Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41380453

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”

Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41326138

Points: 105

# Comments: 118

This is definitely the case. I've modified NDAs (from our lawyers or other parties') and have written plenty of business contracts and I find some people are uncomfortable with them unless you wrap them in a "whereas" preamble and put some pointless nonsense like "The parties agree that time is of the essence in this agreement". What a pointless waste of time.

It's incredibly valuable, but sure doesn't scale.

But it’s to prove chain of custody / lack of tampering since revenue ultimately depends on the data.

And NATO’s role in the war is crucial, of course, as a supplier of materiel, but not as deep as the conspiracy theorists like to think. They did not launch this war and do not direct it.

Also, despite my comment being voted down, it’s not a joke that NATO was shocked by how Ukraine has fough, not just how well. Its influence is openly discussed in the US and a European press and can be seen, for example, in the rush to embrace low cost disposable drones.

But it’s more than that: Ukraine has been more nimble and creative than the stogy western militaries who stopped taking Russia’s military that seriously in the early 1990s. Russia has underperformed, but not by a lot. But Ukraine has taken a weak hand and, without a navy, bottled up the Russians in the Black Sea. They demonstrated and used a flexibility far from the capabilities of any of the western militaries at scale. NATO needs not just to embrace that (which will likely take a generation) but also be ready to fight an adversary that has a similar attitude.

One thing I loved about doing technical enterprise sales is that I’d meet people doing something I knew little or nothing about and who didn’t really understand what we offered but had a problem they could explain and our offering could help with.

They’d have deep technical knowledge of their domain and we had the same in ours, and there was just enough shared knowledge at the interface between the two that we could have fun and useful discussions. Lots of mutual respect. I’ve always enjoyed working with smart people even when I don’t really understand what they do.

Of course there were also idiots, but generally they weren’t interested in paying what we charged, so that was OK.

> Helping a customer solve challenges is often super rewarding, but only when I can remove roadblocks for customers who can do most of the work themselves.

So I feel a lot of sympathy for the author — that would be terribly soul sucking.

I guess generative grammars have increased the number of “I have a great idea for a technical business, I just need a technical co founder” who think that an idea is 90% of it and have no idea what technical work actually is.

Note: I am not Ukranian, or even in any way European, though I have lived in western Europe.

What I miss is good filtering and search within the feeds. Some readers make "smart folders". But usually the searches are pretty primitive: not searching metadata (like starred or read/unread, in or out of another named search, etc), lacking regular expressions etc). Also no way to apply changes (e.g. read/unread) to multiple selections, etc.

I'll look in from time to time -- might be worth a switch.

We never utter the work blockchain because if you say "a blockchain" most people hear ** THE blockchain!! ** and either think we're a yet another bunch of scammers or worse, get tremendously excited thinking we're doing web3 or some other scam they want in on. Instead we say "we protect the data using Merkel trees."

We have the other buzzword problem too: we use some machine vision (for some safety matters) and use RNNs to determine some local operating parameters and to crunch data for some lab experiments. Even though we have two former AI research scientists on the team, none of us want to be lumped in with the big langage model folks, since that's not what we do (and the hype is insane).

The blockchain application: we have a shitload of sensors monitoring equipment we'll be deploying all over the world. Our revenue depends on the performance of this equipment. So every sensor is built into a little box that signs and timestamps its data. The data are aggregated by the equipment and streamed up to our servers (cough "the cloud"). Connectivity can be intermittent, so machines can offload data to topologically nearby installations.

It's actually pretty nice to be outside the hype bubbles. We just concentrate on our work instead, and mostly the prospective customers don't understand any of the tech, much less what those buzzwords mean.

This is of course not just in "the industry" -- for an extreme example there are a lot of elections arund the world in 2024 and almost all of them have at least one candidate trying to convince the hiring team (i.e. the voters) that they are qualified to do a job they've never done before.

Different empires defined their own prime meridians (and thus implicitly their date line 180 degrees away) from the ~16th-19th century. Eventually in the late 1800s a conference was organized to pick one and since Britain was the center of commercial shipping (with all the concomitant infrastructure like Lloyds, project finance, Admiralty law etc) there was little dissent.

MIT is one the the preeminent universities in the world, perhaps the preeminent one.* The loss of MIT gives permission to other institutions who may be more concerned about reputation to do the same (they don’t want to generate whispers of “did they do this because they are having money troubles?”). It may also cause authors to submit other prestigious journals before elsevier ones.

* really any change in the top 10 ranked schools from year to year are just a kind of browning motion. They are as a group equally prestigious.

Unlike me they may have access to some capability to actually do it.

I still read it regularly, but some of the spirit has gone. But you never know -- someone new could show up and revive that joi deivivre je ne sais quoi. Haines definitely did that when he joined.