fiachamp

Issue with technology accelerating nature...

Reddit data is already super corrupted with marketers and bot accounts. Why I use https://thegigabrain.com to filter thru the bs on reddit.

In Cuba, the only wealthy people are government bureaucrats. As always, communism becomes dictatorship and the people suffer most. Top down control of economy doesn't work. I went to numerous tobacco plantations in Cuba and they told me the government takes 90% of their harvest and they're allowed to keep and sell 10%. I stayed with an OBGyn who gets paid $80 USD/month. He built his house out of cinderblocks. That's how you get rewarded for your 'free' education. Anyone glorifying communism is a fucking idiot with no life experience.

That share of income from wages started its downward trajectory in 1971, when the US removed the gold standard and money-printing replaced hard money. The result was a man-manipulated interest rate fueled economy. Low interest rates benefit existing asset holders the most since they most definitively increase asset prices. Think about the simplest discounted cashflow, a perpetuity. When you change the discount rate r from 4% to 1%, the perpetuity value increases by 4x.

I've been working on a tool that also filters out the cruft comments from reddit / ugc searches. We just came out with a chrome extension as well. Would love your feedback on it: www.thegigabrain.com

I've been working on www.thegigabrain.com to address this problem. Filtering out the noise from reddit and other UGC sources to get the most useful answers

Isn't the solve for this to store it on a decentralized storage network like Filecoin?!?

The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. Startup guy, you don't have to accept being part of a bloated hierarchy that rewards politics more than good decision-making. You could check out at the corpo job and start prototyping your own startup ideas. Or join another early stage startup where your performance matters. I'll be starting one soon - let's keep in touch.

dont need all this complexity to prevent airborne illness from going exponential, just masks + contact tracing. the results have spoken for themselves in asia

Long game is a few superstar teachers teach kids online and their parents and neighbors / community teach them social etiquette

Actually, it’s people with computers and internet...

Maybe a solar and energy storage investment would help...

If central banks weren't on a mission to create 'inflation' by manipulating interest rates, tech would do what it was meant to do...deflate the price of everything. Instead governments try to make interest rates low to create inflation and achieve asset price inflation - pricing anyone who didn't own assets before their ingenious printing out of the market. Hence why millenials control so much less wealth per their age than boomers do. Boomers took us off the gold standard in 1971 and that is when you see the wealth gap begin to explode. Go do some actual research and look at the exponential wealth discrepancy curve starting in 1971.

This author doesn't realize that 'people' don't care if someone is a billionaire if they became one by taking risk themselves. Yes, people will rightfully shit on the ones who inherited their wealth or achieved most of their success through backroom regulatory dealings but elon musk parlayed his whole lifetime earnings into Tesla and SpaceX while the US government printed money to subsidize investment banks and mortgage lenders. Did 'public' sector or 'private' sector generate the more useful innovation? I'm all for the rule of law and at the local level it makes sense to have democratic government. The most obvious trend in this era is that centralization of power is bad but most of it has occurred through politicians who are out of touch with the people they represent who live 1000s of miles away from them + central bankers manipulating interest rates and preventing an actual free market that would let shitty companies go bankrupt. So when people poo on where much of the world has arrived in wealth disparity, they should blame crony socialism in the public sector rather than free market capitalism (which to date only exists on the internet and in crypto). Instead governments are demolishing the currency employees get paid in to subsidize shitty companies and inflate asset prices. And that process is mostly not run by billionaire but by elected and appointed bureaucrats.... This writer has the nuance of a fart joke.

The extra cost comes from tax obligations which will increase with the company valuation

good luck buying the index in a zero interest rate policy world...see nikkei since 1990 for example performance

You might want to check out the Honey app, which actually lets you search for items across 100s of stores. Plus gives ‘gold’ bonuses on top of the coupon testing it does

I would add another factor lots of people overlook: the trend towards index investing. In the past, asset management involved actually analyzing the performance of a business, now it’s just trillions of dollars allocated merely by market cap. Index investing makes everyone QEs bitch - the end game for it is what we’re about to experience.

Nope. This kind of shock is how you determine which companies are robust or antifragile to reality. You don't sacrifice humanity for the companies, its the other way around.

