xenophon

The point is that if this article is correct about the assumption that AI is capable enough to reduce the friction of consumers rationally comparing options for a far wider basket of goods, then competition will reduce prices. No company wants to reduce prices if they don't have to -- their hand is forced by declining market share (or, with discounters, price reductions are a deliberate strategy to increase market share and absolute profit).

The bull case for AI and consumer welfare is 1) turning more markets into "perfect competition" like airline tickets, and 2) driving actual prices lower because the marginal cost of production is lower with less labor. Even if real inputs don't change, removing labor will reduce marginal cost (which implies that you'll see the largest price declines in labor-intensive industries).

Well-written; seems like an expanded and more detailed version of the Twitter essay that made the rounds a couple weeks ago.

One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially lower marginal cost floor.

In other words, people may make less money, but goods in industries which benefit from AI should become cheaper in a growing set of competitive markets. The magnitude of the impact on prices should correlate with the magnitude of the employment impact; the better AI is at taking our jobs, the cheaper prices should get for an ever wider basket of goods.

For more on how this model might have changed journalism for the better, this is a great old article from the former CIO of the Yale Endowment: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html

Universities with large endowments still charge tuition. The available proceeds from appreciation of the trust may not be enough to cover their operating expenses.

Branch | Ecommerce Product Manager / Hybrid PM + Dev | Remote Friendly EST (NYC / Toronto Preferred)

Branch makes and sells work products for remote workers and growing teams. We're looking for a Digital Product Manager or hybrid PM / dev to lead the development of our ecommerce site and systems. You’ll ship beautiful, functional and accessible commerce experiences addressing both our enterprise and DTC customer segments, as well as full-stack applications to support our operations and broader enterprise ambitions.

As the only product management hire at Branch, you’ll have the opportunity to lead a product practice at a well-funded and rapidly-growing startup pursuing a unique opportunity that anchors in online commerce and extends far beyond it.

What we're looking for: as a pure PM, 2-5 years of relevant product management experience (preferably at a high-growth ecommerce startup) OR experience founding an ecommerce business, reps managing a sprint planning process and owning a product roadmap, deep knowledge of Shopify Plus and the Shopify ecosystem, strong portfolio featuring experience shipping exceptional features that users love, and comfort shipping low or no code features. We would also be very excited to hire a developer with 2-4 years of front-end development experience, ideally within the Shopify Plus ecosystem, with an interest in pivoting to product and a willingness to plan and build at the same time.

Open to any remote candidates in EST (or willing to work those hours), with NYC and Toronto preferred. If interested, email hn [at] branchfurniture.com with a few sentences about your background and interest, along with your favorite and least favorite things about the Shopify platform.

Branch | Ecommerce Product Manager | Remote Friendly EST (NYC / Toronto Preferred)

Branch makes and sells work products for remote workers and growing teams. We're looking for a Digital Product Manager to lead the development of our ecommerce site and systems. You’ll ship beautiful, functional and accessible commerce experiences addressing both our enterprise and DTC customer segments, as well as full-stack applications to support our operations and broader enterprise ambitions.

As the only product management hire at Branch, you’ll have the opportunity to lead a product practice at a well-funded and rapidly-growing startup pursuing a unique opportunity that anchors in online commerce and extends far beyond it.

What we're looking for: 2-5 years of relevant product management experience (preferably at a high-growth ecommerce startup) OR experience founding an ecommerce business, reps managing a sprint planning process and owning a product roadmap, deep knowledge of Shopify Plus and the Shopify ecosystem, strong portfolio featuring experience shipping exceptional features that users love. Some ability to code and love for furniture / design / productivity are a huge bonus.

Open to any remote candidates in EST (or willing to work those hours), with NYC and Toronto preferred. If interested, email hn [at] branchfurniture.com with a few sentences about your background and interest.

Branch | https://branchfurniture.com | Contract iOS Dev, Content Manager | Remote Friendly EST (NYC / Toronto Preferred)

Branch makes and sells work products for remote workers and growing teams. We're currently hiring for two very exciting roles. First, we're looking for a Contract iOS Developer with 5-10+ years of experience building native iOS apps from the ground up to build a groundbreaking new experience for the workday (can share more when we meet). We're also looking for a Content & Campaigns Manager with 1-4+ years of experience to own the production of exceptional written content and seamless coordination of all creative content throug the full user journey, including evergreen, seasonal and promotional marketing campaigns, UX and product copy, and dedicated content marketing across channels.

Open to any remote candidates in EST (or willing to work those hours), with NYC and Toronto slightly preferred. If interested, email hn [at] branchfurniture.com with a few sentences about you and your interest.

Another classic of this genre, brought to you by McSweeney's: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/armed-band-of-thugs-or-m...

Branch | Ecommerce Product Manager | Remote Friendly EST (NYC / Toronto Preferred)

Branch makes and sells work products for remote workers and growing teams. We're looking for a Digital Product Manager to lead the development of our ecommerce site and systems. You’ll ship beautiful, functional and accessible commerce experiences addressing both our enterprise and DTC customer segments, as well as full-stack applications (mostly built on Shopify) to support our operations.

