shubik22

For context, here’s the full paragraph. The positive framing (“a GAIN”, and “significantly less…”) makes me think this came from someone spinning on Softbank’s behalf.

> For your piece, the Vision Funds actually posted a GAIN for the quarter of $0.8 billion, including shared assets such as its ARM holdings. Stripping out shared assets, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million) — significantly less than the 2,919 billion yen loss a year ago ($20 billion).

A daily whimsical rhyming word game that uses generative AI. We’ve got a pretty dedicated base of users by this point through other channels but it’s never really taken off on HN. A great case for generative AI augmenting rather than replacing human creativity IMO :)

> The job she posted listed its selling points — the business had 400 percent growth a year, the backing of a legendary venture capitalist, no limit to personal vacation days, full coverage of employee health-care premiums and the option to work remote or locally.

> Dyba estimates that she sent the listing to about 75 prospective hires and received back maybe five responses, three of which were either a brief “no thanks” or the simple declination of her InMail message. A declination — that’s LinkedIn language for “Please, stop throwing all these jobs at me with employer-paid health-insurance premiums and unlimited vacation time.”

Sorry, what? As an in-demand tech work, I feel incredibly fortunate to be compensated far above many others who work harder at in my view more significant work (e.g. teachers, or nurses). I would certainly not defend tech compensation relative to many other sectors of our economy.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in value creation and wealth in technology over the past few years (from an already high baseline). I think part of what we’re seeing is a larger percentage of that value flow to software engineers and other technology workers. And still that percentage of the overall value created pales in comparison to the value that’s accruing to tech executives and venture capitalists.

When I read passages like the one quoted above (which by the way is written by the reporter! not even quoting someone), it’s as if the article is written by a tech exec or VC who’s outraged that they have to spend an additional 1% of their market cap paying engineers.

55.78% of funds returned! Truly an incredible accomplishment, and not in a positive way.

(edit: On second thought, does the 44% of original funds remaining include people who haven’t tried getting refunds? Curious if there’s an estimate of ETH lost purely to transaction fees.)

One takeaway from the Theranos saga for me was that the type of fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes can have very real consequences on people’s lives beyond some rich investors losing their money. The stories about people receiving incorrect test results, the irresponsibility with which Theranos ran their lab, not to mention Holmes using David Boies to attack the brave whistleblowers in my mind go far beyond the “fake it till you make it” / “mistakes were made” framing of the case.

If I had played a role in supporting that type of behavior, however small, I would probably have a different takeaway than “got this specific example wrong! but my core point was correct”.

I would pick a fund/funds that matches my risk target/preferences (e.g. equity funds riskier than bonds, small cap riskier than large cap/overall market, foreign riskier than domestic). If I had a very large risk tolerance, I might also allocate a small percentage of your portfolio to single name stocks.

Lastly, I’d just keep in mind the risk you’re taking with your investments. A five year time horizon doesn’t strike me as particularly long or compatible with having a high risk tolerance. Investing in equities can give you high returns over a long time horizon, but their volatility means that you can have large negative returns over a short time period (e.g. the S&P had a max decline from its peak of almost 60% during the 2008-9 financial crisis).

(Standard disclaimer about investing being risky, please do your own research as well.) Good luck!

I attended a Papers We Love meetup back in 2015 where Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp's CTO, gave the main talk on Bloom filters and HyperLogLog (interested parties can watch a recording of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c). It was an awesome, very educational talk (on a topic I was previously unfamiliar with), and based on my very limited impression, Armon struck me as a really smart, intellectually curious and nice person. Great to see Armon/Hashicorp achieve such a huge, positive milestone.

> As for other Americans who want to use psychedelics in a more secular setting, it’s easy to imagine spa-like retreat centers popping up across the country. Indeed, a prototype already exists: Field Trip Health has opened a half dozen lavishly appointed clinics (with more on the way) offering ketamine-assisted therapy for depression, which is already legal, in anticipation of Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA and psilocybin.

Here's their website: https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/. To my eyes it looks no different than the website of a well-funded mattress seller, or travel startup.

I am nervous about applying a capitalist model to legalized psychedelics, but I have no doubt that many companies will try to make money once these substances are legalized.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/sunday/drug-legal...

Perhaps this is too harsh an analogy, but how is this different than someone who spends years working at a tobacco company and then launches a company which sells a smoking cessation product? As other comments here point out, even the process of opting out of these brokers via Optery requires disclosure of personal information and some level of trust. I can imagine the fact that you all previously worked at data brokers make people less likely to trust you with their personal information, rather than more.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449344763

I agree that immutable data structures > mutable data structures, and while I don't have experience working with Elixir, it's high on my list of new technologies to play around with when I have time. However, although in theory you can go wild mutating your objects and monkeypatching in Rails, in practice those features have never really been a pain point in any of the Rails applications I've worked on, both in personal and professional contexts. Unless you're a very new programmer who doesn't know any better, you're hopefully not mutating the request object in Rails in hidden places, or monkeypatching Object#to_json (for example).

