dokein's comments

With respect to Iain Banks, he's probably one of my favorite authors (both sci-fi and non-sci-fi).

With respect to the question of having consciousness and free will -- don't we all just reduce down to atoms obeying the laws of physics? Are our actions not therefore deterministic? Sure maybe there's some quantum uncertainty principles at work (but it's not like LLMs produce the same output every time either). So it's not at all clear how consciousness arises, and thus not clear that e.g. GPT-7 "cannot" be conscious.

The other part of this is as relates to the question of AGI and its risks -- there's lots of things that are not necessarily consciousness but are nonetheless extremely bad for humans. Viruses. Tigers. Fire (when not appropriately managed). And for the set of things on Earth we're pretty well equipped to handle them, but if the sun went supernova, screaming "nooo I'm conscious and you're not" would not prevent humanity from being wiped out.

SmarterDx | 150 - 230K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning (M.D. data scientist combos, former ASF board member, Google and Amazon engineers, etc.) and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have been backed by top investors including Floodgate (Lyft, Twitch, Twitter), deployed successfully, 3X'ed in six months, and there is enough market demand for us to 10X in the next 18 months (plus runway through September 2024).

Who we are looking for:

- Data engineers

- Data scientists (to further explore new features or product lines unlocked via newer LLMs)

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.com/positions.html

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

Largely unrelated to most of this thread:

Does anyone know of a solution that allows people to book times, but only contiguous with other meetings?

Usually, if it's a letter that's signed by the C-suite and reviewed by 5 layers of internal and external PR, it won't say anything interesting.

This is because, to be interesting, it has to be something unexpected.

But the job of the PR is to minimize disagreeableness.

It's rare to that something is both unexpected and minimally disagreeable. A sudden advance in medicine resulting in a cure for cancer would be both (but even then, if it were e.g. an mRNA vector some people might find it disagreeable). But a company's position on a technological advance almost never meets both [Google PR: "Google also supports cures for cancer!" Yawn.]

My totally wild guess is they helped drum up some of that initial customer interest and opened your eyes to it. Is that right?

Anyways, here's my free advice. You get a refund if it's bad:

- One, define whether this is a small business or a startup.

- Two, separate sweat equity from financial equity.

In a classic SV-type startup, the company is illiquid for a 4 - 7 year time period. You want ownership at the end of that time period to reflect the fraction of work adjusted for risk.

With respect to the work, "having the idea" and doing some validation on it is typically worth a small premium but not a large one, because 99.9% of the work at time of starting the company is in the future. The main question is whether the potential co-founder will contribute roughly equally for the next 4 - 7 years. If not, don't try to change the equity split -- find a different co-founder or hire them as an employee (and their added value should be far more than "motivation and quick learning skills" because you should have that too).

With respect to risk, there's a few stages in the early days:

- Pre-product v0.1

- Pre-customer interest

- Pre-PMF (this is the big one to get past)

It sounds like you already built v0.1 and have proven customer interest. Thus you've de-risked the startup for this potential co-founder significantly. That's worth another chunk of equity. But you have to make a judgment call as to how far away you are from PMF: ideally there's an equity split where, if the product blows up tomorrow you won't be frustrated about him/her having a ton of equity; but if it takes another 2 years to translate customer interest into real PMF, (s)he won't be frustrated about working for a dramatically smaller share (or, if we're being realistic, both of you will be a little bit frustrated but not super frustrated).

Lastly, with respect to financial equity, I would ask if you really, really need that 150K to get to the next stage. I'm assuming 150K is meaningful to you because you are a Masters student. Can you get to the next stage with 10K? 20K? 30K (and then raise outside capital)? Can your potential co-founder afford to put in 5K? 10K? 15K? My general advice is when the sums are in the 5 - 10K range, each person just puts in what their financial situation allows for and it's small potatoes at the end of the day. But 150K is a lot and you should structure it as a separate investment [1].

The tough part here is to come up with what you think the business is worth today. Without knowing anything about your idea, it sounds like it's at best something where investors in the U.S. would put in ~$500K for roughly 10 - 20% of the company.

[1] Note though that a truly independent investor will typically get Preferred shares for their money -- but they will probably disagree with one of the founders having Preferred shares, so the shares you negotiate as part of this investment will likely be converted to Common shares upon raising real capital.

U.S. GDP per person employed was about $100,000 dollars in 2021. FTX had depositors from many countries (and the vast majority have lower GDP per person employed).

It's not clear how much is permanently lost, but even $1B (out of the $8B missing) of customer funds would be equivalent to more than 10,000 years of employed human labor. If the average employed person works 40 years, this would be 250 lifetimes [1] that was stolen by SBF and colleagues.

I'm trying to imagine what a reasonable sentence would be and can't settle on anything besides life with no parole.

[1] Life savings is only about $265K for the median person about to retire. So stealing $1B is stealing about 3,500 people worth of life savings. This is much worse: this is stealing the entire productive life of the person. Their 8 hours x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year x 40 years of going into work day in and day out, time spent away from family, facing the grind, doing what they have to do to survive.

The concept of an average Joe holding an index fund only became popularized in the 1980s or even 1990s. A lot of grandmas kept their money in a savings account or in bonds for decades while becoming significantly poorer on a relative basis.

How is a person with early stage dementia supposed to differentiate between "new thing that's actually an incredibly wise investment decision" (i.e. Vanguard, popularized in the WSJ in the 1980s) versus "new thing that's actually mostly a scam" (i.e. most of crypto, popularized in the WSJ in the 2010s) when their once-trusted sources of information have failed them so miserably?

