GCA10

Amen on the value of imperfect tutors. I'd say that the best moments of early adolescence come when you dispute something with an adult -- and are able to establish they they're wrong and you're right.

Later on, we have to learn how to do this delicately enough that we don't make enemies. But the journey to adulthood takes a big step forward during those early rushes of realizing that we can see/recognize things that our elders cannot.

Oh, it does matter. I've made a living at times from non-fiction storytelling, and if you don't get in the habit of sticking to the facts, it's shamefully easy to slide ever closer to George Santos territory.

But there's a compromise that will keep us both happy. Nothing wrong with having this go into the "legends" category -- where it's harmless fun to keep them circulating. Just as long as we know that this isn't quite how everything works.

The IRS has been signaling hard the past few years -- to all employers, big and small -- that the "contractor" category only works if you meet a bunch of tests. Anyone with a Gusto account, or a working HR department, knows this.

From a social-equity standpoint, I'd rather see FTX depositors get some cash, instead of having the IRS book the biggest recoveries. But in terms of what the law is, if we're looking at total FTX contempt for the right way to classify people on its payroll, it's hard to argue against the IRS coming down hard on this one.

As the guy who started the thread, I'm just glad to have provided an (accidental) portal into a whole new subdomain of HN community expertise.

We've ended up with the perfect mix of helpful insights, provocative theories, well-documented personal experiences (sample of one) -- and brief snark that gets reined in before it gets ugly.

Later on this year, I'll offer some thoughts about hotel bookings that can be nerd-sniped the other way -- into a discussion of Brave search

Just started testing Brave Search, and it scored a rare 100 on the first test: If you type in the name of a favorite boutique hotel, will you get that hotel's true website -- or the usual hairball of third-party intermediaries?

(For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)

Brave gets it right. Bing, Google and even DuckDuckGo do not.

I think the article actually says something slightly different -- which changes the math a lot.

Yes, they placed these "neighbors" bets, but it sounds as if they had several of them in motion on each spin. If they're covering an average of three clusters per spin, our random odds become (15/37)^13, which is approximately 1:125,000. Still plenty of grounds for suspicion, but if the casino is open for action all year and hosting 1000 or more roulette betting episodes a night (i.e. 13 spins/player), something this improbable SHOULD happen several times a year.

Slightly off topic, but the profusion of weird prop bets on sports is a path toward quiet match fixing that we may never be able to roll back. I'm seeing this in e-sports already, where players can still try hard to win but also "accommodate" gamblers who are betting on odd metrics like over/under on total kills, etc.

"Writing doesn’t just clarify your existing ideas; it generates more of them."

So true! Redrafting and self-editing involves so much more than just getting the commas in the right places. This is how we see new linkages that weren't obvious at first. It's how we become more discerning, so we can define the limits and strengths of our concepts more precisely. And it's one of the best ways of opening up new avenues of thought. (If A is valid, then B, C and D become possible.)

This essay becomes more fun -- and more useful -- if we apply OP's standards to other areas of trust and risk. For example:

- Are there no absolute red flags in online dating? (Some ex-convicts with teardrop tattoos may be fully reformed.)

- Are there no absolute red flags in getting into a taxi (Some angry drivers with alcohol on their breath may be capable of getting to the destination.)

In such situations, the thought experiment fails. Wrong decisions can be catastrophic or fatal. Past a certain point, we don't roll the dice, even if good outcomes are possible, too. And we cringe when others knowingly take those risks.

OP's argument probably works best for Y Combinator, where the financial risk per deal is small and fully bounded. (The portfolio is vast; there's no implicit commitment to fund any deal beyond $500k, and everything is so early stage that the worst investments will likely fail quietly. They won't become the reputation-ruining messes of expose journalism, indictments, etc. that will impair your ability to stay in the venture business.)

For larger VC firms, particularly ones that get most of their capital from scandal-wary limited partners at universities or state retirement orgs, it's a different story. Extreme investment outcomes (good or bad) define your reputation in ways that can last for many years. Even a single deal's red-flag implosion can hurt your credibility far longer than you'd like.

So, bravo to OP for working at a firm where periodic red flags can be safely ignored. Do be careful in your choice of taxi drivers or online dates.

So I pulled up what seems to be the original source for the Soviet car-envy reference. It's an April 13, 1955 bylined piece by C.L. Sulzberger in The New York Times, datelined Hollywood.

