Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#711

Post by michaelcampbell » Sat, May 14, 2022, 12:22 PM UTC

blagie wrote: post #112

MAGZine wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the stage of the startup, but the books should probably be open to people who have made it to the offer stage until at least series b. if they're not, I'd be worried about the financials, the culture, or both. Refusing to disclose the number of outstanding shares is a huge red flag.

It's a huge red flag, and it's a hugely common red flag. A startup was peeved I valued their equity at zero when they wouldn't share. I got strong hints my equity was worth at least $100k in extra annual salary, but they wouldn't budge on disclosing anything I could hold them accountable to. I think they were being honest, but I didn't take the job. I did take a previous job like that, and when the company sold, we w…

Have you looked to see if they're still around?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#712

Post by michaelcampbell » Sat, May 14, 2022, 12:25 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #645

worik wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpacking that: > Code is an expression of a business solution At some very high level that may be true. The person who makes the final decision on what code I work on (who happens to be the brother of the CEO, poor fellow!) may have to consider "business requirements", but only lightly. We implement what we are told to implement. I am a worker. > The meat of any application is in the business rules it enables and en…

You’re not unpacking anything in what I said, you’re just disagreeing with each point, and each disagreement is mostly rooted in a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. My point is that the code, and all it’s material constructs that you pointed out (loops, allocation etc), do not exist apart from the business, because it’s the only reason those things exist in the first place. I’m not sure how much experience you hav…

> Sure you could just see yourself as just a cog in the machine, with no responsibility whatsoever in wondering why the fuck you’re doing what you’re doing. But I certainly would not hire you.

But there are lots, and LOTS of people who would, and want EXACTLY THAT. They want people to be told what to do, and do it, and not question why.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#713

Post by Banana699 » Sat, May 14, 2022, 12:47 PM UTC

r3trohack3r wrote: post #318

kurthr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is "the market" working for you! We could allocate resources to productive assets by fiscal spending, but that is prevented by politics. Only when "the market" gets its cut can any infrastructure be built in the US. That's also true for much of the medical establishment and pension/retirement systems. If the market was efficient, we wouldn't be complaining about it. Unfortunately, a "free market" and an efficien…

> We could allocate resources When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists. The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT. The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value s…

A quick trip to Wikipedia's bitcoin page yields[1], which, among other comparisons, compares bitcoin's consumed energy to countries. At 145.9 TWh yearly, it's less than Egypt and Poland and greater than Ukraine and Norway. This is up from the 2021 estimates[2] of 121 TWh yearly, larger than the countries of Argentina and Netherlands.

Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste.

This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference.

The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash.

Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

[1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#714

Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, May 14, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

harambae wrote: post #650

chiefalchemist wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Down-voter Congress has the power to monitor and "regulate" The Fed. That is, The Fed is not - or isn't supposed to be - completely autonomous. It has oversight, or should. The reality is, it does not. Congress lets The Fed run wild. That might be the status quo, but it's not how it legally needs to be. So yes, Congress isn't doing their job. And no one (read: the media) is questioning that negligence. Again, on…

>only in America I agree with everything else, but Europe is dealing with even worse inflation than the US and the ECB is being even more dovish.

I can't speak for Europe, but Congress does have the power to put The Fed on a leash and they don't. The conflict of interest is blinding. We The People in the darkest dark. Again.

That's the scope of Only in. America, in this case.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#715

Post by danielvaughn » Sat, May 14, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

michaelcampbell wrote: post #712

danielvaughn wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not unpacking anything in what I said, you’re just disagreeing with each point, and each disagreement is mostly rooted in a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. My point is that the code, and all it’s material constructs that you pointed out (loops, allocation etc), do not exist apart from the business, because it’s the only reason those things exist in the first place. I’m not sure how much experience you hav…

> Sure you could just see yourself as just a cog in the machine, with no responsibility whatsoever in wondering why the fuck you’re doing what you’re doing. But I certainly would not hire you. But there are lots, and LOTS of people who would, and want EXACTLY THAT. They want people to be told what to do, and do it, and not question why.

