For everything to become incredibly amazing. 5G was more pumped than AI, especially in Europe. For some reason people kept mentioning robo-surgery as a use case...
Doom worked for me in that I could select the menus, start a new game and move the character around. But it seems the “shoot” button is not working. From googling it seems “shoot” is mapped to the ctrl button which then I assume is not passed through the browser to the emulator :(
"Glorified auto mechanic" is exactly how I'd describe how software development is viewed in Europe. There is a much bigger emphasis on "just" buying software from Microsoft and SAP to "solve" problems.
It reminds me of the ancient joke about how in Germany if you tell your neighbour you are an engineer he will introduce you to his daughter, in the UK he will ask you to fix his microwave.
Except these days it seems the whole of Europe undervalues software engineering.
It's not so much different in America other than that we get paid more. Most companies "hire some geeks" to solve what they see as just a different kind of plumbing without physical pipes. The average person doesn't respect software engineering so it's no surprise that management doesn't either. So that extra pay we get is mainly to compensate for the mental abuse we're guaranteed to endure.
Also, most developers in America don't make that much more than European developers. It's just that we happen to be willing to pay seasoned developers quite a lot more. Most junior and mid-level developers here don't make much more than $90k, and many of the companies that are willing to pay at least that or more are located in areas where the cost of living makes that salary abysmal.
Also, most developers in America don't make that much more than European developers. It's just that we happen to be willing to pay seasoned developers quite a lot more. Most junior and mid-level developers here don't make much more than $90k
But the ceiling for top developers in most of the world is below that. Even here in the UK, where salaries are starting to get pushed up a bit, there are still only a few employers who would beat that today, and mostly in places like London where cost of living is also relatively high. Hardly anyone is making the kind of money that you see devs with as little as 5 YOE routinely making with half the companies in SV, even people with multiples of that experience who would be staff/principal level in a big US tech firm.
Picking up other hobbies got me back into software side projects but not as an end in themselves as they used to be (and I'm pretty tired of "learning" new tech at this point -- it's just the same things over and over and over again, usually with even more complexity); rather, I feel compelled to write little pieces of software that vastly improve my experience of the new, interesting hobbies.
Avoid competitiveness and "getting ahead" -- pursue mastery the same way a zen gardener does. It's very enjoyable to be good at useless things.
You could make an argument that Berkshire Hathaway is the largest M&A firm ever. But it's not really private equity (though it's not really public, either).
Dell's approach was actually more like the classic "taking a company private again", where you use public equity markets to grow big but keep control, then take it private at terms that don't really reward shareholders for the massive growth. This looks like the modern variety of PE capturing predictable revenues from a large, mature client base that can pay their fund the expected returns for the next 5-7 years. It's boring as hell and never means (a) a better product, or (b) a bigger pay-off for employees.
Having worked for a Silver Lake funded company (I originally called a startup, but that's not fair to say anymore for a private company that now makes billions), I can assure you that they don't take a back seat to how the company is ran (that's not to say they take a direct hands on approach, either).
In 2017, I joined a company that had been spun out of Ebay and bought by a PE firm. The firm invested a large amount of "growth capital" in the biz to transform the product from a software license to a cloud-based service. This transition not only increased our revenue exponentially but also gave us the ability to analyze data on how customers were using our product (prior to this, we had zero visibility into how customers used our on-prem product). Using this data, we were able to better serve our customers & partners and improve the overall experience of using the product. A few years later, we sold the company to a large company for a pretty penny (>$1B).
This is all definitely anecdata but, IMO, being backed by a PE firm forced us to focus on revenue (really EBITDA) alongside product growth. A mechanism that forced us to focus on the impacts of each product decision we made. I think this ultimately helped us keep a steady pulse on the market w/o chasing every shiny new trend that popped up.
This is for signing a document with a "hand" signature, not cryptographically signing it with a cryptographic signature. Besides, if you don't trust in-browser JS then you shouldn't trust any site on the web, e.g. online banking.
That this is running completely locally without any software to install is pretty useful and cool. Your criticism isn't great (IMO borders on concern-trolling) because the alternative is something where the docs go to some centralized SaaS that store everything including your signature for an unknown period of time.
> the alternative is something where the docs go to some centralized SaaS that store everything including your signature for an unknown period of time.
No. The alternative is using a desktop application, which offers a superior UX in every way.
I don't get what's so bad about installing applications. It's painless. Browsing the web on the other hand is painful.
"This is for signing a document with a "hand" signature, not cryptographically signing it with a cryptographic signature. "
Ah very well, then it's not as important.
"Besides, if you don't trust in-browser JS then you shouldn't trust any site on the web, e.g. online banking."
Online banking is different from the PoV of expectation of privacy. With online banking I'm managing the account the bank has plaintext access to by definition. Had this been about digitally signing a document, the vendor would be an untrustworthy third party (the signer and the verifier being 1st and 2nd parties).
"That this is running completely locally without any software to install is pretty useful and cool."
No it's running in-browser, not natively. It's not enough it runs locally, it needs to run locally the same way, every day, without requiring 365.25 code-audits per year, per user.
"Your criticism isn't great (IMO borders on concern-trolling) because the alternative is something where the docs go to some centralized SaaS that store everything including your signature for an unknown period of time."
No the alternative is a native client that does this offline, where you can inspect the source, download and compile it (hopefully reproducibly), and where you know you can trust the program acts the same way during runtime, every time. That's not true for JS applications. Since this isn't about digital signatures, I admit I was wrong in that respect. However, wrt security related programs, in-browser crypto isn't safe as the sources showed.
Yield farming carries a similar or greater risk to investing in stocks and sector ETFs, and that is certainly not what retail banks do with customer funds (that was outlawed by the Volcker Rule in Dodd-Frank), nor is retail banking how investment banks make money. Nevermind that there obviously is no FDIC insurance for these crypto "savings accounts".
You're asking good questions, but be careful not to jump to easy answers -- you might lose your money!
My point is that a bank is essentially a commissioned matchmaker for lenders and borrowers, and that depositing your hard earned money in a traditional big bank savings account is effectively a free cash flow for them insured by the U.S. government. So while I agree with you that a Citibank savings account and a Yearn USDC deposit have frankly incomparable risk profiles, in the sense that if the bank ever needs to claim FDIC insurance then shit has truly hit the fan, I disagree that these two positions generate income (or lack thereof) in any fundamentally different way.
I would not recommend my grandmother uses Yearn, but I also wouldn't recommend that my little cousin who knows how to program saves her money in a Wells Fargo account either.
Regardless I appreciate your considerate comment. I always know something interesting is afoot when HN relentlessly downvotes both pro and con comments.
