Tech is in a weird position with regards to this issue, partly because there is a way our products are hyper accessible but in a way where there is a material generation gap between regulator and regulated, partly in the way that it is instead exactly like any other endeavor.
“Man I wish we had legislators who understood us.” Well they can’t do heart surgery or airplane maintenance but still regulate both, so the onus is sort of on us to do what every other industry does: figure out what we want for a regulatory posture then communicate it to gov’t.
One of the things I like about ridesharing and delivery apps is about how they “flatten” some of local real estate markets, which are otherwise extremely sensitive to differences of a few blocks and, for some businesses, a few tens of feet.
(I think the real estate market doesn’t fully appreciate this yet? Seems to be something where the first movers are going to do quite well for themselves, but relative illiquidity and huge cycle times for real estate mean that might take a while.)
Examples:
A restaurant is two businesses. One is a demand aggregator; it gets sited in expensive commercial real estate because high-demand locations are that. The other is a commercial kitchen; it is in expensive commercial real estate only because has to be collocated.
If you enjoy filmmaking, you owe it to yourself to watch Camera Tomeru Na (English title: “One Cut of the Dead”). Read nothing before watching. Trust me.
It is simultaneously the most meta mic drop in the history of mic drops, a celebration of craft, and very, very Japanese.
There’s more positive things that could be said about it but to enumerate them will compromise other things on the list.
OSS: We don't support .NET 4.0.
Company: We run a billion dollar line of business and have to run on .NET 4.0 because that decision is made above me.
OSS: Point me to a contribution you've made to any OSS in last month and I will patch.
Now while I can appreciate that, lawyers don't say "You've paid a lawyer in the last month? Cool, thanks for supporting the profession! Let me get right on that M&A document review for you."
Probably a healthier response would have been "Send me your economic buyer; we'll talk."
"Economic buyer?"
The person at a company with authority to approve the purchase of your software license / consulting gig / etc you're going to pitch. Generally not the dev looking at Github in a billion dollar business.
I had been programming since I was six but, as a consequence of having never met a professional, was almost entirely unaware that there was a career in it. The tech industry was an abstraction I read about in the Wall Street Journal, like Wall Street itself.
(This is a major reason why I spend so much effort writing.)
As long as we’re on “Interesting perceptions of reality that one can have as a geographically isolated individual with minimal social network”, at graduation I was under the impression that there were no open programming jobs between St. Louis and Asia, so I decamped to Japan.
It is surprisingly easy to have this happen, often due to founder attention being elsewhere, metrics collection lagging major trapdoor decisions (like hiring), the costly behaviors feeling really success-inflected in the moment, locally-optimized decisionmaking, etc.
Example of locally-optimized decision making: if you hire an ambitious person and give them a budget for ads, it is highly likely that they will spend that budget for ads, even if your organization is not constrained by not having spent all the ad money.
Relatively few smart, ambitious people will write in their performance review “The best thing I could do this quarter was nothing and so I ruthlessly executed on doing nothing.”
There’s an interesting thread on HN on what to do in the event an exit results in a life changing amount of money. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186002…
My general recommendation would be “Avoid major changes to your life in the short term.”
Emotions are a funny thing and the combination of a startup pressure cooker plus being suddenly unemployed plus dealing with sudden frequent adversarial interest may not optimize for your ability to solve fairly straightforward math problems.
“Adversarial interest”: there exist a number of interconnected ecosystems designed to separate people from their money. Some are criminals, some are crooks, and some are simply requests for involvement in projects which should not be on your very very short list of projects.
There's no magic to doing development at Stripe. Take smart people, write Ruby code, connect to financial infrastructure.
But we have had to do some interesting things to scale this to an engineering organization of hundreds of people. stripe.com/atlas/guides/s…
Thoughts:
Disclaimer at the top: Raylene, who wrote this guide, ran our entire engineering org for years. I've got a commit bit, but engineering is not my primary job anymore, so I'm more of a consumer than producer of that org and its output.
So consider these personal opinions.
Our operations are *sprawling* in breadth and complexity. Our codebase is similarly large. There are tools which help navigate it (and will boot up github.com/livegrep/liveg… on the first day of any future companies I found), but the big win is reproducing eng practices at scale.
(I will, someday, do something in business which results in greater economic impact than this blog post, but I oft despair of ever doing it in as efficient a fashion. High seven figures impact *just from the negotiations I know about* for one workday...)
Acceptable answers to which include: “Well clearly you didn’t put this team of high performing people together by luck, so let’s table the negotiation for the moment and talk about whether this is a good fit, and if it is we will find a mutually acceptable number.”
This is saying “You’ve negotiated salaries before and will again and we both know this but since we’re both professionals I won’t call bullshit to your face.”
Another thing is asking “Roger with respect to your feelings on that component of the negotiation for the moment. Where do you have flexibility?”, nail down an increase there, then come back to salary.
Sometimes I wonder if the real vector for fixing “X business was attacked; Y million personal identifiers were accessed” is to ratchet up on-opening and post-opening identity verification in the financial industry such that knowing 4 facts about someone isn’t worth $Xk++.
There’s a credible argument for “Any information in 1,000+ databases not administered by AppAmaGooBookSoft will inevitably be leaked, multiple times, regardless of technical countermeasures. The war on security breaches is unwinnable at the scale of the economy.”
Your name, DOB, address, SSN, and everything else used in a widespread fashion to open up a credit card account is in 1000+ databases. That is highly unlikely to change.
In "Subtle ways to bork SaaS subscriptions", I present to you:
1) Pro-rate a customer's account to adjust their billing day for SaaS company's convenience. 2) Remaining invoice is 36 cents. 3) Don't charge b/c uneconomical below 50 cents. 4) Disable login for unpaid invoice.
