typest

It comes down to the difference between b2c and b2b business. In the case of b2c, you’re selling to consumers, who themselves use your UI and will leave if it’s bad.

In the case of b2b, it’s more complicated. You’re selling to office administrators, whose goal is to score the best deal for the company. Since they aren’t the primary users of the product, stuff like UX doesn’t matter as much as cost.

Best illustrated by Slack, which thought they could sell to businesses based on a beautiful UI, but their market was dominated by Microsoft Teams, which could sell better to enterprises.

You can think about it this way -- approval voting allows you to vote strategically for a candidate (in case you are worried about the lesser of two evils winning), and then allows you to also vote for anyone you actually prefer, guaranteeing this can't hurt the strategically chosen candidate.

This would allow third parties to see real support, and then go on to win subsequent elections.

I think you have two incorrect assumptions here. You're assuming A) that parties and political ideologies exist in 1 dimension, and that B) the second party is closer to the third party than the first, such that its votes will go to the nearest neighbor, which is then the third party.

Even granting A, B is definitely not true. There are many similarities between the two major parties, and removing one in favor of a third party would likely split voters between the third party, and the other major party.

Also, A is not true either, so the distance between parties becomes even more unclear.

I for sure believe voters should be able to reject the current political choice on offer! I support IRV over our current system for sure. But, my main point is that IRV is actually not what many people believe it to be, and is far worse than other, simpler systems, such as approval voting.

Most surprising consequence is probably that IRV is unlikely to break 2 party dominance, even though it this is an often claimed advantage of IRV.

The frequently imagined scenario with IRV is that, in a two party system where most people will rank 1 of 2 parties first, then a small percent of voters can safely rank a third party first. This party is then eliminated, but not before a surprisingly strong showing (e.g. 5% first rather than the .05% we currently have). This would likely happen.

The problem arises in the next election, when the third party is now strong enough to command a large percent of first place votes. Since the party with the least first place votes is eliminated (even if they have a ton of second place votes), the third party now stands a real risk of cannibalizing votes from the next most similar "mainstream" party. If this cannibalization were to occur, both parties could lose to the other mainstream party that many voters might not have preferred! Due to this risk, it's likely voters would strategically rank the third party below the mainstream party even if that wasn't their true preference. In this way, IRV can still lead to 2 party dominance.

Yes, you are right. I should have written more carefully. I am a huge fan of approval voting. Anyone reading this -- you should look more closely at approval voting, which surpasses ranked choice voting in many ways.

https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...

This is completely false. Pretty much all voting systems are susceptible to tactical voting, e.g. gaming the vote. This was formally proven via the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem[1], which showed that the only way for a voting system to be ungameable was to either have a dictator (a certain special voter who always picks the winner), or to pre-constrain the output space to only two alternatives.

This critique certainly applies to Instant-Runoff Voting, the algorithm in question here. It is known that IRV often incentivizes voters to not rank their favorites first [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_... [2] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/

Yes, in the long term, the universe will succumb to heat death and all value will go to zero. But on any time scale we might like to talk about (our lives, the life of the Earth), it seems plausible that exponential growth could continue (or at least, the long term argument doesn't apply).

Examining the price of coffee I buy every day, it hasn't risen. Do you predict it will? Should this take awhile, or will it happen pretty soon?

Thanks, yeah, I felt a little uneasy with the comparison. I figure this means market cap should be a bounded function of GDP, yeah?

Are the market caps of Apple and other tech giants growing as exponents, or sigmoids? This, to me, is the big question. Can multi-trillion dollar market caps continue to grow at this rate, or will they taper off?

Naively, one expects to get returns as a percentage of investment. In this multiplicative sense, Jeff Bezos at a 188B net worth is much closer to being a trillionaire than a one-billionaire (a factor of 5 vs a factor of 188). But can Amazon's market cap continue to grow in such a fashion? What bounds it (and that of other tech companies)?

One might assume that they have to be bound by world GDP (80T). But if they're truly creating value, can't they expand world GDP along with themselves?

Even here you have many false assumptions though. For instance, the Harvard median new grad salary is 69k [1]. So you’re wrong in your assertion that compared to nearly everyone at elite universities you have failed. By your own definition of success, compared to most (by definition of median) people at elite universities, you have succeeded, and it’s they who have failed.

You also have an implicit assumption that people who work at Cisco or IBM haven’t put in work or mental anguish, and you’re wrong. I know many people who worked and studied hard to get jobs at these places.

You’re artificially restricting the set of successful outcomes so that you can say you’ve failed because you don’t fall into that arbitrary set. Not to mention that your entire definition of success as defined by things like money and perks is wrong.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/09/14/sta...

Serious question: How do you know you're good at behavioral interviews? Have you ever seen the feedback written on a behavioral interview? The companies you're describing don't usually give out feedback to applicants, so you can't know, right?

It sounds to me like you have anxiety. I'm saying this because I have anxiety, so I know what it's like. One hallmark of anxiety disorders is that you think things are true about the world, even though you don't actually have evidence this is the case. Or, you fixate on some pieces of information while ignoring evidence to the contrary, which again is irrational thinking. Or you hold assumptions about how the world works that aren't proven. You should look into cognitive behavioral therapy as a potential solution.

You say "compared to everyone else". But, you have to acknowledge that the net worth and income numbers you named put you into the 99th percentile, right? So, you actually mean "compared to a very small subset of people I have failed", right? And this is just a completely irrational argument. I mean according to this vein of thinking, then since I don't have as much money as Jeff Bezos, I've failed. And the implication then is the whole world has failed. Right?

