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That is where there is a disconnect between the Tesla marketing language and technical language.

They publicly advertise and collect cash for pre-sales of "Full Self Driving". Most Hacker News technologists (a generalization for sure) would reserve a phrase that bold for Levels 4 and 5.

But here they are in writing stating that they are currently only at Level 2.

So a couple core questions around Tesla are:

- Is it acceptable to take pre-orders from the average consumer for a feature that might be 10 years away?

- Is it ethical to use exaggerated marketing speak for specific technical functions (to give a non-Tesla example, this is like when I see companies implementing rule-based decision trees or linear regression and calling their apps "Artificial Intelligence")?

I've seen "The analysts were also not understanding its potential" a few times and this is mostly incorrect. I know there were large value funds who had looked at GameStop and there was another primary reason the stock price was so low: management.

Value investors totally understood that there was a well-liked brand here that still had huge cash flows. And they knew all the bear cases about the move to digital and the retail biz dying.

A main reason there were value funds who analyzed GameStop and came to the "neutral" conclusion was that the old management team wasn't making any big moves to even attempt to turn around the death spiral.

DeepFuckingValue and even Michael Burry were half-wrong in their original thesis: just using cash flow to do stock buybacks was not necessarily going to turn GameStop around.

It wasn't until Ryan Cohen got involved, got on the board, and started pushing for serious e-commerce and digital initiatives that the stock and story majorly turned around and caused the momentum trade.

If the stock continues going up this week, it's that the "magical meme" energy is actually the momentum traders and various celebrities who want to keep the story going by putting more money into it. Of course, they are then likely to flip their positions for a profit before they tell their followers they've sold, leaving the fans holding the bag. Just at a more extended timeframe than you'd predict.

They probably don't want to share details for the sake of the family's privacy. I assume it's the typical online harassment stuff: threats to the family's physical safety because of Left's opinions.

Part of the reason for Tesla's quality issues getting extra attention is because their brand positioning is very much about how they are superior than the competition and more of a "tech" company than a car company. So for an alleged "tech" company to have equal to or worse quality issues in an old industry, and possibly lagging its competitors in this quality regard, is inviting critics to call Tesla and Elon out as hypocrites.

I am not currently short Tesla and not all criticism against them is fair. My point is more along the lines of "If you make big claims and brag about yourself, the onus is on you to deliver."

First, the blog post does cite "The End of Accounting" by Lev and Gu, which provides a pretty good academic dive into this topic and I'd recommend to anyone who likes this post: https://www.amazon.com/Accounting-Forward-Investors-Managers...

Second, in conversations with professional investors (firm with AUM >$1B), their analysts and portfolio managers have been making these kind of intangible asset adjustments for years, if not decades, now. That's the whole point of having professional investment analysts, especially at "value" firms; they wouldn't be able to generate alpha if they weren't trying different methods to identify opportunities. So all this "intangibles" chatter that's become popular in tech media isn't news to the investment community.

Third, the big question inspired by the book but not covered as much in this blog post is: If investors are already making valuation adjustments for intangible assets, and company's are having to estimate a lot of the accounting inputs anyway, then is it better to try and fix/update GAAP, or can we just reduce the regulatory paperwork burden for public companies and have investors demand the metrics for each company that they feel are relevant?

Fourth, this post is a good overview of the topic and something anyone in a business role at a tech company (and ideally eng/prod/design as well) should understand.

The fundamentals were not bad ideas. Regus has been doing things similar to WeWork for decades.

Neumann committing fraud, poor cash management, and self-dealing conflicts of interest are what killed WeWork. Not the coworking space concept.

Luckily I think history is doing its job in changing how Jack Welch's legacy will be remembered. I don't think students or upcoming businesspeople are really learning Welch's approach anymore.

There's also a lot of questions on how much of that cash is tied into the China plant and Chinese relationship. Some analysts estimate that's about $2 billion of the $8B, so maybe a $1.5 billion buffer, and that's assuming some level of pre-covid demand.

Plus there's an argument to be made that a company isn't likely to actually run the cash all the way down to zero before waiving the desperation flag (I recall hearing GM had $1-$2 billion in cash when they filed bankruptcy in 2009).

Without knowing what the rest of 2020 demand looks like and the concerns above, the time horizon could easily be cut from your estimated 2 years down to 1. Only one year left to survive is a precarious situation.

Not saying that's guaranteed to happen, but the are plenty of valid concerns one would have as a common stock shareholder.

Compared to WeWork, Uber, and Wag, buying ARM was not their worst idea.

I made this same point when it was announced three months ago that Wag (another major Vision Fund investment) was struggling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21095990

Yet somehow people still seemed to defend the strategy ("you underestimate biotech ROI" or "investing in moonshots was not the point of the fund").

Most criticism is invalid because it misses the underlying flaw of the Vision Fund: If you're going to waste $24+ billion on the Adam Neumann's of the world, you could not have performed any worse by taking on riskier projects.

It was obvious to everyone that WeWork was going to flop (even if Softbank got some money back from an IPO, the ensuing stock price crash would've tarnished their reputation and who knows how quickly they could've exited) and that Adam Neumann was a con. So the return there was going to be heavily negative.

I doubt $10+ billion into drug research would've yielded as negative of results, especially in this era.

The only valid critique of our approach I've heard is that it's a logistical pain to try and spread and manage $100 billion around $5 million at a time.

A documentary on this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o75teVHwkT8

> [3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV.

And outside of SV, seen this in the Midwest at both tech and non-tech focused companies.

