skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with a lot of things pg has said but this essay is SPOT ON.

Manager mode is utter BS. MBA books and management coaching teaches people to occupy a higher position in the org chart and to define rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of whatever they are managing. Tech companies have a perverted form of this where IC track and manager track are separate - so managers are only defining rules, bureaucracy, and measurement of people - stack ranking them.

Of course this method is flawed. We all inherently feel so. But no one asks why this is flawed. It is flawed because MBA-style box management is trying to impose boxes - which is orthogonal to innovation. Innovation literally means thinking/doing work outside the box.

As an example, lets say that your 10 layers of management has hired a whole bunch of innovators but then said that they will be stack ranked against each other every 6 months based on criterias and hiring committees. This is a BOX - that is preventing ANY work that may require working OUTSIDE THE CONFINES OF THE BOX.

Imagine a situation where a project is at 6 months performance review BOX boundary but still needs 2 weeks of slow rollout to ensure it doesn't crash on customers. In FOUNDER mode, the team is encouraged to take those 2 weeks to ensure that customers get a good experience - because it matters. In BOX management mode, these 2 weeks are going to appear as a fail for the stack rank committee gods. The nuance of the 2 weeks is lost. Instead, the management chain will ensure that the stack rank is executed perfectly - thus causing the people WHO CARED about the service and customers to depart - voluntarily or involuntarily.

Ultimately, NO ONE is happy with the BOX management mode of work. Employees feel like their work and insight is undervalued, C-Suite is unhappy about causing customer issues, teams are unhappy because the BOX is hurting morale and causing sabotagey environments. The only people who seem to be ok with this is the 10 layers of BOX managers whose entire existence depends on perfect execution of the BOX.
Honestly, it's because Tumblr is too good for Twitter users.

In my brief experience with Twitter, it felt suffocating. Every recommended tweet didn't see me as a person to share thoughts with but as some sort of prey, like they only wanted me for my attention, formulating tweets with open-ended questions and clickbait to bait me into engaging with them.

On Tumblr, it's just people's blogs. I follow a guy who takes photos of birds. No sweating. No engagement metrics. Just cool birds. Check it out https://www.tumblr.com/doingitfortheexposure

It's relaxing.

I don't think Twitter users would get used to the peace of mind that Tumblr can offer them.

In fact when I checked Bluesky, some new Brazilian users were talking about how there was no "trending topics" section in Bluesky. A part of Twitter's interface that I personally tried very hard to avoid looking at.
I have done the building in quite a few of these.

Often what happens is that the engineering that made it a cool demo in the beginning, is pushed aside, and once funding and a variety of product managers and sales people start chiming in, users and genuine value proposition is forgotten in favor of things that sound huge for the business, in theory. Not seen it materialize in practice yet.
From an execution perspective, I believe it makes more sense to start from the top down. Workers should believe that their boss is a boss because they can synthesize ideas.
That is how eventually I settled back on Windows 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare, nowadays WSL, and a bunch of Android and WebOS devices.
Going with an email/calendar/contacts analogy:

Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.

And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).

Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).
Yes. So I tell them that, and as purely visual trick to remember what it means I tell them to just rotate it by 90 degrees and they can see what to add if they get confused.

It’s the same as with the unit circle. I teach them about pi, but also speak about Tau in case they get confused, so it makes more visual sense to them.

Same with small kids when a/b=c. I draw little arrows to show them how you can rewrite it, as purely visual trick.

Oh well, what works for one might not work for another i suppose.
A few other models from the same line also have it IIRC, but they're all based on KaiOS and they end up being barely usable. I don't think it's their fault, I'm not sure it's even possible/EULA-compliant to use the service if not via the clients Meta gives you.

I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.
Good points in pg's essay:

* CEO/founder should engage directly at multiple levels rather than only interact with the company through their direct reports. (Same applies at every management level, btw)

* Delegation is good, and it should happen in proportion with trust.

* The dominant culture at many tech companies is flawed and sub-optimal.

Bad points:

* "Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides". The two supporting points could both be true: "VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world." However, it does not follow that the only option left is "Steve Jobs Style."

* "an annual retreat for [...] the 100 most important people"... I have trouble envisioning an effective org chart with lots of people at the top who would not also be in the "top 100" list. If your department heads are not your most skilled operators, then... maybe that's a good problem to fix.

