On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation.
There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company.
Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed, you will need friends with connections to central banks.
I self-funded my startup to the tune of half a million dollars.
I've had what I can only assume to be a VC-funded competitor study my endpoints for high latency / expensive queries, then saturate them with millions of requests a second across thousands of simultaneous IP addresses.
Business is survival of the fittest. Pressures and growth gradients come in all shapes and sizes.
- Moved DNS to Cloudflare, which handled the brunt of it.
- IP and CIDR blocks
- A few trivial heuristics to catch certain behaviors they were using
- In-app query caching for read-only endpoints that serve the same data to all users
- Redis TTL caching for read-only endpoints that take view arguments. A means to manually expire on writes.
- Runtime control plane additions to dynamically block IPs/CIDRs, user accounts, and endpoints (if they find another hole to exploit, we can just block a few endpoints rather than the whole service)
- A tool to inject bad responses (we found another, probably different actor consuming and reselling our service)
> On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation.
Would you be willing to give a few more details about what happened? I'm not interested in the identities of the companies or people, just interested in a high level overview of what happened. We don't hear these stories often.
- Hired a journalist on some mid-size news company to tarnish the company’s reputation. I never imagined they would bother to do this, but I was wrong.
- Used an APT for hire but I don’t believe they did succeed , still it is quite insane. I was lucky enough to catch a targeted rootkit but issue was quickly remediated. I’ll eventually find a consultant to analyse the Win 11 rootkit. They were definitely not script kiddies.
- Some black hat SEO and shills for hire, but that is expected.
I’m really surprised by hired journalist / APT aspect. Something I never imagined would happen, but apparently it does happen.
You missed a step, it goes from the central banks to the LPs to the VCs. The big hedge funds that get all of that low/zero interest money are certainly active in private equity AND forcing their behaviors/policies on companies far and wide.
You're saying this as if the central bank is forcing money into the economy when it really is a pull based system. The commercial banks ultimately decide how much money they want to issue and if they think you have a viable business they won't hesitate to give you a loan.
Want to explain? I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest and if anything the inflation hurts bootstrappers worse.
The Fed selected BlackRock to run a groundbreaking program to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from large companies slammed by the coronavirus crisis.
> I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest
Low interest rates doesn't mean loans are “easier” (this is going to depend on the risk policy of the specific bank, and is mostly unrelated to the interest rate), but it lowered the interest rate you'd pay for every loan no matter who you are (I personally bought a house with a .7% interest fixed mortgage in 2019, I didn't have to personally know Christine Lagarde for that).
> if anything the inflation hurts bootstrappers worse.
Low interest don't drive inflation up (we've had anemic inflation for a decade of low interest), if anything, inflation leads to interest rates hikes.
Inflation rises when the Federal Reserve sets too low of an interest rate or when the growth of money supply increases too rapidly – as we are seeing now, says Stanford economist John Taylor.
I never said you needed central bank connections to get a home loan. To get infinite runway on unsecured risk is a very different area of privilege than secured home loans.
No, I'm arguing against die-hard monetarists who still buy Friedman's bullshit 25 years after the Asian financial crisis and 15 years after the subprimes crisis. Japan has had more than two decade of low interests with no inflation, and the rest of the world had one decade with the same result, but as these people are cultists, they don't care about facts and they never did.
Inflation isn't a money problem, it's a supply problem coupled with a market power one. (Nor is inflation a “diminution of the value of money” either).
> To get infinite runway on unsecured risk is a very different area of privilege than secured home loans
I appreciate the context and will research the differences you shared; this topic interests me.
> This is goalpost moving.
My comments have been under the context of the post, VC funding. With VCs, you often find companies spring from nowhere with a marketing blitz or infinite runway in an exclusive access phase. This is not accessible to the common person, and in my opinion stems from a modernly masked form of nepotism. This is also not accessible in a world that requires near-term profitability, so maybe more of this will be broken in the years to come by economic realities.
I am personally of the opinion that the central bank is irrelevant. The only factor relating to central banks that has any relevance is that they issue cash with a price control aka the zero lower bound on interest. This results in the usual problems with minimum price controls. There will be an oversupply of the "product" in question. Because the ZLB applies to the short term interest ratethere will be an oversupply of liquid and immediately accessible deposits or account balances. People will be hesitant to commit their money long term and they instead just wait for the next opportunity. This then leads to a slow down of money circulation, which in turn forces the entire economy to adapt to this artificially created situation. This behaviour creates an opportunity to plug the gap with newly created money by commercial banks by keeping less than 100% of the deposits in reserve. The problem is that the newly created money will end up stuck in the same accounts as before which means that the bandaid solution has to be repeated endlessly. The obvious solution is to eliminate the zero lower bound and let the market determine both positive and negative interest on liquid account balances. Then the central bank won't have to do anything at all except prevent commercial banks from creating too much money by having reserve requirements at 50% or higher. You will get most of the neoclassical predictions like full employment even if the economy is no longer growing or the last world war has been eighty years ago.
But the reverse is also true. If you keep the ZLB enjoy living in an imperfect world that needs constant government intervention to deal with the constant dysfunction that such a price control generates.
I understood how one-sided discovery is problematic in paper-asset markets. I think this is a big reason we are seeing efforts to shut down decentralized exchange. Decentralized exchange prohibits censored price discovery. Orders must execute in public by nature of the systems. Now from what I understand, if the order is big enough to cause major market impact it goes to dark pools, or other frontrunning/delay measures are executed in private via contractual negotiations. Interesting that this is also similar in borrowing markets, thanks for that context.