SmarterDx | 150 - 230K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning (M.D. data scientists, former ASF board member, Ebay fraud detection engineers, etc.) and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have since deployed successfully and been backed by top investors including Floodgate (Lyft, Twitch, Twitter) and there is enough market demand for us to 10X in the next 18 months (plus runway through September 2024).

Who we are looking for:

- Full stack engineers

- Data engineers

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.com/positions.html

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

The majority shareholders do have a fiduciary duty to all shareholders, thus if they grant themselves unreasonable compensation you would have basis to sue them.

"Control shareholders have a fiduciary duty to the minority shareholders to act with 'good faith and inherent fairness.' As such, majority owners have a fiduciary responsibility not to use their influence to engage in self-dealing, including actions that are unfairly prejudicial to the minority shareholders."

See: https://ffslaw.com/articles/have-the-controlling-shareholder....

If everyone gets diluted for new funding that's one thing and you have no protection against that. But if the 51% just vote to fuck over the 49% that's very different.

I suspect that VCs are disproportionately exposed to people (e.g. upper and upper-middle class tech workers in SV) that are open to e.g. oat milk, meat substitutes, etc., and so bias towards everyone in the US being similarly open. Of course they probably know intellectually it's not true but it's hard to overcome the subtle biases formed by one's day-to-day experiences.

Similarly my understanding is that Cambly had a hard time raising their early round because all those VCs already knew English.

I generally agree with you, but if I had to steelman SBF's actions:

1. Prosecutors don't operate independently of the court of public opinion. They can throw the book at you (e.g. the George Floyd officers) or let you off easy (e.g. other officers who historically did similar things but did not face the same charges).

2. The current perception is that he committed fraud (like Madoff), and if convicted for that would likely go to prison for the rest of his life.

3. He's clearly not innocent of wrongdoing, and there's too many people involved who are cooperating with authorities, so just being quiet doesn't help him as much (in contrast to being found at a crime scene with no witnesses).

4. If he can get a conviction only of criminal negligence then perhaps he can get out of prison faster.

5. Thus perhaps if he can loudly admit to being a bumbling idiot and super negligent, it might sway the public opinion to criminal negligence instead of outright fraud.

Patients have easily 20-30 codes per one hospital visit / one bill and ordering matters so sadly quadrillions may be an underestimate.

Over the years, I've subjectively found HN to be less optimistic. The tone of the comments here are not significantly different from many other topics.

Note that I am not saying that HN is now less neutral--it may be that the current level of optimism vs. cynicism maps better to reality.

That said, I think more optimism is generally better (for motivating action) if you want to start a new business or build a new technology; more realism is generally better if you want to go down an established path or join a venture purely as an employee; and more cynicism is better if you want to be a rabid online commentator (joke!).

SmarterDx | 150 - 220K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning (M.D. data scientists, former ASF board member, Ebay fraud detection engineers, etc.) and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have since deployed successfully and been backed by top investors including Floodgate (Lyft, Twitch, Twitter). We have already hit our Series A targets (growing at 500% YoY with a 1X burn multiple) but still have runway for another 17 months.

Who we are looking for:

- Full stack engineers

- Data engineers

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.com/positions.html

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

SmarterDx | 150 - 230K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning (M.D. data scientists, former ASF board member, Ebay fraud detection engineers, etc.) and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have since deployed successfully and been backed by top investors including Floodgate (Lyft, Twitch, Twitter) and there is enough market demand for us to 10X in the next 18 months (plus runway through September 2024).

Who we are looking for:

- Full stack engineers

- Data engineers

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.com/positions.html

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

SmarterDx | 150 - 230K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning (M.D. data scientists, former ASF board member, Ebay fraud detection engineers, etc.) and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have since been backed by top investors including Floodgate & Flare Capital and there is enough market demand for us to 10X in the next 18 months (plus runway through September *2024*).

Who we are looking for:

- Full stack engineers

- Data engineers

- Healthcare data scientists

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.com/positions.html

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

SmarterDx | 150 - 230K + equity + benefits | Remote first (but U.S. only due to data confidentiality) | Full time

We are a Seed stage health tech company using A.I. to improve hospital revenue cycle (making healthcare costs lower and allowing doctors to focus on patient care). The team is small but high functioning and initially scaled the company to $1MM+ in contracted revenue without raising capital. We have since been backed by top investors including Floodgate & Flare Capital and there is enough market demand for us to 10X in the next 18 months (plus enough runway for 2 years).

Who we are looking for:

- Full stack engineers

- Senior product designers

Be part of the journey as we hone our PMF and build to scale! For more, see: https://smarterdx.notion.site/Why-SmarterDx-99ce53e9e2fb4b8e...

If interested email us at hiring at smarterdx dot com

One issue is that the current gatekeepers (peer reviewers for journals, grant proposal scoring committees, promotion committees, etc.) are often the people most prominent in their field. On one hand this makes sense for obvious reasons (an expert is the most equipped to judge their field), but on the other hand things like the amyloid hypothesis get 'baked-in' because, well, it's pretty hard to ask those same individuals to highly rank a large grant proposal that goes against their own theory.

So I think the answer is gatekeeping needs to be different -- not less.

It's not clear that the data shows an increase in rent with interest rates (https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4f3dc7c9b86908d1c41fb...)

We are actively looking to hire frontend (see my prior comment history).

If you send me your resume (hiring at smarterdx dot com), we can either proceed down the interview path or I promise to give you feedback as to why not!