It's like no one in government(or the Fed) has read Antifragile...

Dated a top F21 buyer for a few years and I can say that:

1) Prototype to street was way more than 3 weeks. More like 3 months (still faster than most fashion which makes buys 6 months ahead). Zara is the main large retailer that is actually about 1 month from concept to store.

2) The quality of their men's wear was pretty good for the price.

3) They worked their corporate employees to the bone and paid them 60-70% as much as other retailers for the same job. Girlfriend ended up doubling her pay upon accepting a role with another retailer. And on her last day, they still left her a pile of work that took until 5am to finish...Greedy and unprofessional.

4) Sad to see a whole lot of honest employees lose their jobs. Although the owners of F21 had a big fall coming given the amount of greed and indifference they expressed to employees https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-forever-21-factory-wo...

I was in Shanghai last year and can confirm that China is far more authoritarian than even the US under Trump. Cameras every 400 Meters on the street, digital ads showing photos of debtors,etc. Great food, architecture, and ancient culture though. Overall made me appreciate the 'freedom' of the US a lot more, since I've been pretty bearish since 2016

Still seems gigantically space inefficient. Would love to see this experiment done with scooters, especially in LA where the weather is pretty good year-round. I say this as someone incredibly annoyed with people leaving Bird scooters all over the street.

Recalls a fundamental lesson about nature/reality preferring redundancy to the detriment of pure efficiency by Nassim Taleb: https://youtu.be/AcTvkt8k0sE?t=563

Pure optimization is a very ruin-prone path to take over time.

I own shares of Facebook and even I see that 'amount of advertising you CAN show' is not the amount of advertising people will be okay with, we're getting close to saturation before people realize they're being exposed to constant bullshit. At this point, I am so frustrated with ads that I'm willing to pay $10/mo for ad-free social media.

In orgs I've been in the daily standup was clearly intended to help people get a heads up on who can help them with blockers or may be working on a similar part of the codebase that day. It also helps PMs know what kind of support they'll need to give their dev team that day since they often get pulled into meetings by other parts of the company.

As far as timeboxing, the PM is timeboxed by having stuff in good enough state of definition that their devs feel they can work on them. So if you don't have your specs there by the time sprint planning happens, your projects don't get done and you risk your job. Of course, we have an issue if the PM is writing shitty specs and not around to help answer edge case questions.

Word. Humans are inherently social beings. Even from birth, physical touch changes rate of brain development for the better. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201310...

Really good book on relationships and humans as fundamentally social is Attached. Leaving ya with the final memo from Chris McCandless, independent adventurer from 'Into the Wild': "Happiness only real when shared"

Thanks for posting this, right around Worldwide Mental Health Awareness Day too.

To anyone reading this who is struggling but hasn't had the time to talk to a human therapist, I'm working on an accessible AI therapist to provide at least some experimentally verified help. I've got a prototype up at facebook.com/mindfulmarsha and would love feedback from yall. I work on this bot at night after work and am a ways out from doing anything to monetize it, so if you're interested in helping with dev time, message Marsha on FB or contribute to our patreon: www.patreon.com/mindfulmarsha

I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder after a panic attack in 2014, ironically during a time that it looked like the startup I was at was going to be unable to raise a round and my girlfriend at the time was suffering from severe depression. It has taken me years to be functional despite my appearances, and I literally, while working on adding the PHQ-9 Depression screener to the bot, realized that I had also been suffering from depression. Trying to turn this pain into a platform though. Looking forward to feedback!

There actually IS a way to exercise after you leave without laying out cash + tax dollars today. Consider esofund.com, its a fund that will pay your exercise price and tax liability for a proportion of your upside in a good financial outcome. If it doesn't work out, well at least you didn't throw away your own cash. They're basically a vc that takes common stock in companies by getting rights to employee shares.

IMO - its a question of exposure and convexity of your positions moreso than risk. Risk involves predicting the chance that different outcomes occur and...no one is really good at that. However, do you feel comfortable exposing X% of your total assets to the upside of Google growth? If you think in terms of controlling your max loss per opportunity and making sure you're in ones that have significantly more upside than exposure, you don't need to predict correctly quite as much.