tfehring

> * If an insurance company wanted to charge higher premiums, they would just do so.*

That’s not an option in many cases. The first homeowner featured in the article is in rural Northern California. CA’s insurance regulator has been extremely restrictive about letting insurers raise rates, especially in that area, so her insurance premium was probably a fraction of the expected cost of insurance claims.

There’s a saying in the insurance industry, there’s no such thing as a bad risk, only insufficient premium. Natural catastrophe risk is definitely increasing, but the insurance industry can handle that. The fundamental issue is that regulators in many states (including CA and FL) won’t let insurers charge enough to compensate for that risk.

Yes, insurance companies should sometimes lose money on business that they expected to be profitable. But they shouldn’t be writing business that they expect to be unprofitable a priori. Many states and lines of business are firmly in the second category right now due to overzealous insurance regulators.

It would be extremely poor form for founders to intentionally leave their startup at this stage to take another job. In all likelihood they were pushed out by the board.

My guess is that the founders were all in on Pi, their conversational language model, and investors lost confidence in their ability to build a sustainable venture-scale company on the ~4th best AI chatbot.

I agree that there's still lots of ambiguity and Waymo's PR comment provides limited and one-sided detail. I stand by my previous comment as the most likely course of events, but we won't know for sure until video is released.

The comment that claims bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California is incorrect. From the CA DMV website [0]:

> Bicyclists must obey STOP signs and red signal lights, and follow basic right-of-way rules.

There was an attempt to change this a few years ago, but it didn't pass.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed...

Yeah, my reading was that the bike ran the stop sign and then attempted to make a left turn in front of the Waymo as it was going straight through the intersection.

You get the full $500k upfront. In exchange, YC gets 7% equity upfront (for the first $125k), plus a proportional share of equity in your next funding round (for the next $375k).

There’s not a fixed federal limit on loss ratio or profit for car insurance like there is for some types of health insurance. But they need to get approval for rate increases from state regulators for every state that they issue policies in, and some states can be extremely hard to get rate increases through, even when insurers are breaking even or losing money in those states. It’s a tragedy of the commons - each state regulator would benefit from keeping premiums low within their state, but in reality any losses need to be subsidized by higher premiums somewhere else.

Long-term interest rates aren’t set by the Fed, they’re market rates based on the Treasury’s demand for borrowing and investors’ demand for purchasing US government debt. If there were enough demand for zero-interest US government debt to support the Treasury’s borrowing needs, then the interest rate on that debt would already be zero.

I’m curious, how would you advocate for using the labor market directly as a stabilization tool?

Netflix is one of the most data-driven companies there is. They know exactly how much customers care about those things, as measured in dollars of revenue, and they account for it in their product and content decisions.

As a consumer, I wish that consumers as a whole were more price- and quality-sensitive and more ad-averse, since that would make it rational for companies to offer me better, cheaper products. But based on revealed preference, they’re not, so they don’t.

In the US, health insurers can only price based on age, location, and tobacco use. Setting health insurance premiums or denying coverage based on any health-related factors has been illegal for over a decade, and changing that would be totally unviable politically.

However, it's a significant risk for other types of insurance including life, disability, and long term care.

My impression is that it's pretty true of Microsoft in general, but not of the AI research teams I'm familiar with. As with any tech company of its size, there's lots of variation from team to team.

It's frustrating, but she's exposed to potentially massive personal liability for the board's actions. I'm surprised that she agreed to an interview at all - frankly, I probably wouldn't if I were in her position - and I'm sure her answers were carefully scripted and run by her attorney(s).

I think this Reddit comment captures the most plausible story at this point: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1812w04/co...

Dalton says basically the same thing in the video. Lightly edited excerpt from the YouTube transcript (starting around 11:28):

What often happens - again, to go deep on this - is that the way they'll pitch the person is that they'll pitch them their idea, like, "I'm an idea guy, I've got a great idea, do you want to be my worker bee to go do all my ideas?" And of course the person that's the best person you've ever worked with does not want to sit in a cage and do all of the work that you give them. And instead I'm like, well have you asked them if they have startup ideas? And then you sell yourself, where you can come together, come up with the idea together, as co-owners, and it's shocking how often that appears to have never occurred to someone. Like they think the idea of finding a tech co-founder is to find someone who will basically submit to their whims and be, like, their assistant, and that's not the move.

FYI you seem to be shadowbanned, I vouched for this comment but you should probably reach out to hn@ycombinator.com

My main concern is that a new Altman-led AI company would be less safety-focused than OpenAI. I think him returning to OpenAI would be better for AI safety, hard to say whether it would be better for AI progress though.