His article is really a wide-ranging essay about movie tastes and U.S perceptions around the world. The final sentences read: "The Russians managed to obtain a print of 'Grapes of Wrath' and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain, hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main impression, reported by our embassies, was 'In America, even the tramps have cars.'"

Sulzberger (part of the family that owned/controls the NYT) was a well-regarded establishment journalist. So we're on pretty safe ground to assume that at least one U.S. diplomat told him what he quoted. But then it gets hazy. Was this just the diplomats' ready-loaded witty retort? Or an overheard murmur from a couple Russians? That'd be my guess. We're way short of knowing what the vast Slavic world deeply felt.

Kind of amazing how that sort of aside comes to be treated as broad-based fact nearly 70 years later.

Agree with earlier commenters. OP uses lots of words to suggest what's really a one-word tweak: "Work-life alignment" covers the key concepts in a way that "work-life balance" does not.

My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.

Directionally right. I saw older family members switch out of stocks at 65, only to discover that their ultra-safe fixed-income investments failed to keep pace with the next 25 years' relentless increases in medical and care expenses. Assuming that you're not facing an immediate health catastrophe, your time horizon at age 65 is still decades, not single-digit years.

We've probably made it easier for people to have "half a career" in music -- getting paid a modest amount of money on weekends, evenings, etc. to do what they love. In my own circle, I've got friends who earn $5,000 to $30,000 a year playing live music -- and then round out their earnings doing some amount of teaching, bookkeeping or whatever. Ditto for actors, writers, semi-pro athletes, etc.

The more I think about these tradeoffs, the harder it is to see them as unilaterally good or evil. It's a second-best solution for dealing with the gap between what people love to do, and what pays the bills.

Not sure if there is a first-best solution. Some countries have created "artists' cartels," which provide subsidized higher incomes for people in the club. That does make it easier to make a living as an approved artist. But the jockeying about who gets into the club, who pays the subsidies and what it takes to stay in -- argh! it all gets really protracted and ugly.

And then you're just one more letter glitch away from reading it as NFTs. Which would be marvelous, because then bored apes would be researching Bored Apes.

I'll offer a companion scale that speaks to when/how we declare stuff done and ship it.

A. Levels 1 and 2. I ship stuff when it's as excellent and finished as I can possibly make it.

B. Levels 3 and 4. I'm too busy to get every last detail tidied up, but when I ship stuff, it's 90% of what I wanted it to be. I don't always nail the deadline 100%, but on both quality and timeliness, I'm respected and seen as someone who doesn't let the team down. I secretly like peeling away when it's almost done, because there's usually something more valuable and exciting coming next.

C. Level 5. I'm very erratic. On a few key projects, I'm still shipping in a pretty dependable way. But the amount of half-done stuff in my mental attic is scary. I've still got the willpower and credibility every now and then to offload/kill the most hopeless projects, and that gives me a bit of a reprieve.

D. Levels 6 and 7. I don't have a coherent approach to shipping. Incomplete work leaves my control when someone else seizes it from me. There's a ton of stuff that's half-done that I may never have time to revisit. I'm too tired to sort out anything -- or put up a fight.

There's a classic Tim O'Reilly line about the importance of "creating more value than you capture."

Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.

And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"

FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.

"This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase"

So true. Family members have seen it in pharma. It's endemic in retail banking. Large parts of media/entertainment have gone this way, too. The core ideas of being your own PR department -- and hopping from one short-horizon metric to another are just how these places hand out recognition, promotions, etc. At the better ones, innovative work will be tolerated, too. But the easiest path is pretty much what OP describes.

Actually, back in the day, that's exactly what the top encyclopedias aspired to do. It's worth looking up who wrote the main entries in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Future Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford did the entry on radioactivity. British medical researcher Joseph Lister (the inspiration for Listerine), wrote the entry on slime molds. Environmentalist John Muir weighed in.

And, in my absolute favorite, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote the article about anarchy.

Fair question -- here are a few examples:

On Wikipedia's entry for Facebook, there's no discussion in the 2006-12 section about Facebook's steps to monetize the site around targeted ads. That has had gigantic global impact and was the impetus for Meta/Facebook's emergence as one of the world's most profitable companies. But Facebook never "announced" that it was doing this. So the entry is clogged with a string of quite minor "announcements" that it did make -- touching on short-lived headquarters moves, feature tweaks, obscure awards, etc. instead.

