> The agent runs over port-forwarded SSH. It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can:
- Wander around the filesystem
- Edit arbitrary files
- Launch its own shell PTY processes
- Persist itself
When you ssh into a remote server as a client, afaik that server cannot execute arbitrary code on the client. At a minimum, the client would have to explicitly take action for that to happen.
I wrote about it in a bit more detail a month ago because it seems to be a common misunderstanding: "VS Code Remote Dev and Dev Containers are not security boundaries" https://lets.re/blog/vscode-remote-dev/
I've attempted to use the sandbox-exec utility, but didn't have the stamina to get a working sandbox file written.
In general, I'd like to be able to sandbox more things. I'm using the app store version of slack because slack doesn't really need access to all of my files.
Containers on MacOS are ran inside a Linux VM. If you ensure that the Linux VM doesn't have access to anything besides the required files/networks, that should be pretty secure.
Best case you go through the settings of Docker, Podman or whatever you use to limit integrations. Then, from within the VM and container see what networks, files, etc. you can reach to be sure.
I think in context the challenge here is to use remote editing to treat the container as a VSCode remote. As shown, that's not enough of a sandbox because the agent gives a route out.
Usually it should also not be problem with -X because then the client is not trusted (but some distributions change the defaults here because some clients then don't work properly! unfortunately, there is not much interest in fixing this since two decades because X is dead anyway or so)
I've never seen any distributions enable ForwardX11Trusted by default. Do you have any examples? It seems very unlikely to me that a distribution would do this for a relatively niche use case.
If I have X11 forwarding on, what can Evil apps do? Launch UI for sure. Screenshots? I imagine so. What else? Send keyboard events, which would be game over?
They can only do those things if the X11 security extension restrictions are disabled with ForwardX11Trusted=yes or by using -Y rather than -X. This has been the case for the past 20 years.
I hate to break this to you, but typescript ain't type-safe. There's a lot I like about typescript, but your runtime is still node, so any "type-safety" is mostly illusory. Not to mention every typescript codebase I've ever looked at includes a copious amount of Any, so...there's that.
Also, typescript has OOP support for a reason -- lots of typescript codebases make copious use of classes. Javascript tried to remain mostly functional for a long time, and people kept trying to make class-based OOP, so, they added it.
Finally, React is not a full-stack framework -- it's a framework for generating UIs. It has recently added support for server-side rendering, and NextJS has added support for that, but Rails and NextJS are very different. Rails is batteries included, NextJS is bring your own [everything] that happens on the server.
YMMV/to each their own/etc etc etc, but referring Rails as "fundamentally unserious" (github, stripe, shopify, i could go on) reflects the opinion of someone who either has an axe to grind with ruby/rails, or is willfully ignorant of it's capability.
Important distinction: this is for a growth fund ("mature companies" in the article). Growth funds are typically fund dedicated to either later stage financings or follow ons from earlier stage rounds that the firm invested in. Growth funds are heavily reliant on an active M&A market, or companies that are likely to IPO. M&A is effectively dead right now, and many late stage companies have valuations that are too high to IPO without taking a big valuation haircut.
That's the point. The value of a company is determined by the price that people are willing to buy & sell its shares at, but you don't have to be that person.
The VC fund in the article is basically saying "We believe that anyone buying late-stage startups at these valuations is a fool and is unlikely to get a better price when it goes to the public markets, and we are not going to be the greater fool with your money."
The whole VC/startup grift needs the greater fool to be either a big company with money to burn to do an acquisition, or the retail investor to be the greater fool via IPO.
Yeah, it really bothers me that as a society we've decided that ponzi schemes are actually fine as long as it has some loose "tech" branding associated with it. It seems like the startup strategy in Silicon Valley is "grow at all costs, worry about profit later, IPO, now it's the public's problem".
Of course someone could say "well they're not forcing you to buy the IPO'd stock!", and that's sort of true, but only in the strictest sense. My 401k, like I think nearly everyone's, is a mutual fund, and it invests in a little of everything. I also buy ETFs that do the same thing, because it's really the only way to preserve wealth, for better or worse. Even if I, for example, thought that WeWork's business model was unsustainable, I don't really have a way of "opting out" of buying their stock without effectively starting my own index fund, or having my cash lose value in an FDIC savings account.
Most (all?) retirement plans offer you some amount of choice in funds to invest in, and most companies of the sort you're describing are not included in many of the more popular indices. For example, WeWork was never in the S&P 500. Similarly, target date funds are one of the more popular investments options available as by default and/or recommendation in retirement plans. The first one I checked (Fidelity's Freedom Index) applies its U.S. allocation to large caps, which again means it does not include many of the companies you have in mind.
Fair enough, I guess if the company never makes it to the S&P500 or NASDAQ-100 you're mostly shielded from this stuff if you do the default funds. There are some questionable tech companies on the S&P, like Uber for example, but not as many and nothing as dumb as WeWork.