> I am personally of the opinion that the central bank is irrelevant
The economic history of the US (which was one of the last industrial power to addopt a central bank) is against you on this one, especially the period between ACW and the creation of the Fed in 1913.
The purpose of central bank isn't to set up price control on money (which it doesn't, btw) it's to make sure that commercial bank don't have liquidity issues.
I'm not defending VCs in any way (and I kind of agree with your sentiment here), it's just that you don't need to have any relationship with the central bank to do that: the central bank sets the interest rate, it affects the entire money market all at once so anyone with access to this market will benefit from cheap credit.
Japan did absurd amounts of QE and low interest and all they got was less inflation than the rest of the world.
Your referenced article is also ignoring the obvious elephant in the room which is the opposite of monetary policy. The US government and governments in Europe did a lot of fiscal policy. The stimulus checks and loans were a far more effective way of increasing inflation than monetary policy can ever be, because monetary policy can be reversed by the private sector and therefore make it ineffective at achieving any outcome. QE for example, is a meaningless operation. It has no reason to exist.
Yeah and what gets funded will change. Ultimately higher interest rates mean that time to profitability should decrease in order to make it an attractive investment.
Honestly though, VC is such a tiny, tiny percentage of the investment world that maybe this won't happen (but the vast majority of funds are gonna fail to return their capital as they were funded in a ZIRP world and need to invest in a world with higher interest rates).
So was the company the best in their field? I sometimes see small / badly managed companies pull such interview processes and it is ridiculous. You would expect they would hire 100x engineers with these tasks but I wonder what they are exactly looking for.
My theory is that they’re looking for compliant, docile employees who won’t have the courage or the liberty to refuse unpaid overtime demands or complain about shitty stressful work conditions.
By having such an abuse and convoluted requirement for applying, you’re selecting for people in this situation. Then all you have to do is hire the best on the technical solution and you’ve got one more employee you can abuse in your company :)
No. They were just starting out trying to sell their open source product. In fact, I had interviewed with a different company solving the same problem whose tech I thought was way more impressive.
I also recommend manually reading/checking the the BIOS EEPROM and re-installing the OS from scratch at least every 6 months. This should mostly eliminate most of the advanced threats.
You can setup an ansible script to re-install everything so it can automated.
How does re-installing the OS from scratch every 6 months "eliminate most of the advanced threats"? The malware has up to 6 months to do its work. OS re-install may delete the malware, but the next visit to bad link may re-install the malware as well.
It is just a precaution measure, some of the malware like DDOS Bots might persist more than 6 months.
Honestly, an immutable OS would be more ideal but it isn’t very realistic. If you are adventurous, it would also be possible to setup a system where host image gets rebuild every night and persistent data gets pulled from a git repo.
You should absolutely never release a commercial binary to public with debug symbols.
There are ways to convert symbol names on the crash report server, so the claim that you can get better crash report with debug symbols is not correct.
Why you shouldn’t release debug symbols:
* It helps patent/copyright trolls litigate you easier.
* Makes it easier to reverse engineer your binaries, which will help malicious actors and competitors.
* You might lose some trade secrets.
If you are a startup owner, please ensure to never release commercial/close-source binaries with debug symbols. You can thank me later.
How did they target the group though, did they just scan the internet traffic and said, oh wow there is a group of people who only talk through Signal, or were there another precedence?
According to this Wikipedia page [1] that details the case they (or at least some) were put under surveillance when they returned to France after they had spent time in Syrian Kurdistan to fight against IS with Kurdish YPG [2].
How so? They were fighting against ISIS, alongside YPG, who the US government (and probably France too) supported officially. It makes sense they were surveilled at first - France wants to make sure volunteers aren't actually supporting ISIS - but they weren't and that's not why they kept the surveillance going. It was because they were an "ultra-left" group and France was apparently concerned they might attack police or sabotage phone infra or something (per Wikipedia.)
They were then arrested preemptively (after the surveillance was retroactively authorized by a judge!) and one member was held in solitary for 16 months. Despite all that, the prosecutors apparently couldn't find an actual plot to accuse them of planning, so they're pointing at their use of Tor and Signal instead. It's pathetic.
It's burying the lede because the title makes it sound like the authorities in France are going around finding tor/linux users and arresting them, when what actually happened is that the group was surveilled because they were known to have fought in syria, and after they came back they were also using tor/linux. Don't get me wrong, arresting them for that reason is still an injustice, but it's misleading to paint the whole situation as "arrested for using linux and encryption".
> the group was surveilled because they were known to have fought in syria
That's not correct. One person fought against Daech in Syria, then a few years later a dozen persons get arrested ; most of them don't know one another. You can't really talk about a "group" and certainly can't say they took arms when only one of them did (and for an arguably very good cause which was approved by the State on paper).
I agree with you the video title is misleading, though.
but ultimately that's what happened. they're charged with criminal conspiracy, but rather than alleging some specific plot, the prosecutors say that using Tor and Tails proves their clandestine nature, and that nature is incriminating in and of itself.
them fighting alongside YPG has nothing to do with why they were arrested, it's just backstory.
YouTube is horrendous, I keep reporting couple of animal abuse videos but platform just keeps them.
Some of these videos especially with small animals like hamsters have millions of views, so I guess there is a monetary incentive for them to keep such videos.
There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company.
Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed, you will need friends with connections to central banks.