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
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
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
CRYPTO
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!
ALL
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
TECH

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WIRED
WIRED
@WIRED
On Wednesday, The New York Times published a blockbuster report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It's.... not flattering, to say the least. Here are six follow-up questions that merit more investigation. 1/

1) During the past year, most of the anger at Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg. The question now is whether Sheryl Sandberg, the executive charged with solving Facebook’s hardest problems, has caused a few too many of her own. 2/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


2) One of the juiciest sentences in @nytimes’ piece involves a research group called Definers Public Affairs, which Facebook hired to look into the funding of the company’s opposition. What other tech company was paying Definers to smear Apple? 3/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


3) The leadership of the Democratic Party has, generally, supported Facebook over the years. But as public opinion turns against the company, prominent Democrats have started to turn, too. What will that relationship look like now? 4/

4) According to the @nytimes, Facebook worked to paint its critics as anti-Semitic, while simultaneously working to spread the idea that George Soros was supporting its critics—a classic tactic of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. What exactly were they trying to do there? 5/
TECH
Mike Metzler
Mike Metzler
@MTZLER
I’ve been flooded with Snapchat Spotlight questions after posting I’ve qualified for a payout 4 times. Here are the answers to the most common questions I’ve gotten in my DMs. These answers are my own experience and may differ from others .

Q: How will I know if I am getting paid?
A: You will get a message from Team Snapchat that looks like the below message 2-3 weeks after the snap has gone live. At this point it important that you verify your email address.


Q: How long after I’ve been notified I qualify, will I know for how much?
A: my experience is that usually 7-10 days after you get the qualifying message, you get a message with the amount, it will look like this. This message will include a unique access code for HyperWallet.


Q: How do I set up my HyperWallet?
A: Around three weeks after you get the payment amount you will get an email to your verified email from Snapchat Pay. It will look like this and will require you to fill out some tax forms, takes like 10 min.


Q: How long does it take to actually get the money in my account?
A: it took me like 7 days from when I had my HyperWallet approved before I got the money into my HyperWallet account. I recommend you set up auto withdraw. You can send money to PayPal, Venmo or bank account.
TECH
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Michael Dearing
Michael Dearing
@mcgd
An irony of facebook's situation.

Sheryl got her MBA at Harvard. One of the most famous cases (Extra Strength Tylenol) in one of the most famous classes (Business History) she took: in 1982, someone put cyanide in Extra Strength Tylenol capsules and killed 7 people in Chicago.

What do you do when someone turns your product into a weapon? When they use the system you built to harm? James Burke, CEO of J&J, was shockingly open with the public, he pulled the product and made significant packaging changes to make product safer (but not tamper-proof).

He over-shared every step along the way re investigation, redesign, stood up as both CEO and human. The reintroduction of new Extra Strength Tylenol succeeded. Burke saved the brand.

But four years later it happened again. A killer put cyanide in the capsules, this time a woman in Yonkers died. Same CEO, Burke, pulled the product again, completely changed the form factor from capsule to caplet and relaunched *again*. It worked *again*. How'd they do that?

Burke (CEO) tapped J&Js goodwill bank account w/ the public. Two big withdrawals from that bank account in four years + 8 dead bodies! But his honesty, openness, humanity (choked up about the deaths more than once), humility kept the goodwill bank balance positive the whole time.
TECH
Steve Schoger
Steve Schoger
@steveschoger
How to make a "Briefcase" icon in @figmadesign.

🧵 thread 👇


In a 24 x 24 pixel artboard, use the rectangle tool (R) to draw a 18 x 10 pixel rectangle positioned horizontally centered and 6 pixels from the top of the artboard.


Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 96 x 96 pixel circle and align the top to the center/top of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.


Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 48 x 48 pixel circle and align the bottom to the center/bottom of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.


Flatten the shape (command + E) and double click it to make it editable. Select the top left and right points and give them a 2 pixel corner radius. Select the bottom left and right points and give them a 1 pixel corner radius.
TECH
Tessa Davis
Tessa Davis
@TessaRDavis
How do you optimise your slides, audio or video when delivering online teaching?

There are many learning theories out there, but Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory is epic.

