karl11

Interview is gold, he is right.

Only losers think it doesn’t matter if it works.

Business owners carry a lot more stress than salaried employees (generalization but directionally true). They also don't have a "boss" that can fire them. Those two things are likely the reason for a higher likelihood of bad behavior.

I don't think there has ever been a company so poorly understood (willfully or otherwise) as Palantir. They make a software platform, it does not come with any data, does not come connected to any datasources, etc. You can literally sign up right now for a trial and see this for yourself. It looks the same if you were to purchase a license. This headline might as well say 'Say No to PostgreSQL' or 'Say No to Excel' or 'Say No to Salesforce', etc. Wild.

There is an important concept alluded to here around skin in the game: "the AI is not going to assume any liability if this code ever malfunctions" -- it is one of the issues I see w/ self-driving cars, planes, etc. If it malfunctions, there is no consequence for the 'AI' (no skin in the game) but there are definitely consequences for any humans involved.

Taylor Lorenz? Don’t forget your Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as you read this…

This article is basically nothing more than a headline - there is nearly zero reporting attached to it...

Lack of manual journals would be a non-starter, I am actually not clear how a business could possibly run their books without manual journals.

An example: you make something that uses 5 inputs. I have inventory and cost of goods sold accounts for each of those inputs, but my invoices out to customers only reference the final product. This is where ERPs add insanely complex inventory management solutions. However, the simple way to deal with it instead is to use a manual journal to reconcile your inventory and cost of goods sold accounts monthly or however often you like.

Check out the movie "Perfect Days"

It's because every small business has this problem and need, and there are a lot of small businesses. But selling technology to small businesses is extremely hard.

From the outside looking in, it seems to me that the biggest benefit of YC is the people you get to meet and build relationships with along w/ the advice and feedback and accountability to focus on the things that actually matter to growing a business. These are lessons and relationships that will carry through even if you decide that VC-backed hypergrowth isn't for you and you want a small lifestyle business. Joining YC does not preclude you from doing things differently, but it does provide access to some amazingly smart and capable people that would be hard, if not impossible, to replicate somewhere else.

HP-35s in RPN mode

Revenue is irrelevant when looking at savings, you have to look at net revenue or gross margin. Majority of Spotify’s revenue goes to record labels. If you are making -40mm / yr then a $90mm swing is a huge deal.

Also, can’t just look at salary - employees cost a lot more than their salary. 10% employer tax, health care, other ancillary benefits, IT equipment / space, etc. A $150k salary probably costs the company $250k all in.

The thing about abortion that most people seem not to understand is that the debate is fundamentally about answering "when does human life start?". One side believes it starts at conception, which equates any abortion with murder. The other side believes it starts at some point after that, which makes abortion up to that point a women's health / rights issue. Irreconcilable, but also toxic when the two sides never talk about what they actually disagree on, but instead call each other murderers or anti-women's rights or whatever.

There is an old saying about biting the hand that feeds you…

I love the irony in all the comments here criticizing his spreadsheets and arguments by people who have clearly not read the book or looked at the spreadsheets.

Just to make sure I understand this — the argument is that in order to combat authoritarianism, Silicon Valley companies should censor more content?

Seems no different than Costco's Kirkland Signature brand. Private labeling something as your own that is made by someone else (and not disclosing who) is not really a new concept.

I bet that this ends up resulting in higher prices. Once hospitals know what the others are charging, it is more likely to cause the cheaper ones to raise their prices than it is the more expensive ones to lower them. Medical care is a scarce good and (mostly) the end consumer is not footing the bill directly, either for the care or the insurance.

Nothing, they provide the software for the data engineers and data scientists to use. It seems that the vast majority of people that have heard of Palantir totally misunderstand what the company actually sells (a software platform) and what they do not sell (data).

Will be interesting to see how many of these employees take the severance when the company asks them to sign an NDA in exchange, which would likely includes a non-disparagement clause, and would also mean many of these tweets would need to be deleted.

Absolutely. But really there should not be capital gains tax as it is double taxation - you have already paid income tax on the same dollar.

Author should consider data for wealth and class mobility. Inequality might be rising but also there is more mobility (upwards and downwards) than there ever has been. Meaning it has also never been easier for someone in poverty to become wealthy than it is today (not saying it's easy). And not saying things are great now or not, but mobility needs to be factored in when discussing inequality.

Yes. And their names should be attached to anything they review (including the papers they reject) so that they have some skin in the game.

When the demand is more inelastic, as it would be for fuel, the taxes need to be a lot higher to change your demand. I bet you would drive less if the gas tax was 500%.

The purpose of something and the incentives it creates often do not overlap, hence the pervasive unintended consequences caused by government policy, corporate policies, and rules of all kinds. I do not see a logical argument one could make that taxes are not an incentive, certainly there is no such argument in this comment.

Anything you tax you should be ready to have less of, and anything you subsidize you should expect to have more of.

Naked shorting is illegal

What better way to find out whether or not this is true than with a real experiment? This is a fantastic idea, because we could see what alternatives actually look like. If you don't want to live there, you just simply don't live there.

The censorship you don't like always starts out as the censorship you like.

Whatever you think about Trump, it is not a good thing that 3 companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google) have the ability to effectively silence the democratically elected US President.

Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.

There are very few perils of leaving Google - a top tier company in an industry that is continuously struggling to hire enough people. If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.

Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.