* Assuming that the skills and intuition that make a founder successful will 100% apply to the very different job of being the chief of a 2000-person tribe. We should not assume that.

On average, everyone has an equal chance of needing to learn something new to succeed in a new situation-- founders included. Don't let pg's founder flattery go to your head.
And that's completely warranted.

Not only does the CEO get the privilege of choosing whether he wants to relo to Seattle (with a chartered jet for transportation, no less), but Starbucks is also willing to expense up to three months of temporary residence while he's in Seattle until he finds "permanent secondary housing", at which point Starbucks will expense relocation costs.

The average worker that moved to Boise during COVID? RTO, on your dime.

The offer letter also allows the CEO to use the jet for personal travel, up to $250k/year (which is negotiable). Keep in mind that any travel he does while he's with vendors, suppliers, corp customers, etc counts as business travel that hits various corporate budgets and DOES NOT count towards this limit. So if he's into golf and wants to fly himself and his friends to Augusta or something, that's covered by Starbucks (and can also be considered a business expense depending on who's with him; see the previous sentence).

Meanwhile, an employee (that isn't in Sales) who wants to fly Economy to a conference FOR WORK within the continental US has to charge the entire thing against their training budget (usually less than $3000) and, in some cases, provide evidence that they were there.

And people on here wonder why founders, by and large, don't make startups for the love of it anymore.

I agree with the internet here; this is bullshit.
(robot voice) Does it support sharding? Sharding is the secret ingredient in the web scale sauce.
Can confirm, I know of a small tech startup in southern EU that was founded by an American MBA wannabe type. Immediately after getting a mid sized B2B contract he pivoted into manager mode, expecting to grow to 200 people rapidly, and as one might expect the entire company imploded from disfunctionality in less than a year. Of course that was not the only issue that sank it, but I'm sure it contributed.
Gluing together premade components is not “from the ground up” by most people’s definition.

People are looking at the ground up for a clear picture of what the thing is actually doing, so masking the important part of what is actually happening, then calling it “ground up” is disingenuous.
Focus your energies, achieve maximum by December 31, go into 2025 as a champion
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVmSewHqMY
It's a general problem: the good information is behind paywalls, so people only find bad information and start believing nonsense.
but there was a critique, your proposal was "something something let an army fix it" and they provided context "something something various armies caused it."
While the old prememant ownership thing has gone out of fashion, maybe we could have something like a 20 year lease where the Brits go in again and bring law and order? This kind of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Egyptian_Sudan
jemalloc and tcmalloc use size classes, so if you allocate 23 bytes the allocator reserves 32 bytes of space on your behalf. Both of them can find the size class of a pointer with simple manipulation of the pointer itself, not with some global hash table. E.g. in tcmalloc the pointer belongs to a "page" and every pointer on that page has the same size.
OP made a specific claim - words represent an evolutionary progression from hieroglyphs, are therefore better, and we should go forward and not back.

I see nothing in cultural memetic theorizing (which I summarized as “culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics”) that supports that.

The term “cultural evolution” is highly unfortunate as it is one more example of humanities folk borrowing science terminology in a bid to coin some evocative word salad that will sound relevant and scientific.
Can confirm, as a libertarian I don’t want a free market, it’s more like I think the rights of people should be above the rights of companies, corporations and so on. Governments exist to protect the rights of the people and in this age, in developed countries, there is no greater infringement on those rights than by large businesses.
Bluesky is the new Orkut! ;-)
Bathyphysa Conifera
A close friend of mine once said, many decades ago, all Human Innovation can be traced to the desire for sex.

As I have aged, I have come to believe that fully.
Sure, only if they take a look at every speed limit in America and readjust them to be realistic for modern cars.
California lawmakers approve legislation to ban deepfakes
It sounds like you have never been in the position of e.g. establishing hiring protocols and used those not to get the best people into the company, but instead to ensure that no one who has the potential to outperform you gets hired.

At the IC level sure, it is your manager’s job to create alignment. At the hiring level pg is talking about, they are deciding which of those people to bring in, and they think about it in at least as much detail as you when you design the intricate functions of the next product you ship.

