One doesn't have to agree with the original report, but one can't in good faith deny that the whole thing smells of a financial scheme with circular contracts, massive investments for an industry that's currently losing money by the billion and unclear financial upside for most other companies out there.

I'm not saying AI is useless or that it will never be useful, I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons to worry about the amounts of money that are being poured into it and its potential impact on the economy at large. I believe the article is simply taking a similart stance

I didn't create an account because it's asking for my email address when using my google account. Don't want more spam.

Also, some decisions seem more politically charged than necessary, like using "Donal Trump" as an example of an "Easy" debate opponent.

Finally, I don't know the SMS-style abbreviations are much appreciated on HN (u for you is the most annoying example in your introduction). I'm not sure why it's bothering me enough to tell you about it...

But here too, arguing on invention vs discover is pointless because there’s no common truth…

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42738020

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Disclaimer: I’m an IC myself.

I worked for my 1st company for 15 years. Held to their RSUs most of the time. Then moved to another (public) company and stayed there for a year before leaving. Now in a startup with a lower salary and no immediate liquidity on my stock options.

When you work at a public company, you have multiple exposures to the company’s growth: the RSUs that have already vested, the RSUs that haven’t vested yet and through your own career growth and salary increase that goes with a successful company. If you were early enough, you also get market cred for having made the company successful. If the companies goes under (or shrinks, or lays people off), all those assets are at risk.

Usually, one has more in granted stocks than in vested stocks. If your company just went public, you might have a lote more sellable than in your pipeline, but even that is unusual. Usually, you’ll still have more in the pipeline than you’ve already vested.

If your company has been public for a while, you should get frequent refreshes, which means you still have a significant numbers of unvested shares.

Regardless, you should sell as soon as you can, because of the remaining exposure through unvested equity. Use the proceeds to place in an ETF, or in a high-yield savings account, or some more aggressive investment strategy. Or use it for the downpayment on your house, or fund your kid’s college funds, whatever floats your boat.

Anyways, keep in mind that you still have a significant exposure to the growth of the company through your unvested equities. If you’re worried about short-term cap gain, don’t be. If you sell immediately, there’s no growth between cost basis and selling price, so no cap gain. Another upside to selling is that you’re not bound by the blackout periods, so your assets are much more liquid. And remember you still have exposure

It might not be such a bad thing to increase cost of trans-oceanic transportation. Right now we’re shipping stuff that makes little sense no to produce locally simply because (cost of overseas labor + cost of transportation) < (cost of domestic labor). I would suggest this is absurd both from an ecological and from a humane standpoint. Increasing the cost of transoceanic shipping might help flip the scales a little bit

Alternatively, I’d suggest that the premiums might not increase that much. Cost of insurance would be (cost of a claimable event)*(probability of such event). I’d hope the latter tends towards zero, significantly reducing the product of the 2.

We can also look at the potential impact of such a “new” policy on total insurance costs. Apparently, the Dali is able to transport 10k containers. And current shipping prices of $4,000 per container, that means that the cost of the trip alone is in the $40M range. If we take the lowest possible value of the goods, that’d be $40M and the arrival location. I’d argue that the probability of losing the vessel and its cargo is higher than that of hitting a bridge, especially if ports start deploying tugboats around their facilities

I had some concerns about the second one, but I think it works too…

> No one is required to follow The Rule [...] or even think that [it] is a good idea. [...] anyone is free to dispute or ignore that idea [...]

> This is a one-way promise [...]. the developers are saying "we will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us"

No one is forcing their beliefs onto anyone. keep the pitchforks in the shed.

Fire started simultaneously in a battery and and in a power inverter. It doesn't look like there's any comment on why/how it started on either and how/why it started on both at the same time.

Batteries were lead-acid, not Lithium-Ion (lead-acid is supposed to be less of a fire-hazard).

There's timestamped video of the start of the fire. Alarm was triggered within less than a minute. Someone was at the initial fire location within 2 minutes. Building was evacuated within 4 minutes. Fire Department called within 7 minutes of fire start. On site 17 minutes later. Power company is called within 17 minutes of the 1st fire alarm. Power company couldn't cut power from the substation because of fire risk (and delay to get approval from OVH, which owned the substation). The upstream substation is shut down 80minutes after the fire started.