Wikipedia's entry on Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is an achingly long list of votes she's taken over the years, or one-line quotes about her positions at various moments in time, without any effort to write coherently about what's been consistent or evolving in her political views. Also absent is any nuanced sense of how Collins's journey interacted with changing political tides. We end up with a 20,000-word string of factoids that goes on forever, with scant insight about her enduring impact, core principles, etc.

Exactly so. It's a rule meant to prevent one type of problem (people injecting unvetted nonsense or personal vanity/grudges into articles) that ends up creating a different and rather over-arching problem. On the longer articles, Wikipedia becomes an almanac of disjointed facts, not an encyclopedia of coherent knowledge.

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when.

So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved.

There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.

Very true of hot-water heaters, too. We had the misfortune of recently needing to replace the "original" one that came with our house when we bought in in 1997. The installer told us that all current models, including some quite expensive ones, are warranted to last seven years and might give us a few more. "But you won't get 25 years out of anything today."

Thinner vessels seem to be the main culprit. That does save a few dollars on materials costs.

Long-time writer here. Couple of thoughts.

Yes, conjuring up the right words can be a b*tch, and it's so tempting to step away from the keyboard in favor of something that's simpler or more lucrative. But the magnet that keeps pulling me back -- and making it easier -- is this sense that people out there genuinely need the story or lessons that I'm trying to convey.

Start with: Who's my audience? Then: What's my message? Then: Why do they need this? Get solid about all three of these, and a lot of good things happen. You'll press ahead with flawed but fixable first drafts. You'll come back and do the rewrite necessary to get it better. And when your confidence flags, you'll get revived by connecting with readers, friends, fans, etc. who want and need you to succeed.

Writing may seem like a solo sport. In a lot of ways it is. But the more you can conjure up a community that cares, the stronger you'll be.

Broadly yes. It's why deserts have such extreme temperature fluctuations between day and night. No clouds are part of the reason, as well as very little humidity to serve the same heat-retaining/heat-reflecting role.

On my first time in the Nevada desert I was astonished to find that I needed a jacket at dawn to stay warm, after all kinds of daytime heat. Looking at Elko NV's weather this week, it's got highs of 99F/37C and overnight lows of 61F/16C

We're told at the end of the piece that the author "is an attorney based out of Maitland, Fla., with a practice concentrating on local government-related matters."

It would be nice to know if he's represented either Disney, the state of Florida or a relevant Florida county at any particular time. (Or all the time!) Being a paid advocate for one of the players doesn't disqualify him from talking. In fact, it might make his assessment even more valuable. But I do wish BloombergTax had offered a more informative ID.

Agreed. I spent a bunch of time a few years ago doing home-coaching for our two teenagers as they rolled into SAT time. The way you get better at the math section is to genuinely fix whatever gaps might exist in your knowledge of algebra and geometry. As OP says, that "is not an inherently bad thing."

There's probably another 20 points that can be picked up by learning to read the questions very carefully -- so that you don't race to show how quickly you can spin-up an off-task answer that precisely matches the wrong question. Getting that right also "is not an inherently bad thing."

The verbal section is a bit more of a swamp, and there might be a larger element of gamesmanship there. But for schools like MIT, where math aptitude is the main event, I think keeping a math-focused role for the SAT can help a lot.

It identifies not just the elite-school wizards with lots of AP and math SAT 800s -- but also the teens from humbler public schools that didn't have an AP track, but whose 790s on the (pre-calc focused) math SATs speak to their ability to play at a higher level.

Apropos of analogies, I think the test-takers got rid of those because they can be ridiculously skewed to particular (affluent) cultures. For some people, it's obvious if yacht-to-dingy is akin to symphony-to-quartet. For people who grew up with less money, it is a total WTF moment.

Or pseudo-writers who get paid a pittance for stringing the same short, flattering phrases together, again and again. With a little practice, it gets easy to spot the repetitive cadence of the shills.

A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession."

Brad Stone's second book about Amazon ("Amazon Unbound") does a refreshingly candid and detailed job of explaining how this switch happened. It's tucked away in Chapter 10, I believe, and it never got as much media pickup as I would have expected.

For me, at least, grasping the extent of this transformation made it a lot easier to understand what I kept encountering.

My bad -- and thanks for clarifying that. Must be my small sample so far. If I keep playing Wordle long enough, it looks as if I'll get a full dose of despair after all.

One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations.

So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words.

Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps make the game a mood-stabilizer or even brightener. We're usually clever enough to find a solution most days. When we're slow and need all six turns, we get a cheery "Whew!" to console us. It's a simple, barely noticeable bit of gamification at its nicest.