^^ what this guy said. You named yourself lowiqengineer because your SAT score was “only” 2200. That’s in the 98th percentile —- if it were an IQ test, it would get you into Mensa, the organization for high IQ people!

You talk as if people from FANG (your invented acronym to exclude Amazon) look down on all others, but it seems that you are the one looking down on all others, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to get into G/FB straight out of college while also building up not just 1, but 2 or 300k or net worth.

These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them.

Take a step back. You won’t “fail” life because you “only” got a job at one FAANG and not another, or because your net worth is only 100k straight out of college....even the sentence I just wrote sounds completely ridiculous.

Your problems are stemming from how you view yourself and the world, which is full of false assumptions. A lot of smart people on HN have told you this —- you should listen to them.

To add onto this —- living with only one kidney rather than two only barely increases your risk of dying, and many people each year die due to lack of kidneys. So, creating a market here (regulated of course) would save a lot of lives.

Well, this IS an urban center, so no, it’s not normal.

> I only graduated a couple of years ago so inflation is negligible.

If only inflation were the only thing driving the price up! The whole problem with college cost is that cost is increasing faster than inflation.

I went to a similar university to Harvard. I enrolled in 2013, and the total cost per year was under 60k. It's now 80k. Cost of attendance is increasing at ~ 4% per year, which is entirely unsustainable. Crazy how a couple years means a difference of 20k per year = 80k over 4 years.

I celebrate efforts to educate and credential students that don't put them into a lifetime of debt. But, a few points of order/grains of salt:

Even though going to college means you may take out more debt that you can pay off in any reasonable amount of time, bailing on college to classes from social media entrepreneurs or to start a company backed by Peter Thiel is a risk-heavy strategy that will not pay off for most. Yes, autodidacts with a safe family situation will likely do well.

But what about students from poor backgrounds, students without stable family life, or just students who don't fall into the upper echelons of industriousness? How many of these students are thriving right now in a world of Zoom classes? Talking with friends who are teachers, many students are just skipping their classes altogether. Why would we expect them to do well in this new online world?

College, although way too expensive, works decently well for many of these students. I don't think online influencer courses will substitute.

Yes, unbundle Harvard. But the harder and more impactful piece is providing quality education to those who aren't in the tails of the distribution.

Ranked choice voting (often implemented as instant runoff) likely won’t break the duopoly in the ways you think it will. Approval Voting is a better technique. Check out the Center for Election Science for more info.

Renters.

I totally agree with you. The general negativity towards remote work seems, to me, to reflect a lack of imagination about how our lives, and our societies, could be organized in a world with more remote work.

The potential reduction in housing cost alone(one of the largest inhibitors to developing wealth for most Americans) should be a massive cause for celebration. We can stop orienting our lives and our cities around commuting (and therefore cars) and start focusing on people.

People complain about the loss of the workplace as a social environment. What about the opportunities to create new social environments that aren't centered around work?

I wrote more about this here, if you're interested https://manyfoxgiven.com/2020/01/21/remote-work-promise/

Sorry, can you explain what you mean here? I am always trying to get better at both python and functional programming, but I don't know what you mean about lifting operations up/inlining them in this case with defaultdicts.

helpwithcovid.com. I believe there is quite a bit of demand on some of these projects.

> Amazon has detailed someone measures its taking

Does techcrunch not have copy editors? Two errors in the first six words of this article. I was an editor at my high school newspaper and we would not have published this.

That was way, way nicer than I thought it would be.

What would you say is top of the market then? Google seems to pay pretty highly.

This sounds fantastically interesting, and I could see it being successful. Basically — go live in a (literally) college like setting, but you have a source of income. I would do it. Hit me up if you want to chat about this idea.

You read through all the advice in these blogs [1][2]. Seriously.

If you are invested in low cost index funds, most assume you can safely withdraw 4% a year and not deplete your principal. If you're retiring at 35, you might want a greater safety margin, so let's say 3%. That gives you 60K a year.

How do you retire on 60K a year? Obviously take what I'm saying with a grain of salt as I'm a relatively young person and haven't done any of this yet. But...60K is the median household income in the US, so half of families in the US live on less. If you're retired, you can probably save in ways others can't. For instance:

* Housing. You don't need to stay in a high cost of living city, so move to a much cheaper area (maybe a college town).

* Education. You have much more time, so send your kids to all public education, and use your extra time to educate them further.

* Debt. You have a ton of assets. Why hold any debt?

* Automobiles. Bike instead, if you're physically able.

* Health. Probably the hardest one since insurance in the US is tied to employment. I understand the recommended approach here is to pay out of pocket for a plan, but many have trouble with this. Of course, the standard advice is to use the extra time you have due to retirement to stay as healthy as possible, but I acknowledge this isn't a perfect plan.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ [2] https://www.madfientist.com/

There is not necessarily a catch. Pay is not based on cost of living -- it's set by market rates, and the market rate for software engineers in these areas who can do the jobs required at these companies is high. All these companies operate at an immense scale where an engineer, through what is often a simple change, can add significant value to the company.

So, yes. For now, these companies are giving college grads enough money to retire by 35 (assuming the college grads are halfway financially savvy).

Source: I am a recent college grad at a FAANG.

Can you explain this a little more? I’ve always wondered about this question.

It’s weirdly circular, but it’s also correct. This is how many things with network effects work. Something is useful because others use it, which makes it more useful, which makes more people use it...

In this case, you could also look up “coordinated Nash Equilibrium”, which can partially explain some of the behavior in bitcoin.