yinyinwu

Pulley | Engineering & Design| Remote or Bay Area

Pulley helps startups manage their cap table and equity. We're a small team of former founders (4 of the 8 are YC founders). We're growing quickly and hiring across the board. https://pulley.com/

To apply, send us a note at careers@pulley.com

I thought that insurance fees were capped at $7 - 10k even with high deductible plans. Even if the bill is split over two years, it's $20k.

How does the insurance bill end up being so high?

What are the applications for this?

The rate of business travelers who fly business class is not 100%, but it's very high for most airlines.

For US and European carriers, it's around 75%. Since the cost is 4 - 7x higher than commercial, most people aren't paying for this expensive personally. Not sure about other industries, but for consulting and tech, the standard is to allow a business upgrade on international flights and not domestic.

The TL&DR I'm getting from the thread is that everyone should stop flying because it's so bad for the environment.

On a commercial plan, business travelers accounts for >70% of an airline's profits. My read on the article is that Boom is targeting the business customers on a commercial flight and faster transit time is one of the biggest wants for business travelers.

The technology around Supersonics has existed for nearly half a century. The Concorde supersonic plane was flown in 1969 - nearly nearly a half century ago. At the time, one of the big cost was gas. Significant improvements has been made to materials to improve gas efficiency for supersonics.

Boom can use the Tesla approach by starting with business class customers to prove the demand then moving down the latter to consumers. Tokyo could be a weekend trip if the flight was five hours.

Congrats Tracy!

Lots comments are focused on the funding structure, and that misses the point. Pioneer takes the risk in funding early projects not companies. They explicitly call out that they will invest in researchers or artists who aren't sure whether they want to start a company.

If you can raise funding through traditional VC channels, go for it. If you're a researcher in Iowa with a new physics idea, Pioneer is a better than a government grant.

The average size of an NIH grant in 2015 was under $500k. And that amount is intended to support the project expenses, not just the researcher. A close friend of mine is a physician at Stanford. She received a prestigious NIH grant. The grant amount to fund herself was $50k...in the bay area. This is common in academia.

Congrats on launching! Hope you guys are successful.

Hi there - We are auditing our smart contracts prior to launch and plan to open source them. If you are interested in trying out the protocol on launch, send us a note.

Per GDPR specifically, I am learning about the regulations and my understanding is that the right to be forgotten focuses on personal information. Personal information is not a great fit for DIRT registries because it is not publicly verifiable. The concept of voting to determine correctness works best if that data is public and observable.

Climate change is an interesting example. An example of a DIRT registry, would not be the question of "is climate change real". It's unclear what defines "real". Rather a registry could be a list of the average air temperature in a city over time.

Whoever stakes the most tokens also has the most to lose. There is other side of the moderation - anyone can challenge incorrect data and earn tokens for their work.

Currently, there is no support for moderation at scale. Projects like OpenStreetMap offer a valuable resource, but struggle to maintain quality at scale. This is a relevant article: https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/.

With DIRT's model, we want to create a way to build data sets with a focus on accuracy that can scale.

Curating trusted data for narrow-focused markets is a feature for DIRT. Before Amazon sold books back in the day, it was hard to buy a specialty text book at your local bookstore.

If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.

Two parts:

1. Economic - you stand to lose the tokens. Similar to mining on bitcoin, the cost to spam the network is proportional to the value of the network. If there are a lot of users, the value of the token is higher and it will be more expensive to acquire the tokens needed to game the system. Even if you are well funded, this will hurt.

2. Reader disinterest - There is the negative feedback loop where users of the information will stop using the information, and the incentive to game the system will drop.

Thanks for the comment!

Transparency would be the third benefit. With the blockchain, you can see the entire history of votes. Every transaction is recorded. Today, if a website accepts bribes for reviews, visitors to the site do not know that this happened. With DIRT, if a wealthy token holder had a lot of tokens and tries to throw a vote, you can see the attack happening.

Before Wikipedia, the idea that an openly edited online journal would be better and more accurate alternative to Encyclopedia Brittanica would be surprising to most people.

There's two parts of the design that leads to more accuracy for DIRT:

1. Skin in the game - a token deposit to write encourages accuracy because you can lose the deposit if you are incorrect.

2. Encouraging moderation - moderators can earn tokens. If you vote and challenge correctly, you can earn tokens. This creates an economic reward for moderators that can protects the data accuracy in the long term.

We're posting the whitepaper and more importantly, launching the protocol with a first application in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Thanks! DIRT is a fundamentally different approach because it removes the middleman and there is no central moderator. Our goal is to move the trust from a central party to a system of rules that anyone can participate in.

I think verified identity could be a registry on DIRT. Adding reputation on top of voting is something we're exploring.

TCRs work well when the information is both objective and verifiable. Using Etsy as an example, you can usually tell if a piece of jewelry is hand vs machine made. However, in the listing tags of Etsy sellers, there are sellers who misadvertise machine made goods as handmade. Etsy sellers have internal chat boards where they call out repeat offenders for misleading advertising. Honest sellers who are making the effort to make their jewelry by hand are the ones hurt by the misleading behavior of others.