I have a lot of VTI stock right now, which if I understand correctly invests in basically everything in the America stock exchanges, though I guess an argument could be made that I should have known that dumb companies being included in there was always a risk.
Still, I don't have to like it, and I do think that a lot of these companies IPOing when they don't really have any way of actually making money is an issue waiting to happen.
Yeah, I hear you. It definitely feels like there's been a shift toward investing based on sentiment rather than fundamentals, and there's certainly an argument to be made that's not a good outcome for society.
Personally I feel like it's a bigger issue for individual investors that in recent years companies now IPO only in later stages or not at all and that much of the more profitable bits of the growth curve are now accessible only to the private markets.
I believe Warren Buffet was opposed to robo-trading strategies for this exact purpose. If the bulk of the money is going to fund anything with a market cap greater than $X, then it is useful for VCs to pump a stock up to $(X + Y) market cap to acquire funding via rebalancing.
From a VC perspective, you can exit as other funds rebalance into the stock at the inflated valuation.
Would be quite interesting if WeWork et. al. were schemes by the financial backers to capitalize on cap weighting strategies. The folks involved would not have been opposed to this in the past.
>I don't really have a way of "opting out" of buying their stock without effectively starting my own index fund, or having my cash lose value in an FDIC savings account.
Some other approaches:
* Buy long-dated put options for companies you think are overvalued, so your overall portfolio (retirement account+personal trading account) has 0 exposure to stocks you don't like. If a stock's price goes down, exercise the option before its expiration date and profit.
* Assemble a portfolio of sector ETFs and exclude the tech sector. Or buy regional ETFs in regions with low tech exposure. (If you're American, I recommend buying ex-America ETFs for hedging purposes anyways, since your career already gives you significant exposure to the American economy.)
Granted, you will be paying higher fees with these approaches, but given how dominant tech stocks are, if you really believe they are significantly overvalued, I think you should be willing to pay those higher fees.
With an ETF you don't have to do any of this work. And generally, the market tends to go up not down. For most stocks. Even the ones you think are no good.
You are not going to make much shorting in general unless you have a nose for identifying the next Theranos et al.
You're basically replying to tombert, not me. All I'm saying is, he has the opportunity to put his money where his mouth is if he really wants to. It's a funny definition of "no good" if you expect the stock to go up.
> I don't really have a way of "opting out" of buying their stock without effectively starting my own index fund, or having my cash lose value in an FDIC savings account.
I've done that, out of necessity -- the US IRS hates foreign ETFs, and I live out of the US.
Market movers are almost certainly a Parato 80/20 thing, and most of the growth of the stock market, or even the S&P, is in a handful of companies.
Find the prospectus of any local Index funds and then start looking at their top 50 picks; cross reference that with a few others. Pull the 20 that stand out the most.
> Of course someone could say "well they're not forcing you to buy the IPO'd stock!", and that's sort of true, but only in the strictest sense. My 401k, like I think nearly everyone's, is a mutual fund, and it invests in a little of everything.
Every 401k has multiple fund choices, so pick one that does not invest in recent IPOs.
In fact this should be very easy because most funds don't participate in recent IPOs! Depending on the 401k, you might not even have any fund that invest in recent IPOs.
The previous grift is over, the new one (AI) is getting started. VC fund actually wants to exit the old market, where they are the greater fool at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, and enter the new one, where they can find new fools to unload on.
It's just general market conditions. Once interest rates fall, tech VC will go right back to the grift.
Biotech has also seen a major slowdown this year too, despite the huge $43b, $14b, $10.8b, $10b, $8.7b, $7b and $7b [1] acquisitions last year and all the usual IPOs. It's just interest rates catching up to everyone's funds.
I think we just have near stagflation in Europe and a bad economy + inflation in the U.S. If certain wars are stopped, energy prices go to normal and the excess COVID money supply is gone, things will be as before.
But the U.S. population has to want it rather than voting emotionally again.
> But the U.S. population has to want it rather than voting emotionally again.
Why would the US population want:
>> The whole VC/startup grift needs the greater fool to be either a big company with money to burn to do an acquisition, or the retail investor to be the greater fool via IPO.
? IMHO those greater fool-based moneymaking schemes can go die in a fire.
>>> The whole VC/startup grift needs the greater fool to be either a big company with money to burn to do an acquisition, or the retail investor to be the greater fool via IPO.
I was the one that originally wrote that. Bear with me for a second.
I avoid working for startups, but the VC/startup grift indirectly benefits me, as they soak a bunch of software developers from the market at large, increasing demand and salaries across the board. I call it a grift out of sincerity, but I was never hypocritical to pretend I didn't benefit from it.
