BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

 Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.
The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.
Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have mortal locks on distribution.
Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.
Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth available on the market at the moment at any price.
The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.
The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.
If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz.
Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.
The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.
There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.
Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."
Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.
Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.
Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes.
The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you.

We don't see most of it every day for the same reason abstractions protect us from having to care about metallurgy while programming.
CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke.
Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's the ambient level of literacy.

Serious people in positions of power eat Thanksgiving dinners, too. Guess what they ask at them.
Salaries in the tech industry are up *a lot* in the last few years, caused by: a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like.

Investor money *does not* pay most salaries.
This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation.

Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.


I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
FOOD
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.
ALL
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):


Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.


"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."


Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
CRYPTO
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.
ALL

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Biz Stone
Biz Stone
@biz
Originally, tweet length was 160 minus username length. One day, I turned to Jack and pointed out that I got one more character than him. He said, "That's not fair. We should standardize." I agreed. He said, "How about 140?" I said, "Sure." And he updated the code.

Last year, we upgraded tweet length to 280 and guess what? Use of 'please' is up 54% and 'thank you' is up 22%. I love that! Also, people are asking more questions and having more conversations. All this, and the majority of tweets are still under 140. It worked.
TECH
Jonas L
Jonas L
@jonasLyk
Wanna disable Defender when enabled Isolated Core and Tamper protection?

Its a bit more trouble- but doable, without ruining Isolated Core/Secureboot etc.

Defenders process will run as a unkillable protected service- so new tricks needed.

Here we go:

Ok- tamper protection is easy, just make .bat - run as adm:
:again
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WdFilter\Instances\WdFilter Instance" /v altitude /t REG_SZ /d -1 /f
goto again

Then unload minifilter with process hacker:


The registry key will be changed while the minifilter do not protect it, when tamper protection makes the driver load again it cannot attach to volumes nor protect registry keys.

Removing it will make it recreate, but invalid altitude do the trick

Notice now the service is: Protected light(antimalware)
Now we cant do anything to the service/process- not even see its open handles.


Lets start by elevating to SYSTEM- just launch a command prompt, then close process hacker- and run it again from the command prompt.
Now process hacker runs as SYSTEM
INTERNET , TECH
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Yoel Roth
Yoel Roth
@yoyoel
We’ve recently seen research about so-called “bots” and misinformation on Twitter and wanted to share our perspective on why findings that might seem remarkable at first are likely inaccurate. We’re working on a more detailed explanation, but some comments for now.

We continue to be excited by the research opportunities that Twitter data provides. Our service is the largest source of real-time social media data, and we make this data available to the public for free through our public API. No other major service does this.

Many researchers, academics, and journalists use our public API — a set of tools for programmatically accessing information on Twitter. We make all public Twitter content available via our APIs. You can learn more about them here:

The basic issue with much of the research based on our public APIs is simple: The APIs don't provide insight into our defensive actions to protect Twitter from manipulation, including bots.

Because of this, API-based research can't distinguish between accounts we've already identified as bad (and hidden or removed) and real, authentic ones.
TECH
The Captain
The Captain
@TheCaptain182
What an amazing presentation! Loved how @ravidharamshi77 brilliantly started off with global macros & capital markets, and then gradually migrated to Indian equities, summing up his thesis for a bull market case!

@MadhusudanKela @VQIndia @sameervq

My key learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️


First, the BEAR case:

1. Bitcoin has surpassed all the bubbles of the last 45 years in extent that includes Gold, Nikkei, dotcom bubble.

2. Cyclically adjusted PE ratio for S&P 500 almost at 1929 (The Great Depression) peaks, at highest levels except the dotcom crisis in 2000.

3. World market cap to GDP ratio presently at 124% vs last 5 years average of 92% & last 10 years average of 85%.
US market cap to GDP nearing 200%.

4. Bitcoin (as an asset class) has moved to the 3rd place in terms of price gains in preceding 3 years before peak (900%); 1st was Tulip bubble in 17th century (rising 2200%).
TECH
Aviral Bhatnagar
Aviral Bhatnagar
@aviralbhat
I spent 1.4 lakhs on Zomato alone this year

Once these platforms build a habit, it's hard to leave

Lifetime value of customers is immense, which recover marketing costs and more

These very "loss-making" companies eventually become money-making machines

I love the assumptions people are making here to try to work out how this is possible, but I'll not share the math to just keep this fun.

