Hacker News: aripickar

New comment by aripickar in "Anthropic raises $13B Series F"

aripickar — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:09:42 +0000

Tech Companies are valued at a multiple of next 12 months revenue, not last 12 months revenue. Since anthropic grew from $1billion to $5billion in revenue in ~8 months, that means it ~10x'ed revenue y/y off of 1 billion base. If you assume even 60% of that growth is retained (low for traditional saas businesses, but who knows), then anthropic is ~10% of google in terms of revenue in mid ~2027.

Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.

(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).

New comment by aripickar in "Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding"

aripickar — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 16:47:18 +0000

I don’t think they were the same difficulty at all as some of the upper divs. Classes like CS 170 (Efficient Algorithms), Cs 189 (ML) and CS 182 (Deep Neural Networks) were all significantly more difficult than any 61 series class.

New comment by aripickar in "I lived in LA and commuted to Berkeley by plane to save on rent"

aripickar — Fri, 19 May 2023 05:27:05 +0000

For full context, this is someone with a wife and two kids[1] who had a couple of semesters and just needed a temporary solution, not a 20 year old kid. Different then the title might suggest.

[1] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/05/15/uc-berkeley-la-plane...

New comment by aripickar in "It Wasn't AI"

aripickar — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:47:32 +0000

IMO one of the way that most schools are going to end up being able to detect plagiarism is going to be a custom word processor (or something similar) that can track all of the edits made into a document. Basically, have the students type an essay where all of the keystrokes are recorded by the program, and so it can be detected by the program whether someone is copy and pasting whole essays, or if someone is actually typing and revising the essay until it is submitted. Essays that are just turned in in general are probably going to be a thing of the past.

New comment by aripickar in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2023)"

aripickar — Mon, 01 May 2023 20:02:15 +0000

  Location: San Francisco 
  Remote: Not full time (at least hybrid, no full time remote)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:  Java, Python, Bash, SQL, AWS, Postgres
  Website: https://aripickar.github.io
  Résumé/CV: https://aripickar.github.io/Ari_Resume_Winter_2022.pdf
  Email:ari.pickar@gmail.com

Hi HN! I am a fullstack/backend engineer with 3 years of experience looking for opportunities to work in person in San Francisco (preferred) or the greater bay area. I have previously worked in both the python (django) and java (spring) ecosystem at AWS and Noom. Currently looking for full time opportunities. I'm open for anything from first engineer to larger companies.

New comment by aripickar in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2023)"

aripickar — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 19:48:30 +0000

  Location: San Francisco 
  Remote: Not full time (at least hybrid, no full time remote)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:  Java, Python, Bash, SQL, AWS, Postgres
  Website: https://aripickar.github.io
  Résumé/CV: https://aripickar.github.io/Ari_Resume_Winter_2022.pdf
  Email:ari.pickar@gmail.com

New comment by aripickar in "Report from the California Department of Financial Protection on SVB [pdf]"

aripickar — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 02:59:26 +0000

Yeah, probably the best way to prevent this from happening would be to have the FDIC guarantee up to 40 million for businesses, or something on that level. Going from having >95% of your cash uninsured to even like 30% uninsured (for a huge company) would be a massive change.

Catch (YC W19) is shutting down

aripickar — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 19:03:45 +0000

Article URL: https://catch.co/thank-you

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045961

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by aripickar in "Worst Opening Sentences of 2022"

aripickar — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 17:37:33 +0000

That sentence seems enough like some bastardized version of shakespeare[0] and Lisp that I bet you could get it to compile in some dialects.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...

New comment by aripickar in "YC’s $500k Standard Deal"

aripickar — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 21:25:43 +0000

It's less that it's illegal/impossible and more that it's not in the interests of the company in the long run. Say you do that, then what? If you screw over the seed investors, they are probably are going to tell the series A (and B, C, etc) investors that you screwed them over, and its going to be a lot harder to impossible to raise the next rounds. Plus who would want to invest in a company when the founder already screwed over the last investors. The only way that it could work is if you are able to grow the company indefinitely without raising more money (See Toptal).

Basically, you are exchanging all the goodwill and ability to raise in the future for a small percentage of equity. Not a great trade, if you ask me.

New comment by aripickar in "YC’s $500k Standard Deal"

aripickar — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:58:19 +0000

Not quite. The way that it works is that the 375k is invested now, but at terms that are determined in the next equity round. If the next round values the company at 10 million, then the 375k would be 3.75% of the company.

New comment by aripickar in "DMV approves Cruise and Waymo for commercial service in parts of Bay Area"

aripickar — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 23:31:54 +0000

Is there a timeline for when you will be rolling out the availability to ride in one of your vehicles to the general public?

New comment by aripickar in "Launch HN: Awesomic (YC S21) – Get design tasks done with 24-hour turnaround"

aripickar — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:29:18 +0000

This is something that would have been really useful when I was trying to get a POC out for a startup I was working on, especially at 1/3 of the cost that we ended up paying for an agency with a lot longer turnaround time. Kudos on launching a product that looks really useful!

ps: For some reason the expansions of the FAQ tabs expands really slowly, might want to fix that.

New comment by aripickar in "Launch HN: Emerge (YC W21) – Monitor and reduce iOS app size"

aripickar — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 18:10:56 +0000

There are limits based on the size of the binary that apple will allow on the app store. In addition, here's a really interesting story about how uber had to fight to downsize the app cause they realized that staying under the cellular data limit made people able to download the app when they were on the go: https://twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547845

New comment by aripickar in "Sci-Founder Fellowship: Helping scientists to start companies"

aripickar — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 19:26:23 +0000

Early stage startup valuations are more or less worth the paper that they're printed on. Probably more cost effective to hard-code the valuation to the same number than to try and determine the value for each startup applying.

New comment by aripickar in "Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience"

aripickar — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:11:19 +0000

Its not one console held in a single repository. AWS has teams built around individual features, and each individual team is responsible for creating its own UI, which is why its not a particularly coherent standard. Open-Sourcing it would involve releasing thousands of repositories built on many different types of internal architectures, and would be largely infeasible to change/build upon without a solution like Vantage that sets up it's own IAM role.

New comment by aripickar in "Ask HN: Why are there no M1 Macs in Bay Area?"

aripickar — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 18:27:13 +0000

I got one from the Costco in SoMa with no wait, that’s probably the best bet for immediate availability.

Crowdsourcing CPU Power to Go Fast in Paper Mario: TTYD – Recipes @ Home

aripickar — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:31:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpn30v5Y_YQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25142700

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by aripickar in "The accidental genius of Yo"

aripickar — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 17:29:45 +0000

Ooh I did a similar thing at in college where I used a raspberry pie to hook up the door handle to speakers to play “The Boys are Back in Town” whenever someone opened up our front door at the beginning of the semester.

New comment by aripickar in "You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)"

aripickar — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 21:41:38 +0000

That’s an interesting question. I think I would. But at the same time, I think that I would be more interested in building the next spacex than working at the current one.