shawnhermans

I recently started collecting Blu-ray because of thrift and second hand stores. In a few cases, I was able to purchase some of my all time favorite movies unopened in the original retail packaging for a dollar. Not to mention my local library has a larger Blu-ray selection than my local video rental place did before they closed.

The Wii came out in 2006 and all my discs still work fine. But me thinks this missing the main point people are mad. People are fine with digital only for the most part, but they don't trust Sony to do the right thing. For instance, I wonder if all the games I bought for the PS Vita and PS3 will be available in 5-10 years. With physical media I at least have the option of going to a retro game store and buying a copy.

Incidentally, I've recently started collecting DVD and Blu Ray. I've found unopened copies of some of my favorite movies at thrift stores for a few dollars. It is nice to know I can watch a movie without figuring out which streaming service it is currently on or having to connect to the internet. Plus, if I had friends, I could loan them a copy.

I resisted learning SQL for years. When I finally got around to learning it, I kicked myself for not learning it sooner. Sure, it has its share of jank and every DB has its own flavor, but at the end of the day you can do insane amounts of data processing using an easy to learn, although sometimes difficult to master, query language.

What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.

Former Catholic. I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal. I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history. What I am trying to say is there is no love lost between me and the Catholic Church.

With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.

I stopped commenting on HackerNews years ago because of that same phenomenon. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with RMS. It isn't an excuse to act like a total asshole all the time.

This whole conversation is frustrating because it is boiling down to a stupid semantic debate. The author is claiming that people don't get paid to explore data, they get paid to find things. IMHO, this statement doesn't even make sense. When I explore data, I almost always find something. This something might not be useful to an "end user," but it is almost always useful and necessary.

Sometimes, the only thing I find by doing exploration is that a particular dataset is absolute garbage and shouldn't be used for any purpose. The only way I find stuff like that out is if I explore the dataset.

> Anyone who has tried to edit a page that's politically contentious, or that anyone cares about, knows that what's written depends almost completely on who has the most time and patience.

[Citation Needed]

I'm really struggling to understand the issue. I understand the issue of conflict of interest when it comes to things like government contracts and public corporations. Here conflict of interest occurs because the person makes decisions on how to spend money that isn't their money. It is either the taxpayer's money or the stockholder's money.

In a private company, like Andreessen Horowitz, they are effectively spending their own money. If they choose to invest in a company founded by one of their partners, I do not see the conflict of interest. From the outside we may question whether or not the startup is really worthy of being funded, but it really isn't our call to make.

But what if it was our call to make? Did they make a bad decision by funding one of their own? Looking at his track record he already has experience as a co-founder and a CTO. On top of having prior experience, he has worked as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for over a year. The people making the decision whether or not to fund his startup have experience working with him. They probably have a good idea of whether this person can or cannot deliver.

I think most people object to this, because they imagine a situation where a better startup is not funded because the partners decided to fund their buddy instead. Let us say that is true. For the sake of argument, assume this guy is incompetent and should not be given funding. Imagine this guy worked at Andreessen Horowitz for over a year and everyone knew he was incompetent, but decided to fund him anyways just because they were BFFs.

I guess it is possible something like this happened, but I doubt it. I recently finished reading Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing about Hard Things and he doesn’t seem like the type of person who keeps incompetent people around just because likes them.

The only valid objection I see is if they are using information provided to them under a non-disclosure agreement to gain unfair advantage. But is this a valid concern? As others have pointed out, most ideas are cheap. Even if that information provides some short-term advantage, it won’t help in the long-term as the market changes.

Warren Buffett has a solid reputation of making excellent investments. As long as the money returned a good investment, I wouldn't care at all.

This is a crude way of handling low performing employees. It measures time spent at one's desk and not productivity. A good manager shouldn't be worrying about how their employees spend their time but should be worrying about whether or not their employees produce.

If there is an employee an employee who is constantly leaving early, coming in late, and not working, management needs to deal with this directly. An open office plan is not a good replacement for good management.

The author makes a lot of statements but doesn't really back them up with solid facts or analysis. Consider the second reason of "Bitcoin will not end the need for trusted central parties" and claims that intermediaries do more than just payment processing. As an example, he talks about YouTube and revenue splitting.

I don't understand the connection between YouTube revenue splitting and Bitcoin replacing traditional currencies. I guess this is supposed to be an example of intermediaries providing value added, but can we at least provide an example in the payment processing space? What does a credit card company provide that is not provided by Bitcoin?

Overall, I am on the fence on Bitcoin. I get the feeling cryptocurrencies will drastically change the world economy in the future, but I don't think anyone really knows how and to what extent.

As others have pointed out, I don’t think Berkshire Hathaway and YC really compete in the same markets. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have some great words of wisdom on their approach to investing, but I am reminded of two of quotes in particular: “Our favorite holding period is forever” and “Never invest in a business you can’t understand”. Berkshire looks for long term returns by making safe, reliable investments.

This is the exact opposite of YC and other startup incubators. Their approach is to invest in newer companies with great potential, but also great risk of failure. The business models of these companies are not always clear.

From a personal level (I live in Omaha), I find it interesting to contrast Berkshire Hathaway and YC from a cultural perspective. YC is located in Silicon Valley, while Berkshire has its headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. When asked about why he stays in Omaha, Buffett said "It's very easy to think clearly here. You're undisturbed by irrelevant factors and the noise generally of business investments."

Silicon Valley’s culture is the opposite of Omaha in many respects. Companies are concerned about chasing the latest and greatest trends even if many founders don’t complete understand those trends. Startups aren’t thinking about the next 10 or 20 years, they are more concerned about their next round of funding.

The success of Berkshire Hathaway demonstrates a valuable point: Silicon Valley isn’t the center of the world. Plenty of successful companies thrive in backwoods locations like Omaha. This isn’t meant to say Omaha’s culture is superior to Silicon Valley’s, they are just different. Diversity is a good thing.

When these types of things happen, I notice a strong "blame the victim" mentality. When Sony was hacked, I saw similar comments about how it serves them right for having bad security. Some people even go as far as to praise the hacker and think they shouldn’t be held accountable for their crime. After all, if Uber didn’t want this, they wouldn’t have made themselves so vulnerable to penetration.

While I agree companies like Uber and Sony need to invest more time and energy into security, real people are hurt when these types of things happen. It isn’t the executive-level “fat cats” who are hurt the most. It is normal, everyday people. They did not ask for their personal information to be stolen. Their only crime was working for a company with poor information security.

Furthermore, the fact Uber issued a subpoena for information from Github does not make Uber the bad guy for requesting the information and Github the good guy for withholding the information. A crime was committed and this is part of the investigation. The information requested by Uber is not unreasonable. They are basically requesting log files for that specific Gist.

Channeling my inner Matthew McConaughey from A Time to Kill, imagine this happening to an organization that is more likeable than Uber or Sony (shouldn’t be that hard). What if this happened to an organization responsible for helping rape victims and this person leaked the private information of rape victims to the Internet? Would people be so willing to support the criminal? Would people be so eager to praise Github for not cooperating?

Just because Uber is a horrible, unethical company does not mean it isn’t protected under the law. We shouldn’t condone crime just because we don’t like the victims.