peripitea

Just reading this and I don't understand how anyone would say this passes the Howey Test. This is clearly a security. The only possible debate is whether there is an expectation of profit, but I can't see anyone seriously entertaining that debate -- there was an ICO! What do you think the median person buying into that ICO was expecting? "I'm going to spend a few thousands dollars on this token that might have utility in this project in a few years"?? Come on.

I am so confused haha. We just saw a large-but-not-that-large bank fail, and got a small glimpse of the chaos it might cause if the government had not stepped in to backstop deposits above and beyond the $250k FDIC limit -- missed payroll, companies going out of business, mass layoffs, etc. And you don't think the entire sector crashing would impact you? I guess I'd ask, do you recognize that's a tiny minority opinion, and if so what insight do you think you have that everyone else (including experts who are well aware of all the facts about how the industry has evolved that you laid out in your other comment) is missing?

Yes, but you don't want to deflate for other (often worse) reasons. So could they raise interest rates to 10% and kill inflation? Easily. The trick is in raising them to the appropriate level to curb inflation without suffocating the economy.

The bank sector does not crash in a vacuum. If it crashed it would have a massive impact on your life, regardless of how much you hold in your personal account. The last paragraph from this very article gets at that: "Why do I believe (disclosing investment in any banks) is an irrational disclosure, despite general support for this ritual? Because I live in a society, which is sufficient information for you to know that I’m structurally levered long to the stability of the banking system, much like you are."

The term "real" is overloaded. The author is clearly using a meaning here that is different from the one you are using, but that is intentional. His usage makes sense in the context of that particular segment of his writing. From an equity perspective, those losses are very real whether they are realized or not.

A much more likely explanation on the bowling thing is that physical fitness is not required to be a good bowler. Consider:

-There are lower-paying sports where fitness does matter, and they all have fit athletes at the top.

-There are way more conventionally fit folks than there are pro athlete slots; It's not like the select few fit people in the world are being exhausted before they can fill the ranks of all professional athletics.

Pre-profit doesn't just refer to your cash-allocation-adjustment scenario. There's also the broader notion of what you focus on. A company may be pre-profit because they're not prioritizing profitability as a strategic objective early on. They may have no (current) way of turning a dial and becoming profitable, yet still be making the correct strategic decision to ignore profitability for the sake of e.g. growth or product development. Countless now-gigantic, now-profitable companies started as startups who were intentionally (and correctly) focusing on strategic objectives other than profitability.

Why is it a euphemism? Delaying profits as a primary objective has been a common startup strategy for decades.

This may be intentional. For example, if demand for their service is still exceeding supply, they may be targeting customers who are less price conscious.

I don't know about other ISAs, but with Lambda school the job had to be related to your bootcamp learning for you to owe them money.

He says not to buy one on Amazon, but I got mine on Amazon for $500 and it works great. Meanwhile the cheapest bike on his list is $1k.

As with so many things, awareness is often the hardest part. I don't have any advice that isn't already covered here, but kudos to you for recognizing this dynamic in yourself; that awareness will almost inevitably lead to improvement.

No worries. You caught me at the end of a long day where I was drained from supporting people I care about through some tough situations, so the questioning of my empathy hit a little harder than you could have possibly anticipated. I appreciate the apology and understand where you were coming from, and I wish you well.

Damn. I know you don't know me, but this is unnecessarily condescending and off the mark. I'm very well aware of everything you mentioned. Maybe I was unclear. My confusion is about the extent of misunderstanding and willful misrepresentation of the idea, not about the resulting outrage.

Your explanation is a great example -- if you want to look at the idea exclusively in those terms, that sure sounds problematic. But do you really think that's the only way it could have played out? Keep in mind, we are living in a system that causes massive aggregate harm to underrepresented people on a daily basis. And I'm just referring to the tech industry and particularly its hiring practices, let alone society as a whole.

Killing a new idea just because you can conceive of scenarios where it might be harmful (though I would argue not even that much more harmful than the status quo in this case) is probably unwise in general, but is almost certainly so in a space where the status quo is already so fraught. I work in this space, we need more/better ideas (among many other things), and I think this idea actually had a plausible chance of putting a dent in some of the problems at the core of these systemic issues. Sure, it's a small chance, but to just throw it away? That bums me out.

Edit just to be clear: I have no idea who the people behind this site are and had never heard of it before day. I just work on some of the same problems and would love to see the system improve more quickly.

>I think it’s funny that people assume that all radical ideas are worth trying and that change can only be good.

Nobody thinks that.

"having money/networks of people with money would give people an advantage in the world" is the status quo! I've worked in tech hiring for years and have seen and tried all kinds of ideas to fix that problem. With the status quo as bad as it is, we should be more willing to give radical ideas a shot; clearly the conventional ideas are not working. Is this idea a bit crazy? Sure! Do I think its odds of succeeding are well under 50%? Yup! But is it ok to kill these ideas before they even have a chance to prove themselves? No; in fact I would argue on net it's incredibly harmful, and that the people who claim to care the most about fixing this problem are causing harm by killing fledgling ideas that could plausibly help.

To your 1): I think it's at least plausible that this would become common; many crazier-sounding ideas have succeeded. There's a big disconnect between talent identification/development industries and hirers, and something like this could help to bridge that gap.

To your 2): Trust me, I have done all of that. It helps, but it is far from a panacea. That is the conventional shit that has resulted in the tech industry barely making a dent in its diversity numbers for well over a decade now. There are so many people for whom I would have so much rather just invested money in them getting a job immediately than spend yet another hour walking through their latest interview experience and explaining why something innocuous they said or did was probably incorrectly treated as a red flag by their interviewer.

