d0liver

I feel this. As a dev, most of my time is spent thinking and asking questions.

I like prime numbers. Non-primes always feel like they're about to fall apart on me.

Income alone is not a good measure.

If you don't mind my asking, what do you do?

Not sure. From other comments, it sounds like that's an adjustment that they made later.

Yes, but they never repaid it. They have just been paying out the interest.

Sounds like the Wikipedia article is talking about a different set of bonds, "Another of these bonds, issued in 1648, is currently in the possession of Yale University."

From the article, it looks like the original interest on this one was 6.25% (75/1200) though.

Citation needed

The problem is not men's _rights_. It's men's _mental health_ and _education_. And, feminists do definitely support those things. But, when your answer to your problems is "We need more power" and you already have a really disproportionate amount of it then of course feminists are not going to be happy about that.

Resource scarcity generally creates economic depressions, not growth. In general, something like a food shortage will cause people to freak out and try to horde whatever is left which causes commerce to start siezing up. This is why whenever it starts to happen the government comes in and injects a bunch of cash into the economy.

I have no idea what you mean by "The only demographic that provides results for their work".

Even from the perspective of creating competition for desirable outcomes, you want your workforce healthy and educated to be at their most productive. People are obviously going to be more productive when they're able to take care of themselves; they don't just stop caring about their lives once they have their most basic needs met, and even if your needs are being met, you have to continue to work to have your needs met.

Since this is YC backed, is there a plan for monetizing it?

You've got it backwards. The principals of economics accurately describe a shitty situation created by corporations. They do not determine how the corporations must act; economics models exchanges of wealth. When the corporations control the wealth they simply model what the corporations are doing.

You are looking at it a different way, but the conclusion should be the same. You are saying there is more demand for specific CEOs because they are the ones who control the industry (this is actually why they "can't be replaced"); yes, of course, they value themselves highly. They already have control of all of the money that can be used for hiring and therefore determine what is desirable even when it is not valuable. This makes the situation that much worse because: 1. Supply and demand can be used to model it and 2. It doesn't do anything helpful to resolve the very real problems that exist.

Demand isn't the same thing as value. When we create an economy where a few people have all of the disposable income then we also create one where the only business interests represented are theirs. We should let value dictate demand, which only happens when we spread the money around.

This definitely feels like a very hopeful and intentionally narrow sited analysis. Like, we're saying that Waymo's accidents were primarily low-speed collisions but also they were only allowed to go 35mph max and drive in off peak hours when accidents are far less likely to begin with. If we're doing a comparative analysis then we'd need to compare to humans driving unimpaired during off hours at 35mph at most. And, it's also definitely worth considering how predictable and consistent the failures are; a human might miss someone backing out and hit them once because they are distracted. A computer missing the same means that there's a set of conditions that will trigger failure every single time they occur. So, if those conditions are repeated heavily in any place then the likelihood of catastrophic failure increases substantially.

Pretty much all software companies now have ongoing costs associated with the software after you would have purchased it - ops, hosting, security updates, and backports for compatability. In order to sell it to you and have it make sense they'd need to charge you a lot for it - the cost of keeping it up for however long you might use it. Essentially you'd need to pay ten years worth of subscription costs and just not have a choice in the matter. I'm sure they would prefer that, but you wouldn't buy it at that price because you know you probably won't use it for that long. Also, maintaining multiple versions of the thing is going to be a lot more expensive than just getting everyone on the current version. So, the company which has ongoing costs charges you an ongoing bill because it makes the most sense for both of you.

I think that maybe what you really don't like is the fact that US monopolies are not regulated and so all of your options suck whether or not they are SaaS companies.

Encoding and compression also have the property that they vastly change the data _representation_ of information (often changing it completely). Yet, the underlying thing reamins the same in a way that's easily recognizable by a human. This is similar - sure, a transform is being applied that changes the representation of the data. But, ultimately, it's just mashing together large chunks of other people's IP.

I'd still much rather see real art. It's kind of the difference between eating a homemade meal and eating manufactured crap out of a vending machine. And, from what I can tell, the art generators are basically just stealing other people's stuff. It'll probably be brought up as a real IP issue at some point.

If all they expect are passing test cases, then just use canned values in your code to make the tests pass. This is way more performant and even more efficient to write.

A lot of your framing has to do with what's expected of the system. Like, scaling from 100 users to 100M is an expectation not a property of the software. Making that library _more_ secure is also an expectation. Expectation becomes debt when your current expectation exceeds the limits of the system. When that happens it's largely because someone, often not a developer, changed the expectations. When that happens the difference between the expectations and actual system has to reconcile somehow and that's usually via some "shortcut" and there's some associated cost.

So, within your framing, the point is just that when things change (due to no fault of your own) the whole organization has to adjust expectations or you have an organizational issue.