As for the general population is hard to say. The layoffs that affected tech reached way beyond cushy software engineer jobs.
We may recognize that building castles on sand is a bad idea. Perhaps our economies, and the rules that create incentives (perverse or otherwise) should be different than they are.
Fact is, we have a lot of fucking castles built on sand right now. If they crumble, a lot of people will be left to wander among the rubble.
I do hold a deep despise for the billionaire class that was the ultimate beneficiary of this whole "building castles on sand" activity. It's not them who will lose the most when everything crumbles though.
> I avoid working for startups, but the VC/startup grift indirectly benefits me, as they soak a bunch of software developers from the market at large, increasing demand and salaries across the board. I call it a grift out of sincerity, but I was never hypocritical to pretend I didn't benefit from it.
I get that, we as software engineers have indirectly benefited from the scam.
> As for the general population is hard to say. The layoffs that affected tech reached way beyond cushy software engineer jobs.
I don't think it's hard to say. If the general population was made understood the full situation, they'd tell us software engineers to get lost along with the billionaire VCs, because the general population are the ultimate greater fools that pay for it all (either directly through the stock market, or indirectly through the businesses who make so much through monopoly off of them that they can easily afford to be greater fools).
We software engineers have had a pretty privileged time while a lot of people have been struggling (viz. the whole "learn to code" bandwagon from a few years ago).
To be frank, the whole "learn to code" fiasco was pushed not by software developers. My impression was that it was pushed by parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers to push wages down.
Nonetheless, I don't think you are wrong. I'll just point out that the monopolies you refer to, and the billionaires that ultimately benefit from it exist due to policies and laws that directly benefit them so they achieve that very position.
I don't deny that we lived though a privileged time - I was perhaps lucky that I had aptitude and interest in coding right at the time when the profession was on the rise.
While some may be deeply concerned about AI taking jobs (which I think is complete bullshit), my main concern is a shift in economic conditions that will severely reduce demand for developers due to less money moving around the sector.
I believe the the ones that will suffer the most are the newcomers. Either recent graduates that are coming to the market at the worst possible time, or those that switched professions very recently only to find the promised land had withered before they arrived.
> To be frank, the whole "learn to code" fiasco was pushed not by software developers. My impression was that it was pushed by parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers to push wages down.
Yes, it wasn't pushed by software developers, but it wasn't some fake thing either. The main driver was the anxiety and stress a lot of people have about their economic situation. Software development was seen as one of the few achievable "good" job as precarity crept into many previously stable types of employment. The "parties interested in flooding the field with newcomers" just took advantage of the situation.
An analyst on the radio talked about Saudi Arabia. Apparently their sheikh is tightening the budget and Arabs always were the biggest fool. It's having a huge impact on grifters world wide.
Value isnt singular. Every single transaction in the economy is the result of a difference in opinion about value.
My House has a public valuation, but the value it me is much higher, so It is not for sale.
Im sure there are several things that you dont buy for their market price because they have less value to you. You dont go into the store and buy every Item you see, or put every item you own for sale.
Agreed, but if I decide to sell my car, what I originally paid for it, what I think it's worth, or how much I've invested in repairs, or how much I still owe on it, all has nothing to do with the price I can get.
There are an infinite number of ways you might choose to price your car. If you want it sold in the next 30 minutes, you'll have to settle for what anyone has in their pocket. If you're willing to wait 20 years, you might get a much higher price. Anyone who has bought or sold a used car will know that market price is an average, in reality prices are diverse.
With all that said, my point was to highlight the role of choice in deciding to sell or not. I wouldn't recommend selling your car if you owe more than the market price, and don't have money for a replacement.
bit of a stretch to call that natural human language - forget the type of actual people that post there, it's been a massive astroturfing target for political and marketing bots for over a decade.
Yes, but the driving motivation is probably more financial than emotional. Trying to IPO at a price lower than the last valuation is announcing to the world that the last investors lost money, while simultaneously trying to convince the world to be the next investors.
In theory, the market will bounce back so IPOing now is effectively selling low.
> If they have enough cash/free cash flow, they don't have to take money at a lower valuation
Sort of? You're describing either a healthy business, at which point their market value shouldn't be an issue, or management holding the business hostage because they prefer their salary to shareholders having a return.
There isn't a return for shareholders if the valuations are lower. The problem is not management holding the business hostage today, the problem was investing at unsustainable multiples a few years ago.
Now the only options are to either cash out at a lower valuation and not make any money, or wait and hope the business grows to the point where you can get a higher total valuation despite the lower multiple and see a return on your capital.
> management holding the business hostage because they prefer their salary to shareholders having a return.
But Ive been fed that the principal agent solution of equity and executive privilege prevents this! Next you'll tell me capitalism doesn't allocate resources efficiently.
> Isn't the market what determines the value of a company?
