I have just started trying to cold email/linked in message people who have the relevant job titles on linked in. I just started yesterday so I can't tell you how its going yet. But I'm looking for people at companies large enough to have people dedicated to a specific subsets of mechanical engineering.
Readit Newspeterwoerner commented on Ask HN: Where do you find potential customers to validate your idea / MVP? · Posted by u/showsover
peterwoerner commented on What I learnt after burning $10M as an entrepreneur twitter.com/awilkinson/st... · Posted by u/dsr12
To put a bit more nuance (or perhaps just spin) on it, the problem is not VC itself. VC can play a vital role in supporting innovation. Unfortunately, what it does far more often is let a bunch of marketing/financial dorks with strong connections to the money pipeline enter a young market and obliterate all of the actual innovators. It's not only innovation that gets lost, but diversity as well.
Case in point: continuous data protection. If you were around ca. 2004 you might have heard of this. Like backup, only to any second in the past. Nowadays we might say git for your entire storage system. Anyway, I was a fairly early employee at one of the original companies in the space. It was our marketing VP who coined the term. We worked really hard to promote the idea, and often collaborated with our competitors in that (much like Asana in this story).
Of course, that initial spirit of shared mission eventually disappeared. At that point, VC-backed and BigCo competitors were all spinning up their own products, backed by many times the engineering and (even more importantly) marketing budgets. They didn't actually win head to head, because they didn't actually have any products, but they totally froze the market. Storage is a hard market for a startup in the best of times, and these weren't the best of times, so that company ended up in a fire sale to Veritas/Symantec. End of story. It's pretty unremarkable in itself, except that I could tell almost the same story about half of the other startups I worked at.
None of this is necessarily bad. Just "creative destruction" and all that. In the end good ideas do get implemented and benefit users and make someone a lot of money. Unfortunately, those people are rarely the ones who innovated. When it happens over and over and over throughout the industry, it starts to seem like VCs are setting up incentives to be a copier (at best) rather than an innovator, and I'm not sure that's healthy in the long term.
I think its just the nature of innovation. It takes 1/4 the effort to copy as to create new and this is true in marketing as well as engineering. Call it the second mover advantage, where someone else has already paid the cost of innovation, risk reduction and marketing (convincing people that they want x) and the second mover capitalizes on the new zeitgeist that they created but with lower overhead.
something like 60% of people can’t reach 1 million let alone 2, given their position in the lifetime income distribution. i’d be all for changing policies with the sole focus of giving everyone the opportunity, but not the right, to reach $2 million in wealth by retirement age. that would require some wealth redistribution to start, and radical shifts in how we allocate income. since that disfavors the already wealthy, it’s hard to effectuate without sustained, concerted effort by the 99%.
I don't want to be too combative because you do have a point that, especially with kids, its hard to not live paycheck to paycheck. But if you start early all you have to do is bust your butt and live cheaply for a couple of years and wait for compound returns to kick in.
Back of the hand says that if you invest 10,000/yr from 20 to 30 you'll have saved ~$100,000. And then 7% and with the rule of 72 is then: 30: 100,000 40: 200,000 50: 400,000 60: 800,000 70: 1,600,000.
S&P is closer to 12% than 7% which means you might be able to get away with saving less aggressively or earlier retirement. If you are able bodied and willing to learn a trade you should be able to make atleast 20/hr. I made 19/hr right out of college as a manufacturing technician and saved ~1000 month. You have to sacrifice to do this e.g. live with roommates in a cheap area, rarely go out to drink/eat etc., but if you start early, don't have kids and save aggressively its very doable. I didn't completely live like a monk, I bought a canoe and went canoeing most weekends and had a rock gym membership for one year while doing this and a martial arts membership the other year. I also lived one block from the projects in a 3-1 with 3 other people so rent was tiny and ate rice and beans + chicken thighs or eggs 3-4 times a week for dinner to keep the cost of food down. Its straight forward on median salary, but you have to sacrifice. The budget is straight forward too: The budget is simple, you get 400 for rent, 400 for food, 400 for transportation, 400 for bills (internet, electric, water, sewage), 200 for health care expenses, 100 float and 100 for fun. You can even do it in SF if you do two people to a room (just like dorms in college) in a large house--transportation will goes down, rent might go up and food probably goes up as well.