I think it was a good thing that, in hindsight, the leading AI research company had a strong enough safety focus that it could do something like this. But that’s only the case as long as OpenAI remains the leading AI research company going forward, and after yesterday’s events I think that’s unlikely. Pushing for more incremental changes at OpenAI, possibly by getting the board to enact stronger safety governance, would have been a better outcome for everyone.

I’m sure they had A/B tested the feature, but it’s hard to think of a metric they could measure in those tests that would reliably detect the alleged harm.

I’m not sure they made the right choice in the absence of data, but I do believe that they didn’t have the data or a good way to get it.

Yep, insurance is really at quantifying and transferring risk. Maybe the best thing about it is that it translates high, unlikely costs in the future into small, certain costs today, and the latter are far easier to respond to rationally and proportionately.

As a minor point, there's nothing inherently capitalist about it - the largest personal lines auto insurer in the US (like many of the smaller ones) is a mutual company, meaning that it doesn't have outside shareholders and functions more or less as a cooperative owned by its policyholders.

> [Matt] Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson, had the idea of adding fentanyl dealing to a list of crimes for which undocumented immigrants lose their sanctuary-city protections. "My hope was to incentivize a change to the drug market—if we went back to the good old days of heroin and Oxys, we’ll save hundreds of lives every year," he said. "It didn’t go over well with my colleagues."

I wonder what share of San Franciscans would actually oppose the deportation of undocumented immigrants who'd been convicted of dealing fentanyl. Are residents being poorly represented by their elected and appointed officials, or are they living in the product of their own preferences?

Financially, yeah, you can cash out and get similar liquidity to what you'd get from an exit while keeping plenty of upside. But investors are only going to provide that option in the situation where they like you as a CXO and think you're the right person to continue growing the company to a $1B+ valuation, which is just a nice way of saying that they'll expect you to continue to pour your heart and soul into the business, work long hours and think about the business 24/7. If you sell your $100M startup to a strategic acquirer, generally you won't still be CXO. You'll get a comparatively chill director-level job, or you can quit relatively quickly and just find a beach somewhere.

> The only way to avoid vendor lock in is to allow passkeys to be persisted unencrypted.

Is this true? Naively I’d expect there to be a two-key solution that would allow Vendor A to transfer passkeys to Vendor B without requiring them to be stored unencrypted. Is the issue just that the two vendors have to trust each other (as opposed to just both being trusted by the user) for that to work?

This is very close to what I’d do, but with the addition of enough office space for anyone who wants it, and less frequent “required” gatherings rather than once a month. It’s really counterintuitive, as suggested by all the other replies so far, but I really think it’s the best setup:

1. Individuals and teams can work in whatever way is most productive for them.

2. On a day to day basis, everyone who’s in the office is there because they want to be there, not because their boss requires them to be there. Speaking from experience, this leads to way better energy at the office.

3. Yes, you’re restricting hiring to a single geographical area. But for a small startup in a tech hub that’s not an issue, there’s plenty of talent around, you just have to convince them they should work for you.

4. People will want to work for you, because they’ll appreciate not only the flexibility, but the fact that you’re treating them like adults who can manage their own working practices. I’ve told several recruiters this year something to the effect of “I’d only be looking to move for a role with more scope and autonomy, and if I can’t be trusted with a decision as simple as where to work from, this role probably doesn’t offer the level of autonomy I’d be looking for.”

At a larger scale you might have to branch out to multiple hubs, but I think having departments or at least functional teams colocated but with flexible work arrangements is a huge advantage over the alternatives.

Based on the source data [0] I think the number they're reporting is just the total personal income earned in each state. In California's case, per-capita income actually increased slightly, but the population went down so total income went down. In New York, both population and per-capita income decreased in 2022. Still sort of a weird number to report on though.

[0] https://apps.bea.gov/regional/zip/SAINC.zip, accessed via https://apps.bea.gov/regional/downloadzip.cfm

Diabetic mothers are significantly more likely than non-diabetic mothers to give birth to children with autism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/

That practice has been referred to recently as "shadow (insider) trading". It's an actively evolving area of case law, but the SEC's opinion is yes, see https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2022/01/19/sec-v-p...

Or Matt Levine on the same case: https://archive.ph/5Dlmw

For reference, 90th percentile income globally is about $19,300 USD per year according to [0]. If you're in the top 10% by income, it's likely that you're also in the top 10% by emissions.

[0] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...

A lot of MBA material is intentionally geared towards roles in senior management, so while there's some material that would be practically useful for someone like an engineering manager, that's definitely not the focus. There are other programs that are optimized for technical management roles, e.g. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/graduate/industry-progra...

I think the material itself is useful, and that the MBAs who show up and ruin everything would be even more likely to ruin everything if you put them in the same positions without the knowledge from their MBAs. But the barrier to entry for even elite MBA programs frankly isn't that high, so if you treat an elite MBA as a sufficient condition for a leadership hire, you're gonna have a bad time.