There are several markets involved here.
> then they aren't worth what they think they are.
Which is an indication that your market is corrupt or lacks the information discovery necessary for accurate pricing information to be generally available.
A startup I used to work for within a year of interest rates rising and lower spend by businesses and consumers ended up cutting staff by ~84% and they nearly 100% outsourced development (it may in fact be 100% now but idk for sure).
They did this to avoid any changes to their sky high valuation, as if they went and fundraiser it would have tanked it.
At this point I think they’re hoping to meander along until they’re forced into fire sale or they get acquired for their customer base
Not really, the DCF value of a company is sum of its discounted Future cash flows. But the value to a acquirer usually exceeds it because they can can extract a "hidden value" specific to them. It's called "acquisition premium"
If interested, look up "Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies"
I'm not sure if it's really anti-trust. I think companies are being stingy with M&A because most companies are no longer worth the acquisition cost. They're looking for more "strategic" buys as money isn't cheap anymore. You're still seeing M&A, it's just occurring with more complimentary companies that actually add value (or hires) to their existing portfolios.
Biggest one IMHO is interest rates. The days of virtually-free credit lines are gone for the near to mid future - at least until the situations in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia are sorted out, but even then, China may want to take over Taiwan leading to the next global crisis.
Another reason is the AI craze. Everyone and their dog is focusing on being a/the dominant power in that area, so interest in "old tech" is waning.
And the last/smallest factor is that many of those individuals who exited in the last few years are hesitant where to put their money, and there is not much space for multi-billion dollar established companies to make acquisitions when they're all forced to let people go as a result of the post-/mid covid hiring spree and anti-trust authorities worldwide being very critical of more agglomerations at the moment - some because of strategic reasons (Europe in particular isn't looking too friendly to more of their companies being bought out by foreigners), some because they do not want to risk even more companies growing too-big-to-fail.
A combination of interest rates and cap tables being all messed up from 2021.
If you have a company that raised a 100m of preferred at a 500m valuation, are you going to take an offer for 150m? Most founders are just going to keep grinding hope things get better.
Will echo what many have said here already, but with a slight twist:
1. Anti-trust activity takes a HUGE portion of the liquidity that does M&A out of the market. That has a dynamic effect -- other players who are not under direct anti-trust scrutiny think twice about their potential M&A activity. This, in theory, should reduce M&A prices (reduction in supply supply), but this is probably largely offset by point 2.
2. Inflated valuations from 2021 era. Lots of companies raised ridiculous late stage rounds around this period. Then interest rates rose. Now your company that raised on 100x ARR is worth a lot less than it was. But the company still has to grow into and beat it's last valuation. Combined with the M&A dynamics, it's much harder to justify a post-money above what your last raise was if that raise was a post-covid valuation, unless the business is just truly on ripping (e.g. Wiz).
It's not anti-trust in the case of smaller acquisition targets. There are also fewer strategic acquirers in some if not all markets. For example, if you built a good product 10 years ago on top of an open source project, there were a number of companies looking to grow by acquisition, such as RedHat, VMware, Rackspace, and Salesforce. Of those only Salesforce is still a factor.
> interest rates are also hurting LBOs which shouldn't affect startup acquisitions but does affect PE
Reasonable hypothesis, but not quite. LBOs' share of American buyouts has been falling monotonically since at least 2015 [1]. Buyouts have increasingly been smaller add-on acquisitions, with tech dominating activity.
The reason anti-trust action has chilled M&A is because there were only four strategic buyers. Due to decades of failed anti-trust.
The other reason isn't so much weakness as much as pandemic-era valuation madness. Reasonably priced, a lot of start-ups would sell for less than their last valuation. That would seriously cut into the founders' pay-outs, which are usually based on common stock.
I can only really speak to Cybersecurity and other adjacent parts of Enterprise SaaS, and M&A activity is fairly strong in both.
The big issue is a number of startups in that space raised at very favorable terms with Growth Funds in 2019-23, which made them extremely expensive to acquire versus to either build in-house or conduct a tuck-in acquisition.
What's I've noticed is that if it costs greater than $100-150M to acquire, it's difficult to make a case for acqusition versus build in-house unless you are extremely behind and need an internal culture change (eg. Cisco and Robust Intelligence being similar in magnitude to Cisco's previous foray into SDN w/ Meraki)
Series C and below remains fairly robust ime, as we can see with Dig Security, Talon Security, Robust Intelligence, NeoSec, etc.
There have been a decent number of tuck-in acquisitions in 2024. Flow Security (CRWD) and Eureka Security (TNBL) were fairly notable.
The main open question right now is about AI Security and Safety - specifically, whether to build or buy.
Most other segments (DSPM, OT Security, Vulnerability Management, CNAPP, etc) have largely been acquired and consolidated.