Think about it like this: you have the chance to build a product that wins every trial but you won’t get anything more in the process, or you can design a product that is less competitive and sends you personally $<meaningful_amount> every time it is trialed, whether or not they buy. Assume no one will ever be able to definitively prove which one you did.
For the record, if you do not know what a dict actually is, and how it works, it is impossible to use it effectively.

Although if your claim is then that most programmers do not care about being effective, that I would tend to agree with given the 64 gigs of ram my basic text editors need these days.
Engineers should always be considering the business impact of their decisions, but it's also the job of management to create and enforce that culture at every single level. On the other hand, it is also suffocating to talented engineers to have to try and predict how their bosses would do something and emulate that instead of just doing the work, and I think this push-pull is where most engineering managers fail their employees. Too little control and the less engaged/talented engineers will make decisions that tank the project, too much micromanagement and velocity tanks. With that said, regardless of where engineering management sits on the continuum of control, outcomes will suffer if managers are just simply bad at engineering and making business decisions, which is also often the case.
Bill Ackman Says X Ban Will Make Brazil an 'Uninvestable Market'
It seems utility-scale battery storage is growing rapidly in Texas as well?

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/grid-scale/why-...
> Do you expect them to go unpunished simply because it was all talk? Should they?

If there was no house to be sold, and the agent wasn't even an agent, and they had no way of accepting that money, then of course they should not be punished.

As an example, lets say it was a youtuber who did this, and they recorded the video as a funny prank to post on the internet.

This would not be illegal and they would not be punished.
This whole article is written around one key sentence:

> There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

But there are absolutely no examples given of what these things actually are. Paul kinda vibes around that vague statement for 5 more paragraphs, giving absolutely nothing concrete.

And to be honest this hn comment section scares me, as it feels like people are discussing Paul’s new clothes without actually voicing out what they are talking about.

What the hell is “Founder mode”, exactly?
NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space
Growing up with the tech press in this era, “commodity RDRAM” is a funny phrase to read!

As I recall, the partnership between Intel and Rambus was pilloried as an attempt to re-proprieterize the PC RAM interface in a similar vein to IBM’s microchannel bus.
Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality
TFA is about camera footage obtained via warrant (thus following due process). Do you think evidence should not be obtainable via warrant?

> Unfortunately the current SCOTUS doesn’t see it that way, they think webcams and electronic surveillance should be in the constitution or authorities can do anything.

Citation needed.
Copy-pasting from above:

> I guess my point is more that I wish the communication styles enabled by smartphones and the social expectations they carry weren't the norm. I'm not even really sure what I would do if I could wish my own phone into existence.

I also broadly agree with the usual laundry list of complaints: closed platforms, surveillance, ads, lack of innovation, smartphones being more like status symbols than actual pieces of technology.
TIL! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...
> A relevant one for this purpose is they've pledged to cut carbon by 50% between 2020 and 2030.

I wonder if thats even possible given how much dairy they use. While I cant find any official numbers on their dairy use, one site estimated it at 750 million liters a year. Another site suggests Starbucks actually sells more dairy than coffee (a drink like a latte or mocha is 90% milk).
Knowing Linux is different than knowing how to use a CLI.

I dislike that the two are conflated.

Firstly, Mac and Windows both offer a very mature command line interface.

But also, I don’t think knowing Linux should require you to know the command line either. If other operating systems don’t require it, neither should Linux.

If you’re focusing on “developer tools”, even then, what tools do most devs need that can’t be done from a UI? I live a lot of my time in the terminal but there’s very little that can’t actually be wrapped in a UI
Scientists find 1,700 ancient viruses in Tibetan glacier
You don’t think the HBS crowd has kind of a vested interest here? They are on the top of the professional faker totem pole for god’s sake. :)
I'm not a psychiatrist, but it might be hard to tell them from the psychotics who can model the standard view of the world well enough, for long enough, to lie to the police about their condition.

More practically, I doubt they get unsupervised phone calls.
https://archive.is/nsR9w
PG's commentary is interesting but I think he is leaning towards an unsatisfactory conclusion. He's trying to simplify management into modes but in reality life is more complex and nuanced.

Chesky's experience instead says to me that as managers we should be be wary of all advice and management styles and playbooks. For sure it's good to listen to advice and learn about management but life and managing a business are so much more complex than any set of rules or observations can describe.

In fact, since every organization's situation is unique, then managers should take all advice and accepted wisdom with a pinch of salt and forge ahead with their own unique set of principles for their own unique set of challenges. This is what Chesky deduced.

