Hacker News: velominati

New comment by velominati in "Googlebook"

velominati — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:16:34 +0000

Google never sold through their first production run of Chromebook Pixels. Will prediction markets take bets on when will end up at https://killedbygoogle.com?

New comment by velominati in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

velominati — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:25:30 +0000

It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop.

Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

New comment by velominati in "Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?"

velominati — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 15:39:16 +0000

“ It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick.[2][3]” you can’t make this stuff up!

New comment by velominati in "Rowing Across the Atlantic Ocean; My Experience (2021)"

velominati — Mon, 09 May 2022 14:02:28 +0000

This sounds like an incredibly foolish expedition. They took a boat to sea without practicing basic seamanship procedures (person overboard drills), an inaccessible life raft, and no practice as a crew. That’s not adventurous, it’s reckless.

New comment by velominati in "Stripe Press"

velominati — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:24:32 +0000

Money helps, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient.

I've been at a company that many considered to have excellent design and that received a lot of attention here (Heroku). There was a culture that permeated the company around beautiful design and what I would call "maker excellence". It was a place where people who liked building great things (both engineers and designers) felt at home.

New comment by velominati in "How far could a spaceship go if we never ran out of thrust? (2020)"

velominati — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 15:56:04 +0000

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) goes into the relativistic effects as well, and it includes a crazy (made-up) fuel that could make it possible. Great easy read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401-project-hail-ma...

New comment by velominati in "How People Get Rich Now"

velominati — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:40:33 +0000

Thanks for posting the PG wealth tax article. It is a highly flawed analysis.

First wealth appreciates over time. So if your wealth appreciates at 15% / year, and the govt. taxes it at 1%, the net effect is growth rate is slowed to 14%. With these assumptions, someone starting with $1mm in wealth ends up with $2.6 billion after 60 years!

Second - PG ignores that most wealth tax proposals have a high minimum wealth - in the $50mm range. So there is no early compounding of the tax. Adding this into the model, the wealthy founder ends up with $3.3 billion after 60 years.

With no wealth tax, this hypothetical founder ends up with $4.3 billion. So, yes the government has taxed a total of ~ 25% over 60 years, but the founder ends up quite wealthy.

New comment by velominati in "Expanding our testing in San Francisco"

velominati — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 23:33:13 +0000

Yes, that is the correct term.

New comment by velominati in "Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can"

velominati — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 16:05:28 +0000

Is it the longest known exposure ever, or longest ever with a beer can?

New comment by velominati in "Airbnb’s Stunning IPO"

velominati — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:42:50 +0000

Plus of the 10% of the shares soldo, most were to institutions with an understanding that they are going to hold it "long term" (i.e. which may be just a few months). Part of the IPO road show is for the company to select investors that believe in the company and who will be "good" shareholders.

New comment by velominati in "Airbnb’s Stunning IPO"

velominati — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:31:05 +0000

It is a misconception that when a company IPOs and the stock pops, that the delta is money left on the table. The vast majority of the shares are sold to institutional investors. There are explicit or implicit lock-up periods in place. And most of the pre-IPO investors will typically have a 6-month lockup. So if 10% of shares are sold in the IPO and 10% of those shares are actually trade-able, only 1% of the total stock is liquid. That can lead to very large price swings (i.e. the pop).

New comment by velominati in "Google Cloud buildpacks: container images made easy"

velominati — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 17:05:55 +0000

PM for GCP buildpacks here, AMA.

Google Cloud Buildpacks

velominati — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 17:03:56 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/buildpacks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24731961

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

New comment by velominati in "Modeling a Wealth Tax"

velominati — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 16:02:20 +0000

This isn't the correct way to model wealth tax's effect on founder equity. Paul's model doesn't account for the changing value of equity over time.

When a startup was at the seed stage and worth say $5mm, a founder with a 50% stake would be paying $25,000 / year with a 1% tax. If the company grew and received a b-round of investment valuing it at $150mm, with the founder diluted to 20% ownership, the wealth tax on the $30mm in equity would be $300,000. As you can see the tax rate changes over time significantly.

There would likely be some unexpected consequences. Founders would re-consider sky-high valuations during funding rounds because of the effect on their tax rate. Startups may consider generating real cash-flow earlier on in order to issue dividends to their shareholders to cover the wealth tax instead of selling shares. If equity holders did sell shares to cover the tax, there would be a more liquid secondary market, which could make "house-of-cards" startup more apparent early on.

New comment by velominati in "We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology"

velominati — Mon, 11 May 2020 18:40:37 +0000

I was expecting URL parameters "Famous_company" and"Hyped_technology" to substitute in the text.

Google Cloud Buildpacks

velominati — Wed, 06 May 2020 16:08:00 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/buildpacks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092650

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Connect to Your VPC and Managed Redis from App Engine and Cloud Functions

velominati — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 17:42:36 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/connect-to-your-vpc-and-managed-redis-from-app-engine-and-cloud-functions

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971141

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by velominati in "The next generation of wall chargers"

velominati — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 02:17:42 +0000

I saw someone do this with the plug to a laser printer once. The toner literally exploded in his face when he plugged it in.

Google App Engine doubles memory on Second Generation Runtimes

velominati — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 16:45:51 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/app-engine-second-generation-runtimes-now-get-double-the-memory-plus-go-112-and-php-73-now-generally-available

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224897

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by velominati in "Cloud Run – Newest member of our serverless compute stack"

velominati — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 20:25:55 +0000

I'll post the example source code here tomorrow after the talk (still tweaking it).