As the only product management hire at Branch, you’ll have the opportunity to lead a product practice at a well-funded and rapidly-growing startup pursuing a unique opportunity that anchors in online commerce and extends far beyond it.

What we're looking for: 2-5 years of relevant product management experience (preferably at a high-growth ecommerce startup) OR experience founding an ecommerce business, reps managing a sprint planning process and owning a product roadmap, knowledge of Shopify Plus and the Shopify ecosystem, strong portfolio featuring experience shipping exceptional features that users love. Some ability to code, love for furniture and design big bonus.

Open to any remote candidates in EST (or willing to work those hours), with NYC and Toronto slightly preferred. If interested, email hn [at] branchfurniture.com with a few sentences about you and your interest.

I’m one of the founders of Branch Furniture (venture backed DTC office furniture startup based in nyc). We founded the business to help growing companies (think WeWork graduates) furnish their office space with ergonomic office furniture without an Aeron level budget. Our enterprise business basically disappeared during the pandemic, so we’ve been selling to consumers for the past year and have learned a TON about what makes a great home office.

You definitely should check out our seating line if you’d like an option that offers a fair amount of adjustability and (though this is subjective) a home office friendly aesthetic at a sub $300 price point. If you’ve got a higher budget ($400-500) and willing to work the liquidator / Craigslist home office grind I’d honestly endorse the used Aeron approach as well — they’re rock solid chairs, extremely adjustable and buying used is objectively better for the environment (we have a trade in program for our enterprise clients and working on one for consumers).

But beyond the chair you pick, three big lessons to keep in mind:

1) For most folks in tech, it’s not the chair that’s the problem. Adjusting it to your body and needs is critical to maximizing its ergonomic benefit for your body. Something like 80% of office workers only adjust the height and tilt of their chair. Would strongly recommend giving the user manual for the chair you buy a read (download it online if used). We offer an ergonomic consultation to every buyer and are working on a few cool tools to guide folks who use our furniture in making the most of it.

2) The rest of your setup is equally as impactful to your comfort. Get a monitor arm or put your monitor on a stack of books. If you’re short or petite, get a footstool so you upper and lower legs are at a 90 degree angle to each other and your backs of your knees don’t press against the chair seat. A standing desk makes a difference, if not for standing than to adjust the height of your work surface to your own height.

3) Take breaks. Seriously. There are no chairs I know of that will support you adequately over 10 or even 8 hours of work, summed over weeks and years.

I’m so glad to see this question being discussed! Figuring out the most supportive setup for your needs is like flossing; you don’t always see the benefit immediately, but you’ll be glad to have done the research after a decade of desk work (and perhaps before). Feel free to reach out — email in bio — if you have any questions about ergonomics. We also released a cool guide to basic ergonomics that might be worth a read. [0]

[0] ergonomics.branchfurniture.com

The -mab suffix means it's a "monoclonal antibody," or a lab-made protein that specifically targets a certain antigen (for example, an antigen found on a cancer cells).

Try Derek Parfit. His book "Reasons and Persons" touches on some fascinating questions (identity) with clear thought experiments that actually reach the level of clarity this article suggests.

OP referenced revenue growth, not margin expansion. All else equal, you'd expect to see existing products take share and generate movement on the top-line.

Though it could be the case that their investment in new product development reduces their ability to meet current demand and therein throttles revenue; not sure if the 10Q references their order backlog.

Parts of the story may be apocryphal, but one of the most famous case studies of office design contributing to collaboration is the Pixar office. In the late 1990s (and to this day) the modal layout for larger companies was dividing teams into dedicated buildings by function withn a broader campus or office park.

Per the story, Jobs had the notion of designing an office that encouraged interactions between teams with broad open areas, communal social resources and bathroom placement in central atriums to encourage unplanned interactions between teams.

'Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.” ' [1]

[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-an...

The issue here is moral hazard. Yes, buying insurance is bad if it disincentivizes you to work your hardest to prevent the outcome that you're insured against.

Not saying that everyone with a bunker falls into this category. But it's certainly true that when the best resourced and connected among us have the means to withdraw comfortably, their aggregate effort to remedy whatever is causing the disruption will diminish.

Congrats on the launch! I'm working on an ecommerce product targeting enterprise customers; does Mutiny work with sites built on Shopify?

Bureau | Multiple Openings | New York, NY or San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite

Our mission at Bureau is making it easy for teams of all sizes to furnish office space with beautiful, high-quality furniture that adapts as your headcount and needs change—as easy as setting up payroll on Gusto, or adding a new account on Slack.

We're growing rapidly and hiring across all roles to scale growth, operations and engineering. Open roles and our values here: https://www.bureauwork.com/pages/careers

Specific roles we're hiring for:

Growth Lead (NYC)

Founding Engineer (NYC)

Operations Manager (NYC)

West Coast GM (SF)

Shoot over an email (sib+hn@bureauwork.com) if any of these roles interest you, and particularly if you have an interest in real estate tech, furniture or the built environment. Would love to share more about the company and our vision for physical productivity and the future of office space.

