rweba's comments

The book "Slicing Pie" delves into the topic of how to split equity before receiving any outside funding in detail:

https://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Funding-Company-without/d...

https://slicingpie.com/

The idea is to dynamically adjust equity based on how much everyone is contributing.

Some people report good experience using this dynamic split method:

https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/has-anyone-used-the-slicin...

With that said, I am sure there are a lot of different methods that could work depending on the people involved, it's not as if there is only one "right" way to do it.

One of the best books I read last year was "The Halo effect"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NY128M/

It talks about exactly this issue: If company A is successful, we explain it by saying that the management is absolutely brilliant, if company B does the exact same things but is failing, we explain it by saying that management are totally incompetent.

It's a major cognitive bias which renders most "business press" articles totally worthless.

The solution, obviously, is to gather a large amount of data and do some rigorous analysis.

People have tried to do this but the general conclusion is that there are no real simple rules that a business can follow to always succeed despite our eager desire for simple explanations.

Based on Nick Bostrom's fable about aging:

https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

A couple of points:

(1) Unlike in the story, in real life aging is a natural process that almost all living creatures go through. It is not something that is externally imposed by a malovolent entity. So I would question the implication that not preventing aging is immoral.

(2) Death allows each new generation to take the lead and shape society according to its values. If aging was eliminated social conflicts might increase between the ideologies of each successive generation.

(3) Younger people could no longer just wait for the boss to retire or die to ascend to senior positions, they would have to overthrow the boss in order to advance in the organization.

(4) Even a low birth rate might lead to overpopulation if people don't die.

Aging and death are not necessarily bad things. There is a natural completion to the process. A sense of closure. Do your time, have your experiences, say good bye. Having the knowledge that we will die and that we will lose our youth makes us appreciate them more and gives us a sense of urgency.

Indeed, it is arguably mostly our primitive instincts that make us fear death and want to stick around in perpetuity. Is there something important that won't happen because any specific person dies?

Now, with all that said, if a cure for aging was really discovered I would be the first one in line!

NOTE 1: If the human life span remained the same, but people were able to be as healthy at age 80 as at age 20 that would be great and would pose very little social problems I think.

NOTE 2: Very interesting look at the mathematics of aging: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-...

Well, he WAS a child prodigy who published his first major paper at 18 and got his PhD when he was 20, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he actually did independently come up with the idea of hashing at age 13.

In general I think people should just stop being triggered by Wolfram's comments.

Yes, he does go out of his way to emphasize what he feels are his personal contributions.

Yes, in some cases some of his claims do appear to be a bit exaggerated (e.g. some of his cellular automata stuff)

But at the end of the day, he is still a pretty smart guy who actually writes about math/science topics fairly well, and I think that is far more important than raging every single time he gives himself credit for something or emphasizes his own work on a topic.

I have been thinking about it and I think the issue with Facebook in particular is how AGGRESSIVE and CARELESS they have always been in violating privacy. Just like Uber their philosophy is "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission". And of course they have an official slogan of "Move fast and break things".

So all these different controversies are not just a coincidence but are very much baked into their organizational culture. They are obsessed with winning at all costs and clearly see privacy issues as just inconveniences to achieving their goals.

I am not sure if it is possible to imagine a social network that truly respected privacy at its core, that didn't try to get away with as much as it could, that put its users interests ahead of increasing Daily Active Users.

But if Facebook actually operated like that, I suspect there would be a lot less concern.

I don't know if that is even possible though.

This should not be viewed as a failure.

This is the nature of startups, even if you do every single thing right, work hard, manage the cash flow, innovate, etc., there is a more than 90% chance you won't get that billion dollar plus exit.

The only unique thing here is that Lytro got a lot of hype and raised a lot of money, so people naturally expected a unicorn.

What I am saying is these guys don't necessarily have anything to be ashamed of. In the worst case they gained a lot of experience that they can apply to their next idea.

That said, I am curious: Will the founders get ANY money out of it? A comment claimed that they raised $200 million at $360 million valuation, so theoretically they may end up with nothing.

This is great stuff!

I am a CS professor and these are exactly the kind of things my undergraduate students struggle with!

Especially these two points:

* Start assignments as soon as they are given out. Stupid, right?

* Be curious. You are there to learn, which means digging beyond the provided material. So many students are sadly focused on the grade or assignment, not on the learning.

You should definitely write a book!

Eh, I still don't buy the hyperventilating.

The breathless narrative is that Amazon is some all-consuming all dominating monster that is just going to crush everyone everywhere.

I don't see any justification for this.

(1) Walmart is much bigger. Not to mention Tencent and Alibaba who.

(2) They have well-funded competition and no monopoly power in any of their sectors.

