4,042 karma · joined February 23, 2007
California already has a property tax, about half of which is based on the land value, and the other half on the structure on the land. So this is not some brilliant idea, just a renaming of what we already have.
If the author is suggesting to repeal Prop 13, that is also not a new idea, and has been discussed for decades. Good luck.
It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...
I challenge anyone to find better founding engineer compensation. Comparisons from YC: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/l/software-engineer
1) It's not a security, so it's not a share of the company. In order to be compliant with US law, we can only offer a utlity token 2) Crypto is a 10x better underlying data structure and architecture for the financial system: https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
(author/fetchfox ceo)
I usually make a few different offers that have cash / token allocation tradeoffs. Higher token = lower cash, and lower cash makes you more like a founder.
Just to give a concrete example, for a recent very good candidate, the offer on the high token side was ~20% of the expect total allocation and 150k cash. There is also a higher cash option with lower token allocation.
For less exceptional candidates, the offers are a lower token allocation the equivalent cash.
I've seen this also, and I think its lame.
This is why at Fetchfox I explicitly use the phrase "crypto token" in the article and in all offers offers to prospective hires. It's a crypto token, so we call it that.
There are a lot of negative associations with the term, but using euphemisms just confuses people and makes it seem like you're afraid or that you're trying to trick them. I say, call a spade a spade, and call Voldemort "Voldemort".
I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.
Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.
That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.
I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.
The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.
Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.
I have a long article at https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for... about why I think crypto rails are fundamentally better than the current banking system, from a computer science perspective.
The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.
Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.
FetchFox as a company has two goals:
(1) Make the best possible AI scraper (2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures
It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.
Draft doc with comments enabled: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvxEQBRexuFJT5qCr9MCeZRV...
FetchFox is an AI web scraper. It convert takes a prompt and a URL, and crawls that site to give structured data.
[edited to remove listing, as we are working through existing applicants at this time]
MIT license. It’s just one line of code to get started: ‘fox.run(“get data from example.com”)’
Basically, the Foxtrot scraping library sends the page in chunks. The chunk size is capped at the max context length of each model, which for Gemini is 1,000,000 input tokens for lite. That's compared to 128,000 for GPT-4o-mini.
Typically, you won't need all the tokens in the page, and sending a million tokens when 100,000 will work is wasteful in terms of cost and runtime, and can also hurt accuracy.
I'm going to re-run the benchmarks with a cap on the prompt size for models like Gemini.
Unfortunately the bigger issue with Gemini is cost, which is too high for the scraping use case.
The statement is pretty vague, and it’s hard to know what it means on a technical level.
When I was there, people were pretty confident in this bet. They had just signed a huge deal with GSK, so it seemed to be going well. There wasn't widespread dissent at the time (~2016-2017). I imagine its different now that the stock price has crashed over 10x.
The company did follow Ancestry.com pretty closely. Ancestry did not bet heavily on genomics. Instead, they bet heavily on a subscription model and focused more on consumer interest in their ancestors. This has worked out a lot better for them than 23andMe.
FWIW, I agree it's obvious in retrospect that pharma was a bad bet. Leadership should have made better decisions.
If you use 23andMe, and request data deletion, they will do a best effort to delete the data. It's part of their GDPR requirement. When I was there, I worked on this project and they put a lot of effort into it. A big chunk of engineering org focused GDPR compliance for a month or two. They definitely don't intentionally keep data around if you request deletion.
The one caveat is that data deletion is hard, and its possible that some gets accidentally retained. I left the company over 5 years ago, so I don't know how good their deletion process is now.
One final note: to keep costs low, 23andMe doesn't look at your whole genome. They only look at a handful of "SNPs" in your genome that are known to be significant. If you've heard how we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this is what they're basing this on. They look at the <0.5% of DNA that commonly varies between humans.
The reason I mention this is that, if you're very interested in your DNA sequencing, you may want to opt for a higher cost service that does full genome analysis. I don't know any names but I believe there are some DNA services that do this.
However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.
Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.
Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.