noego

Finance 101: Being cash-rich is a major advantage in environments where fundraising is a major hurdle, and where the funds can be put to productive use very quickly. For example, for a startup to raise funds for a major marketing campaign, it has to go through a lengthy and attention-demanding process of pitching to VCs and negotiating terms. Hence why having a big war-chest ready to fire, can be a competitive advantage for a startup.

For big public companies, it's the opposite. If a company wants to fundraise 10% of its market-cap, either for an acquisition or major investment, it doesn't require nearly as much effort. It can issue new shares, and immediately sell them to investors the next day for cash. The hard part is finding profitable investments, not raising the funds to make it happen. Hence why there's little competitive advantage in hoarding cash.

On the flip side, having a big cash hoard is bad for your investors' returns. It bloats your market-cap, without having any impact on earnings. This means that your P/E ratio is now inflated, and your earnings yield is reduced. From an investor's perspective, if you have invested $100 in the company, you're only only getting back $6 in profits every year, not $7 or $8.

Another way to look at this, is that Google/Apple invest their cash hoard very conservatively, in things like short-term treasuries, because of which their returns are very low. Whereas most of their investors would far prefer to invest the money in investments that produce better returns, such as the S&P 500. By not returning the cash hoard to its investors, Google is essentially forcing them to make low-return investments that they would never make otherwise. Of course, investors aren't going to be happy with this, and they will retaliate by lowering their valuation of GOOG stock, thus depressing the share price.

Your comment reminds me of something Dan Luu had written about.

https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do?"

Granted he's mostly talking about engineers, but I'm sure someone more knowledgable about marketing could write an almost identical essay.

> We looked at paid PaaS providers like Mailgun, Sendgrid, Amazon SES... And all of them would cost several thousand a month at this scale. And since we're not a sexy funded startup from California, but a boring customer-funded business, we can't afford this bill

I'm a little curious about their reasoning for buy-vs-build. They say they "can't afford several thousand a month", but their list of clients includes Adobe, VMWare, GE and many other impressive names. I find it hard to believe that with a list of major enterprise clients, they can't afford several thousand dollars a month?

It seems more plausible that they can indeed afford it, but figured building it in-house would be cheaper and produce more profits. Developer costs in USA run about ~$5-10k/month, and that's assuming you're not trying to compete with companies like Google. Would be curious to hear about the number of dev-weeks they have spent learning all the stuff they mentioned, building it, troubleshooting any issues, and keeping the system running and up-to-date. I'm also curious about the effect building this project has had on their bus factor.

To be honest, 80% of what I want is a self-driving car that can drive itself on the highways during regular weather conditions. Getting it on and off the highway, I don't mind doing that manually. I would love to be able to read or work during the hour that I spend on the highway everyday. I would love to take a overnight road trip where I can go to sleep in SF and wake up the next morning in LA. I'm aware that accidents/bugs will happen, and as long as the car's safety record is better than that of humans, that's fine with me. I've never spent more than $20k on a car before, but for a car that can drive itself on the highways, I'd pay a whole lot more.

This was addressed in their presentation 6 months ago.

https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs?t=1460

TLDR: Both their APM and TTFA is comparable to human pros.

> "Restricting the bot to one screen of information at a time is great"

I'm actually curious on the details of this, because it makes for a huge difference. The pro players spend most of their time looking at the mini-map, which shows you what's happening all over the map, in areas where your units/buildings have field-of-vision. You can't see exact units/buildings on the mini-map, but you can make out unit movements as well as expansions. Not giving AlphaStar access to the mini-map would be a severe handicap.

I wonder how people felt about handing all their personal photos over to a stranger just so they can get developed and printed, back in the 1990s. By today's standards, that would be incredibly creepy. But everyone did it because... having photos is pretty awesome.

It would be nice if companies like Google made it very clear that specific forms of user-data can/will be human reviewed for development/operational purposes. Personally, I just assume that anything I say after activating a digital assistant will be anonymized but listened to by a human one day. And I still think that Digital Home Assistants are pretty awesome despite that.

Just because corporations are getting away with bad behavior doesn't mean we should encourage a free-for-all. I've already endorsed breaking up big corporations, more vigorous antitrust enforcement, and increasing taxes on the wealthy. There is such a thing as a right way and a wrong way to fix a problem.

This is going to be a unpopular opinion. I think a tech union would likely be good for the average tech worker - and bad for absolutely everyone else, broader society included.

Cartels and price-fixing agreements are extremely lucrative, which is why they were commonplace until outlawed by antitrust legislation, and why cartels like OPEC still operate today. Unions and collective bargaining are no different. Unions are equivalent to a cartel of labor-suppliers, and collective bargaining is identical to price-fixing.

Just like with cartels and price-fixing agreements, unionizing would likely benefit the average tech worker. It would also have an extremely bad effect on innovation, bureaucracy, and cost-of-tech-development which would spill over to consumers in the form of higher prices.

