This is a tale as old as humanity itself. Power-hungry people will always push lies to foster their version of events. This always causes pain and destruction.
I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.
Maybe in hindsight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.
Irak war seemed to me reasonably "in plain sight". And there were other blunders as well. What I find amazing though is that more people passionately believe very strange reasons.
30 years ago people were like "meh, sure we don't get something, I bet there are hidden interest that I don't know about". Nowadays they are like "oh, yeah we attack country X because they have aliens that attack us telepathically, I know that for sure and if you don't agree you are an alien too!".
In all seriousness, if I ever had access to a time machine, I would want to see what the world looks like now in the timeline that Al Gore became president. I fully suspect that September 11 is one of those events that, in Doctor Who parlance, is a static point in all timelines, so I want to see how Gore would have responded, and what ramifications that would have had over the next 20 years.
just created an account on HN so I could reply to this comment: why the heck did you have to remind me of that! 20 something years removed I had forgotten that little detail and was so happy in my ignorant bliss!
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Faith is a fascinating approach here, though it has some flaws. It works on an emotional level if you believe that there is a god that takes care of you as this quote suggests, but if you look for material evidence that there is such a god, there is none to be found. In the medical sciences this usually goes under the name “placebo effect”.
Material science can't explain how quantities give rise to qualities, or phenomenal consciousness. This is why materialism is bunk - because it doesn't explain much at all. Using it as a litmus test for whether something can or cannot exist is flawed reasoning IME.
All of science depends on materialism. Modern neuroscience strongly suggests that all experience has a material basis. Thus, the hypothesis that whatever “experience” or “qualia” arises from is in fact material seems to be well supported, though not yet conclusive.
No actually, all science does not depend on materialism. Prior to material science being a thing, there were the occult sciences which are still practiced around the world today and most definitely fall under the category of science. One can form a hypothesis, make observations, experiment and base their reasoning upon evidence.
Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciousness via material science. Just because people think that if they slap enough neurons together they'll achieve consciousness, doesn't mean it's true. It's not well supported because there's no evidence that this is the case, just conjecture.
I agree science doesn't depend on materialism but experimental observation suggests consciousness is a materialistic effect as it's affected by material substances like LSD and ideas of a conscious spirit separate from the body like ghosts don't find much evidence.
We have no idea what brings matter into existence, because material science only takes into consideration what we can measure. We base our understanding of the material world solely on that. We can only measure an infinitesimal amount of the stuff that's out there, and anything we can't measure we come up with blanket terms to describe - like dark energy or dark matter.
What if all matter and our shared reality, is a manifestation of the mind? What if we are all a single mind going through dissociative identity disorder and each of us is like an altar of a person that has multiple personalities? There are all sorts of possible explanations for phenomenal consciousness that material science shrugs off because it limits what is possible to only the matter that we are able to observe and measured, which again is a tiny fraction of all the known matter in the universe.
Edit: All of these downvotes to my original and subsequent reply are quite amusing. HN is honestly a terrible website - people just downvoting anything they don't want to hear. Why even read the website? Just speak your own thoughts into a tape recorder and play them back. Same effect.
The popular narrative must be preserved at all costs. No room for dissenting opinions on this website!
"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
Absent any existential debate about religion and faith, this bit of the Sermon on the Mount relies on some pretty profound misunderstandings of biology and ecology.
Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.
Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.
[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.
Stripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
I hope they never go public (also as an ex-Stripe!)
I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making?
In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh
I see the benefit, but if you're joining Stripe you know the trade-off of RSUs in a company that doesn't provide daily liquidity. They provide it on a regular basis, so you're not locked in forever (a la my 2014 Gusto shares).
I'm sure they already have more than the 500 non-accredited or 2000 accredited shareholder total that would trigger most of those reporting requirements anyways. So Stripe already has most of the drawbacks of being a public company without the benefits.
The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.
Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.
A low liquidity IPO would likely result in a massive share price increase: the number of interested buyers would vastly outnumber the number of shares available.
Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
You'd need to amass 50% of the shares to kick out the founders. That'd be impossible for a hostile party to do if Stripe IPO's because they wouldn't release anywhere close to that number of shares.
The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.
One advantage is that whales can't play around with the stock price, say VCs dumping stocks at an unfortunate moment and putting pressure on the price. But it's also just wall street folks doing price manipulation for options schemes that can be an issue (it's illegal but has low enforcement if you are rich and well connected). Also lower chance of activist investors, and less of a quarterly pressure to show nice numbers, etc.
The advantage is also a disadvantage: minority shareholders of non-public companies have much less rights than those of public ones, and that includes employees. That's part of why you are dependent on the founder's goodwill on whether a startup exit can screw over rank and file employees or not. I'm not sure how much that danger is still out there if the company is doing tender offers, but it might still exist actually. Similarly, you can structure tender offers in a way that say former employees are disadvantaged, and many other arbitrary criteria.
Note that this depends greatly on the jurisdiction, e.g. in Germany there is legislation that's unfriendly to minority shareholders even for public companies, e.g. visible in the Varta takeover, imo part of why the idea of adding stocks to pensions will be ripe for money grabbing schemes of whales against the smaller owners.
Also employee of private company with tender offers, but not Stripe. Opinions my own.
When I was an employee of a subsidiary of Infospace, my RSUs were always worthless (honestly, I don't remember if any vested while I was there), at Yahoo, we could generally trade, although one shouldn't trade immediately after earnings, but I don't remember if this was enforced at the affiliated brokerage. At Facebook, I think it was typically a three week window every quarter.
Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
Also ex-Stripe. This suggests an opportunity to build an exchange that addresses these problems. Could one build an exchange with deliberate "turn-based" liquidity to avoid the problem of daily stock price distraction, for example? (This is hard because there will always be secondary markets, but presumably this is already the case.)
I get the feeling that the founders will not bend and invest for long term and not quarterly, as a non ex-stripe at least judging by their patience to IPO
Above certain amount of shareholders, the rules for the public companies start applying, so you get all of the disadvantages of being a public company (like SEC filings, etc.) without the advantages (like ability to raise money.) IIRC this is what forced $MSFT to do IPO in 1986.
An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors - those that want out - to liquidate out in a big way by dumping to a very large mass of investors. There is no other means to do that without signaling a gigantic loss of confidence.
Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
I'm glad. I don't think every company needs to be on the stock market, and companies that are profitable like Stripe is, absolutely do not need to be on the stock market. Why? So people can buy and sell their stock on a whim?
Are there caps on how much you could sell during the tender offer? I had one come through my email ~3 years ago for a company I previously worked for. IIRC it allowed you to sell up to 10% of your stock.
> As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
The tender offer announced in the article is open to former employees as well, so they personally profit regardless of Stripe being public (unless the claim is that by being public the valuation would be materially higher than the stated valuation for this offer).
Blizzard recently set up a World of Warcraft promotion with Pinterest where you could share your housing builds from in-game. Many people were insta-banned from Pinterest for "spam" after just posting one or two pictures.
And you'd be happily working at IBM building "resource management" software and hardware for the Nazis because "what they do with this software is not your responsibility".
It ain't so black-and-white, and people with this kind of mentality are what enable the atrocities we've seen in the past and are seeing today.
API documentation / types / signature is just one of the four types of documentation[1] that every service and library should ship. The other three are for telling people the things that code cannot tell you. The OP is arguing that the only "docs" you need are "how do I call this", not "what does this do", or "what do I do with the results", among plenty of others.
So no, what the author should be writing is "Ship Types and Docs".
But yeah the “Reference + Explanation + Tutorials + How-To Guides” concept is the best one I’ve come across for documenting technical systems. I’m planning to lean into it heavily for my next project.
Haven't read the post and after this comment I unfortunately don't think I will. I'm a true believer(tm) on typed code, but it is no substitute for docs.
No, they wouldn't, because they didn't care when this happened during Trump's first term, Trump said this would happen during his 2nd term, AND THEY STILL VOTED FOR HIM.
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