The thing is, there aren't that many startups in the space left that garner mutual interest in acquisition.
It's basically bimodal now, whereby
- a number of Series B/C startups have enough cash in hand to potentially do a tuck-in for a Seed or Series A AI Safety/Security startup and as such don't want to get acquired by a larger company because they have a strategic path forward to differentiating themselves from larger players [Acquirers interested, Startups uninterested]
- a number of Series E/F companies that have raised capital at multi-billion valuations but do not have a path forward to generate revenue at those valuations (eg. Lacework valued at $9B but ARR shy of $100M) [Startups interested, Acquirers uninterested]
Most notably, the earlier stage startups are now founded by startup founders who already have a $1M-50M net worth now due to successful cybersecurity exits in the 2019-23 period (IPO or acquisition). You can see this first hand in the Israeli and Bay Area cybersecurity startup scene.
Databricks' acqusition of Tabular was absolutely strategic.
Both Databricks and Snowflake are in the process of integrating Iceberg capabilities into their own lakehouses, because the industry is consolidating towards Iceberg, especially after Clickhouse and Dremio integrated Iceberg support in 2022.
This is why Snowflake preemptively announced the Polaris Catalog right before the acqusition by Databricks was announced.
Databricks, Snowflake, Dremio, and Clickhouse are all competing for the same piece of the pie, and much like Cybersecurity in the late 2010s to early 2020s, there is a drive to "everything" platforms, and RFPs can absolutely get sank due to lack of capabilties in comparison to a vendor.
> the IRR clock doesn't start until they call capital from the LPs
Capital calls must be honoured on short notice. That means committed capital must be kept low-risk and liquid. That has an opportunity cost. While you are correct in conventional IRR, particularly that touted by funds, only starting the clock when capital is called, LPs measure their own IRRs that consider the opportunity cost of committed uncalled capital.
Do you have any inside info on how some of these big LPs are modeling opportunity cost against their growth equity commitments? My understanding gleaned from friends has been that they're generally just cutting exposure to growth-stage software and planning to park the capital in pretty vanilla/liquid public equities and fixed income anyway.
Seems like no one really wants to be interested in increasing their exposure to PE or growth equity anymore.
Thanks for sharing your perspectives in this thread. You seem to have a lot of deeper knowledge about how all this works. Any guidance on what to follow or where to learn to understand these complex dynamics of the investment world? I feel like much of what I’ve seen is more like the basics.
M&A is not dead. Not at 20/21 levels, but certainly not dead. Some sectors in tech are much stronger than others, now if you’re a company that is burning cash and doesn’t have an appealing growth profile then yeah you won’t get a deal done (source: me). IPOs are basically dead atm
There's also the fact that antitrust regulators seem hell-bend on killing the M&A market entirely.
Historically, there were two main paths for startups, IPO and being acquired by a larger competitor. The latter path is now a lot more difficult, due to the DoJ, the EU and whatever the UK's thing was called suing everybody who tries to do an acquisition.
In the long run, this means fewer startups will get acquired, fewer startups will have an opportunity to exit, the potential upside for VC firms is going to diminish drastically, fewer companies will get funded, which will ultimately lead to the incumbents having all the power and startups having none. This is a very bad thing.
Any links handy to justify that claim? My impression from headlines was that some massive enterprise M&A was blocked recently but not so much "startup exits". Maybe I missed it though!
I don’t know very much about business - but having the goal of most new companies being to be bought by a larger company doesn’t really sound healthy to me.
Shouldn't goal for most companies to be self-sufficient and to generate reasonable dividends for their owners? Then depending on goals of owners they might or might not be private.
For me that sounds much more desirable than having a handful of extremely highly valued giga corporations. It cannot be long term good to have so much valuation concentrated to what less than 10 or so companies...
Man the 'it's really bad government is enforcing antitrust laws' crowd sure is pushing this hard on HN this week. You understand all of the original thought on capitalism explained how it was essential the government keep this type of control on markets in order for capitalism to work, right?
If your only business model is to get bought out by a larger company capitalism SHOULD world to reduce the number of startups.
Also, the incumbents just buying everyone up also = incumbents having all the power, and is also a very bad thing. Hence the creation of antitrust laws, and the concept of it being baked into foundational capitalist thought.
> late stage companies have valuations that are too high to IPO without taking a big valuation haircut.
AKA, we've made a loss, but don't want to admit it yet.
If I were tax policymaker, I would force all assets to have a valuation every year, and published in a register, and allow anyone else to buy any of those assets for the declared value.
If you over declare, you pay more tax. (you'd pay perhaps 1% of the asset value every year, and that would replace income tax, capital gains tax, etc)
If you under declare, someone else will come take your asset off you for whatever value you said.
Suddenly this whole idea of "unrealised gains/losses" goes away, as does fake valuations for tax avoidance.
