> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.
I also recently came across some of these fake company campaigns with attached employee profiles. It's very hard to distinguish them from legitimate companies.
It's especially hard now that many legitimate companies use a lot of generic sounding AI-generated content, which seems to be same approach the spam/phish/malware teams are using.
IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.
I don't see how we can trust anything in a post-generative AI world any other way.
>IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.
I think this could be a great opportunity for Google. Lots of organizations already make use of Google Workspace/Gmail. Imagine if Google Workspace offered the equivalent of a "Twitter blue check", where you pay extra, and anyone who views your email in Gmail sees a little check mark next to it, that shows Google verified you are who you say you are, and Google thinks you're not malicious. Salespeople sending cold emails would love it.
I don't think you can solve this problem purely cryptographically. An attacker could always bribe a US citizen to set up a shell corp or whatever. Most objectively verifiable indicators can be gamed. There has to be an organization that's good at security, like Google, which is in the business of continuously keeping up with adversaries. Actually Google might not be the best because they kinda suck at tailored customer service, but anyway.
The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.
Indeed, either take the investment and the dragons that will come to burn your village or grow slow and own your future (Basecamp/37signals), but make peace with that you’re always going to be small (but it’ll at least be yours).
instead of posting a poorly informed take, you should go and have a look at their list of product offerings. They havent been just a "notification API" for a long time now.
I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof) of what that the code is actually going to do in production. That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with financial computations.
It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.
I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.
Do you live in or are you at least familiar with Philly? This comparison is cherry-picking a WeWork the nicest area in the city and juxtaposing it with an office space in/near one of the worst neighborhoods. Of course the prices are going to be like this.
I live 45 minutes from center city. Allegheny ave is not that bad and only about 15 minutes from the wework office. Its mostly art students from Moore and Temple in that particular block. Plus Id be proud to call that my office, its a cool space. Wework provides a service, I just personally only see value at that price in the extreme short term, something a larger economy of scale may rectify.
The problem with using "small business" as a blanket term is that they vary widely in stage and ambition. For example, it's a mouthful to distinguish between "brand new small business" and "established small business" as well as "small business that intends to stay small" and "small business that intends to pursue growth to become medium-sized or large-sized without taking dilutive investment."
For 95%+ of small businesses in the world, it's "small businesses with no VC involved, and who intent to stay small" [1].
Startups in the SV notion of the term don't even compare in number, even in the US. Heck, every accounting firm you see, it's such as "small business". Every local grocery store. Every restaurant. Every ice cream parlor. Every jewelry maker. The list goes on and on...
[1] Well, they wouldn't say no to striking it big, but it's not like SV founders dreaming of $10B exit.
This is so true. And not confined to HN.