I'm in favor of breaking up big corporations, as well as implementing a wealth tax, raising the top tax rates, and strengthening the social safety net. But I don't think encouraging the formation of cartels and price-fixing agreements is in society's best interests.

The subtext of most "rich got richer" articles, is that there's a missed opportunity to make everyone richer by raising taxes on the wealthy, and lowering taxes on everyone else. The rich would still get richer, but at least everyone else will get to share in the spoils as well.

You hit the nail on the head. If you simply play the pass-line and free-odds on craps, the house edge is extremely small. And yet, most people lose far more than predicted by the odds. The problem is exactly as you stated - people don't have a defined exit-strategy, and their implicit exit-strategy is to keep playing till they lose everything. Which is guaranteed to happen 100% of the time even if the house-edge was 0.

An approach that I've found to be useful, and have personally used in Vegas:

- Always start off each session with a fixed $X in chips, even if you're flush from previous winnings

- If at any point during the session, you get to $2X or $0 in chips, end the session immediately and cash out everything. Even if you're on a "hot streak"

- Bet large enough that you will get to $2X or $0 in a short/moderate period of time. The longer your session drags on, the lower the likelihood of getting to $2X

- Once a session has ended, have a cooling off period. Eg, no further gambling until after the next show/meal

If done right, gambling can actually be extremely cheap. With a house-edge of 0.5%, you can gamble $10,000 and only lose $50 on average. This makes it far cheaper (and more exciting) than eating out or going to shows.

The usual disclaimers still apply: only gamble what you can accept losing, no more

Sure, but we're talking about directional shifts. Do you want Amazon to move in the direction of being a laissez faire platform that is open to everyone? Or do you want it to move in the direction of being a tightly controlled ecosystem where all merchants are at the whims of Amazon's corporate overlords? Your suggestion would move Amazon towards the latter

Sure, Amazon shareholders can "make or break the lives of millions"... but only if the government lets them. Neither Amazon nor its shareholders can really overrule what the American government decides. In theory, this means that you and I hold ultimate power, and Amazon operates at our discretion.

The real problem is that the American government is beholden to corporations like Amazon, and the ultra wealthy like Amazon's shareholders. Not you and me. This in turn comes back to campaign finance reform. As long as politicians are beholden to the wealthy to fund their election campaigns, you and I aren't going to have nearly as much say.

I don't think the value of a theory can be evaluated in isolation. It can only be evaluated relative to its competition. During its time, Newtonian gravity, even if it didn't perfectly fit all data, was still superior to its competition on an aggregate of the 3 criteria mentioned. Only once Einstein's theories were put forward, were we able to replace Newtonian gravity with a superior alternative.

It felt like the key parts of the story were being left out here.

From her telling, it sounds like everything was going well for her in Poland. Then she did a very short stint in Seattle where everyone was "extremely closed minded... only caring about their manager’s approval". I'm not sure what that even means, but it sounds like that triggered in her a major depression. After which she spent a lot of time "pretending to work", which eventually resulted in her being fired. Clearly something major happened in Seattle, but we have no idea what.

Is there anything that MS could have done differently here, to avoid the problems she ran into? Or is this just a case of her investing too much time into her career and burning herself out?

The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to be frank.

I imagine a big appeal of falsifiability in its early days, stemmed from its opposition to religious dogma. Imagine dealing with someone whose answer to every question comes back to God. "Why did the patient die?" "Because God decreed it." Talking about germ-theory must have been a massive improvement over theology, hence why ideas like falsifiability must have arisen to provoke people to think in more critical ways.

My own standard for evaluating theories comes down to the following: The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful predictions for the future.

"Simplest" because we need to prevent overfitting.

"Fits existing data" because the whole point of a theory is to explain what we see around us.

And "useful predictions" because it will actually provide practical benefit to us. As opposed to a theory like "God decreed it", which may be extremely simple and error-free, but provides us with no practical benefit at all.

As I see it, falsifiability is a side-effect of the second and third requirements. If a theory is making useful predictions, we might as well check to see if it's accurate. And if it's not, there's no point in holding on to a theory that's making faulty predictions. Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful and fit any data at hand.

They did know that they could lose money. They just underestimated the amount of risk involved, as well as the level of correlation between their different trades. Fat tails, black swans, etc etc

Does anyone know if these tenants were covered by any rules preventing the landlord from not renewing their lease? If not, the landlord could always choose to not renew their lease the next year, install the smart locks, and then lease out the apartments to tenants who have explicitly acknowledged and approved of the smart locks.

I wonder if the courts would still try to enforce a no-smart-locks policy in that case. If they did, it would set a major precedent against landlords being able to customize their own homes and renting it out only to tenants who are okay with it.

When my stock vests, it is treated the same as my salary, and I get hit with an immediate income tax. Capital gains tax only kicks in afterwards, if I decide to hold on to the stock.

