zetazzed

If your company makes $1bln per year now and pays a CEO $1 mln, and then someone comes along who has much better ideas, better work ethic, and more experience and you (the board) are convinced they can add 5% of revenue as pure profit to your company per year. They will add $50 mln in value per year. If that person asks $5 mln as compensation would it be responsible to say no?

Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.

I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.

I have a very conscientious friend who used to drive across state lines to do a video visit from their car with an out of state provider. It's pretty wild to think about what a waste and time sink this is for families with complex illnesses.

Andreessen always argues for "growth" and declares "time to build," but as soon as someone tries to build an apartment in his town of Atherton, he's going to fight it: https://fortune.com/2023/02/23/atherton-steph-curry-marc-and...

Atherton is prime silicon valley real estate that could allow engineers and startup founders to live there at a reasonable price and fuel growth in the tech economy. But if it's going to inconvenience Marc or compromise his nice views, growth is no longer important to him.

Wow, what's even the point of such a small fine? Even in their reduced revenue state, X probably does $3 bln/year in revenue? So this fine is 1/10000th of their annual revenue for the company. X seems to have barely even tried to avoid this, leaving "some questions entirely blank" in the questionnaire to explain their approach. Given this fine size, I can see why they didn't bother getting a team of moderation and legal experts to huddle on the documents.

Estate tax only kicks in > $12M. But probate kicks in if your assets are > $170k! I don't support extensive tax trickery to get out of estate tax (unless you count giving it all to charity as tax hacking, which I definitely don't), but I have been converted to advise everyone with heirs and meaningful assets to set up a trust and work with an estate lawyer to make sure they can bypass probate when needed. Otherwise funds can be tied up for a lengthy period of time (and incur a lot of lawyer fees) even in simple cases.

Yes, I have not gone AMA but I have heavily pressed a doc to get me out RIGHT AWAY because I was getting worse in a hospital rather than better. Sleep was the top concern, and my biggest frustration was how nurses and doctors would all chuckle, smile a little, and say "oh, we know, everybody has a hard time with lack of sleep here" like it's some charming quirk of the system. Often these would be like "pill at midnight, vitals check at 2am, labs at 5am, vitals again at 6am." I mean at least lump vitals together with other existing wakeups! Nurses also vary greatly, and the best ones would work out ways to improve sleep a bit and the worst were just unbearable in slavish adherence to schedules in the chart, even when some of them are obviously arbitrary or flexible. (Don't wake me up to give me a scheduled pain pill! If I'm sleeping well, I'm not in pain.)

Francesca Gino made $1M/year from HBS alone:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/harvard-professor-raking-over....

Woah, fairly confusing. Looks like the base Pro gets the same "pro camera" according to this: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/ But the zoom options are different so it's clearly not the same.

Yes, if I were Waymo I would be so pissed. It looks like protestors and regulators want to lump the two together. I'm pretty supportive of careful public testing of AV, but even I look at these recent Cruise incidents and find it very understandable that a city would want to kick out these AVs.

The rumor I heard is that it came with a ton of restrictions:

- If Barstool sells, Penn gets 50% - Barstool cannot accept gambling adds for several years (which would compete with Penn) - Barstool cannot go into the gambling business

Since Penn is going to partner with ESPN, they had to get rid of Barstool, but that's too controversial for many players to take over.

100% this. You can find all kinds of detailed topics, like CUDA graphs, memory layout optimization, optimizing storage access, etc. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/. They have "playlists" for things like HPC or development tools that collect the most popular videos on those topics.

This should be a happy moment for the way global science works! Researchers in Korea wrote a paper. American, European, and Chinese theorists in Berkeley and Shenyang analyzed the approach right away and confirmed its hypothetical viability. Now another team in Huazhong is conducting replicating experiments. All in the matter of about a week! This kind of open collaboration is helping us all go faster, and it doesn't have to become a cause for nationalism.

I drank Anchor occasionally, but then Fort Point was a better local, everyday beer.

Now I think I East Brother is the best regional option for pilsner - just a little extra maltiness is really nice.

One of the examples here is the Berlin airlift. If you are interested in the Berlin airlift, I'd really recommend the book "Checkmate Berlin" (Giles Milton). It starts in 1945 and covers the whole arc of the Soviet-Western relationship. You could argue that it is rather rah-rah anti-Soviet, but I read it in mid-2022 and was down for that. Really fun read with great spy and political stories.

For those interested in food and history, I would definitely recommend the Tasting History series on YouTube. Every episode, Max Miller makes a dish from a (sometimes vague) old recipe and does a short, relevant history lesson. E.g. he covers 500 year old proto-pizza here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY&t=12s), medieval trenchers here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XvMKdD2tY&t=12s), and lots of Roman recipes.

For something more academic, Ken Albala has a whole course on the cultural history of food here: https://www.wondrium.com/food-a-cultural-culinary-history

I'm not connected to either - they are both just great sources of fun that will make you think about food differently.