I am (and presumably the people who created and funded this are) capable of critical thinking, and I don't share your judgment. Maybe you're right; maybe I'm right. Either way, your confidence is epistemically unjustified. That is why these ideas need room to breathe.

I'm (perhaps naively) shocked at how opposed to this people are on Reddit, but especially on HN. This community was founded on startup ideals of trying radical ideas, knowing that most wouldn't succeed but some would go on to have outsized positive impact. Anyone who claims to definitively know that this idea would have problematic/racist results is kidding themselves. I've worked with and mentored a lot of minority candidates (who often have trouble with the cultural test that is getting and passing interviews), and my first thought on reading this idea was: "Sweet, I could start a little fund getting under-represented people I know jobs; I think I could probably even make it profitable. This could be transformative." Of course I don't know for sure that it would work, but to just confidently dismiss it out of hand seems about as stupid as the people who, upon first hearing about Lambda School ISAs, insisted that it was morally akin to slavery.

I imagine any significant state actor already has multiple employees working inside AWS. I'm not an expert on state security apparatuses or anything, but that just seems so potentially valuable that I can't fathom why they wouldn't.

A public company's value is based on a collective estimate of what people think its cashflows will look like in the future. For a mature company that you don't expect to change much, looking at present financials is a solid way to estimate future financials. For an earlier-stage, or more speculative company like Rivian with a wide range of possibilities in its future, current financials are not typically helpful, with a few exceptions (e.g. growth indicators, signs of poor management).

For example: Five years ago, I thought Tesla had a 30% chance of failing, 20% chance of being bought by a major auto manufacturer (for let's say ~30B), 30% chance of turning into a major auto manufacturer (est value ~100B), 10% chance of turning into the top auto manufacturer (est value ~300B), and 10% chance of turning into something that transcended auto manufacturing (est value ~1T). If you multiply this out, you get an expected value of 0+6+30+30+100 = 166B. At the time the market cap was around 40B, so I thought it was underpriced and bought some. Obviously I'm glossing over some things, but it's sensible enough and should illustrate how you can get there.

In terms of the notion of "what if you never find someone to buy it from you?" The short answer is that that's extremely unlikely. The longer answer is that you can also just price that into your probability distribution, but because of the low likelihood it's unlikely to affect your price much.

FWIW I don't know much about Rivian, but my sense is also that they are overpriced. You could go through the same little exercise above for Rivian and see if you agree. To summarize what my distribution would look like, I think they have a much higher chance of failure than Tesla in my example above (because they're much less far along), and not enough potential upside to justify the valuations being discussed. But I could easily be wrong.

Interesting. You are far more cynical about this than I am. I can't say I know their motivations, but it seems at least plausible that they could land on this structure for earnest reasons if they both: a) believe they need more money than could be raised as a traditional non-profit, but b) want to limit the power of investors in the case where they successfully develop a strong AI.

>The result was a “capped-profit” structure that would limit the return of investment at 100-fold the original sum. If you invested $10 million, at most you’d get $1 billion. Not exactly what I’d call capped.

What on earth would you call it then?

I'm not sure I understand the problem specification. You want to be able to search "law", and find documents containing "qanoon" or "kanun", right? How does your proposed solution handle that? It seems like the approach with ML TL -> Lucene would still only find one of the two, unless your model is written to return a set of possible transliterations. Or are you saying your approach doesn't currently solve this part of the problem, and that's one of the things you'd like input on?

Is the corpus the only data you have, i.e. do you need to use it for training and validation as well?

In terms of the size of the data, if you want to store the corpus on the phone anyway, won't the index and model be relatively small in comparison?

Don't have anything to add right now but I like the idea of this thread and would support it becoming a regular thing.

Jordan is a poor country. He's just illustrating how he's used to being the underdog.

Why are people implying this money must have come from BLM donations? She wrote a book that was on the NYT bestseller list, and presumably has other income streams beyond her work for BLM. I have no idea whether BLM is allocating their money properly or not, but it seems quite plausible that she has earned all the money in question through legitimate means.

Not sure if I'm understanding you right, but this is an amendment to that February filling. This isn't a brand new raise.

I don't follow this too closely but are you referring to company-released videos? Seems unfair to compare a compilation of bad incidents from one of many (thousands?) of users of Tesla's system to one curated by the company releasing it. I've seen a few videos of the Tesla doing 15+ minute drives without intervention too.

I find this type of argument confusing. Let's say we did live in a world where their hypotheses were true. To make it concrete, let's say that a SuperAI was 20 years away and would wipe out humanity. How would we be able to know that right now, other than through the type of speculative inference you're criticizing?

Put another way, just because something is impossible to demonstrate conclusively and/or via observed reality does not automatically mean it can't be true, right? Of course it does mean that these claims warrant far more skepticism, and probably the large majority of them are untrue. But it seems obviously incorrect to automatically assume that they can not be true. Am I misunderstanding your reasoning in some way?

I'm struggling to understand your point. It's a different threat model; of course it will manifest differently, no? A mothership-style model seems much more vulnerable to every node being compromised than the decentralized vector Win95 botnets have to go through.

I could see arguing with the inevitability of the exploit -- Win95 botnets seemed much more inevitable to me than this Tesla mothership threat does. But it seems like you're arguing that they will both have similar impact if exploited. That doesn't make sense to me, because they're completely different threats, but it's possible I'm misunderstanding your argument in some way.