Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Careless People

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 575 posts

Re: Careless People

#501

Post by mistrial9 »

gr__or wrote: post #460
selkin wrote: post #403

This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!) In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not. She was one of the titular carele…

How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?

a crucial weighting is -- how much was this person implementing the things being decried, versus "change from the inside". Without having read this book, I will personally take away the benefit of doubt on "change from inside" given that this person is an attorney by trade, and has been hired for real money by this company.

Re: Careless People

#502

Post by busterarm »

Arainach wrote: post #256
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them. Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta h…

I share this experience -- had a friend who left from IG to form a startup and came back to FB a couple of years later. His entire perspective on the company shifted and he left after only 2 months. Complete disillusionment at all levels. "This is not the same company."

That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.

Re: Careless People

#503

Post by jandrewrogers »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

To add, it isn’t just hard work and talent but also the willingness to take a calculated risk when an opportunity presents itself. Most talented and hard working people I know are so risk averse that they would let multiple opportunities to make billions pass them by.

Re: Careless People

#504

Post by busterarm »

noitpmeder wrote: post #483
rozap wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Koolaid is stronger at Facebook, because it has to be. It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.

Sounds like a net negative filter. I'd recommend you try prevent personal biases from playing this big of a role in hiring decisions.

Not really. Any FB experience post-2011 is a pretty strong signal that the potential hire has a weak ethical foundation, if not overtly unethical inclinations.

Maybe if you only interned there or it was your first job and you left before 2 years.

Re: Careless People

#505

Post by camdenreslink »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.

> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

Hard work and talent are related to success. But when the outcome is "become the richest person in the world", hard work and talent are a rounding error compared to luck. Does anybody really think Zuckerberg is even in the top 5% hardest working or talented people in the world? A decision as inconsequential as rewriting Facebook to a different language in the early days could have derailed the entire enterprise. There is a lot of luck involved.

Re: Careless People

#506

Post by bix6 »

teekert wrote: post #52
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.

You should read about what he did on Kauai. He fell in love with the community so he stole their birthright.

Re: Careless People

#507

Post by bena »

acyou wrote: post #449
bena wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play. Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.

My Ticket To Ride games are usually very passive, everyone has a sort of truce that lasts essentially throughout. But sometimes someone gives up on a big route and devotes themselves to messing up other people, and then things get spicy. Then again, I think we play wrong, because we don't ever use Stations (I think those are only in Ticket To Ride Europe though)?

Probably. We have the original base game and the Ticket to Ride Junior edition. Neither of those have stations.

Re: Careless People

#508

Post by diggan »

caseyy wrote: post #377
diggan wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source. No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Ll…

Llama 3 license: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/LICENSE Calm it with the ad hominem attacks. It's not the place for it.

> Llama 3 license

And here I've written an overview if you find it easier to have it summarized: https://notes.victor.earth/youre-probably-breaking-the-llama...

Re: Careless People

#509

Post by bix6 »

miiiiiike wrote: post #296
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.) Everything is v…

I don’t understand why people try and justify or defend these tech villains. What has Mark done to defend you? Besides harvest and sell your data.

Re: Careless People

#510

Post by mapt »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…

Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition.

Likewise running a company. You guys are, to be blunt, freaks. It requires very particular psychological and social conditioning to be in that place doing that thing, it demands specific types of personality traits and adaptations, and that probably doesn't make you, the successful CEO, a well-balanced, "normal" person.

Now take that person, who is a little bit alien in the first place, and ask what happens when they can choose everything about their surroundings, when they get fitted for their GERDpod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk . They still have the same personality quirks, traumas and experiences that got them to this place, but now they're rich beyond imagining, every whim trivially achievable except power over other people (and that only minimally constrained). Like a person stuck in a perpetual state of orgasm, the question of whether they like it or not and really isn't relevant to whether we're going to be inviting them to the cookout or how they're going to behave in church. Any interaction, they're going to make it weird. Because they're weird. Their situation is weird, and the mentality that brought them to that situation is independently weird. A normal person would have pursued normal fulfilling things in life, and they chose entrepreneurial ambition.

Post reply on HN