Rather, the difficult parts have been deciding what logic lives where, and other issues more common to web applications overall than Rails specifically. If anything, Rails' convention-driven philosophy (which it sounds like Phoenix follows as well) makes development significantly easier than it otherwise would be, in my experience.

Say what you will about "democratizing" finance, but even if you think enabling retail investors to buy options is a laudable goal, surely they should at least know what a "put" and a "call" is? (The point being options are complicated to understand, and if you don't even know their names, you probably don't understand how they work. And if you don't understand how they work, maybe you shouldn't be buying them.)

I feel like a lot of the arguments I see in favor of "democratizing finance" could be applied to a company making some incredibly harmful drug. Ok, maybe we shouldn't make it illegal for companies to produce or sell that substance, but surely we can all agree that company is actively doing harm to its customers? And we don't need to pretend that the company is "democratizing" chemical consumption.

The one point I’d take issue with is:

> You have to be performing at the next level for several months.

This is definitely what you’ll be told (and was the party line at the FAANG company I recently left). I don’t think it makes a ton of sense though (so you perform at N+1 for a month, get promoted and then slip back to N?). And in my experience, it’s more often used as an excuse to avoid promoting people when they should be promoted and then avoid having to justify the outcome. (“Of course I agree with you that you’re performing at an L5 level! But you need to do that for just a little longer, wait until next cycle.”)

This is a somewhat cynical view, and doesn’t apply to every situation. However, I would advise any engineer who gets told this line (you’re doing great, just a few more months!) to not accept it as fact and push back against it every single time.

To become a doctor in the U.S. requires an incredible amount of intelligence, hard work and personal sacrifice. To destroy the lives of these med students based on such an unreliable and unfair process is, in my opinion, a true injustice.

1) https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/02/458222801/epis.... A great Planet Money episode about how Brazil combatted hyperinflation by just replacing their currency.

2. https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy..... A Paul Krugman Slate article about a 1978 journal article that uses the example of a babysitting coop to illustrate the way that the monetary supply can have ramifications on the real economy.

3. And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586483811/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_.... A much longer read, but this is book about the economic crisis in Argentina is one of my favorite economics books, and also teaches you a lot about the international monetary system as well.

Me: what’s their contact info? Agent: inquiries@nymag.com Me: This is a third party but they have an NY Mag email address? Agent: Yes. Me: ... How are they a third party then? Agent: One second, I’m transferring you to my supervisor.

Nothing turns me off a brand I like and want to support more than 1) autorenewals at 2x your intro price and 2) making cancellations both arbitrarily difficult and insulting.

IIRC, the performance of Node was ok but clearly worse than Go/Java/etc. Uber was using JS not TS back then, but the real issue (at least when I started) was lack of a defined interface for the API/mobile app communication. That was eventually addressed by adopting a forked version of Thrift.

I was briefly shadow-banned a month or two ago, due to a few submissions of posts on my personal blog from this account (and not much else).

What was odd was that when I looked at the "newest" page while logged in, I saw my post on HN but when I looked when not logged in, the post didn't show up. I didn't know shadowbanning existed and thought there was some kind of issue with HN, so I emailed hn@ycombinator.com. dang@ sent back an incredibly thorough and thoughtful reply literally 3 minutes later (this was at 7:15 p.m. on a week night).

So while I find it a little odd to 1) shadowban someone without telling them why and 2) intentionally obfuscate the fact that they've been banned by making it seem to them like their submission was successfully submitted, I was really amazed by the care and efficiency of dang's response. So thanks dang!

However, the answer to this is not to just cut out the "pays well" part of the equation and assume that the rest will follow as a result. As others in the comments here have pointed out, interesting work is hard to find, full stop.

I would actually think that the non-conventional nature of the author's offer would actually decrease the quality of the work. In my experience, work can be enjoyable based on two dimensions: the technical aspect of the work (am I learning? is this engaging?) and the "organizational" nature of the work (is the company well organized and run? are there clear expectations? or is there just chaos everywhere?). Even if work you can find from this kind of offer is better on the first dimension, I imagine it'll be far worse on the second dimension.

That being said, I hope the author proves me wrong and finds a work situation which makes them happy. Good luck!

Even years later, there was still bitterness among the employee base about the holiday gift. It was a bit mystifying to me (as I never had the expectation of a $400 electronic for a holiday gift from my employer), but really shows the power of anchoring. Once people have an expectation for some reward or benefit, any downward deviation from that expectation is met with great distress.