4,422 karma · joined September 17, 2013
If eth switches to proof of stake in a meaningful way, I'll definitely take a serious look and possibly start investing in that ecosystem.
It's truly a national gem. Researchers at INRIA are responsible for scikit-learn, coq, ocaml, etc etc.
17 years ago, Paul Graham was able to post this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html - nowadays, the compensation in tech has shifted upwards so much (https://www.levels.fyi/) - that start ups are just not competitive when you adjust for a risk premium. Finance captures this concept using metrics such as the Sharpe ratio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio) - which measures how much extra returns you are getting in exchange for the additional risk you take on. For start ups - your expected returns are lower, and the risk is very significantly higher.
Are there other great reasons to join start ups? Absolutely: several start ups are working on exceptionally cool science problems, some are solving tasks that will make a meaningful improvement in the lives of people (https://detroitwaterproject.org/, etc), some people just prefer working in a small company, you get a chance to work with your friends - but - if you are going to work for a generic SAAS company, don't accept a pay cut.
The VC that's financing your start up evaluates their investments with a spreadsheet and zero affection. Ask them how they sacrifice their own income to work on more interesting work, and they'll (politely) laugh in your face.
NeurIPS is an extraordinarily competitive conference. Most authors will look at it as another way to potentially be rejected by a reviewer/area chair (in spite of all assurances about the process), and will write something incredibly trite and bland to make sure nobody is upset.
Another concern is that this leads to a death by a thousand cuts - it's very easy to justify asking authors to write an additional section - but - if someone with sufficient authority doesn't say no, the logical endpoint is something like the application process for tenure track positions, where you need to produce something in the order of hundreds of pages (teaching statement, research statement, cover letter, diversity statement, list of funding, recommendation letters, etc).
As I posted at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913860) - talk is cheap, let's see where they put their money before we compliment them. I guess we've seen it now.
I remember during the Theranos saga, Marc Andreessen kept defending Elizabeth Holmes over and over (he deleted most of those tweets unfortunately) - yet he was smart enough to not put any of his own or A16Z's money into Theranos. Words are cheap: let's see A16Z actually lead the way into investing in physical goods before we praise them too much.
An incredibly strong signal of how decent someone is is how well they treat people that have no ability to help them. Even a selfish asshole will be charming and kind to the rich and powerful: if you want to see their true colors look how their reports talk about them when they aren't around, or how they treat a waiter who messed up their order.
Short version: paying CNA more increases lifespan and quality of life for people in retirement homes because they are more motivated and you can hire better staff.
Senior leadership has a much better understanding of the business context and long term plan than I do, but, I have a much better understanding of the problem details in my specific domain.
What I find most valuable from senior leadership is clear feedback about how what we are doing fits in the broader context of what the company is doing, as well as specific high level feedback on the roadmap of our org.
The story format can be helpful to frame a vision of how you'd like a product launch to go, but, it's not suitable at all for most of the communication a CEO/SVP does.
I think in general it's actually quite easy to tell which results are hype and which are not. Do a power analysis and estimate what kind of sample size would be required to measure the effect the researchers estimate - if they are off by an order of magnitude, reject.
For example, about 10-15 years ago, the big craze in biology was microarrays, and the early papers made crazy promises about everything that they would deliver. With hindsight, it turned out almost all the early papers were fatally flawed and were drastically statistically underpowered: it turns out that living systems have a huge amount of noise, making clean measurements is difficult, and things are very complicated. The same exact thing played out with microRNAs, epigenetics (chipSeq data is exceedingly noisy), metagenomics, single cell genomics, etc.
Every single time you'd get 'trailblazers' who'd come into the field, do shitty rushed science, hype their results like crazy, and by the time people figured out that all the initial results were garbage, they'd have moved onto the new hot thing.
I guess the advantage that hard sciences have over the humanities is that eventually we'd figure it out and do things properly - but the amount of money that has been wasted in shitty research that didn't add anything to human knowledge is probably in the hundreds of billions in the last 15 years alone.
To the extent that we have lots of influential people browsing this forum, make it clear that unless to any politician that unless they aggressively tackle global warming, they won't get any donations/votes no matter how good they are in other areas / how much influence they have over the business you are running.
Our future descendants will heap scorn and curses on our generation, and we deserve every bit of it. Every politician that refuses to do what is necessary or finds it convenient to play stupid language games about 'settled science' is doing incalculable harm.
As citizens, I encourage everyone to reducing their carbon footprint as much as possible (yes, that means that your life gets comfortable) and voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming. If you are a wealthy person and aren't buying carbon offsets for all your emissions, you are a bad person.
Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ever met were in academia - and the business world has been a breath of fresh air in comparison. When I used to work in computational biology, I met several senior professors who lead big labs who had absolutely no understanding of any of the methods used by the grad students in their group.
In an ideal world, we could get people to act ethically because it's the right thing to do: if we can't do that, at least we can appeal to their self interest and point out how horribly this could backfire if people found out.