Read this thread + use his theories to improve learning transfer

Non-ideal slide to get started👇

1/17
TECH

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WEAPONS OF MAHADEV

Sarvaripati Shiva is one of the most fearsome manifestations of Mahadev. Assigned with destroying all of the universes at the end of time, Shiva is one of the most fearsome warriors. He is the Mrityunjaya.
Here are some weapons associated with him:


TRISHULA: the 3 pointed blades denote creation, maintenance, and destruction or the 3 Kalas – Past, Present and Future. They also represent 3 Gunas – Sattva, Rajas and Tamas).
Shiva’s trishul can only be stopped by Shiva himself.
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Trishul is also said to represent Ida, Pingala, and Sushumna. These are the three basic nadis – the left, the right and the central – in the pranamaya kosha, or the energy body of the human system.
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PARASHU: axe with 4 cutting edges which Shiva gave to Parashurama. In his anger, Parashurama used the parashu to get rid of the all the Earth’s tyrannical kshatriya caste twenty-one times over.
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CHANDRAHASA SWORD: The divine sword Chandrahasa literally means ‘the laughter of the moon’. Ravana gave this sword to Indrajit on different occasions especially to fight against Devas.
GIRISH: A special sword of Shiva with unique characteristics.
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Beautiful story of Shri Krishna, Mata Rukmini & Satyabhama which teaches the importance of Bhakthi.
Devotion is important than anything.
#bhakthi
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Satyabhama, royal princess was very proud of herself. Rukmini was very humble, her devotion was pure to Shri Krishna.


One day, Rishi Narada( Kalahapriya) arrived in Dwaraka and met Sathyabhama. In between the conversation he hinted that Krishna exhibits affection more to Rukmini than her. Worried Sathyabhama asked what can should be done to gain Krishna's undivided attention.
@SriramKannan77


Narada asked Satyabhama to make a vow, that she will hand over Krishna to him as a slave, if she cannot trade wealth equivalent to Krishna's weight. Narada thus convinces Sathyabhama that Krishna will admire her for sacrificing all her wealth for him.


Sathyabhama was sure that she have enough wealth to balance Krishna.

She went to Krishna and told about her vow to Narada. Krishna patiently listened to her and accepted the challenge. Satyabhama arranged to bring large scales to weigh and brought all her precious jewels.


Krishna patiently sat on one plate of the Scales (tula). Sathyabhama started piling up the gold, jewels on the other plate. She kept adding more and more wealth, but the pan with Krishna did not even budge. Even after keeping all her jewels the scale did not move a little
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libertyandjusticeforall
libertyandjusticeforal...
@Mark923to25
1. #Qanon told us that Saudi Arabia is a central piece of the puzzle in taking out the Deep State...we are watching the Deep State attempt to remove Crown Prince MBS and disrupt Pres Trump's administration's ties with MBS and the "new" Saudi/US coalition. Early in his admin,


2....@Potus sent Jared Kushner (JK) to SA on an undisclosed trip and told King Salman that business as usual was over, and if he wanted Pres Trump's support, Prince Alwaleed would have to be divested of $ and power; Alwaleed is one of top Deep State $ men and was tied to HRC.


3. @Potus knew that before he could begin cleansing the US and the rest of the world of the DS, he would have to cut one of the financial head's off the snake (Alwaleed). After JK met w/ King Salman, Alwaleed was arrested and divested of billions; MBS became leader of SA.


4. SA loves Pres Trump because he's a man of his word; SA could not trust Hussein or Clintons because they use SA for oil and leverage; SA has many factions, but essentially you have the new and upcoming SA that is attempting to modernize through Crown Prince MBS, and then you


5...have the old guard represented by Alwaleed who was one of the Deep State financial heads and loyal to the DS more than SA; SA knew Hussein was financing Iran to hold western world hostage, and SA was caught in middle of Deep State black mail; this is why @Potus was celebrated
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Ivor Cummins has been wrong (or lying) almost entirely throughout this pandemic and got paid handsomly for it.

He has been wrong (or lying) so often that it will be nearly impossible for me to track every grift, lie, deceit, manipulation he has pulled. I will use...


... other sources who have been trying to shine on light on this grifter (as I have tried to do, time and again:


Example #1: "Still not seeing Sweden signal versus Denmark really"... There it was (Images attached).
19 to 80 is an over 300% difference.

Tweet: https://t.co/36FnYnsRT9


Example #2 - "Yes, I'm comparing the Noridcs / No, you cannot compare the Nordics."

I wonder why...

Tweets: https://t.co/XLfoX4rpck / https://t.co/vjE1ctLU5x


Example #3 - "I'm only looking at what makes the data fit in my favour" a.k.a moving the goalposts.

Tweets: https://t.co/vcDpTu3qyj / https://t.co/CA3N6hC2Lq
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Egypedia
Egypedia
@Egypediax
Ancient Egypt was the most advanced civilization in the ancient world. Why was Egypt so special?

There are so many firsts in Egypt that we all know about, and that makes Egypt unique. For example, the Sumerians did not build the pyramids of Egypt.


Save as history
HISTORY