RookyNumbas

The crack vs. cocaine comparison is no good, we should stop using it. Free base is a very different drug than cocaine. An equivalent "white" version of crack would be crystal meth, which has had similar sentencing guidelines to crack.

I am not convinced that you have ever worked at the average startup. Your points are incredibly divorced from the reality most face.

Years worth of runway is not the norm. Having your choice of senior engineers to hire right away is not the norm. Most startups exist as sinking ships.

It sounds like you lucked in to a company that raised a shitload early on and so had the luxury to make these decisions.

Doc may have been a weirdo, but he was also the most popular and liked person in the entire town. The plot revolves around people trying to throw parties for him because they think he's so great.

Today, no matter your weirdness, it's likely been productized and advertised to the masses in some way.

Sure, that's all correct. But before showing it is dead it would be useful to have empirical evidence that it was ever alive. And the evidence is very mixed at best. The history of the EMH is a battle between those showing where it breaks from reality, followed by increasingly desperate attempts to save it with some additional explanatory factors.

It's a nice model. But like most economic and financial models shouldn't be held as gospel.

Yes, 99th percentile quant compensation is significantly higher. But it's a bad comparison. Google alone hire mores more people into these positions than all quant firms combined. 99.9% at FANG might be more comparable.

Will Durant has an interesting quote that has stuck with me, something along the lines of: Out of every 100 new ideas, 99 of them will be bad, and inferior to what was replaced.

My impression is that "It's better now than before" is used to protect the effort that got us here, not cancel it. It's used to protect us against the 99 bad ideas.

I think that someone in your position could shift a dial a few degrees. And the resulting consequences, compounded over time, would be absolutely staggering. I'm guessing you did shift a few dials while working there, and probably in a good direction.

It seems like you are painting a picture where Amazon was destined from the beginning to be dealing with the issues it is now. Were there no other possible futures? Were there not individuals who had a massive impact?

I'm related to someone who runs very fairly large warehousing operations across north america. His decisions have certainly been influenced by employees. Hell, I think I've changed his mind on an issue or two over dinner conversations.

Companies like Amazon were not always in the position you've described. It took decades to get there. And there would have been numerous opportunities along the way where a single engineer could have had a massive impact.

A single engineer at Facebook will not make a difference today. 10 or 12 years ago they absolutely could have changed the course of the company.

Almost all collective change is spearheaded by the ideas and leadership of a few individuals.

I'm not sure that is actually a counterpoint. It think they are somewhat in agreement. The blog states that there is very little evidence that people of the ancient and medieval world experienced PTSD from combat the way modern soldiers do.

The askshistorians poster focuses on two points:

- Combat and violence were normalized, and there was little moral or ethical ambiguity surrounding it. Unlike today.

- PTSD seemed to come from public perception of the acts and the resulting shame, rather than the acts themselves. Also unlike today.

When I think of the very successful people I know, all have gone through life events that would absolutely flatten most people. The loss of a child, a partner committing suicide, 6 businesses failing, 2 weeks in an induced comma.

And yet a stranger looks at their accomplishments and thinks that they just didn't have bad luck.

I have no visual imagery in dreams either. I still have spatial awareness and can move about unimpeded, but there is no visual element to it. Other dream senses are uninhibited.

While conscious I can play back long complex pieces of music in my head, and can imagine fairly vivid tastes and touches. But I can't picture my wife's face.

> Don't know why you think my emails are spam!

Remember, we don't know anything about your site yet. We haven't read any of your content yet. How would we possibly know that your emails might be worthwhile?

It's like when an app asks you to rate it the first time you've opened it. Maybe it is a good app, and maybe it deserves a great rating after a week of use. But it's a very bad first impression.

Wii was the third best seller, and the only non-portable in the top 5.

That insight happened 30 years ago. Nintendo's best selling consoles and games have always been portable systems.

I like to start by thinking about cache locality and ensuring linear layout. Next focus on one-time, or minimal memory allocation. Then there are a bunch of small, systemic things you need to get right. After that you can start worrying about worst case big O scenarios.

Of course this depends on your language. A c programmer will have a different mental model than a python one.