hn username @ ( e-mail@ddre.ss ) dayley.me
- Thank you for sharing this, Scott! He mentions "Taste" throughout the post and this intangible quality makes all the difference in an early-stage winner-take-all market dominance race.
In 2007 I was teaching myself programming and had just started using my first version control tools with Mercurial/Hg after reading Joel Spolky's blog post/love letter to Mercurial. A year or two later I'd go to user group meetups and hear many echo my praise for Hg but lamenting that all the cool projects were in GitHub (and not bitbucket). One by one nearly everyone migrated their projects over to git almost entirely because of the activity at GitHub. I even taught myself git using Scott's website and book at that point!
"Product-market fit" is the MBA name for this now. As Scott elegantly states this is mostly knowing what problem you solve, for whom, and great timing, but it was the "flavor" of the site and community (combined with the clout of linux/android using git) that probably won the hearts and minds and really made it fit with this new market.
Edit: It didn't hurt that this was all happening at the convergence of the transition to cloud computing (particularly Heroku/AWS), "Web 2.0"/public APIs, and a millennial generational wave in college/first jobs-- but that kinda gets covered in the "Timing, plus SourceForge sucked" points
- I've been using (and occasionally paying) Kagi on and off for a couple of years now. I truly think they're building something interesting and valuable! While I haven't agreed with every product decision they've made, the founder is very good at both understanding his business and also explaining their decisions. This is a well crafted explainer of the search business and the monopoly case-- much better for sharing with less tech-savvy peers than most mainstream media explainers on this subject!
Edit: wording
Edit 2: Can you imagine a world where Google's Internet Search Index is legally considered an "Essential Facility"!? https://law.stanford.edu/publications/essential-platforms/
- This is a fantastic idea, and I think the overall negativity misses the point of it being an evolving and collaborative project on github.
When you don't know what you don't know, any little map can be helpful to get one started.
When one desires to learn a skill they usually don't know what questions to ask to get started. This is one of the biggest challenges in learning, and there's a multibillion dollar industry devoted to easing that burden via textbooks and instructional videos. But equally important: beginners don't have a mental model for where that specific desired skill or knowledge lies on the continuum of the domain in which they're seeking to grow. This project puts skills in context, even if some of those contexts are (currently) very flawed.
For example, I've begun working with a couple of teenage garage bands that live near me. I have a lot of experience as a working musician, and they didn't have any at all-- but they knew they wanted to write, record, and perform teenage garage music. I noticed a "Music" domain on the maker tree. It could use improvement, but what it does is make clear that there's more to being a performing musician than learning guitar. In fact I've watched these kids go from "make a playlist" to "learn about copyright & licensing" to "produce a track with another person" to "play a ticketed show", and many of these steps were both required ("learn to keep a beat" springs to mind ;) ) and also not obvious to them when they started.
Each one of these domains is massive and full of intrinsic, context-dependent experiential knowledge. But they make a great starting point. I already learned some things about, say, the PCB design domain and have a better catalog of what I'd need to search the internet for to begin that rabbit-hole.
Edit: spelling, grammar
- I agree, but only because I routinely speak with people who make double that and still struggle to pay monthly bills. Short answer: financial outcomes aren't about the number (above a basic threshold), and they’re almost entirely a function of behaviors & (some) luck.
Paying more is still a valid form of defense against petty corruption, though.
- All of the sibling comments are good answers to this question!
What hasn’t been mentioned is that Signal is an extremely high-profile target for rogue actors and nation-states. Employing staff with personal financial troubles in sensitive positions can contribute to the temptation to use access for personal gain. This is one way intelligence services groom double agents. Despite what appears to be very high salaries they won’t get rich in the Bay Area— but it seems like it’s above a threshold where one of these engineers would feel desperate.
Also: I imagine having a WhatsApp founder as a board member/funder helps here, as they famously built and scaled globally before their acquisition with only 20-30 engineers…
- Author: Thank you for writing this! I love reading about how people overcome challenges like this, especially under pressure (and usually overnight!). I am better for hearing not just the technical post mortem but also the human perspective that is usually sanitized from stories like this. This is the kind of technical narrative only a small/solo dev or entrepreneur can share freely.
- You’re both correct— tptacek is correct in that the 4th amendment is constrained to government search and seizure and there is no positive assertion regarding privacy written into the constitution. But you’re also correct in principle, as the strongest positive assertion regarding privacy (in general) from the U.S. federal gov’t originates in the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965, and Justice William O. Douglas’ reference to privacy as a right inferred primarily as ‘penumbras’ extending from the more specific guarantees of the first 5 amendments.
Edited to Add: All bets are off now, as the court has explicitly reversed stance on this as it regards abortion, which leaves a big precedent for expanding future privacy “exceptions”.
- They could start by citing Matt Levine’s own 2021 introduction to the idea published during the halcyon days of r/wallstreetbets and pandemic markets, titled “Is Everything Securities Fraud”[0] ;-)
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-03/goldma...
- A more information-dense post with some background [edit: …background on the phenomenon and its significance to climate and weather forecasting] from the U.S. National Weather Service:
https://www.weather.gov/bis/sudden_stratospheric_warming_eve...
- >But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?
It DOES happen with car mechanics. Leonard Green LP owns Caliber Collision, Carlyle Group owns Service King, and Icahn Enterprises owns AAMCO, Pep Boys, and Precision Tune Auto Care.
While I don't have a specific example in my head about restaurants and grocery stores, I have to think that there are steps in the value chain that are absolutely owned and influenced by PE. Logistics? Real Estate?
Real Estate is a great example: most commercial real estate is held inside PE portfolios via Real Estate Investment Trusts, and lease rents are an extremely non-trivial portion of business costs for EVERYBODY, espcially grocery stores and restaurants.
But I agree about the many social and regulatory complexities regarding health care specifically. Often that complexity is what makes industries like health care such a lucrative investment for PE as it can be easier to hide incentive structures.
- I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that this appears to be a (very polished) "Hipstamatic for video" yet. I feel like Hipstamatic has been a zombie app for years now, but was once beloved and at one point in 2011-2012 people spoke about it alongside Instagram...
Obviously video is harder, but the "analog film" UI looks mighty familiar... ;)
- Thank you Jan for your work and your courage to act and speak candidly about these important topics.
Open question to HN: to your knowledge/experience which AGI-building companies or projects have a culture most closely aligned with keeping safety, security, privacy, etc. as high a priority as “winning the race” on this new frontier land-grab? I’d love to find and support those teams over the teams that spend more time focused on getting investment and marketshare.
- As a part-time working musician I also wonder about this because they aren’t very artist-friendly, either.
Their discovery-specific algos/UX are ok, but I think becoming the global de-facto music/audio-specific social network is their biggest moat. It’s been so tough to replicate that apple/google/amazon have yet to make much of a dent despite spotify’s actively hostile UX and practices.
Edited to add: Music generes and fandoms have always been tribes and spotify was the first to capitalize on that aspect of music culture. Other companies approached their products in a “building a “digital CD-vinyl collection” kinda way, but there are few network effects in that.
- I think this is an important point since the cost of money is a big part of building and buying housing. There are other nuances contained in this exchange too.
But beyond cost of money what, if any, specific argument are you making regarding housing? Lower subsidies in hopes the market follows? Further restrict the money supply to try and contain inflation? There are lots of second order effects that are too broad here, like high interest rates acting as a de facto subsidy to the wealthy (who then, maybe, buy more real estate, etc...
https://www.apexbt.com/sw033291.html