Dot.con by John Cassidy: https://www.amazon.com/Dot-America-Lost-Money-Internet-ebook...

Is there something specific in Postgres (perhaps in the binlog) that makes it easier to do this than MySQL? Seems like there's more tools for this kind of data loading than I've seen for MySQL.

BTW: Awesome work ankane! Cool dude too :)

One key to the success of index funds is that the indexes will remove underperforming companies and replace them with growing companies. The argument for this enforced survivorship bias is that it's meant to provide a dynamic view of the economy changing. In practice, this also helps keep the returns of the indexes up and is a case of survivorship bias working out in the individual passive investor's favor.

https://jpm.pm-research.com/content/29/1/51

This is similar to what Eric Reis outlines as an innovation financing model in his book "The Startup Way": https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Way-Companies-Entrepreneurial...

*No affiliation. Just thought that his innovation financing and accounting models were the most interesting part of the book.

This (or something like it) makes a lot of sense to me. I've been at multiple organizations where there have been efforts to create these "data dictionaries" explaining the meaning of the data, especially when the schemas or APIs are not well designed.

But then manually writing documentation is obviously tedious and can typically only be written by the data team that knows the underlying data well, which is not always the best use of their time.

I'll definitely be following Syndetic and hope they can help crack this problem.

Part of the "certain level of expertise to talk yourself into something extremely dumb" is because we've all heard the stories of genius ideas that were dismissed as crazy. And if someone considers themselves "smart", then they think they can identify those opportunities before the general population.

This leads to both/either FOMO ("I don't want to be considered dumb because I didn't invest in X") or self-optimism/egotistical ("I'm smart because I found the Next Big Thing"). These two factors explain a lot of the cases where supposedly smart people talk themselves into stupid decisions.

Or as another commenter posted, these people are not really "smart" or are smart but not "wise", because a wise person would recognize such situations and be on the other side of the stupidity mountain into enlightenment land.

Harder to have the same growth rate coming from a much higher base (already being worth about $100 billion five years ago)

In Horowitz's defense (on the options pricing matter, hopefully not taking this thread too far off course), I thought he had explained his position on options pricing reasonably: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avo...

You're correct, that's not how companies usually make their personnel decisions. But one would think more companies would factor in PR-risk as a real financial risk. But Google being Google economically-speaking, this still probably isn't a material event.

I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing.

This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c...

I am sure he's made a lot of people money, but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.

Edit: First article I linked to was paywalled, so here is the underlying story: https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...

As a Stripe Atlas customer, I received a snail mail letter from Stripe about this issue. It included some suggestions from them to prevent identity theft.

As I texted a tech friend of mine: if I’m receiving a physical letter from a leading tech co like Stripe, then it’s at least a moderately serious issue.

The main difference is the level of knowledge and intent on coming through with your promises.

It’s one thing to pitch people saying “If I/we do X and Y, we’ll make money.” It’s another if you make that pitch knowing you can’t possibly do it or that you know ahead of time you also need Z and don’t disclose that to your colleagues. Or maybe X and Y are possible but you have no intent to do it and just pocket the money and fly away.

If you later find out something unexpected, ethically you should disclose that to partners before taking more of their time or money.

Using your information asymmetry to take other’s money is unethical.

Also, often the best con men won’t seem to have malicious intent because they don’t; they have purely selfish motives. Whether other people benefit or are harmed is irrelevant to their selfish benefit.

I’ve seen this play out where yes-men/people just follow a psychopathic leader around because he rewards them for being members of his cult (as a means to keep them as followers, not because he cares about them). I would bet there were some very well paid people near the top of WeWork who knew it was a farce but were too well paid to sacrifice themselves and expose the truth early.

I did not and will pick it up, thank you for the recommendation!

Not at all, haven’t seen him in about two years (by his choosing) and mom just divorced him a year ago.

Mostly I’m worried he’ll end up conning more money out of others now that he’s unconstrained by family. I’ve seen people are generally too trusting because:

1) good people don’t think about lying in the same way/frequency as con men,

2) as another commenter noted, the cost for due diligence is too high,

3) there is a fine line between “con” and “fake it till you make it” or “a good salesperson” and people will give benefit of the doubt that someone is the latter two.

"It is exciting to read about a fraud — from a distance. It is not so funny to live through one."

This is a great summary.

My estranged father is a professional con artist: He has multiple lies on his social media about his alleged wealth and committed credit card fraud while I was in high school resulting in my parents' formally declaring bankruptcy.

I have found it very difficult in life to convey in words what being exposed up close and personal to con men is really like, because normal people lack imagination to put themselves in the mind of someone who doesn't care at all about humanity.

Author Chuck Klosterman has a chapter about con artists in his book "I Wear the Black Hat" which covers similar ground as Harford: people enjoy these stories and con men because of a mix of admiration (life is easier in some ways if you literally biologically can't care about anything except base biological needs of sex, power, and consumption) and curiosity for the different.

Having known multiple con men in my life, including family, I can definitely claim it's less entertaining in person than in media.

The other book I recommend on this topic is Dr. Kent Kiehl's "The Psychopath Whisperer" for its mix of neuroscience and personal stories.

"I Wear the Black Hat - Grappling with Villains Real and Imagined": https://www.amazon.com/Wear-Black-Hat-Grappling-Villains/dp/...

"The Psychopath Whisperer": https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-...

The author, Mario Carniero, is both one of the top three smartest and nicest people I know (and many other Ohio State students where he did his undergrad would agree). Glad to see his research getting Hacker News recognition.