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> I worked at a company where HR would request a copy of the competing offer

"I'm sorry, but the offer is from a stealth startup who does not wish their name to be known."

> it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.

That's the real gut punch. Honest hard-working people are getting shafted while liars and thieves get ahead.


You can't make billions of dollars by following rules...

Society would be better if we could, and we would all benefit.

Looking at what the growth trajectories are of countries with high corruption, it’s not great, so our growth is probably still reduced by the corruption or lawlessness that still exists.


Why do you think having billionaires at all is of benefit to society? Or do you just mean that the people inclined to break rules to accumulate unreasonable wealth would just follow them instead if that worked as well and that is what would benefit society?

Because in a well organized society where wealth accumulation is not by corruption, then by definition it would be by creating value, which benefits everyone.

The alternative is something like oligarchs that extract wealth because of state granted monopolies, corporatism that strangles competition with anti competitive regulation, etc. The accumulation of wealth is all out of proportion and possibly not even correlated in those cases with the production of actual value.


Wealth is accumulated by capturing value, not by creating it.

Technically true, but ideally it would be capturing a portion of value created by them, rather than a portion of value created by others, is my point.

Ideally less people would be attaining that kind of personal wealth. Companies should be scaled back as well IMO.

> I just crossed out the clauses I didn't want to accept and initialed them.

Places like Zoho or Verisign don't let you do that.


> It’s not that difficult to have legal help with your contract.

It's difficult to have legal help with your contract responsive within the timeframe that you have available for signing it before the business rescinds their offer and moves on.


> to someone is unhappy with your font choice

Everyone hates when I set my app's fonts to courier size 8.


Wait until Google shows ads in premium too. Paid-for cable TV did the same rugpull decades ago.

Sure, then stop paying for it when they start showing ads in premium. It's a monthly subscription.

Not paying for it because it might become bad some time in the future is not a great argument.


So what's your argument? That YouTube shouldn't exist, or that it should be a charity? Something else?

How about advertising without the tracking? Advertising not shown specifically to me because of any attributes Google thinks apply to me? Advertising limited to a 5s lead in at the start of the video (today, this video is sponsored by …) and a static banner hidden when going full-screen. Advertising held to high standards, and advertising which can be vetoed by the video's uploader. In short, ethical advertising.

Google can surely figure this out and still turn a profit on Youtube. Greed stops them from doing this.


Google almost certainly doesn't turn a profit on YouTube now. It would unquestionably lose billions of dollars a year with the advertising you want.

Why? Surely knowing the content of the video gives them enough context to serve advertising relevant to the viewer without tracking.

At the very least they could guarentee that YouTube Premium tracking doesn't get used for profiling later. I think that would be a very acceptable solution but they don't offer it.

You pay but you're still snooped on.


> So what's your argument? That YouTube shouldn't exist, or that it should be a charity? Something else?

I've been thinking about it for a long time (years). I don't really have the right words for my thoughts, and I think charity is probably closest.

But yes, at this point, I think that many "free" services should be charities to prevent them from being corrupted by rugpulls.


Both sound like good options to me. Split it up or turn it into a nonprofit. Although I suppose the former would man paying 15 bucks to each baby YouTube, so maybe not.

I’m a Premium subscriber. If they show me a single ad I will unsubscribe immediately.

That’s the thing about modern capitalism. Making profit isn’t enough, the profit has to keep growing. So once the market is saturated, you either reduce perks, jack up prices, bundle new features to jack up prices (my GSuite bills doubled in ~3 years before I went in and adjusted the plan; the latest price hike “reflects the significant added AI value”), or find new ways to monetize the same users (ads, “partners”, etc.). It’s inevitable.

It has to do with the culture of the company you're working for.

Professional companies are stereotyped to suits and ties, and company attire is often part of company dress code.

Tech companies are stereotyped to kids and what they wear, and company dress code (if it exists) is often super-lax except for executives -- because the executives need to interact with Professional companies and look the part.

