throwaway9191aa (u/throwaway9191aa)

throwaway9191aa commented on The Hobby Computer Culture technicshistory.com/2025/... · Posted by u/cfmcdonald

plapsley · 10 months ago

Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.

Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/

Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)

throwaway9191aa · 10 months ago

I very much recommend this book as well. Great read. Thanks for writing it!

throwaway9191aa commented on Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests theintercept.com/2025/03/... · Posted by u/jbegley

asacrowflies · a year ago

I know if I refused to do my work or even hinted I wouldn't do it...no matter if the boss destroyed it... Id be fired faster than those police lighting up a suspects vehicle with bullet holes.

throwaway9191aa · a year ago

Why are these comments saying that not doing a small part of a job that your boss doesn't want you to do is means for dismissal?

If something you are doing is being thrown away, you should change focus (like pulling back on quality of life arrests, and focus on real crimes).

If your boss is destroying all your work, you're going to get fired for not producing anything. I'd recommend you figure out what your boss cares about.

throwaway9191aa commented on Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests theintercept.com/2025/03/... · Posted by u/jbegley

MegaButts · a year ago

Whenever you feel like not doing your job, just tell your boss "I don't want to" and see how that goes for you.

I understand how motivation works. Sometimes doing a job sucks. That's part of why you get paid to do it.

It sounds to me like those police officers don't want to do their jobs. I'd encourage them to quit instead of wasting tax dollars. Of course the real issue is they want the money without the work, and the respect without having to earn it.

throwaway9191aa · a year ago

But that isn't what appears to be happening. Their "boss" (the DA) is the one saying "I don't want to". When your boss gives you clear incentives, like not prosecuting (throwing out) portions of your work, you are going to stop that work and focus on other things.

throwaway9191aa commented on Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith vincentschmalbach.com/sta... · Posted by u/vincent_s

HWR_14 · a year ago

15% of 0.5% of a billion dollar company is just over $700,000. That's not FU money, but that's a down payment on a 3.5MM home.

throwaway9191aa · a year ago

My other option was AWS though. That $700k is like 4 years of effort, and I get vacations. Actually realizing a sale on a billion dollar company after 4 years is just incomprehensibly low. TBH Amazon is also less work than running a startup. If you think AWS oncall is bad, think about having even less people on your team to handle the load, or to build the product durably in the first place :)

Also, I have no way of knowing if the same ownership thing is going to happen again. Giving me another 0.5% of the above calculation. Sure, lots of people make millions in a startup. Way more people make millions, although over a longer time span, in tech companies and index funds.

throwaway9191aa commented on Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith vincentschmalbach.com/sta... · Posted by u/vincent_s

laserlight · a year ago

> If you join early, got plenty of stock options and the startup turns into a unicorn, those millions are totally possible.

GP comment argues correctly that there's no guarantee that employee stock options will return a profit even in the case of successful exits. Valuation multiples, senior debt, clawback options (see Skype exit [0]), fractional stocks being rounded down to zero after stock splits have all been implemented successfully by startups and VCs. I wouldn't invest my time, which is very precious compared to my capital, into any company that is managed by someone I don't know personally. I would rather earn surplus money to invest into high risk high return options. Treat startup equity as a lottery ticket and don't pay too much for one.

[0] Skype options turn out to be worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692985

throwaway9191aa · a year ago

This is why I joined AWS 9 years ago, and left the startup world. I own (still?) 15% of a company as a founding engineer (with no voting rights). As part of a raise, the company sold its IP to another company for a 0.5% stake in that company. So now I own 15% of 0.5%....... I just didn't understand the business side of all this at the start. As I understand it, the raise wouldn't have happened and the original company would have folded if the deal wasn't done, so you can't really argue fraud.

Since then, I have seen similar things happen more than once to other friends. I can only imagine that as the number get larger, the problems become more complex.

throwaway9191aa commented on The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die morethancoding.com/2024/0... · Posted by u/brikelly

CalChris · 2 years ago

Any blockers? If blockers have been resolved immediately then the short answer to the question will be no. Otherwise it will be yes.

Sounds like a decent question to me.

throwaway9191aa · 2 years ago

I agree this is a great question. Maybe more for managers, but it let's people think "This is day 2 of that blocker, I need to step in". Sometimes junior devs will let external asks sit too long and write it off as "blocked on another team". Managers can manage this.

throwaway9191aa commented on The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die morethancoding.com/2024/0... · Posted by u/brikelly

throwaway9191aa · 2 years ago

These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven't, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks.

I purposefully schedule meetings after our standup to make sure I cut it off after 30 minutes. Our team of 11 will go for almost an hour if nobody cuts people off.

throwaway9191aa commented on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/leotravis10

ozzydave · 2 years ago

The first time I used DuoLingo, I was just trying to get through the tree, without really learning, and that was useless. Now I have a different technique: I’ll only listen (never read), and if I can’t comprehend and respond immediately, I’ll fail that exercise deliberately, so I’ll be re-tested later. For me, I only understand the language if I can understand some one speaking to me and respond in real time.

throwaway9191aa · 2 years ago

I started doing the listen-only as well! By this, I mean I just don't look at the screen, I'd love to know if there is a way to setup a listen-only option.

I've also used Jumpspeak, which is an AI conversation partner. It works ok, but the speech recognition is... not great. But you can have a conversation and practice listening and responding. I was able to treat the AI as an uber driver and ask about places to go in Peru, and how to get there, and why they were nice.

throwaway9191aa commented on The Failed Commodification of Technical Work ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/t... · Posted by u/M2Ys4U

eterm · 2 years ago

There's more difference between 2 points and 3 points than between 5 points and 8.

If you're looking to fill an arbitrary bucket, relative size matters most.

throwaway9191aa · 2 years ago

Our team had so many planning poker sessions where we spent 12 people * 2 dev hours trying to figure out whether stories were a 2 or a 3, management finally said it is always a 3. We were literally spending more aggregate time trying to decide effort, than the actual effort it took to complete these tasks.

2 and 3 are equal. 5 and 8 are equal. The question is simply "Is this a couple days, the whole week, or the whole sprint?".

throwaway9191aa commented on Amazon cuts 'several hundred' jobs in Alexa division cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazo... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

tsunamifury · 2 years ago

I've been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story:

I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant. At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I/O announcement, so off we sprinted.

But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn't going to be an assistant if it doesn't have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks. Sharing some information and changing the music isn't what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can't do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute.

I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn't realize it didn't matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential. So 2017 I/O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it's a great demo -- mission accomplished.

Now 6 years+ later, it's a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why? Because it can't do anything for users. All these years and billions later it still can't do anything important -- it has no user journey.

And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn't matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products. It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it! Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary...

I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...

throwaway9191aa · 2 years ago

Almost 25 years ago I worked at a little startup. I started to build a network management system using ..... tcl/tk some open source HP Openview, what was the name?

Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down.

Some things never change.