Hacker News: the_watcher

New comment by the_watcher in "Notes on the Ivory Coast"

the_watcher — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:09:39 +0000

Matt Lakeman's "Notes on $PLACE" have become my favorite random email update to get. They're all excellent. If anyone knows more about him (does he write anywhere else?), would love to learn more about his background and travel experiences.

New comment by the_watcher in "'It gets scary': Neighbors say these Bay Area ghost kitchens are out of control"

the_watcher — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 20:22:04 +0000

I have literally walked in to the one in Redwood City and ordered from someone sitting at a folding desk.

New comment by the_watcher in "Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office"

the_watcher — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 23:22:42 +0000

I like WFH for a lot of reasons, but the "I'm more productive" part of my claim is entirely related to the torture chamber that is the open floor plan office. If I had a private office, I'd no longer be able to honestly claim that I simply cannot be as effective in the office as at home.

New comment by the_watcher in "Apple Introduces M2 Ultra"

the_watcher — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 21:17:26 +0000

If there are no substitutes, a high price is extremely justified.

New comment by the_watcher in "Apple Introduces M2 Ultra"

the_watcher — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 21:15:43 +0000

The markup is because I can go to apple.com, pick the RAM and storage I want, and not really have to figure out anything about flavors or distros, knowing that it comes with the best chip on the market. This is leaving out that it just works with my phone and tablet.

New comment by the_watcher in "Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer"

the_watcher — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 21:07:52 +0000

It would very obviously be useful for work if you can actually get high res, effectively unlimited monitor space. Maybe not for everyone, but people already spend $3500+ on monitor setups somewhat regularly (and employers definitely do this). Apple themselves sell a single monitor that costs $2300 when fully spec'd out (5k, but the point is that they know what people spend on monitors). I can't figure out why that wasn't the highlight of the demo, since that's just very clearly the easiest way to sell a $3500 device with this specific set of features.

The recording video of a kid's birthday was one of the most ridiculous thing's I've ever seen. I'd maybe record my kid with something like this every once in a while, but I certainly wouldn't be wearing ski goggles while he blows out candles.

New comment by the_watcher in "Some personal news"

the_watcher — Wed, 03 May 2023 19:12:30 +0000

Maybe, but that's basically asking him to develop the opposite of the personality type that makes him abnormally good at forecasting.

New comment by the_watcher in "Some personal news"

the_watcher — Tue, 02 May 2023 23:02:34 +0000

FiveThirtyEight had about a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, far higher than anyone else was modeling. And he was one of the few pundits openly talking about how it wasn't some insane longshot. I have no idea where this meme came from, but it's annoyingly persistent.

New comment by the_watcher in "Over 50% of CEOs say they’re considering cutting jobs over the next 6 months"

the_watcher — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 21:07:40 +0000

It's pretty obvious when you look at who is quoted in these articles that someone is paying for at least one PR push related to this. PG wrote about how this works in one of his older essays, in fact: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

New comment by the_watcher in "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"

the_watcher — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 02:28:07 +0000

Does he mention this somewhere? Last time I spoke to him, he was working on Stripe Press, his interest in fraud and spam prevention long predates his work at Stripe.

New comment by the_watcher in "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes"

the_watcher — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 18:41:21 +0000

Going from 0 to 1 internet providers is likely to have an extremely high conversion rate assuming affordable pricing and quality. While it's anecdotal, I have personal experience with this. My family is from rural eastern WA and spends the summer in the mountains up there. Until 2020, the only internet service option was HughesNet, which was extremely expensive and very low quality, as it's a notoriously rugged region that's difficult to serve (it's still ineligible for Starlink). In 2020, a local was able to get a 5G tower installed (way cheaper and way higher quality). When I had him set us up, he told me he'd already installed it for 60% of the cabins on the chain of lakes our house is on. He expected it to be 100% by 2022.

All that said, my experience does remind me that many of the people up there turn it off for the winter, when they aren't there. My assumption is that there'd be some amount of desire to do that, which would also reduce returns.

New comment by the_watcher in "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes"

the_watcher — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 17:33:57 +0000

Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).

Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!

New comment by the_watcher in "Understanding Jane Street"

the_watcher — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 15:06:15 +0000

The Diff is easily one of the best value’s I get despite being >$200/year. I’m not sure how I’d rank it relative to Stratechery, I personally enjoy The Diff more but Stratechery is more relevant to my work and is also excellent. Byrne churns out an all-timer like this every other month or so, and his average posts still consistently include the best sentences I read of the day. It’s one of the only newsletters that, if I get behind on reading it, I make sure I catch up on every missed issue.

New comment by the_watcher in "TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business"

the_watcher — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:16:43 +0000

Patio11 is one of the most responsive public internet users out there. On twitter, he’s not the absolute most responsive, but he has a standing invitation for anyone to contact him about nearly anything on his website, and he takes it very seriously[0]. I know multiple people at Stripe who have been asked to look into things he’s found out about, and he follows up. I won’t claim that he’s perfect about this, but I struggle to come up with anyone at any company of remotely similar scale that is more likely to do this.

Disclaimer: I’ve somewhat recently gotten to know patio11 a bit, but he’d previously responded to my tweets and replied to my emails, long before our paths actually crossed.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

New comment by the_watcher in "Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges"

the_watcher — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 18:24:27 +0000

I agree that salary is not what dictates my level of satisfaction with my work. However, plenty of people make the (perfectly reasonable) tradeoff of work satisfaction in exchange for money. I'm not dogmatic about this - I am aware that plenty of people are deeply satisfied with both their work and salary, and that others are deeply satisfied with their work and are perfectly willing to trade salary for that. That is great! I am very happy for those people. But it's _also_ a perfectly reasonably decision to prioritize salary to enable your preferred non-work life, and it's entirely possible to still do excellent work if you're in that bucket.

This doesn't even touch on people who _have_ to prioritize salary.

New comment by the_watcher in "Be careful how you pay the bills"

the_watcher — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:14:11 +0000

The author lives in Austin. He used to live in Manhattan.

New comment by the_watcher in "Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades"

the_watcher — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:00:04 +0000

This is why AirPods are popular. While this drives audiophiles and geeks who obsess over performance of their technology (not knocking them, I’m one of them for many devices) up the wall, the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference. What they want are reasonably comfortable headphones that just work, and Bluetooth is so famously bad at this that AirPods stand out.

New comment by the_watcher in "Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only"

the_watcher — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 03:37:06 +0000

> moving ad spend to TV, flyers, anything but online because the ROI is so poor

So… deciding to move to channels where ROI is unknowable?

New comment by the_watcher in "One man’s fight to end California’s ban on ferrets"

the_watcher — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 16:45:39 +0000

I was just thinking about the last paragraph. I honestly didn’t know they were illegal in CA, since I had so many friends that owned them growing up (inland southern CA). They bought food at the pet store, brought them in for show and tell, etc. They didn’t hide it at all.

New comment by the_watcher in "Advice for academic refugees"

the_watcher — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 16:42:12 +0000

At my FAANG job, we happily hired CogSci PhD’s, and I also worked with multiple political science PhDs who’d left or turned down postdocs. I’m unsure about any of the Econ PhDs that I worked with, but I strongly suspect you’re right as it did seem like they were drowning in job options relative to others (conditional on getting a FAANG job in the first place, I suppose).