Yep, and maybe I was being too harsh in how I said it. It's an understandable sentiment; I've just never seen it work in practice. Inevitably, the team (over time) begins to move orthogonally to the company. Like I said above, you'd need a very well-oiled machine, ala a super tight chain of command with clear directives at each layer.

I see it in the same way I see security. A company is only as secure as its most vulnerable employee, so everyone must be vigilant about their own personal security practices. Same goes for "product security" - ensuring that the micro-actions taken by each IC reflect the company's objectives. It's an all-hands-on-deck practice.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#716

Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

richiebful1 wrote: post #653

chiefalchemist wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Down-voter Congress has the power to monitor and "regulate" The Fed. That is, The Fed is not - or isn't supposed to be - completely autonomous. It has oversight, or should. The reality is, it does not. Congress lets The Fed run wild. That might be the status quo, but it's not how it legally needs to be. So yes, Congress isn't doing their job. And no one (read: the media) is questioning that negligence. Again, on…

Even more, Congress just elected Chairman of the Fed Jerome Powell to another term in office. If they were unhappy with him, they'd fire him

The fire him, Wall Street and the rest panics. They keep him and we get more insanity.

He was interviewed on Marketplace (NPR) this past week and he should be a politician. Tons of half answers and such. Another disconnected elite with zero affinity for accountability.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#717

Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

thoms_a wrote: post #655

chiefalchemist wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Down-voter Congress has the power to monitor and "regulate" The Fed. That is, The Fed is not - or isn't supposed to be - completely autonomous. It has oversight, or should. The reality is, it does not. Congress lets The Fed run wild. That might be the status quo, but it's not how it legally needs to be. So yes, Congress isn't doing their job. And no one (read: the media) is questioning that negligence. Again, on…

Not a down-voter and I agree with your positions, but why stop at congressional oversight? Why should a private company [1] be controlling a nation's money supply? 1. https://publicbankinginstitute.org/money-banking-basics/

Oh. I agree. "End The Fed" was an eye opener for me. But what we got is what we got. For now?? Until that changes Congress is as guilty as The Fed.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#718

Post by hnfong » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #433

legitster wrote: post #75

This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…

"the fundamentals... But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane." What are the fundamentals of a dollar? Or a bitcoin? Or the Mona Lisa? Part of being an investor means accepting a certain social value to your investments. A lot of people want to be a part of the Tesla story. Maybe they buy a car, or maybe a share of stock. When that story stops being interesting, the PDV of cashflows…

The consumer price index sums up the fundamentals of a dollar pretty well I think.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#719

Post by hnfong » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

drexlspivey wrote: post #341

JamesBarney wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, but the biggest way this happens is investors shifting their asset allocations into bonds. So if bonds pay 10% per year a company with a p/e of 30 looks less attractive than if bonds pay 3% per year.

> They do, but the biggest way this happens is investors shifting their asset allocations into bonds. The opposite is true actually, when rates go up there is a sell-off in bonds which is exactly what is happening right now where bond prices are down 10%-20%

You're describing the same thing from different perspectives.

Bond prices are down, this means yields grow, and thus become more attractive investments than high P/E stocks.

I think the reason this sounds unintuitive is because the bond market isn't exactly a "free market" in the general sense. The Fed is manipulating the money market to set bond yields, so from a causative point of view, the yields rise first, which cause a drop in bond prices, which make buying bonds attractive for investors, who then, as a result, shift assets from stocks to bonds.

(disclaimer: just speaking from knowledge gleaned from, among all things, youtube videos :D definitely not an economist !)

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#720

Post by ramoz » Sat, May 14, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

avgDev wrote: post #2

I work for non-tech generating 100million+ in revenue. Cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours working as an IC. I recently talked to a startup, similar pay, culture would be a better fit since it was mostly techies and I'm a nerd by nature.....but things just got awkward as soon as I asked about their revenue....they were bleeding money and I was told they were being acquired by a big…

Similar story.

Knew someone at a Startup with a product & storyline that would make for a comedy fiction show.

Their CTO called me, enjoyed a convo, and offered me some untitled job - no interviews, no game plans. But full on salary match, equity, whatever… (I make mid 6 figures)

But I’ve been so entrenched in real business that the whole thing just seemed completely off to me.