The fire-engulfed building still has power for another 98 minutes. Fire is considered under control 3h after that (6h after it started), extinguished another 3h later.

There was significant concern that the building would collapse.

There was no fire sprinklers or fire-extinguishing mechanism in the building itself. Water supply was insufficient (single fire hydrant delivering 16k gallons/h). Now water reserve, or pumping mechanism (the Rhein was super close).

Only after 2h were the firefighter able to throw water at the blaze. Before that, there was still electrical power on site.

Recommendations:

Battery storage already have some regulation WRT fire hazard. Charging equipment don't. Apply the same rules for both

improve the ability to cut power from a site

There's a bunch of question that pop in my mind :

Concerning the construction, how common is it to have a 1-h fire resistance ? In the report, they say the floors are made out of wood with a treatment to allow for 1h firewall, and the "internal structure" has a 1h "fire stability". That sounds awfully low to me, especially considering that the fire took 6h to control, 10h to clear.

What's "R-5" concrete structure ?

The power is provided through 2 redundant 20kV AC lines. Then, the power can follow one of 3 path :

  directly fed into the hardware if it's "clean" enough

  corrected to be cleaner before being fed into the hardware.

  converted to DC before being fed into the batteries.

My question : Why don't we convert all the power to DC in a central location before feeding DC power to the servers ? I would expect some significant saving costs in DC->AC conversion, no need for AC "cleaning", and the ability to extract the AC->DC conversion out of the servers (increasing density, and removing some more heat close to the servers). I'm sure it's not a new "idea", I'm just curious as to why it's not a good one.

On the report itself, it looks like the presence of battery makes electrical cutoff much harder. If you cut the main power lines, the batteries and power generators take over, so your DC is still powered.

Feeling of being rarely challenged, loneliness, frustration with slowness, and urge to go and fix "it" have been very present for me over the past 2-3 years. It's been pretty harmful to my mental health. But it's also forced me to look at the bigger picture. So while I feel like I've lost a few years of my career, it's not all lost.

Some things I would suggest :

Don't express your frustration. You care, that's a good thing ! But you can't let the frustration overshadow your knowledge and your message. Seen it in some uber-smart people, and it just makes everyone feel bad.

Act as a teacher? I'm not sure if that's something that interests you, but it's something that'll take some of your time, improve the team around you, make you feel less lonely and make you seem more approachable for everyone. I also find it very rewarding.

Change jobs ? New team, new company, new role ?

If you're interested by CS in general, find people outside of work in the industry that you think are "10x" devs as well (god, I hate that term...)? Simply people you respect that have similar interest. I haven't solved the "how" myself, so if you're open to having some off-HN conversations about this, just let me know and we'll figure something out :)

Please let’s not make blanket statements about Europe vs USA.

Clearly, European countries will be touchy about exporting baby formula. Also, the food regulation being widely different, I’m not sure how easily one could import european baby formula

Current processes use heat+pressure, which are pretty wasteful, and often rely on burning fossil fuels in the 1st place, which will mechanically increase the financial cost”

What I understand from Prometheus is that they have a different way to “assemble molecules”, which relies on “electrocatalysts” instead of “catalysts requiring high temperature and pressure”. On the face of it, I can totally see how such a catalyst would decrease the “financial cost” without necessarily impacting the “energy cost”. It’s simply using a cheaper energy than the current processes.

The twitter answer rings similar to someone who would say “There is no shortcuts around the physics of producing light” to justify why LED lightbulbs would never make it. Most of the energy of incandescent bulbs is just heat, and there are physical process that produce light without all that heat. I don’t see any reasons why the extra heat would be needed to produce fuels

What is the driving force behind your attempts to start a software business ? IMO, that is the most important question that you need to answer before thinking of "what now". I'm not clear if you want to be your own boss, if you want fame and glory, if you want to be filthy rich or any other reasons. None of them are worth feeling bad about, really, but it's important that you're honest about it. Only then will you be able to forge a path that fits that goal.