Few hints: I have excellent cardiovascular fitness, love fine + healthy dining and order with my wife and brother

Guess AOV and order freq
TECH

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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/OK, data mystery time.

This New York Times feature shows China with a Gini Index of less than 30, which would make it more equal than Canada, France, or the Netherlands. https://t.co/g3Sv6DZTDE

That's weird. Income inequality in China is legendary.

Let's check this number.

2/The New York Times cites the World Bank's recent report, "Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations Around the World".

The report is available here:

3/The World Bank report has a graph in which it appears to show the same value for China's Gini - under 0.3.

The graph cites the World Development Indicators as its source for the income inequality data.


4/The World Development Indicators are available at the World Bank's website.

Here's the Gini index: https://t.co/MvylQzpX6A

It looks as if the latest estimate for China's Gini is 42.2.

That estimate is from 2012.

5/A Gini of 42.2 would put China in the same neighborhood as the U.S., whose Gini was estimated at 41 in 2013.

I can't find the <30 number anywhere. The only other estimate in the tables for China is from 2008, when it was estimated at 42.8.
SOCIETY
Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Bhoga Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Temple
#Devarayanadurga
#Karnatakatemples 🚩

Bhoga Yoga Narasimha Swamy Temple, Devarayanadurga is located near Tumkur of Karnataka. There are two temples are here for Narasimha Swamy, one is at the base of the hill which is Bhoga Narasimhar and 👇


the other on the top of  hill which is Yoga Narasimhar.

Bhoga Narasimha swamy Temple Prathista is said to be done by Maharshi Durvasa who did tapasya here. While doing tapasya Muni wished to bath in river Ganga and decided to travel to Ganga river bank,


At that time Ganga Devi appeared here and said she will remain here in the temple pond.

Yoga Narasimha swamy Prathista is believed to be done by Bhrama Deva who did tapasya here for many years.


Narasimhar appeared with Lakshmi Devi here to give darshan to Bhrama Deva here.

उग्रं वीरं महाविष्णुं ज्वलन्तं सर्वतोमुखम्।
नृसिंहं भीषणं भद्रं मृत्युमृत्युं नमाम्यहम् ॥

Om Shri Narasimha Murthaye Namah
🙏🕉🙏
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@justinkan
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5/ Mistake 3: Make a first sales hire who isn’t scrappy enough to help mold the sales process from scratch. Some salespeople are amazing at their jobs, but not cut out to establish the processes that others end up following. This skillset is what @rdedatta calls a “sales ninja”.
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Dr Naomi Wolf
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Henry George ن
@intothefuture45
Thread: *Post-Liberal reading list*
1/ Religion and the Rise of Capitalism - R.H. Tawney
Unto This Last - John Ruskin
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - James Fitzjames Stephen
The Great Transformation - Karl Polanyi
The Quest for Community - Robert Nisbet

2/ Family and Civilisation - Carle C. Zimmerman
Science, Politics and Gnosticism - Eric Voegelin
Liberty Before Liberalism - Quentin Skinner
The Great Debate - Yuval Levin
Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love - Grant Havers
Where We Are - Roger Scruton

3/ The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry - Various
The Unsettling of America - Wendell Berry
Moral Matters - Mark Dooley
Red Tory - Phillip Blond
Blue Labour - Eds. Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst
Together for the Common Good - Eds. Nicholas Sagovsky & Peter McGrail

4/ The Politics of Virtue - John Milbank & Adrian Pabst
Localism in a Mass Age - Eds. Mark T. Mitchell & Jason Peters
The Antimodern Condition - Peter King
The Principle of Duty - David Selbourne
Nostalgia - Anthony Esolen
A Common Human Ground - Claes G. Ryn

5/ The Politics of Gratitude - Mark T. Mitchell
A Time to Build - Yuval Levin
Remaking One Nation - Nick Timothy
Despised - Paul Embery
Defending Identity - Natan Sharansky
Between Kin and Cosmopolis - Nigel Biggar
The Virtue of Nationalism - Yoram Hazony
CULTURE