Andreessen-Horowitz, who most people (and they themselves) refer to as a16z and have the eponymous domain name (a16z.com). They're one of the top VC firms on the planet -- exceedingly relevant to HN audiences and commonly discussed here.
> you'd rather say Andreessen-Horowitz, which is just as arbitrary as a16z
Yes. I know Andreessen-Horowitz and I don’t know a16z. Reading the title i thought it will be about the cryptography serialisation specification. Turns out i was mixing it up with ASN.1.
> Their website is literally a16z.com
I hear now. Before this if pressed i would have guessed that they probably have a website indeed. If you would have twisted my arm my guess would have been andersenhorovitz.com (yup, with the typos. I learned the correct spelling today from your comment.)
I'll be honest - I was thinking authorization (a11n?) - so I didn't read it closely enough. But despite that, and being on HN from almost the beginning (with a different account I lost the password to), I still didn't know what a16z was, though I do recognize Andreessen-Horowitz.
I didn't either. This is an ancient debate that can never be resolved completely, though — because the articles that HN submissions point to don't follow a style guide and there are always assumptions about audience priors. Best to just resolve it and move on.
Sayre's Law: Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small
Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."
That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...
I've heard that some universities set aside $5-10 million whenever they grant someone tenure. It's a fiscally prudent accounting measure. And it's also a measure of how valuable the contract can be. (Of course one still needs to do some work soooo....)
I wonder if that's the amount to endow a chair or something, because $5m is well within the "never work again" FIRE amount - but perhaps a tenured professor not only has his salary, but that of his assistants, etc.
Every serious academic knows it is complete crap, the problem is finding a better metric. Although the crappyness competes with "no metric at all" and I think the latter would be superior.
The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.
Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.
The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.
You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.
How should they be judged then? Any metric can be gamed. And if it will be kind of qualitative assessment then politics will be 10000x more important. The system is clearly broken but I’m not sure if alternative is not even worse.
To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official.
They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy.
To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.
They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
They seem to have found some high-margin value-add niches in doing large signs, tradeshow displays, topographical maps, etc. Seems like there can be some nice SMB opportunities in the space if you can carve out some specialty services & attract repeat customers.
I don’t think this is the case. With “accidentally” collecting an individual’s data, the company’s risk is that somebody cares enough to sue them based on vague and poorly defined damages. With “accidentally” collecting source code, you’ve not only violated your contract with 98% of your enterprise customers (many of which have dedicated legal departments) providing a very real and obvious path to lawsuits, you’ve also gained a strong reputation as a vendor never to be trusted. My employer uses cursor, and I strongly suspect we would cut ties and blacklist them at the first sign of them inappropriately retaining data.
> So you're saying it's still at the discretion of a single magistrate?
A judge isn't a magistrate, but also: No, of course not. There are different layers of legal protections in the UK. You would be able to appeal the notice itself, you would be able to argue at the court against the decision, and you could make an appeal to a higher court if your were convicted. Furthermore you could make an official complaint about the investigation afterwards.
This is infuriating. However, for those in this situation, know this: it works if the document or spreadsheet is in OneDrive. I just wish Copilot told you this instead of asking you to upload the doc.
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