which linked to two guides from Google on this. Sadly neither were particularly helpful, but will share them here in case they are helpful to others:
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-...
(Also plausibly relevant: I have http://platformdemocracy.com/ redirect to the piece. I imagine this might impact search ranking, but I would be surprised if it impacts the title rewriting.)
Author here. Frustrating situation. As the title is long at 84 characters, we know that Google is definitely going to rewrite it. The simplest way is to break it into parts and get rid of the shortest part that still makes sense.
So maybe take
'Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure'
And 1) condense it and 2) lose the colon
'Platform Democracy is Policymaking Beyond CEOs & Partisanship' (60 characters)
If that is too condensed, you could try a a short title in the <title> and a longer title in the copy.
cyrusshepard commented on Google rewrites many page titles zyppy.com/blog/google-tit... · Posted by u/cyrusshepard
Google claimed that the original <title> is used "more than 80% of the time" when announcing the change[0].
Combining this rate with the rate seen by the article (rewritten 61% of the time, on the subset of 81,000 URLs they were interested in), I'd guess that some websites see a lot of rewrites and many other websites see none at all.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-...
So an interesting distinction here is required! When Google says they use the title 80% of the time, they mean they use the title 80% of the time to create their search result title, which they may or may not modify. The other 20% of the time they use an H1 or other elements on the page.
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