There's a lot of in-between, and it really depends on what company you work for and somewhat to what company you want to work for.


> I’ve worked with hundreds of startups over the last 20 years.

That's averaging 5 startups every year. How can you get good experience, or even truly understand a business, if you're averaging just around two months at a company or multiple companies in the same period?


He said "worked with" not "worked at." Likely as a contractor. And if so it's not uncommon for some projects to be very short while others might take 10-20% of your time for 2-3 years. Plenty of time to gather domain knowledge especially if clients are clustered in the same industry.

I think there's high value in understanding and experiencing zero gravity in a relatively low-risk mission.

Forget Mars. I'd love to live in space. Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems (and yes create a whole bunch of new ones). But it'd be cool.

Is there a problem with things being cool even if perhaps low-valued by other measures of value?


How is living in space meaningfully different from living in a submersible in the ocean (apart from the view)?

You would think we would get really good at the latter before going after the former, and yet I see no interest from people wanting to live in a (shallowly submersed) submarine. It would also be an order of magnitude less expensive and dangerous.


Heck, we can barely build permanent settlements in many places on Earth like Antarctica and deep inside many deserts. And, here we have 1G gravity, 1bar breathable air pressure, a magnetic field and shielding from radiation. We don't have any of that outside of Earth.

If we can't build, say, a 10K-person inhabited city on the south pole, how can we even imagine we can build it on the moon or Mars?


Can't agree more. There needs to be something like, a Manhattan sized building in the middle of Africa, with an air-cooled nuke in the center, and a fully self contained modern city, complete with suburban forests, inside. If that isn't going to work for any reasons other than for environmental protection, so wouldn't a Mars settlement.

> How is living in space meaningfully different from living in a submersible in the ocean (apart from the view)?

Just off the top of my head:

- different ability to re-stock

You could re-stock your submersible just about anywhere. You're going to have to do a lot more planning for your groceries when you go in space though.

- access to microgravity

This simply isn't available in a submersible. Microgravity provides some interesting manufacturing and biological capabilities.

- completely different pressure profiles

Combining different pressure environments in microgravity is particularly interesting to me.

- different instrumentation capabilities

It's not just the view -- the atmosphere plays merry hell with instruments when measuring the cosmos. And it does so in ways that just aren't relevant to underwater environments.


Gravity or lack thereof is a big one.

Have you seen what happens to people who live in zero gravity for long periods of time? It doesn't sound fun. I do get the appeal of wanting to experience it for a short period of time, though.

I would also say that scuba diving is probably the closest you can get to experiencing anything close to zero gravity on Earth.


Sure, living in zero G for a long period of time is not good for you.

You asked how space was different from a submersible. I gave you one difference, you expanded on that to a second.


Any space colony intended for long term habitation would create artificial gravity through centrifugal force. It's completely doable using materials sourced from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids; there are design studies dating back over fifty years.

>Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems

Which ones?


Like literal unlimited space?

Global population growth is still measured in the tens of millions. We're a ways off from launching anywhere near a meaningful number of people into space in terms of current terrestrial population.

resources, experimentation with deadly technologies, etc.

Escape proof prisons.

s/Having/Ejecting

> People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life.

More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price, I'd do it.

But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor power management decisions and decided to offload that decision to consumers.


as with anything, it's not just money. Losing battery capacity in an EV is a hassle. A hassle because you charge more frequently, a hassle because you will eventually need a battery change, and so on. What is the price of all that hassle?

That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are barely noticeable.


> What is the price of all that hassle?

A price that can be measured in money. How much more does it need to pay to be worth any extra hassle?

So in a sense it is just money. Money is hassle, fundamentally. It's a hassle to make it and you spend it to save other hassles.


And since lots of EV batteries seem to lose capacity very slowly after the first 10-15%, and you can keep your battery trading in the happiest range, there's a lot of potential for the extra hassle to be worth the paycheck.

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