Yeah, it's wild - feels like we see "software is so slow now! nobody optimizes software anymore, they just run Python and burn cycles!" posts all the time, but man, when a company REALLY wants to optimize something -- it's a thing of beauty.

Subscribe to Wondrium (formerly called the Great Courses)! It includes many of McWhorter's courses and is a fixed cost per month (reasonable IMO). E.g. https://www.wondrium.com/language-a-to-z

Also, if you ever need chill content while you fall asleep, they have many moderately-interesting classes from professors with calm voices and detailed content...

While I strongly think HBS should do much more to prevent fraud, I would also note that they have suspended Gino and seem likely to fire her. So it’s not like they are completely ok with this…

Individual researchers have huge incentives for fraud, but large universities are the ones who most need to look inward here. HBS could become a beacon for stronger research practices in this area - requiring study preregistration and data collection methods that carefully trace provenance and changes. If HBS has fewer but better quirky marketing psychology studies, their reputation will do well. However for an individual researcher, the benefits to using extremely rigorous practices are not as clear, while the costs are high. A random grad student is not going to be able to establish a norm of data traceability.

I worked in this area (at Harvard as well) a bit as a grad student and can absolutely understand the temptation for the lighter version of this. If you can drop one outlier group, you get a cool story and a job at a top 10 b-school. Or keep it, get a muddled result, and try again for a better paper next year. I ended up just leaving the field entirely as the whole "our system massively rewards dodgy practices" vibe really bummed me out.

I don't see where this interpretation comes from. One of their 6 principles is:

"5. Disseminate GWAS findings to the general public"

the 4th point is the only one that concerns limiting usage, and that clearly suggests researchers may seek to to prevent commercial use of their results unless the commercial use is vetted and useful.

What do you mean you can't sell it? Bhutan exports 70% of their energy to India (https://www.sasec.asia/index.php?page=news&nid=1178&url=bhu-...). India needs lots of energy to do normal energy things that improve people's lives, like lighting and cooling homes and running irrigation systems.

I kept my money in FR even when they were at risk because they have been BY FAR the best financial institution I've ever worked with. They gave me a mortgage rate much better than any other bank was offering. When my appraisal came in a bit lower than was required for my desired loan size, they got an exception. When I need something, I email or text one of the two people there who I know by name and they immediately take care of it. I needed a new ATM card, so I pinged my guy at FR and had a new card the next morning. The web portal is fine - basic but does everything you need and does not bombard you with internal quasi-ads like Bank of America does. When I wanted to set up a particular kind of new account I talked to one of my people there, and they explained how they would do it but basically advised I'd be better off doing it at another bank. They never tried to upsell me or push junk onto me. It's really a nice place to do business. And in the end, though I have a meaningful amount there, it is within the FDIC limits, so a crash should turn into an inconvenience rather than a financial disaster.

Note that Desmond has been widely criticized for focusing on a poverty measure that does not include the impact of government transfers. If you include these anti-poverty programs, rates of poverty have declined significantly since the 70s: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/3/10/23632910/povert...

Hmm... this is an article about an app that grew in popularity in 2020 - 2022 and had a really huge jump around March of 2020.

I wonder what exciting growth hack they added in March of 2020? Did anyone happen to see that in the article? I noticed several other apps, like Netflix, had jumps around then too. Did they subscribe to the same growth hacker newsletter?

Still not the most controversial Stanford president... The first pres there, David Starr Jordan, has long been accused of covering up the murder of Jane Stanford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan. Oh, he was a eugenicist too, but I guess that's less surprising?

(Covered at length in the book "Why Fish Don't Exist")

How are so many people getting access this fast? I seem to be in some indeterminate waiting list to get in, having just clicked "sign up." Is there a fast path?

Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later.

Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)

Very partial list of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar movie/TV roles or cameos:

* Airplane * Fletch * Uncle Buck * A movie called "Matrix" that seems to be unrelated to "The Matrix" * The Critic (yes, the animated one) * Scrubs * Simpsons * Dave (recent TV show not movie) * Glass Onion

Also wrote at least on Episode of Veronica Mars.

This seems like a MUCH more fun sports retirement than just flying to golf destinations and chugging champagne... (not to mention his extensive philanthropy and personal writing)

I think I'll point to this as one of the examples of how AWS has been scrappy and successful. (Yes, I'll get like 10 flames on this comment.) They made this nice simple API for S3 that has become a de facto standard. They added lots of features and security controls, and I can easily imagine an architect saying "everyone should just adopt S3, it's so easy!" But huge, paying customers were used to tape libraries so they said, damnit, fine we'll pretend to be a tape library even though that is super weird on some level... Meeting users where they are can be a superpower.

I strongly recommend Darrell Owens' substack (and Twitter). He's a young guy who got involved in housing politics in Berkeley back in high school and is studying data analytics. The blog has real data analysis of housing issues, not just polemics or the latest gossip (though there is a bit of that).