Stasis5001

It's a matter of zoning. If an area is designated as residential, then the city can stop you from building a hotel there. From there, it's at least a little reasonable to consider that a house used as a rental unit with new, paying guests every night being a hotel by all but name.

This article is incoherent, because the notion of dead equity being unfair doesn't make any sense. If I buy a share of Microsoft, that's 'dead equity' since I don't work there and am not contributing to the company's value, yet when Microsoft sold that stock, they got paid in cash. Is that unfair to current employees?

Exactly the same for startup stock. The company granted the stock to investors for cash and employees for their service as part as a compensation package, and as the employee fulfills their service, they earn the equity as well as their salary.

>Are there any other management practices where one would optimize for former employees at the expense of current employees? I can’t think of any.

This is exactly backwards. You don't offer the 10-year clause ex post, you do it when the employee signs. That's optimizing for new employees, not old ones!

There are very good reasons why Susan should be against a prenup. Suppose her and Daniel have a child, and they both agree that it makes sense for Susan to quit her job and raise the child at home.

If they have a prenup, a divorce is devastating to Susan. She's made no income and will likely have trouble finding employment since her skills may have atrophied. Does this seem fair?

>"From the perspective of natural selection, once you’re no longer able to reproduce, you might as well be dead."

Both today's article and yesterdays said something to this effect, which is blatantly wrong. A now-infertile parent affects the survivability of their offspring, possibly positively or negatively. Since their offspring share their genetics, the parent thus is still involved in the natural selection process.

If possible, it's much better to handle physical units with the type system. If your timeout is a timedelta class (or duration/difftime/interval etc.), then this whole issue disappears.

That definition makes it very clear why people are disagreeing with you. Switching costs are those incurred by the difficulty of switching, and not the marginal cost of one provider or another. If internet provider A is $80 / month, and provider B is $60 / month, the switching cost has nothing to do with the $20 monthly discrepancy, or any speed differences, and rather represents how easy it is to cancel my subscription by being on hold for hours or cancellation fees.

2D arrays that are laid out as a linear array of mn elements are faster to iterate through. That's what happens when you declare e.g. int a[5][4], you get the same layout as int a[20]. A vector of vectors is fairly sprawling in memory, and generally matrices don't get resized so you want this compact form because it's quicker to loop through (either way is O(mn), but one has a way better coefficient).

Wait, what? The article actually derives the conclusion that 8 people live in the same zip code, are going to the same destination, in the 10% technophile bracket, and leaving in the same 20 minute window -- and this makes it impossible? Doesn't that show the exact opposite, that even with really pessimistic assumptions, matches are still likely?

Sure but even still, suppose an analyst saves all of Fidelity's clients 1M in two days worth of work. We can't dismiss that as silly because that savings is so small compared to 5 trillion AUM, right?

That's not exactly fair. They hold many assets, so of course any action on any individual asset may not have a significant effect. However, if they behave similarly across all similar assets, it will have an effect on the overall fund.

Your Toyota is more of a commodity. There are millions out there that are functionally identical, and millions more can be made. A given piece of real estate with proximity to a major city is very different in this sense, as there are only so many plots of land like it.

I just tried sending "Attached is my photo". Then "I've been feeling less attached to you". One warns, the other doesn't. This is also more than a single if.

The problem is different than that. It's that the measurement of performance is susceptible to differences in the conditional distribution of disparate groups, given that they were selected.

We can illustrate it by modifing the GP example to not include time at all, and make the metric perfect.

Suppose we are selecting for the next qualifying round for the Olympic 400m team, and select candidates if their 400m is under 50 seconds. Then, we measure performance -- immediately -- by a 400m run. We have two candidate pools: people who compete in the professional circuit, and everybody else. 100% of the former group who apply qualify, while only 10% of the others do.

Okay, so now we immediately measure the average 400m time of all professionals, versus average time of all amateurs who can beat 50 seconds. It's pretty reasonable to expect that the professionals might average closer to 45 seconds, while the other group might average around 48 (I'm not a 400m expert, the actual numbers might be off. WR is 43 seconds).

According to the article, we now conclude that our selection process is actually biased _against_ professionals! This is at the least very counter-intuitive. Maybe we provide both groups with coaching, and re-test after 6 months, a year, whatever. The professionals will certainly still outperform the amateurs. However, suppose one of the amateurs goes on to greatness, and wins. Wouldn't this obviously be biased against amateurs, according to our intuition?

Dumb question. When, say, setting up a new server, you need to set up the environment variables to have your production credentials. How do I automate this process if the variables aren't stored in a central repo? Keeping a static file on my computer could maybe cut it, but won't help me get new team members able to deploy, unless I email them that file or something. Is having a file stored in email or dropbox or something really way better than having it stored in a private git repo? I assume there's a clever way to do this that I'm missing?

If you tell your boss "I am going to take tomorrow off", and they say, "Actually, you're scheduled for an interview, can you please come in? But take Thursday or Friday off by all means", you're going to still go to work, right? Informing, in practice, is identical to requesting, and this is really just a language thing that makes it clear that you (a) should inform somebody you'll be gone and (b) you can take any day off except maybe 5% of days have critical meetings or whatever.

It seems reasonable to think this is codified this way because the alternative language of informing doesn't imply suggestion (b), but sure, it could also be due to the founders being control freaks.

Permission from one of several founders at a 10 person company is proportionally equivalent to letting your team lead know you'll be absent. That's not exactly an excessive standard, is it?

Further, an open expectation of 45-50 hours at a place that also encourages spending 4 of those hours on self-study seems fine compared to the risk-adjusted industry average.

Not at all. If the company doesn't grow, there is no way any of the common stock shareholders get a noticeable payout due to liquidation preferences. Whether their ownership is in the form of options or stock does not matter.

I agree. I came across this once, and ran the following model. Assume you assess the expected value of the equity grant to be, let's say, $100k over 4 years. Then this means your total comp will rise by $10k a year, which probably is comparable to your natural gain in market value. Thus this is equivalent to taking a similar offer except with $40k in equity with linear vesting, and either getting a raise or switching companies to get the $10k/year raise.

What this analysis omits is that the expected value calculation ignores the fact that the equity far exceeding the expected value is correlated with a desire to stay at the company, which makes the backloaded vesting irrelevant.

If you interpolate a bit to account for that correlation, I personally started concluding the $100k offer became more like $50-60k, which dropped the offer below market rate and I walked.

So for those of us who rent our primary residence, we now have to take out loans to buy property and heaven help us if we want to move?

That's literally what the original article argues. The rent control leaves a smaller supply of houses to be bid up by a fixed pool of people who want to live in SF. Whether the toy model the author uses to illustrate this is correct or appropriate is of course debatable.

The problem there is not with auto, it's with the function naming. If you don't know what the function lock does, how would writing Lock l = lock() help? Also, stage1 and stage2 are awful function names in this context.

Sure. But to clarify, it seems like for most people, the ratings they receive consist of mostly 5s, with rare outliers (anecdotally in this thread, it seems most ratings are >= 4.5 and most are ~4.8). In that case, the odds of one outlier pushing another outside the moving average window is pretty low.

At the very least, if you're like most users who rate between 4 and 5, you can most likely tell if the driver rated you a 5 (rating goes up) or below a 5 (rating goes down). It would take a pretty strange algorithm to violate that. Of course, this only helps if your rating changes at all