Thought I'd share one of my favorite short stories (written by Ted Chiang, most recently of Arrival fame) that bears on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

The solution is reversing Citizen's United, when the Supreme Court held 5-4 that campaign contributions represented "freedom of speech" and could not be limited. In a literal sense, Citizen's United enshrined the idea that your voice (and vote) are proportional to the amount of money you can bring to bear.

One of the lessons I've taken from this case and others related to gerrymandering and voter suppression, for instance, is how deeply the integrity our democracy depends on tactical execution of the broader ideals at stake. It's our ability to handle issues at the margin that will determine whether the whole thing works or falls apart.

I'm the co-founder of an office furniture startup called Bureau (www.bureauwork.com) and thought I'd chime in here.

By far the most frequent complaint that came up in our research about cheaper standing desks is their tendency to wobble, along both the front-back axis as well as the side-to-side axis.

Generally, there are four reasons a standing desk will wobble:

1) Frame materials: I'd highly recommend a steel frame for stability. You trade off against weight and some added complexity in assembly, but the desktop will be way more stable across both axes. 2) Lift columns. A three-stage lift is more stable than a two stage lift for a given height--the stages overlap and support each other through a greater portion of the length. 3) Fasteners. The frame-to-feet connectors are most critical, and DIY installations are often under-torqued here. If you're building a standing desk yourself, tighten that bolt as much as you can. 4) Adjustable feet: Most floors are slightly uneven. A quality standing desk will let you screw the feet up and down to compensate for your floor.

We sell our standing desk for $850. Def more expensive than many of the options discussed here, but the incremental cost flows through directly to design, materials and ultimately stability, which we felt was a trade worth making.

Beyond our line, we're big fans of the Herman Miller Renew, which is unfortunately priced well beyond reach for most but a really great piece of furniture. If you have any questions about choosing a standing desk, feel free to DM me.

Apologies for the belated response - this is incredibly helpful! Thanks a ton for taking a look - prioritization in particular, figuring out how to highlight the "best of the best" as the amount of content on the site grows, feels key to me as well.

Hi HN! Whenever I travel to a new city for work or fun, I like to read a book set in that place, or about that place, to set the mood and build a rapport with my new environment before I arrive. After a conversation with one of my friends, I realized that many frequent travelers do this, and thought I'd make a website to curate and collect "destination reads" -- novels, memoirs and other long-form works of fiction and creative non-fiction that capture the character and essence of a city.

I plan to add more cities over the next few weeks, and hope for nominations and contributions from the community. This is the first webapp I've ever built (I used Webflow) -- would love feedback on design, content, and anything else that I can improve!

Yes, but you'll still want those things in a month, or six months, or a year. Given the expectation that your real purchasing power will grow, and you'll be even to afford even more of that hobby if you wait, you'll decide not to transact now for many discretionary expenses. Unfortunately, this puts the store or vendor you would have transacted from in dire straits--and then they decide to consume less.

Summed over an entire economy, this sort of behavior will reduce aggregate demand and the velocity of money enough to damage productivity and growth: it's called a "deflationary spiral."

Some of the key characteristics of a store of value are durability, limited supply, uniqueness, and portability. Unlike gold, BTC is neither unique nor truly in limited supply, thanks to forks that create "inflation" and altcoins that can substitute for BTC in all pertinent ways.

The vast majority of participants in this market aren't parking their money in BTC to preserve it, and neither to use it as a medium of exchange. They're doing it with the expectation of a return. If those returns fail to materialize, the money will move elsewhere.

There are all kinds of motivations to post a negative review, and not all of those motivations map "reliably" to accuracy. Leaving a job can be traumatic for employees for reasons that have nothing to do with the company's culture or behavior--a disgruntled employee fired for cause has a strong motivation to leave a bad review, but that doesn't mean it is reliable.

Glassdoor has the same pros and cons of any review aggregator. It is susceptible to gaming (perhaps uniquely so, like Yelp, because the companies being reviewed are also Glassdoor's advertisers). But it provides a directionally accurate view of a corporate environment given a large enough sample size of reviews--and as with any review, more credence should be given to examples that are clear, detailed and well-written.

I don't think that's true. If you scroll down to the "Property History" section on any Redfin sold listing, you should see the full details for that home, including list price, any price adjustments, and sold price. In some markets, this information is only visible to logged-in users due to MLS restrictions, so you may have to log into your account to view the data.

I think this comment is spot on. Perhaps one way to correct against this bias would be to "backtest" the principles in question on other successful investment managers (at the least)? Of course, the difficulty there is that usually you only have imperfect information about how a firm is actually run.

Try flippa.com -- seems to fill exactly the role you're looking for.

According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

I think this paper is a great example of the playfulness inherent to an effective "hacker" mindset -- do something fun and interesting, and perhaps useful conclusions will follow. Perhaps they won't, but hey, you still had fun.

Love the concept -- I think it is sorely needed -- but my messages didn't post and I got disconnected after a single exchange.