I would also go one step further and assert that it's a positive sign if a founder goes against the grain and breaks the rules - success is more likely than if they follow the established way of doing things. This is innovation.

Perhaps this is the 'founder mode' that PG is trying to uncover: think different.
I like Ayn Rand as much as the next HN consumer, but let’s be a bit more judicious in how we apply her ideals.

If you earned your wealth through driving on public roads, after receiving a public education, without it actually being blatantly stolen due to a public police force, etc etc etc.

Then it is also your responsibility to pay for these items so that they dan continue to be used for future generation.
Ironically, slippery slope argumentation is a favourite style of kids.

Unfortunately, your argument is a well known fallacy and carries no weight.
I bet that Reed Hastings has a sub organization at Netflix that is run in founder mode, even if most of the organization is run in manager mode.

Whether orgs are run in manager mode or founder mode depends on whether there is a founder level leader available and nature of the changes that need to occur for the organization to remain competitive. Some orgs or sub-orgs cannot afford to have a founder making radical changes, because the risk this will lead to an exponential rise in defects for end customers is greater than the potential benefit.

PG tailors to startups and for startups the risk of the wrong product is generally much greater than the risk of product defects. So I tend to agree with his points here.
There are many very good reasons why the top 100 most valuable people would not be the department heads.

Cracked engineers, designers, growth people, AEs... the best ICs shouldn't necessarily be in management positions. Yet, the CEO should neither be air-gapped from those people nor managing their work/career on a day to day basis.
Let me flip that around on you: why would someone need to know Linux specifically for the majority of jobs out there?

I’m very familiar with Linux. My day job for years was Linux based and I honestly do not think one needs to know it, or any other OS specifically , unless your job specifically requires it.
As many people have pointed out, an iPad is not a big iphone. Kudos for the developer for being open to learning design from other apps.

And for caring about the UX.
Jensen Huang of NVIDIA uses stochastic sampling instead of status reports[1].
Kind of sounds like the same thing. Dig deep stochastically into the organization. Also sounds like "management by walking around," which was the style at HP under Hewlett and Packard[2]. I think the reason professional managers dislike these methods is they lack technical understanding of what the business actually does and instead focus on the financial aspects.

[1] https://www.apolloadvisor.com/unconventional-leadership-of-j...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around
Private Google Groups Used for Spam
I'm hoping someone in here knows someone at Google ;) I just received spam on an email address that does NOT have an associated Google account, relayed through mail-qk1-f197.google.com (209.85.222.197). The email was sent through a Google Group and contains header "X-Google-Group-Id: 266929046196" and an unsubscribe link "https://groups.google.com/a/cat.streamingscommunity.beer/group/cxe/subscribe". However, that unsubscribe link is not accessible, even though the spam-spewing group still exists and is forwarding messages. Sending an email to "googlegroups-manage+266929046196+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com", I get an auto-reply from Google, thereby confirming my assessment that this is a valid Google Group. The abuse link "https://groups.google.com/a/cat.streamingscommunity.beer/forum/#!forum/cxe/abuse" again doesn't work, because I don't have access to cat.streamingscommunity.beer because the recipient email does not have an associated Google account. But replying to the auto-reply got me an official confirmation from Google that I have been unsubscribed.

In short:

1. Spammer creates a private Google Group

2. Spammer subscribes victims into that Google Group and sadly Google allows that without any opt-in.

3. Spammer sends spam into Google Group

4. Google will dutifully forward the spam to all victims through the official Google mail infrastructure and with valid SPF and DMARC, thereby all but assuring that the victims will, indeed, receive the spam messages into their INBOX.

5. Google prevents victims from unsubscribing through the website because the Group is private
Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.
> I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects

Military interventions most often fail to secure a country than the opposite. Haiti had a long peacekeeping mission from the UN and fell back into anarchy, Sudan has also had a military intervention. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. are other examples of interventions gone south.

Probably one of the few more successful interventions was the Yugoslavian Civil War, nowadays the appetite of the world for NATO bombing a country isn't really there.

No one has figured out how to do nation building from the outside, that often has come from the people in those nations themselves.
I’m beginning to think of the US healthcare system as a cruel and unusual punishment.

I guess we’re being punished for having the temerity to exist?