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If the product isn't making enough money to pay people by year 5 you're not a startup founder you're just unemployed with a side project.


In my experience there has never been a good time to be a founding engineer even in companies that have later made it. It's much better to join the company 1-3 years prior to IPO/Sale where you get many of the benefits but significantly less stress. If I had worked at startups I would have been taking a 30-40% pay cut compared to the roles I did work and none of those startups have gone anywhere with most crashing and burning.


I’ve heard this a few times. Could you elaborate why? Surely at that point, less you are hired to a very senior role, you are going to get a very small equity % and a lot of the capitalisation growth has already been priced in? In exchange it is far less risky.

Do you just go for the market salary and treat the equity as a minor plus?


This whole thing seems like a way to build a regulatory framework so only the existing, largest AI players can continue and there is too much regulation for anyone else to enter the industry.


Pretty much. I hope we at least get some trillion parameter GPT4 grade FOSS models before they inevitably succeed in regulating linear algebra.


This is the thing that bothers me - we’re just talking about doing math, doing more thinking, doing more speech. That’s what these models are. But everyone who isn’t an independent (non monopolist) technologist is vying for control of something they don’t understand to achieve their political or financial goals.


How anonymous can it be? Sure, if you were dealing with a city-wide management company they can keep it somewhat anonymous but saying "John Smith, landlord at 123 Fake St" with the review on a set date is a pretty good indication of who left the review. Even for management companies it would not take a lot of investigation to find the reviewer.


For starters, they could hash every address with bcrypt and only show reviews to people who search for that exact address. Then they could hide the review pages from search engines (which they are currently not [0] doing). They also have no good reason to include the exact date beyond maybe the year, and even then they should let the user change it if they want to (haven’t checked if they do).

None of this would make the site lose its primary function, which is by their own admission to do a background check on the landlord you’re about to sign an agreement with.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Aberdeen+St%2C+Chicago%2C+IL...


Guess what every landlord is typing into the search bar of this site


And because of that let’s expose everything to Google Search so landlords don’t even need to know about this site?


That clearly wasn't the point they were making, they were just explaining why your suggestion of "only make it show to people who search for a specific address" doesn't do anything to limit the ability of landlords to look up reviews about themselves.


It does though. It eliminates the need to ever include an address in plaintext on the site, making it a lot harder for data harvesters to extract private information from it. Landlords likely won’t iterate through each and every similar site to search for reviews. At least not all of them.


> Landlords likely won’t iterate through each and every similar site to search for reviews. At least not all of them.

It only takes one. And if it’s been automated, you’ve just made it plain text but with extra steps.


> if it’s been automated

Bcrypt has key stretching, brute-forcing every address in existence would cost a lot of CPU even for one city. How will the attacker get compensated for that?


A landlord is just going to check their address. Why would they brute force anything?


You are only assuming one kind of attack vector, which is a landlord discovering this exact site. Whereas the more impactful scenario is a web crawler discovering this site, grabbing its content and making it Googleable, so that not one but every landlord can access it. Like I already explained 4 comments ago.

I honestly don’t get why I even have to explain this. The original question was how anonymous it can get. Any practice that reduces the amount of personal information, or the ease to access it, helps, period. Dismissing one because it doesn’t offer perfect protection is like not using condoms because they are ineffective against mono. There is no reason not to implement them - that is, if the maintainer actually cares about privacy.


If the site becomes popular e.g. "#1 Landlord Review Site" then everyone will be checking their reviews on it. If it's never popular and not used often then it doesn't matter if it's clear text or not.


Yes it does. Being a small business does not entitle you to share the addresses where your customers live with everyone.


I think you fundamentally misunderstand or have yet to convey how such a site would solve the problem of distinguishing “I am a tenant looking for reviews of a property” and “I am a landlord looking for reviews of my property”.


I never stated it does. You are the one driving at this point as if it were the only issue, or the most important issue, which it is neither.

What it does solve is the problem of this data being visible to every landlord who types the address of their property into a vastly more popular search engine known as Google. They need not even know of this site, it gets served to them on a silver platter.

And if you think a robots.txt alone solves that, you’re mistaken. A robots.txt is just a recommendation. Web crawlers are not obligated to honor it. The only way to solve it is to make sure the private data isn’t even there in the first place.


Seems like it’s a grudge-site, if your tenancy ended badly.

Regardless, if the info did get leaked or the landlord did some basic investigation, or the property was just small enough that the data pool was small, what’s to keep the tenant from litigation by the landlord?

I’m thinking about all those review-sites for hospitality where a bad review starts a whole lot of grief for the reviewer.


Yeah, anonymity in this kind of case isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. I would never review a workplace on something like Glassdoor for the same reason; "worked in x department and wasn't happy" is easy to narrow down.


People don’t want alternatives because we lived through the IE and flash days. Having a fragmented ecosystem for web makes every project more expensive, difficult to hire for and hard to maintain.


Are stars even relevant? How about we track downloads and production use cases. Takes zero effort to star.


Whatever new genre of music comes out of this will be lit. Can't wait to be dancing to "Chechen Low BPM DnB" in 20 years.


Maybe they’ll all be listening to the ‘… slowed+reverb’ stuff that seems to be popular now.


I'm glad my recent bible purchase can fund everyone else's hobby books.


Having actually watched the video which seems to be rare in this debate there was really nothing bad or misleading about the content. He genuinely reviews the product and shows it working without any editing or magic. It's an exploratory product that just doesn't work that well and as others have said if it had redeeming aspects surely the fanboys would be jumping to the product's defence. The people criticising MKBHD seem to be upset he would not blindly support the company rather than providing anything good about the product. New products get dragged all the time, it's part of launching in the modern world but it's up to the business to prove them wrong.


100% spot on. What I gathered from the review was that the tech itself is really cool but usability was bad (faster to pull out your phone, take a pic and google it vs the image recognition, battery life of 2-4 hrs, etc.) I also found the reviewers tone to be very mild, it's definitely not outrage-driven.

I also applaud the efforts of the aipin folk to try to build something new. They probably raised too much for it to be true but maybe if they fixed the fatal UX flaws they could regain some momentum.

Altogether it's just a bit puzzling why this whole outrage has manifested itself


The tech was bad also


I am yet to watch the MKBHD review of the Apple Vision, but I can safely assume it is very much along the same lines ...


There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.


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