My GPA was bottom 10ish at my high school. I graduated high school essentially because I already had most of the credits I needed to graduate from middle school. I got into college based on test scores alone (and I was surprised that this was possible). My GPA improved a bit early on in college and then improved much more around junior year once I started getting into harder classes. I ended up graduating with a math + CS double major in 4.5 years.

So, sometimes people are just bored. And there are a bunch of other factors here too - perhaps the biggest one being that "graduated within six years" is not a great indicator of success. Linus Torvalds did not graduate within six years but did build the first version of Linux at university.

GPA is a good indicator of how much work you're willing to put into what you're learning _now_, so it tracks well as a predictor of how much you care about GPA which is a pretty good predictor of whether you'll graduate in X years and probably not much else.

To me this reads more like "Even though humans can be modeled as distributed computing systems, we have to remember that they are humans because ethics" which is not my point. My point is that the human element is what makes people productive; it's not some tangent that we have to account for. IMO, the boundaries outlined here don't define the upper bound of meaningful work (the author's thesis) but rather the upper bound for mundane work if it isn't made to be meaningful. In the author's model, we'd say that superlinear productivity is possible _for individuals in isolation_ which definitely breaks the analysis since it's all about trying to hit that linear improvement mark. This doesn't strictly mean that their argument is "wrong" because they're reasoning about hours worked as their unit of measure but it does mean that it's not meaningful because a person's individual outputs can vary so greatly for a fixed number of hours worked.

Humans are probably a lot more like plants than distributed computing systems. Everyone likes a different environment. We bear different kinds of fruit. You can't just uproot a person randomly and move them around and expect everything to be the same. We put roots out into every available nook and cranny, bending around each other to get what we need. Throwing a new person into the mix changes everything.

Reasoning about humans as cogs is inevitably going to be a really awful way to get people and companies to be productive - most of it isn't that. However, humans, like plants, are able to survive and sometimes thrive in really terrible conditions _despite_ those conditions. This is what you see at Amazon; if you throw enough money at anything then you're going to get some kind of result. But, despite Amazon, Microsoft, and Google having billions and billions of dollars to throw at this stuff we mostly still grab for Open Source tools (and so do they). That's largely because the workflows the Open Source community use actually work and that's mostly because they get the human stuff right.

The whole "man hours - overhead = man joules" thing doesn't math and using that as a basis for any kind of analysis is going to lead to weird places. There are elements of human workflows that fit into these boxes - the really mundane work. Reasoning about mundane processes through this lens is maybe a good idea to the extent that mundane work can't be swapped out for more interesting work. The problem is that what we really want is to excel at the stuff that isn't mundane (the force multiplier shit) and that needs an entirely different framework that reasons about humans as humans rather than machines.

Pretty much every billionaire in existence has, at some point, taken millions of investment dollars from someone else. This is ultimately where the vast majority of their business value comes from. Compare to value generated by individuals (like book authors) which can sometimes generate millions of dollars.

That kind of individual value is more inline with the value that an individual with good judgment might be bringing on their own as an owner of an early startup who is willing to take some risks.

Basically, the risk itself isn't worth anything; paired with good judgment, the risk and the good judgment are both worth something. Really, that worth has to do with how common that good judgment is. But, most billionaires are idiots (at least at being billionaires) and their judgment tends to benefit them and nobody else. So, from a role perspective they bring negative value to a company in addition to stealing everyone's productive efforts.

You can look at how companies perform when a billionaire owner hands it off to a non-billionaire CEO. There's no sudden 20,000x value multiplier that's lost. Their role in that situation is essentially to just be privileged idiots and it's a process that's fully automatic after a certain point.

This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on.

It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.

If you gave his workers a choice between splitting the company equally with Elon and letting him have all or most of it, they would all choose to have the benefits of ownership. You can't say that someone "agreed" to something if they took the only available path.

What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist.

Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.

No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more.

Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.

The problem with income inequality is that the people at the top are actively stealing money from everyone else. Elon isn't out there building rockets. He just gets the rockets that other people made automatically and for free. This is the case with literally every billionaire. So, yeah, I'm envious. I'd like my stuff back.

This post is really narrow-sited in terms of economics. The argument is essentially that "Absentminded regulations forced those poor truck makers into building bigger trucks and then consumers just had to buy them". Unfortunately, that's not actually how buying things works. The market being willing to buy behemoths is what validated the product experiment that the truck makers ran and is a much more potent force than what a company decides to make.

The real issue is thus: Trumpers don't actually care what happens to the world or the people in it and if something is "bad for business" then they'll do anything to get around it - regardless of the ethics. People should not be blundering idiots that are continuously drawn towards the next shiny thing; they should be accountable for what they choose to do.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but most of my contracts have essentially been worded so that work related to the business belongs to them, but not everything.