You could also work 50 hours a week and save that extra 25% of salary which again at entry level in the trades would yield you close to 10,000/year (minus taxes but hello IRA). The Dave Ramsey retirement calculator says that if you save 1500/month from 22-25 you with 10% returns and no savings after that you'll become a millionaire at about age 53. You can make that happen as an entry level mechanic who lives like I did who works an average 10 hours of overtime a week.
One cannot transform 1 million into 100 millions without having 1 million in the first case (unless some debt leverage is used, but that is besides the point here). Right.
However, I fail to see how that removes any value (or makes the task look easy) regarding Mc Donald's perspective. For that one guy who transformed 1 million into 100 millions, how many actually lost most of their initial million (in stock trading)? I am like most of us here: I imagine that if I had a million somehow, then I could easily become a billionaire thanks to my wonderful intelligence and wits, because I am better than every other millionaire out there, right? That is all wishful thinking though, and I dread confronting reality to my ego.
In reality, if I had a million, I guess I would invest it into the most risk-free assets rather than bet it all in stock trading.
If you had a million you could also get a loan with interest less than "risk free" assets. E.g. The stock market makes 7-10% but you can get a loan for 1-3%. So 1.5x your returns then become 12-16%.
Perhaps you can invest in lower risk dividend stocks which will pay out your interest + a little and 3x. If we assume those stocks only make 4% but also pay out 3% then you are looking at 16% returns. Moreover when those dividends get raised you are doing even better.
Leverage can go a long way if used well.
Not $188 million rich.
Not $188 million rich, but certainly $2-5 million rich.
peterwoerner commented on Mindsets to Avoid as a Senior Software Developer betterprogramming.pub/the... · Posted by u/sidcool
But a junior can still ask question like: "why isn't there a test for this code", "why are the business logic and algorithm code mixed together" or "why doesn't this align with the design documentation we wrote last week, does it need updating?".
And the junior will learn which things to learn. I certainly think you should allow juniors to code review senior coders work if for nothing more than mentoring, but I am sensitive as to why an overloaded senior would balk at the idea.
But did your analysis class define addition on the naturals? Then that's an operator for the naturals. And then for integers, rationals, etc.
Yep and how to construct, the naturals from set theory, the integers from the naturals, the rationals from the integers and the reals from the rational. I've forgotten the details at this point, but I remember the conclusions.
There's no need to lie to children. Telling children "multiplication is a separate operation on numbers, but it works like repeated addition for the counting numbers you're familiar with" is not a lie.
But you can define multiplication based on abstracting repeated addition. That how we did it my analysis class, although I forget some of the details. So if you say multiplication is repeated addition, it really isn't a lie.
peterwoerner commented on Mindsets to Avoid as a Senior Software Developer betterprogramming.pub/the... · Posted by u/sidcool
In defense of the seniors... It generally takes people several semesters of Linear Algebra to become competent with "matrix stuff." It's unrealistic to expect every senior dev to also be an expert teacher -- never mind expecting them to know what the latest and best learning resources are (for a subject they may have learned, themselves, before the Web was invented).
Sometimes the right and fair substitute for "nothing I can do will help you" is "get yourself a proper education on this subject, somehow, and then we can talk about the code."
I think the issue is that many of us are poor communicators (myself being number 1) so we say nothing I can do will help you instead of I can't teach linear algebra, numerical analysis and do the code review in an hour. Therefore putting a junior engineer who has a weak math background on a code review for my new algorithm which uses spectral sparsification for approximating matrix inverses in n log(n) isn't a good idea.
The distinction Apple makes is that iAds don't "track" you because they don't use cross-site or cross-app tracking in third party services the same way Facebook or Google do.
Apple is of course still performing data collection for targeted iAds, but that's the reason they don't call it "tracking."
If you go to Settings > Privacy > Apple Advertising on iOS it tells you so:
"The Apple advertising platform does not track you. It is designed to protect your privacy and does not follow you across apps and websites owned by other companies. You have control over how Apple uses your information."
Note that I'm not necessarily agreeing that what Apple does doesn't fall under the description of "tracking." Just pointing out why Apple calls what Facebook does "tracking" but not their own iAds.
You assume that Apple is telling the truth. The cynic in me thinks that they narrowed the definition of tracking and follow in a legal sense but not in the way we would think of it. Or they are outright lying. It is also possible that it isn't apple doing it but a third party doing it on Apples behalf.