> If I were tax policymaker, I would force all assets to have a valuation every year, and published in a register, and allow anyone else to buy any of those assets for the declared value.
That feels problematic. How much is your wedding band? Or the urn with your grandma’s ashes? Or the favourite teddy bear of your child? Or all coppies and rights to your wedding photos?
I hope you declare them high enough or people might just take them for the lolz.
Yeah. Maybe. That plan sounds hard. In particular at that level of disruption society will defect. You will owe all the food on paper, but nobody will enforce your right.
Probably it would be much more lucrative to snatch up the homes of older folks who accidentally misdeclared. With the right PR you can even label your victims as tax cheats! What a “beautifull” system!
Why should we let private profiteers benefit from the mistakes of the elderly. We should have the IRS snatch their homes directly for resale. This would optimize turnover and government revenue.
feigning an inability to distinguish between private property and personal property to manufacture resistance to reform of political economy, what a concept
> I would force all assets to have a valuation every year, and published in a register, and allow anyone else to buy any of those assets for the declared value
This would make investment bankers and lawyers happy and nobody else.
Note that any company with a '40 Act investor already has public valuations per those investors' opinions published--it's how you get "Fidelity marks down value of Twitter stake again" headlines [1].
> this whole idea of "unrealised gains/losses" goes away
As does the entire American private capital market, including small business, since illiquid investments now become punitively expensive to hold.
The more I think about it, the more impressive this proposal becomes in terms of solving almost zero problems while actively making the problem worse in different ways.
Ports would tax ships on the value of their cargo. It wasn't viable for the port to create valuations themselves, so they left it up to the ship, but the port had the right to buy the cargo at that price.
The scheme kind of works well if it's liquid commodities (e.g. grain, oil, lumber) and the purchasing right is held by a non-capricious authority (i.e. one that only exercises that right to call a bluff).
Taking a down-round on an IPO can be very damaging to a company. Since employee equity is based on options, that puts those options underwater and means employees will make nothing in the IPO. Internally, the company is doing 409a valuations and admits in writing that the valuation is down.
I wonder how this works for items that have far more value to the owner than the market value. Say shipping my personal belongings to another country. The value of my stuff is probably quite low, but it would be incredibly inconvenient and disruptive if it was purchased at it's market value and flipped on ebay.
Basically all early stage startups use ISOs. Public companies typically use RSUs. Some startups transition to RSUs before their IPO.
RSUs are kind of unworkable if the valuation will increase significantly before the shares become liquid since you owe taxes on their value as they vest whereas ISOs let you defer taxes until at least exercise if not sale.
> If I were tax policymaker, I would force all assets to have a valuation every year, and published in a register, and allow anyone else to buy any of those assets for the declared value.
You and your dad run a plumbing business. Every year you have to pay someone 10k to get a valuation. Then strangers can buy a piece. Do you have an operating agreement? If not he can force a sale if the company.
Couldn't the annual valuations be gamed by insiders? Who's going to impartially decide the declared value?
Best alternative I can think of is a soft fascism where the government receives a small stake in the company each year instead of cash. Then holds or auctions it as some bureaucrat sees fit.
Private ownership would become impractical for the hoi polloi.
The wealthy would need to pay a new class of bureaucrats to keep asset values up to date, to continuously incorporate new information into their marks. Everyone else would be better off renting--owning a car would be risky as it could be snatched from you at a moment's notice due to an overnight shift in the metal markets.
Remarkably similar to a feudal system, actually.
EDIT: What am I thinking, you'd just move all your financial assets overseas and maintain as little real property as possible domestically. The same thing folks do in the Gulf countries where the monarch gets stealsy from time to time.
Bob declared his car to be worth $18k in 2023. Fred fills in an official form, pays $18k to bob, and takes bobs car. Perhaps a 1 month handover period is given, and perhaps a 10% 'hostile sale' fee is given to the government to prevent abuse of the system to take houses from grannies.
Lets say any item worth over $10k (including cars, land, houses, companies, etc) would be part of the system.
Another way of looking at it is "all items in the nation are always for sale, and if you don't want to sell you better choose a high price".
Obviously if you don't want your stuff taken, declare a high value. But you'll pay a bit more tax for the privilege.
Perhaps we could institute a similar law for people and tax their self reported value of their time/labor. If you under-report you can be press-ganged into slavery for a specified duration, say 1 year.
This would ensure that people's labor and their bodies would be put to the most efficient economical use as well as increase tax revenue.
It would also solve the problem of undercompensating of workers. If your employer values your experience and knowledge, they would have to pay a premium for it, otherwise a competitor would buy you out from under them.
poaching is currently inefficient. Poachers have find employees and many employees refuse the offer for selfish reasons, Even if the salary is higher and would generate higher income taxes. These people are cheating society of tax revenue and growth it would otherwise have.