Your billing logic provider of choice may have an option to automatically disable accounts if they are in a negative subscription status. You should *almost always* turn that of, and disable only after multiple automated attempts to recover followed by at least one human review.
What kills SaaS companies? Churn. Easiest way to churn an account? Locking them out of the service and hoping they organize to send in a support ticket to unlock their account.
You might think that it is principally through decreasing annoyance for Green Basket holders but I actually think it likely materially increases conversations per sales rep by decreasing rep discomfort and by telling people that it is actually OK to ask sales reps questions.
"Isn't that literally the point of sales reps?"
I don't know what to tell you, but it took decades of training for me to be able to overcome Midwestern norms about interrupting and start saying "Hey, person who is compensated to sell fashion things: I am buying; please help."
SoftBank rebranded their Nakameguro shop to be half SoftBank and half Y! Mobile, previously Yahoo Mobile, which is their low-end brand. This surprises me because this is a relatively tony area.
I assume it is due to government pressure on mobile service pricing.
(The government exercised some light suasion on Docomo, the biggest provider which was previously a unit of the national carrier NTT, and Docomo basically immediately instituted a X0% price cut.)
The economics of cell phone retail are fascinating if you’ve never looked into them, by the way. This SoftBank store is not owned or operated by SoftBank; it is (effectively) a captured sales agent that has a stock of iPhones they will happily sell you and a login to SoftBank.
One of my ambient beliefs about the world is that planning in multi-decade increments is a relatively rare skill, but it is pretty valuable, and we historically assumed substantially everyone would outsource it to institutions.
Then we hollowed out those institutions.
This was pretty suboptimal.
Pause to acknowledge that maybe doing institutional design on a one-year timescale for the institutions people are relying on for multi-decade planning may have contributed to suboptimal decision making here.
There’s a genre of article “personal financial biography” and I believe a trope of this article is finding people who are both sympathetic and made maximally unsympathetic choices to maximize the spread of the article, on the toxoplasma of rage thesis.
A prime example is on HN.
I want to link to it for the purpose of social and marketing commentary but I don’t want to reward stripmining the commons in this fashion.
But there is no way the structure of this article could be accidental. “We couldn’t afford to rent a suit for my son’s prom so we bought him one on a store credit card.”
I think it is unlikely that most companies in the US would ask to see your incorporation documents, says somebody who sees lots of incorporation documents.
W-9, vendor qualification for enterprise.
Following virtually universal:
* don't call it a donation
* invoice / PO / check
The physics of money **do in fact** make it easier for a line engineer or tier 1 manager to authorize a $X,000 license purchase or support contract than to p-card $25 for a donation.
The OSS community has yet to come to grips with “Companies with $50 million in the bank send an incredible volume of support requests to people who are worried about making their $600 rent, and the community and culture in OSS makes this feel normal.”
“We need a better way to financially support OSS!”
I mean call me the crazy business guy here but how about for-profit enterprises start paying market rates for professional labor?
People want someone to blame for this security incident, and while I sympathize with that emotional desire, folks wouldn’t be fulminating nearly as much if (non-responsible) engineers were getting paid $200k and ate at same lunchroom.
A remarkable letter that shows some subtle truths:
* There is an incredible amount of human effort in mundane things, and that effort comes from people who are mostly as interested in their life’s work as you are in yours.
* You’d be surprised who will write back to cold mail.
* We, for many values of we, underestimate how deep pockets of competence are in a lot of areas where the technology seems like a solved problem.
* Talented amateurs can routinely come up with questions worthy of the attention of experts.
* For the purpose of the above bullet point, tenured professors are sometimes talented amateurs and people who design cat food cans for a living are experts, a fact which both would do well to remember more frequently than they do.
One way to alleviate runs on the bank and similar liquidity crises is to take a bunch of putatively uncorrelated pools and mix them, which theoretically makes pool-specific liquidity concerns less likely to draw a pool’s liquidity to zero.
Time will only tell whether the Bitcoin ecosystem successfully implements these countermeasures to late Renaissance banking crises.
The underlying issue is really simple: participants in the ecosystem think they’re richer than they are. Total amount of hard currency in can’t be smaller than total amount of hard currency out. Confidence loss and profit taking has drained the hard currency reserves.
PSA that the dependency management supply chain attack that all the fuddy duddies were suggesting JS ecosystem was going to inevitably hit has, indeed, been hit, for maybe not the first and probably not the last time.
It would be a good day to know what your transitive does are.
(It occurs to me that this tweet may need the elaboration “fuddy duddy is an (archaic?) US colloquialism for an older person who is distinctly uncool.”)
Fun related factoid: Ruriko had to sign a document when we got married saying that she'd underwrite my plane ticket to the US when she was done with me. (身元保証書; it's the #2 bullet point. moj.go.jp/content/000007…)
#3 is that you're supposed to make sure your foreigner respects the laws, #1 is you're supposed to provide for their living expenses while in Japan.
(It doesn't feel intrinsically wrong to me to ask employers to e.g. post a bond for travel expenses. The outcome the government wants to forestall is "You hire N unskilled or semi-skilled laborers; you go under; we eat costs to repatriate and/or support.")
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
This is a good article, but it's a much better article if you understand that everyone here is facilitating an underlying theft. The Bitcoin / gift card ecosystem isn't an arbitrage opportunity or payments facilitation; it is a laundry.
Part of the genius of the operation is it gives cashers like Eric here some plausible deniability and, from an ecosystemic level, allows the ecosystem to user cashers who "don't look like criminals" & are extraordinarily unlikely to attract sustained negative official attention.
One of my best comments on HN, which I'm going to avoid linking to to avoid causing a one-time mistake to follow relatively benign-intent startup founder around for life, was "Do you understand who is willing to receive $50 in consideration for $100 in Starbucks cards at scale?"