(3) They only have 4% of all retail (online and off) hardly a stranglehold.

Yes, they will do well and grow, but I don't think they will just effortlessly win in every market like this article is implying.

I really like this obituary, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Penrose not only understands the details of Hawking's work at a much deeper level than most of us, but as a contemporary of Hawking's he has followed his career for decades and can give us a good overall impression.

Here is another "simple" explanation:

https://rweba.livejournal.com/446326.html

It's definitely WAAAY oversimplified, but it gives the first idea:

The "filter" just cleverly averages the noisy real data at time T with the Kalman estimate from time (T-1).

I think there are a few factors:

(1) The culture started by Paul Graham, back when he used to write lots of essays, emphasized a certain "hyperrationality" and attracted a lot of super-logical people in the beginning.

(2) Heavy moderation to keep things from deteriorating and discourage overly polemical debates.

The bottom line is that people quickly get an idea of what is tolerated and what is not tolerated so they work to stay in line which doesn't seem to happen as much on other websites.

I lost so many comments on IMDB.

I haven't even bothered to visit since they removed the forums.

I understand why they did it, the racism and trolling was ridiculous there, but there were some good comments, especially on the forums for the less popular movies.

Wow, so this comment just got me more karma than any other comment I've ever made in almost 7 years on HN!

I honestly didn't think anyone would read it, the article was already several hours old when I wrote it.

It's obviously not because it's a brilliant comment, probably a combination of timing and of saying something that "struck a nerve" with enough people.

(1) Your sentiment is common on HN and I do agree that a college degree is overemphasized as a universal panacea, but it's also absolutely true that lots of people benefit from a university education. Comments like yours make it sound like every individual student would be better off if they skipped college. I don't think that's true.

(2) Going to college is like joining a gym. Some people go to the gym every day, seek out the in-house trainers for free tips, study fitness YouTube videos in their spare time, maybe even make a ton of friends at the gym. Other people pay the same monthly fee but can never seem to find the time to actually go to the gym yet they find plenty of time to play video games and eat junk food. My point is that you can't blame the gym if you don't get in shape. Students have to actively participate in the process if they are going to get the most out of it and unfortunately many do not. I don't think that's entirely the responsibility of the college.

This is New York Magazine not the New York Times magazine (which I think still appears in print every Sunday).

More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites. Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have got rid of comments.

In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.

So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

Two points:

(1) I haven't seen this article mentioned here:

https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-...

I am not sure if the article addressed this model in particular, but I found it compelling.

(2) It occurred to me that most of us don't fear death as much as becoming increasingly useless as we become older due to ill health and physical weakness.

It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent in a bed or wheelchair.

So what we want is not to increase the lifespan but to prolong the amount of time we can spend in relatively physically prime condition. I am sure this is not an original thought, but something worth mentioning.

I remember reading and commenting on this same article when it was posted a few years ago.

I agree with most of the comments posted here.

In a certain sense making friends is really very simple.

But, to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes, that does not mean that it is EASY.

It just requires CONSISTENTLY spending A LOT of time in a collegial atmosphere with someone. If you do that, assuming you have a few things in common and don't annoy the heck out of each other, you will inevitably become friends.

This is why people make such good friends in college or in the army.

But consistently spending a lot of time with someone you just met is not easy for most adults outside of a romantic relationship or a work thing.

It's the paradox of choice, we have so many activities going on and different options on ways to spend our time that we have a hard time being consistent with developing any one specific relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

The author does not offer ANY evidence for Amazon's supposed "dominance".

How exactly is Amazon dominating?

What percentage of online retail sales does Amazon have? What percentage of TOTAL retail sales (online and offline)?

And more importantly, how is Amazon's market position harming consumers?

It's remarkable that Tim Harford wrote this entire article without citing a single figure or statistic.

What seems to be going on is that there is a PERCEPTION that Amazon is totally dominating and monopolizing retail, but retail is so big that you can grow massively and have revenues of a $100 billion without coming close to being a monopoly.

Points to note:

(1) Amazon has no MOAT. Anyone can set up shop and start delivering things to people. There is no switching cost.

(2) Amazon has MASSIVE well-funded competition in all of its areas: online retail (Walmart), Cloud (Google), video streaming (Netflix), Books (the big publishers who own the content)

(3) You can live quite comfortably and cheaply and conveniently get almost everything that Amazon has to offer without having to use Amazon if you don't want to (books, retail items, cloud services, etc.). This is not the case with pure monopolies like utilities, or monopolies like Intel or Microsoft where completely avoiding them is a big pain for the average person.

I found the studies showing the impact that movies actually have a significant impact on career choice to be interesting.

I never thought the effect would be that large.