Lots of people hoard their time, spending it with friends, family, and children. This would force that time and labor into the market, where it could be taxed and contribute to social good.
A woman reading a book or singing to their child creates no taxable income, and doesn't contribute to GDP. Under the current proposal, If She didn't pay sufficient income tax on the time she selfishly hoards, a company like hooters could buy her and put her labor to more productive use.
So now you have a full time job managing the declared value of all of your assets? Or perhaps you'd suggest families now have to hire an asset management firm?
If you show up at the tax assessor's office with a check for more than the self-reported value of my home, realistically plus the premium the government pays in eminent domain cases, you get the title. That idea is pretty much "eminent domain for all."
This is terrible. I don't want to loose a priceless family heirloom (grandma's Sheraton-style rocking chair from 1890s) just because someone wants it and can write a check for $1 more than the assessed value. That discounts sentimental value. And if I now have to declare sentimental value and pay taxes on it, I'd rather burn it to the ground (grandma would approve).
A lot of people hate eminent domain too, for that exact reason. I think libertarians want to get rid of it entirely because it's an involuntary transaction.
Not being born to a grandma who could afford a life stable enough to preserve and pass down such a chair is also an involuntary transaction, but libertarians don’t seem to talk about that.
That seems really annoying to deal with. It's possible it would lead to a better society eventually, but in the short term I'd rather speculators not buy my shitbox car out from under me because they spotted the chip shortage before I did.
I think that's the point, to free up all the economic activity that's being held up by patents, copyright and land underuse, and to get fair tax assessment on assets previously exempt from property taxes as a bonus.
I don't see how this has anything to do with patents or copyright. Presumably, those would be subject to this seizure mechanism and thus flow to those most willing to enforce their claims.
Like, 99% of the activity under such a mechanism would be transfers of financial assets.
A power law land value tax would take care of most of the problem at almost no cost (since land is assessed regularly anyway).
This should completely replace income tax. Copyright terms should also be 10 years, maybe 15 max. Patents could probably stay as is, but I don’t see any problem reducing them too.
> power law land value tax would take care of most of the problem at almost no cost (since land is assessed regularly anyway)
Sure. This is a totally different proposal.
Would note that you could go a long way to making this proposal electorally appealing by exempting primary residences. (In my experience, the assessed value of a home is at best loosely related to its market value.)
It would be electorally appealing, but would fail at one of the main benefits.
The number one waste of space in the US is people’s excessively large footprint, causing enormous consumption of energy and infrastructure costs that are borne by future generations.
All these detached single family homes on 0.1+ acre lots are massively expensive and the people living in them hardly pay taxes proportionate to the benefit they receive from the government. Instead, our society takes from the working class via income tax.
If you want to live in a detached home on a large lot, be ready to pay the appropriate land value taxes.
If you want to conserve and use less of society’s resources, live in an apartment building.
Since the tax formula would be a power law function, it would inherently not be punitive to the vast majority of Americans who don’t live on outsize plots of land.
The more stuff you move further distances, the more energy you need.
Obviously, more people living in a square mile will use less energy per person than fewer people living in a square mile.
Think about all the energy needed to move water/sewer/trash/gas/police/ambulances/etc in and around a neighborhood where 100 people live in a Barcelona style communal living versus 100 detached homes on 0.1 acres each.
The huge knock on effects of the latter is that it then necessitates personal vehicle transport, which then compounds into more space being needed for huge arterial roads and highways, which then makes neighborhoods unwalkable, further necessitating personal vehicle transport, and so on and so forth.
> DOA. Partly due to the electoral college. Partly due to American optimism and aspiration. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
I’m under no illusion, but I also don’t see a need to inconvenience myself with half measures if my countrymen are not willing to do what is necessary.
Most of the blue collar workers I know live in single family suburban homes. Factories are rarely located in urban centers, and corporate dormitories are no longer much of a thing in this country.
I don’t see why what color collar someone is labeled as is relevant. My assertion is simply that occupying surface area consumes an incredible amount of resources that are not proportionately represented in today’s methods of taxation.
You've switched from arguing for a land value tax to arguing for densification. LVTs shoulod cause densification ceteris paribus.
Zoning, however, is the mutandis. LVTs absent zoning reform would not be expected to change much in cities. Zoning reform absent LVTs would spark a systemic boom in densification.
Zoning reform and LVTs are thus orthogonal, with the scant interaction being almost entirely defined by the ratio of unbuilt structures due exclusively to zoning or land hoarding. I asserted that ratio is close to one, due to ample evidence for the former. I asked you for evidence of the latter; "physics" is not a response.
> I also don’t see a need to inconvenience myself with half measures if my countrymen are not willing to do what is necessary
This is, by definition, extremism. It's generally seen as a red flag, communicating lack of commitment and/or dogmatic delusions.