In many ways, a system where the wealthy control information is what we have today. You can influence elections with donations.

Today, if a publication or data source posts information about you or your business, there is no means to correct this data. You can post about it on Twitter or email the service, and wait for a response. You can't just fix this information. With DIRT, we create a way for people to at least be part of the curation process.

Different types of data require different governance models. Some datasets are not as critical to protect and could have a low token stake. For other pieces of information, you want every writer to have more skin in the game and thus have a high stake for writing. Our bet with building a protocol is to test what incentives will curate the best data.

Thanks! Great question.

1. Repeat votes - If you lose the vote, you can vote again. DIRT works not only for correcting intentionally misleading data, but also for fixing out of data information. It's similar to a bug bounty for data.

2. Cycle of challenges - Each time misinformation re-surfaces, you would have to challenge and vote down the data. However, every time you are successful in your challenge, you earn tokens for your efforts.

3. Fake news - Subjective information can be harder to adjudicate with DIRT and that will not be our initial market. As an engineer, I would love to believe that the blockchain can solve fake news. However, a lot of research shows it is not the lack of data that the issue, but rather perspective. People believe what they want to believe.

Wikipedia works great in most use cases. There are also situations where DIRT is a better approach:

1) More efficient than centralized curation - Social media companies receive millions of requests to take down copyright information or spam sites. Today, you have centralized teams vetting each request individually and can take months to review. For this use case, DIRT is a valuable alternative to vetting information because it reduces the noise in each submission. 2) Commercial data - For markets where people can profit for spreading misinformation, open editing is not the best approach. You could create a wikipedia list of stores that sell hand made jewelry. Sellers can benefit from inclusion on the list, and would want to join the list regardless of whether they meet the criteria. The likely outcome is that the list would not be useful.

We’re believers in the blockchain and decentralization, but decentralized information curation is not needed everywhere. However, in markets where there is a critical, single point of failure, where you need transparency because you cannot trust any single actor, and where you have a high demand for data accuracy, DIRT can be very useful.

Yes - That's a great analogy. On the moderation side similar to Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerNews with reputation and points. On the writing side, we put a higher bar on data accuracy and deposits to share data.

With wikipedia or projects like Open Street Maps, vandalism, spam, and poor data quality are problems at scale. In particular, crowdsourcing does not work for curating commercial data or information where you can profit by spreading misinformation.

For example, in the cryptocurrency space. Projects raise funding through initial coin offers (ICOs). In an ICO, you can contribute ETH to a smart contract for the promise of tokens in the future. Having an openly editable list of ICOs and their contribution address would not work. The list would be quickly spammed because malicious actors have a really high incentive to put their personal wallet address as the contribution address.

Thanks! What we have for v1 of the protocol is really the starting point. There are also other extensions that could support subjective information. For example, it could be similar to Reddit's upvoting system. You can stake 100 tokens to say Domino's has the best pizza, and I can counter with 200 tokens to say Papa John's is better. Items are ranked on the list based on the token stake. There would be no challenges or voting in this model.

I think the tough part is deciding who should be the arbiter or whether information is intentionally malicious. Censorship can be a real issue.

For the DIRT protocol, if want to remove information, you also need to deposit tokens and put forth evidence to convince voters in the network to side with you. If you lose the vote, then you would also lose tokens. We put forth an economic penalty for being inaccurate.

Thanks for the feedback! One of the differences between DIRT and Wikipedia is that we place a higher value on information accuracy. For example, in the cryptocurrency market project teams often list investors and advisors as affiliated with their project when they are not involved. A Wikipedia list of investors would not be sufficient. You want these project teams to have skin in the game and something to lose if they are spreading false information.

That said - the explanation didn't fit as well into a one liner :)

Hi! Thanks for the question. DIRT works well for objective information. In the cryptocurrency use case, this could be the ERC-20 smart contract address for a token or a list of investors for a project.

To flag information as incorrect, you need to take tokens and challenge the data. A challenge starts a vote and anyone in the DIRT network can vote with their tokens on what information is correct. The vote winner and majority voters earn tokens. The vote loser and minority voters are penalized.

We are planning to publish our protocol design in a few weeks with more details.

Really cool to see companies rallying with Color to support women's health :)!

Good luck with your next steps!

I don't think it's going to happen in the short term. 70% of our users are on devices outside of the better featured google nexus, samsung s, lge g, motorola moto, etc series phones. Even though our user base leans towards early adopters, less than 2% are on the nexus 5 (nexus 6 is too small to show up in the stats). google posts their stats on os adoption here: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html. 30% of users are on 4.1 and above. Phones running lower than 4.1 are not going to benefit from the smarter GC. If you're supporting international users, lower end phones will likely be a bigger percentage of your userbase.