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giansegato | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it

higher ROI than anything else I've ever done for my career, by a long shot

with my website [1] I found investors, I was contacted by a highly sought after silicon valley startup, moved to the US and got my visa sponsored, I even found friends here to get my network going and a professional network much more significant than anything I could ever have on linkedin

the only downside is that writing on your blog takes a long time to become clearly worth it (read: years), so most people don't stick to it and never find out -- do it!

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays

giansegato | 1 year ago | on: Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization

I don't think there's anything about YC inherently misaligned with the next startup era — in fact, they're adapting their model accordingly, hedging their bets + investing in harder tech with higher capex and longer feedback loops. It's gonna take a while to see the new strategy play out, much longer than before in fact. That said, agreed with the general point that the model is changing and the old playbook is not working anymore. I published 5000 words last month that try to analyze this trend within an economics framework: https://giansegato.com/essays/dawn-new-startup-era

giansegato | 1 year ago | on: VCs aren’t your friends

VC management fees are typically 2%/y. if a VC fund has $100 million in committed capital, the annual management fees would generally be between $2 million and $2.5 million. it's a lot of money.

giansegato | 1 year ago | on: US opens probe into 130k Ford vehicles over hands-free tech

I don't understand the general tenor and sentiment of the comments here. I've taken dozens of self-driving cars rides in SF in the last few months. They were magical, and _they work_.

It blows my mind that the general defeatist tone is "it can't be done", while it's literally happening right now. It took a bajillion dollars and decades of work, but we're past the tipping point now.

Sure, regulation must happen, it's not like a chat bot where screwing up is worst case scenario being canceled for a week. Lives are on the line. But outright "it's impossible and must be stopped" is literally against progress.

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)

Uhm. I don't know. At my company, we're living on Slack (it's remote). There are only few tactical meetings. Coordination happen async on Slack. Worked out pretty well so far, we ship tons of stuff continuously. I agree with some other comments here: how much signal to noise ratio you get out of Slack mostly boils down to the people

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: Replit's in-browser coding AI

yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE

iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: Replit's in-browser coding AI

replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: An account was suspended

I know reasonably well some ex FB people from the early days (early 2010s, well before IPO). They explicitly defined FB as a 'utility' - based on how users react during outages and usage patterns.

I think that your definition is not only spot on, but actually what social media platforms themselves interpret their role.

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: On Adobe acquiring Figma

Why would they even want that? They paid 15% of their market cap (30 considering the drop) for a new shiny toy, and now they would just… cash it? Doesn't make any sense, their incentive is to keep it great and working. Whether they can is a completely different matter.

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: You can watch how much I rewrite here

in replit we just implemented playback mode, it's called history mode, and we do happen to have vi shortcuts (couldn't live without them)

(I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)

giansegato | 3 years ago | on: Yak Shaving: A Short Lesson on Staying Focused (2018)

What you're saying and what the article is saying are two different things. The whole point of the article is not "Don't refactor code"; it's "Never fix a bug and refactor in the same pull request".

It's a matter of focus and intentionality.

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