gphil

Yes, I actually linked to Open AI’s discussion of GPT-4o being overly sycophantic. I think this is a tunable parameter that they are going to use, and I fully agree re corporate cultures.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

I also recently came across some of these fake company campaigns with attached employee profiles. It's very hard to distinguish them from legitimate companies.

It's especially hard now that many legitimate companies use a lot of generic sounding AI-generated content, which seems to be same approach the spam/phish/malware teams are using.

IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.

I don't see how we can trust anything in a post-generative AI world any other way.

The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.

Or: incumbent banks worried about disruption have the stronger lobby/influence.

I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof) of what that the code is actually going to do in production. That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with financial computations.

It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.

I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.

Do you live in or are you at least familiar with Philly? This comparison is cherry-picking a WeWork the nicest area in the city and juxtaposing it with an office space in/near one of the worst neighborhoods. Of course the prices are going to be like this.

In a lot of places it's illegal to ride motor vehicles on the sidewalk. I think the sweet spots for this are trails and low-traffic streets.

Interestingly, the all-time Bitcoin price graph looks a lot like the Gartner Hype Cycle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Whether or not this really is a "plateau of productivity" remains to be seen however.

The problem with using "small business" as a blanket term is that they vary widely in stage and ambition. For example, it's a mouthful to distinguish between "brand new small business" and "established small business" as well as "small business that intends to stay small" and "small business that intends to pursue growth to become medium-sized or large-sized without taking dilutive investment."

OK, then I agree with you completely now that I understand. I concur we should incent small and family businesses.

I was with you until the last sentence:

> This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.

How do you pay for the poorest to have tolerable lives with tax cuts? Or are you talking about cutting out regressive taxes on the working poor?

From an American who's been to Trader Joe's a lot and a Marks and Spencer grocery exactly once, I think they are pretty comparable except that the food items are more aligned with their respective nation's typical dietary preferences.

If you factor in the people-hours behind the AWS services Netflix uses, I'm sure their number looks a lot different.

Yeah, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of structural problems--we've never seen this phenomenon before so it's hard to say how it will turn out.

I was just trying to point out that it's not impossible for the current crop of unicorns to produce big enough winners to outweigh the failure of the rest.

I'm definitely skeptical that this will happen though, because the winners would have to be really big (hundreds of billions in actual market cap in the public markets) in order to make up for the really big failures.

> There are about 144 unicorns right now. If only 10% break out, that's only 14 companies that will really make it.

Doesn't this ratio seem about right for any basket of unprofitable (or even zero-revenue) high-growth companies regardless of valuation? If those 14 winner companies average greater than a 10x return then everything pans out as expected--lots of risky investments together produce a reliable if more modest return on investment.

It seems like the only abnormal aspect is the size of the valuations, but that might be just what happens in a low interest rate environment--too much money chasing too few deals. Whether this affects this success rate of these investments remains to be seen I guess.

It's troubling that this is where the entrepreneurial ethos is heading. But it's hardly surprising with the leaders of the "sharing economy" almost ubiquitously operating illegally, enticing their customers and contractors to be complicit in illegal behavior, and flouting existing regulations. To make matters worse, governments are even letting them get away with it in many cases.

I think they mean they are subtracting debt, though I agree that isn't clear.

I think this would be a pretty good approach, especially when combined with the author's strategy.

> without the ability to allow it to be fast

Practically speaking, Python is still slower than a lot of languages that use predominantly immutable data structures. I think you'd want to go to a systems programming language for raw speed anyway.

This is still the wrong math. I'm not qualified to come up with a great model here, but given that the S&P 500 has only lost value in 5 of the last 25 years the chances of having no losses in the last 25 years are a lot greater.

I've been investing for almost a decade, was lucky enough to sit out the worst in 2008, and I haven't had a down year in 10 years myself. This outcome was mostly luck on my part.

Because out of the many thousands of funds who attempt it, some are bound to end up beating the market. You can't know in advance which funds are going to the be the best over the next two decades.

The only thing any investor can control with any certainty is fees and taxes, so you might as well focus your effort on minimizing these. For the most part, Vanguard funds are the best at this that I know of.

> I always thought the cabs in Philly were bad. Apparently they're decent, comparatively.

I also have a laundry list of complaints about Philly cabs, but I've never been anywhere where I felt the cabs were definitively better. Compared to some of the other things on this thread, my most consistent complaints are relatively minor (won't take credit cards, don't have the AC on, etc.) At least they are omnipresent, and never say no to my destination. Almost every time I call for an Uber an open cab rolls by first. If Uber shortened their cancellation window, I probably wouldn't even try to use it at all.

I read your comment first, then I clicked through to see if they really suggesting "mastering" all of these fields (which is nigh impossible as you suggest.) They just say to "learn" them, and if by that they mean "take an intro-level college course on the topic" then I think it's pretty reasonable. It's my opinion that people should wait until after undergrad to specialize (in industry or academia.)

What I want to know is, when the VC money runs out, what's the barrier to entry to this business? Right now, Uber can beat everybody on price and quality because they don't have to be profitable for a long time. But once they have to compete on price, where's their advantage? Installed user-base? Incumbents forced out of business?

Many times I call for an Uber and a cab comes first and then they lose my business to the cab, which kind of highlights the commodity nature of rides--especially in the unregulated environment they themselves advocate. Maybe the long-term plan is de-regulate and re-regulate in favor of Uber?

Just thinking out loud because I'm genuinely curious what the strategy is.

Yeah, once you work through the explanation of that kind of thing the magic kind of falls out of it when you realize how the definitions fit together to produce that result.

However, I think there are certainly some areas of Math that are still pretty mysterious to the human intellect, no matter how advanced. The distribution of prime numbers and chaos come to mind.

Wow commuting from Sacramento to the SF Bay is a thing now? I grew up in the Bay Area (left for College in 2004 and never came back) and that was unheard of at the time. Every time I go back I'm surprised how much has changed.

Development (and lack thereof) is all about how much power the NIMBYs have to stop it. In SF that power seems to be almost absolute in many areas.