"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE]
This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.
"It's an industry standard because other compensation methods for salespeople that pay them like all the other non-salespeople don't work ..."
[citation needed]
I think it's more accurate to say that it's an industry standard because it works, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality and (much more reasonably) risk aversion when it comes to messing with revenue generation.
Sales people that don't sell just get fired, that's the thing about being such a quantifiable role. So in practice at a startup with a hot product you end up with a team of sales people receiving huge amounts of cash comp.
Everyone in in a well run startup org gets performance based compensation in the form of increases in salary, bonus, and equity.
There's no reason sales people couldn't be compensated in the same way. The reason they're not is just that it's considered an 'industry standard' to reward instantly with cash.
Sales people have themselves a sweet deal they're loath to give it up whether or not it's in the best long-term interests of the company or even themselves. It's not a terrible thing but it does seem an anachronism that will go away.
Yeah no doubt you have to have performance based compensation but that's exactly what equity and bonuses are for everyone else. Sales people are special in getting large amounts of cash comp in addition to equity.
"this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..."
For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event.
The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.
On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.
But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.
At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.
It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.
The massive problem as I see is that Chinese intelligence has the incentive and capability to do this and yet no one seems to be doing anything about it.
> First implementation used an SQLite database (with WAL log) – only to find it corrupted after just couple of days of extensive power on/off cycles.
Did you try setting `PRAGMA synchronous=FULL` on your connection? This forces fsync() after writes.
That should be all that's required if you're using an NVMe SSD.
But I believe most microSD cards do not even respect fsync() calls properly and so there's technically no way to handle power offs safely, regardless of what software you use.
I use SanDisk High Endurance SD cards because I believe (but have not fully tested) that they handle fsync() properly. But I think you have to buy "industrial" SD cards to get real power fail protection.
He knew the system well and seemed to do enough local testing to avoid major breakage but still. Why have a bunch of rules and policies that you do not follow yourself?
Because these rules and policies are for people that are judged to need them by the person with the authority and responsibility for making the decision.
Policies like these always have a cost and (hopefully) a benefit. Presumably this lead dev judged that the cost vs benefit didn't make sense for themselves but did for others. It's entirely possible they were correct.
I do not have any affiliation with Elevenlabs or OpenAI except as a user of their APIs. I'd actually prefer it if OpenAI had a better realtime product than Elevenlabs because it'd be more convenient.
You've got to work on something where there's an immediate distribution channel and customers. Don't work on anything so speculative as this, where you're just hoping there will be someone who wants it.
You have to know how you're going to sell it before you build it. There are only a handful of things that work, which other people are using and you can copy.
Really is. Seems like they lost their nerve. Their credibility is in the toilet now. Clearly not good faith actors.
Which is a shame because seems like there's a real opportunity to really shake things up with an open voice model that's competitive with the proprietary ones.
Oh well. Someone else will do what they claimed to want to do.
But it's important to understand that all of Gaul was tribal. The was no unified country. These tribes were invading each other's land constantly to loot, rape, kill, take hostages, enslave, and extract tribute.
Gallic tribes had famously sacked Rome, and if Rome hadn't become so powerful they would have happily done it again. German tribes had successfully invaded Roman territory as recently as around the time Caesar was born. They were a legitimate threat, especially to the Roman province, although it's also true Caesar's had other motivations.
Again, it's just much more complicated than when for example Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded the entirely peaceful country of Poland. Or when Putin invaded the entirely peaceful country of Ukraine.
This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.