>You've switched from arguing for a land value tax to arguing for densification. LVTs shoulod cause densification ceteris paribus.
Yes, but exempting homes from LVTs would counteract some of the incentive for densification. I would even go so far as to say excessive space for homes (which goes along with infrastructure that prioritizes cars) is causing knock on effects like kids not being able to roam around outside, and hence causing having kids to be a bigger burden, and so on and so forth.
>Zoning reform absent LVTs would spark a systemic boom in densification.
I would challenge this assumption, as many people prefer suburban quality of life that depend on not living in densely populated communities. Could be from simply preferring more space for themselves or their cars to being in school districts with higher proportions of kids from richer parents.
>I asked you for evidence of the latter;
I am not sure what you are referring to by former and latter here, but when I mean "waste of space", I mean front a big picture view in terms of resource/energy consumption on a societal level as well as knock on effects of sedentary lifestyles, less interaction with neighbors, and so on.
Physics is the answer to the resource/energy consumption part of why it is a "waste of space". If the goal was to ever meaningfully reduce emissions or consumption of various resources, then it would have to involve denser communities.
I would say that both zoning reform and LVT is necessary to accomplish broad reform.
>This is, by definition, extremism. It's generally seen as a red flag, communicating lack of commitment and/or dogmatic delusions.
Unfortunately, my conclusion from observing humanity so far is that it is extremely difficult to reach consensus when the decision involves lots of short term individual sacrifice in exchange for long term societal benefit. I would say that my hopes now lie with technological progress, rather than say, paper straws or recycling plastics, as those seem to be distractions meant to placate.
The unstated assumption here is that efficiency is the most important thing, rather than any of a number of other things we could value like stability, security, safety, reliability, and so on. The problem with efficiency-driven ideas is that they almost always will result in a bunch of people with money descending on a bunch of people without money and exploiting the difference to...make money.
There’s a similar concept with real estate taxes in some countries: you pay your tax based on self-reported valuation, but if you sell for a price that’s higher than this valuation then you have to pay adjusted tax for like 5 years back.
I'd focus on the back part. Why was programming joyful then? Why is it not now?
Maybe it's the environment? The language? The community?
I think certain people's brains work better with different languages. Often there's an overlap with community. I started my career in ruby, and still write it as much as I can, though these days, not usually for "work". I love writing it, and it's creator wrote it to be loved when you're writing it. Even though python shares a lot of similarity with Ruby, I find it frustrating in a lot of the little details and design decisions, and I just don't enjoy writing it like I enjoy writing Ruby.
I don't particularly enjoy writing javascript, but I've always enjoyed writing Swift. I also enjoy go, though find some of it's design decisions on the margins perplexing, pedantic and annoying.
Experiment with different languages. Find something you understand, that your brain doesn't have to fight with.
Also, get a hobby that has absolutely nothing to do with computers. Do something tactile -- baking, carpentry, fixing things. The raw difficulty of manipulating things in the real world is both deeply satisfying, and gives me a deeper appreciation for the ease and elegance of manipulating computers with software.
Their event pricing would require you to log something on the order of tens of millions of events to get at a 10k monthly bill. If you were turning it on in a high-volume environment, how did you unexpectedly run up a 10k bill after doing the math in half a day? Something about this doesn't add up.
This a while ago, so I don't remember the source of the miscalculation.
We have a popular website, and this was the first analytics product outside of Google Analytics that we reached for. We used several other metered tools that didn't charge extreme amounts for our volume, so this was our very first real surprise.
They're selling to websites with low visitor counts, expecting people to sample small subsets traffic, or catering to large orgs with huge budgets for this.
The out of the box behavior for new customers should be to downsample until a flag is turned on or to set billing thresholds.
Lots of experience with Fly's paid support here. tl;dr Absurdly good.
FAR better wrt both response times and technical expertise than you'll get with any large public cloud provider.
I was dealing with some annoying cert + app migration stuff (migrating most of an app from AWS to Fly), and Kurt (CEO) was personally sending me haproxy configs bc I'm not smart enough to know how to configure low-level tcp stuff in haproxy. Not to put him on the spot here -- I doubt he'll have time to do that level of support going forward -- but that's my experience of the company's dedication to support and technical expertise.
Complaining about companies raising venture capital on hacker news! What!? No way!?
This is going to sound wild, but believe it or not it takes quite a bit of capital to reserve capacity in data centers ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your core value prop of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This used to just be called making a capital investment (because it takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to whine about venture capital.
You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7 coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit takes...capital.
Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not from venture capital firms?
Honestly, do you even know what you're bitching about? A theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b. would not exist if fly did not theoretically create a product so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is not a monopoly, it's market dominance; they are very different)?
And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably should raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and orders of magnitude easier.
