It's an indisputable fact of history that the U.S. military actively targeted civilians in WW2, Vietnam, and Philippines. Women and children were murdered by the hundreds of thousands. Members of the U.S. military have murdered huge numbers of surrendering POWs and raped countless people over its existence.
But I agree that (in general) the modern U.S. military tries its best not to kill civilians in an excessive way. But if we really cared about civilian deaths, we would send in SEAL teams 100% of the time and sacrifice an order of magnitude more soldiers.
We do still choose to kill civilians instead of risking own, when possible. We consider it common sense, but there is another ethical line we could take, which is a hard rule not to kill civilians at almost any cost. That is not our rule.
Some people would like to do their best work not merely "make do". Life is short and I don't want to waste it by not actively pushing myself to do my best.
While I may not be working on something that is very important, it is very important to me that I do my best work.
So when a company tells me to "make do" they're telling me I can't do my best work and so I should leave, because that's important to me.
Except it's completely fake. The CEO and execs typically just take over conference rooms and go on retreats when they need to actually get any work done.
Mark Zuckerberg officially works in the open office at Facebook just like anyone but also happens to have a private "conference room" and likely isn't at his desk much.
I'd be fine with having an open office desk if I also get a very small "conference room".
That's the ticket: let's keep the open offices but add a private conference room for every developer.
It's an example of someone quite effectively solving their own problem in a couple hundred lines of code. That it's flawed in ways that are not part of its original use case is irrelevant.
NIH is a problem when you spend a lot of time creating inferior solutions to solved problems. Not when you spend a tiny amount of time solving your own problems very effectively for years...
Software VC? The number of technically competent vcs is vanishingly small. There may be just one, paul graham. Almost every vc lies their asses off about having a programming background but few to none have written a line of code in a decade.
99% of vcs are closer to bankers than programmers. They're like high risk loan officers. Sometimes they get defrauded.
Michael Abrash, and Palmer Luckey should move to Texas where Carmack is and co-found an Oculus successor. They could raise $500 million easily based on their recent $2 billion exit, or however much they would need. They could probably also hire away the very best people who wouldn't want to work at Facebook given the choice.
Carmack probably doesn't give a shit about Palmer's political tom foolery. All three of these guys don't get the respect they deserve because they not born rich and didn't attend fancy schools like Zuck and this guy.
Those douches claims to fame are creating knock offs of Friendster and iOS.
Palmer Luckey made consumer VR happen. Carmack/Abrash made internet FPS worlds happen. They weren't copying anyone.
Iribe is not needed, nor are any of the other douches that jumped on the bandwagon. Free the visionaries. Shit, they could fund it themselves with that Facebook cash.
Yes, the management class (or officer class) is for the pedigreed elite. You're trying to join the manager class and they have a line out the door of people with pedigree. What school did you go to? Yeah, so why would they pick you...they're themselves incompetent so why would they use competence as the criteria? VCs invest almost exclusively invest in this class and so the cycle continues.
The technical class (or soldier class) does all the actual work and so they have to be competent. This is almost entirely meritocratic in Silicon Valley. Anyone even moderately competent can get well paying some job, even if it's not at one of the big adtech companies like Google/Facebook that can afford to mostly require pedigree from even their soldiers.
What's neat about Silicon Valley is that anyone of the technical class can simply promote themselves to the manager class given sufficient effort and luck. This alone is what makes it so special. It's very rare but it does happen.
Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication.
"He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable."
This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion.
I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
I never mocked this deal. I always thought this was a small price to pay for insurance that Instagram wouldn't subsume Facebook. It was only 1% of Facebook.
But I still think $19 billion was about $17 billion too much for WhatsApp. It's a messaging product that doesn't directly threaten Facebook the way Instagram does. They could have created 10x $1 billion teams to compete and easily done better than what they have with WhatsApp. It seems like a cowardly use of $19 billion. Oculus cost them $2 billion and there are many other breakthroughs that are equally underpriced.
If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything.
I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
But I agree that (in general) the modern U.S. military tries its best not to kill civilians in an excessive way. But if we really cared about civilian deaths, we would send in SEAL teams 100% of the time and sacrifice an order of magnitude more soldiers.
We do still choose to kill civilians instead of risking own, when possible. We consider it common sense, but there is another ethical line we could take, which is a hard rule not to kill civilians at almost any cost. That is not our rule.