Can someone explain why they are raising taxes specifically for stock-based-compensation and not for all high-income-compensation? What's so special about lawyers and bankers making hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash-compensation, that they deserve an exemption from these tax increases?

I agree that inheritance is not necessary for this, if languages provided better built-in support for the composition pattern. I was referring to the downsides of using composition in today's "enterprise" languages like Java.

We're arguing over semantics. Here's the exact quote from the page you linked:

> designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years

They are referring to durability as corruption in the underlying data store due to known storage-technology risks. If they were to take into account all other risks, they would also have to include the risks of nuclear war, cyber warfare, the US government classifying your organization as a terrorist threat, etc etc.

I agree with "anti-inheritance" as a general guideline, but its adherents have to recognize the significant practical upsides of inheritance in many situations.

Imagine you have an interface with 20+ methods, such as the List interface. And you want to create a new implementation of this interface, which is almost identical to an existing implementation, except for one tiny difference. Example, you want an CustomArrayList implementation that doesn't allow the number 666 to be populated into the list.

With inheritance, you can accomplish this in just a few lines of code. Extend the existing implementation, and override just the methods that need to be overridden.

Whereas with composition, you now need to manually implement all 20+ methods in the interface, just to make the pass-through call. This adds a tremendous amount of boilerplate to the code.

Depending on how many methods are in the interface and how invasive the changes are, this boilerplate is sometimes worth it and sometimes not worth it. Ideally, languages will add built-in support to facilitate this pattern without the associated verbosity. But until then, people will continue to use inheritance just because of how much less verbose it is.

Many times, they are indeed MBA problems. VPs micromanaging instead of delegating, not investing enough money into hiring, retaining and developing their talent, etc.

Other times, it is a problem with the existing developers. Choosing not to learn/follow industry best practices. Creating an over-engineered solution instead of a simple one. Skimping on automated testing and spending more time on manual testing instead. Making their colleagues wait an inordinate amount of time for a simple question, code-review or approval. There are many things developers can do that would slow down their team's productivity.

I don't think tribal finger-pointing is very productive. It really does vary case-by-case.

On the flip side, I've seen far too many teams move at the speed of molasses, for reasons unrelated to the intrinsic complexity of the problem. Bureaucracy, analysis paralysis, no automated testing, accidental complexity, tech debt, poor retention of experienced developers, poor compensation resulting in sub-par hires, insufficient training and mentoring for new hires etc etc. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that every single development team is operating at their most ideal.

Your numbers are off. If both people save $50k each from their investment/wage income, then both of them will earn 10% returns on that $50k of savings. Hence why they cancel each other out. You've only given the worker 3% returns on his savings, not 10%

I never understood comparing r and g. r represents the fixed investment income for the rentier. g represents the growth in income for the laborer. Comparing these two numbers, is like comparing velocity vs acceleration.

Example: Let's take r=0.1, g=0.03. Consider a Rentier with a real investment income of $100,000/year (ie, off a $1M endowment), and a Worker with wages of $100,000/year. For simplification, let's assume both individuals spend their entire $100,000 income every year.

If you follow the r>>g hypothesis, you might assume that after a period of time, the Rentier will be far better off than the Worker. But that's not the case. After 20 years, the Rentier's real income will still be $100,000/year, off the same $1M endowment. Whereas the Worker's wages will now be $100,000 * 1.03^20 ~= $180,000

Clearly a higher r will be to the Rentier's advantage, especially if he supplements his investment income with wages as well, and keeps growing his endowment further. But this is going to be true even for r<g. There's nothing special that occurs when r overtakes g, since they are comparing totally different things.

> Programs written in dynamically typed languages don’t have far higher defect rates than programs written in languages like C++ and Java.

They have done a study which found that strong/static type checks can reduce your number of bugs by 15%

https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/19/to-type-or-not-to-type-q...

I would consider that to be quite significant

I have a hard time following what the author is trying to say exactly. As far as I can tell, he seems to be making 2 interwoven points, which have nothing to do with the clickbait title.

1. There are "fitness influencers" on instagram who are trying to build a career out of this

Ok. There are also software bloggers who are using their blogs to build up their tech careers. And startups who are using their blogs for marketing/PR purposes. I wouldn't go around accusing Robert Martin of being "full of shit" just because he wants to build a career out of the things he writes about.

2. There are some "fitness influencers" who haven't earned the credentials needed to be taken seriously

Sure, but that's the whole premise of social-networking platforms as opposed to traditional media. It seems a stretch to accuse everyone of being full of shit just because they chose to build their brand using social-media. What's next: "Everyone on the internet is full of shit"? "Everyone on Hacker News is full of shit"? "Everyone writing articles on random sites like MelMagazine is full of shit"?

Personally, this whole article reeks of clickbait and faux-outrage.

The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their admissions process, in order to favor those born into privilege.

For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less

https://outlookzen.com/2017/03/24/481/