@paulg Please comment on Airbnb and YC investment in it, especially since you care about morals
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Parth Desai
389 posts
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he would have the moral authority to face and maybe even to solve this problem. But I doubt anyone in the phone business now does.
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@paulg Are you going to comment on AirBnb at all? Considering YC invested in it, and thus you benefited from it.
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At one point my son and his friend kept looking for shortcuts to getting rich. Over and over I told them the way to do it is just to make something people want. If this is what I tell my own kids about getting rich, why won't politicians believe this is how a lot of people do it?
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@fahdashwr @iavins Yeah it’s theoretically possible, but given that it’s nanosecond scoped, the collision space reduces vastly imo
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@psdesai_93 @iavins that's what i use in the uuid crate
#working-with-different-uuid-versions" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.rs/uuid/latest/uu…
I don't have a validation of this, but logically speaking I think it would still conflict if you have data being generated in-parallel at the same time? That's interesting..
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@iavins @fahdashwr UUID v7 would be better yeah? Since it has timestamp encoded
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@fahdashwr the linked explanation is a spot on
a smoll fault in hardware, resulting in low quality entropy will end up generating many collisions
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@AOC I'm encouraged that you seem to be changing your position. Initially you said it was impossible to make a billion dollars without resorting to dubious tricks. Now you merely say that billionaires "often" do. Are you now admitting it's possible to make a billion dollars honestly?
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Someone can certainly *make* a billion dollars. That’s not the same thing as earning.
Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence, and scale.
Take Airbnb. They heavily lobby politicians against passing housing laws to protect working class residents because it’s bad for their business model.
Airbnb could not exist at its current scale and size without the housing market destabilizations, displacements, and exploits that are supercharging the evictions of working people everywhere from Puerto Rico to Jackson Hole.
Now young people are planning for a future where they will never be able to afford to own a home while others have 20 and live off renting it out to them at extortionate rates with zero protections. Yes, a tiny amount of people can make billions of dollars doing that. And millions of everyday Americans are bearing the cost.
Paul Graham@paulg
Sure you can earn a billion dollars. I've been teaching people how to do it for 20 years. The way you do it is to start a company that grows fast. You don't have to do anything bad to make a company grow fast. You just have to make something people want. paulgraham.com/ace.html
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@zeeg Agreed - but what happens when a Yes engineer causes multiple production outages, and No engineer has to come and fix it. There are times when a No engineer has valid reasons. The main difference being, is a No engineer saying No all the time or only when it matters
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This “No engineer” is the destructive persona in most conversations.
If you find yourself being that person you need to step back and find a way to recenter yourself on the objectives.
It’s about solutions not opposition.
Jonathan Ross@JonathanRoss321
For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews. This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system. LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it. If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.
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🇨🇳 China:
The U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is contrary to the principles of international law, and puts the global market at risk.
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@samokhvalov You've River in there, and River is actually inspired by Oban. I can give you relevant links. I think it's a bit oto Oban for it to not be included in that table. Those are my thoughts at least
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@psdesai_93 Why should I?
(In fact, initially added but then removed to keep table not so wide)
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leave Canada before it's too late
to be clear:
- you already pay for the school in Canada (which is not cheap)
- you obviously pay your taxes that whole time when you are there as well as paying the oligopolies of banks, housing, and telecomm, swathes of money
- you earn less than any American doing the same job AND the currency you earn in is worse AND the prices of all commodities are higher
- when you leave, you have the "exit tax", which makes you pay full taxes on ALL your assets as if you just sold all of them (including illiquid startup equity btw, that was fun)
- and now the proposal is to pay an additional half a million in cash
*just to leave the country*
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Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱@ryangerritsen
The Liberal party has Patrick Pichette a former Senior VP of Google on stage who lives in Europe by the way, say that if Canadians want to leave Canada to work in the US they need to pay an exit tax of half a million dollars. The guy did the very thing to get a Microsoft job decades ago and paid 30 bucks. Now he wants young Canadians to be trapped here. The Liberals are nuts.
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@najam_ali Why should toll be paid to Iran in the first place? These are international waters.
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I am genuinely struggling to understand this logic.
If the rest of the world is willing to pay a small toll to Iran to keep oil flowing and stabilise markets, then why does the U.S. feel the need to block all shipping, especially when it is not dependent on that oil?
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@ovaistariq @nbrempel Agreed on exit tax being bad.
On the pay being different, Toronto is almost as expensive as Tier 1 cities in USA (which have the pay range) and the pay is worse Tier 2 cities in USA. This doesn’t factor in FX rate. Think that’s the point OP is making.
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@psdesai_93 @nbrempel The pay is different between different states in the US. It depends in general how the market prices talent and the cost of living. However, I don’t see the relationship between this and the $500K exit tax proposed. The exit tax is bad no matter how you look at it.
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I agree with this. Does Shopify pay the same for US based SWEs vs Canadian?
tobi lutke@tobi
Make Canada so compelling that the best and brightest want to net-immigrate, not flee. Let's stick to good ideas, of which Pichette has plenty. Making Canada a cage is not one of them.
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@ovaistariq @nbrempel Number 1 reason why a lot of talent leaves Canada for USA is the pay gap. That’s the point OP is making.
We get paid less than our counter parts in states even in the same company, and this is not even factoring in FX rate.
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@nbrempel What does the US - Canada pay gap have to do with a $500K exit tax?
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(11/11) There is much more in the piece—on the saga of Altman's firing and return; a history of alleged similar complaints earlier in his career; gifts from foreign leaders and a security-clearance vetting process that turned up what one official described as "a lot of red flags," and more. And it looks at wider critiques from industry insiders of the current moment's anti-regulation trajectory—something that stands to affect all of us.
I hope you take the time for a long-read in this case, and subscribe to @NewYorker to support this kind of investigative reporting: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
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(🧵1/11) For the past year and a half, I've been investigating OpenAI and Sam Altman for @NewYorker. With my coauthor @andrewmarantz, I reviewed never-before-disclosed internal memos, obtained 200+ pages of documents related to a close colleague, including extensive private notes, and interviewed more than 100 people.
OpenAI was founded on the premise that A.I. could be the most dangerous invention in human history—and that its C.E.O. would need to be a person of uncommon integrity. We lay out the most detailed account yet of why Altman was ousted out by board members and executives who came to believe he lacked that integrity, and ask: were they right to allege that he couldn't be trusted?
A thread on some of of our findings:
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@miguelabdonsh @arpit_bhayani You can get pretty far with that architecture. Add redis, optimize db queries, scale out horizontally and you should be good for a while.
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@arpit_bhayani The truth is in the context. For MVP: true. For production with real users: naive. But it is true that many over-build from day 1.
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One microservice, one API; anything more than that is overengineering.
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you don't become the greatest food city ever known to man without allowing room for experimentation
greentea 👑💌@matcha7th
Toronto might have gone a little too far
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@bilal_akh I mean let’s be honest, we’re not. We’re a solid 8/10 or even 9/10 on everything but there’s few spots that are 10/10
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