Disqus - Latest Comments for lacker

Re: Organized Play Can't Exist Without Judges

lacker — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 16:41:33 -0000

I guess the lesson is, if you sue the people paying you money, don't be surprised if they stop paying you money.

Re: Build, Baby, Build

lacker — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 13:31:58 -0000

This is a complete nitpick but $200k can definitely get you a place to live near Silicon Valley. E.g. $150k is Google new grad base salary which should be able to pay $3k rent per month for a 1br apartment near work. The people living in vans on El Camino are making a lot less.

Gonna be tough to buy a house though. But hey if you marry another senior software engineer and you both make $200k you can probably get a nice house in Fremont or Union City.

Re: Will World Government Rot?

lacker — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 01:56:06 -0000

Do most large software systems really rot? If you don't add new features to a piece of software, it doesn't suddenly break. I feel like a better metaphor is more that adding each additional feature has increasing overhead, and often it isn't worth the overhead to either keep expanding the system or to remove low-value features.

There are many examples of large software systems that have not rotted. Linux, for example, or the codebase of the large high-quality tech companies like Google or Amazon. The google.com and amazon.com websites have been continuously operating for decades, with growing functionality and scale, and it does not make sense to say they are "rotting". To keep them from rotting it does help a lot to treat the whole as a modular combination of smaller pieces that can be replaced, but, nevertheless it seems like a success case.

Re: Dapper

lacker — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:50:40 -0000

Is it really the most used consumer crypto application outside exchanges? On Ethereum, it looks like Etheremon had more users yesterday, for example (although at 500 vs 400 it's quite small numbers). And if you look at EOS all of their top 10 gambling apps have more users than Cryptokitties.

sources:
https://dappradar.com/dapps...
https://dappradar.com/eos-d...

Re: Migrant caravan swells to 5,000 resumes advance toward US

lacker — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:39:38 -0000

"Real Americans don't scream and holler like adolescent females"

But some Americans *are* adolescent females.

Re: TES vs ANT - 2017

lacker — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 12:08:46 -0000

Nitpick: "TES has a much lower mana curve. You'll see that there's a single card that isn't Ad Nauseam that costs more than two." -> this list has an empty the warrens in it.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

lacker — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 10:16:14 -0000

I agree with this article except for the speculation at the end that "Oracle's architecture isn't well enough matched". Oracle's architecture is basically the same as MySQL or Postgres - they are each databases you interact with via SQL, and developers using it don't really get into the guts, so a system that uses Oracle databases has essentially the same architecture as one that uses MySQL or Postgres.

MySQL/Postgres are better for two reasons. One is that they are free! Oracle is quite expensive and does basically the same thing. Over time the open source solutions evolve, and there just isn't that much more you could ask for from a SQL-based DB, so MySQL and Postgres got "good enough".

The other reason is that, being free, they have spawned a wider ecosystem of free tools contributed by others. If for example you are building an app with Ruby on Rails, there is far more open source middleware, connectors, helper libraries, and documentation around using MySQL rather than Oracle. So it's easier to use MySQL, and that ecosystem is an ongoing advantage.

But overall the point is a good one. Complex systems become brittle over time - extending Windows 95 to mobile didn't work that well. Systems built from many modular components can become stronger over time, and that's how many modern open source systems work.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

lacker — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 10:10:35 -0000

True for Apache and Java, but MySQL is still plenty popular among startups.

Re: Parse and React, a Shared Chemistry | Parse Blog

lacker — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 18:51:36 -0000

You only get billed for API requests that hit api.parse.com over the network. You don't get charged every time someone clicks a button.

Re: BREAKING: Apple’s Tablet Is For The Healthcare Industry

lacker — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:22:49 -0000

Nah... I'm still betting Doodle Jump on a 10 inch screen. No way Apple launches something that's big business rather than consumer focused.

Re: The curse of prevention

lacker — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:33:24 -0000

I'd be interested to see if more people actually did click on the subscribe button as a result of the first few paragraphs ;-)

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

lacker — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:31:20 -0000

No, because a lot of people like me would never pay. Then for half the month, whenever we go to a NYT link we get reminded it's our 10th visit and then have to leave.

Re: Peter Clark aggregates stuff here.

lacker — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:16:05 -0000

that's cool. I want that in a poster without the "lego" logo.

Re: The Venture Capital Math Problem

lacker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:37:00 -0000

This fitting strategy reminded me of an old post -

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/200...

says Fred:

"The way I like to think about this is one deal returns the fund, another 3-4 deals returns it again, and the rest return it a third time to get to the 3x gross that a fund must hit to deliver good returns to the LPs."

If that really holds up then that's enough info to fit a power law - if deals 2 through 4 are equal to deal #1 that's enough information to get k. That's about k = -1.08. If it's deals 2 through 5 equalling deal #1, then it's about k = -1.23.

But I think the lesson here is that this modeling the area under a power law based on its largest element is very volatile. We are assuming that 5B top-exit is constant year to year, which is a very weird thing to assume. For example I would expect that the value of the 10th highest exit is more consistent because it has more fluke resistance. (Or replace 10 with any n > 1.) So I don't think this sort of model is really a good one. If we want to make a good model we should start from the data we are most confident in, which is probably just a big list of exits with their values, and then we can fit to that.

Re: The Venture Capital Math Problem

lacker — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:06:00 -0000

I responded earlier on twitter but I think the math is tough to get across in 140 characters ;-) I think the "scaling exponent" earlier is actually important here not just in a mathy theoretical way.

Basically there are two sorts of power law curves. When the scaling exponent is greater than 1, most of the area comes from events near the median. When the scaling exponent is less than 1, the area is unbounded because of the possibility of a single huge exit that skews all the averages.

So when you assume every year has the same maximum exit, you are implicitly assuming the distribution is the first type of power law. But I'm not sure that's the case. You've mentioned before that just being in on the Google investment has skewed the stats for the top venture funds. I'm not sure about stats for the industry as a whole, but I wouldn't be surprised if total returns in some years were several times the total returns in other years.

In general, if returns are really volatile (math: E[X^4] unbounded), then you can't rely on averages to make good predictions, because it will be common for a single year to be greatly divergent from the previous years. And then there is no "steady state".