flunhat

You might be right -- at this point, with everything that's gone wrong at the govt level, I'm pretty willing to accept rank incompetence as an explanation.

Someone else commented this on the thread, but my understanding is that some non-zero percentage (maybe even non-trivial percentage) of people without, say, a pulse can be revived only at a hospital but not by an EMT (because of equipment or skills, I guess?). This decision forecloses that possibility completely.

I suspect the limiting factor is personnel, not beds (i.e. trained staff to manage covid patients), which can't be increased on short notice. But still -- we have incompetent state & federal leadership that basically knew what would happen yet still didn't do enough to prepare.

> Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer.

Yup. One of the dark ironies of this whole mess has been that hospitals have been letting go of staff because they had to suspend (very profitable) elective surgeries to treat (not so profitable) covid patients. Think hip surgeries being postponed and bleeding hospitals dry as a result.

> Does that make NASA liars?

No. It makes them not-successful. Which also applies to SpaceX in that regard.

> Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.

His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).

Musk doesn’t think that they’ll take a lifetime. He thinks SpaceX should reach Mars in 4 years & transhumanism should arrive next year, for example.

> SpaceX is an essentially unprecedented success by any reasonable definition of success in the modern space launch services market.

Sure. I agree.

> minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals

Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, that’s called “holding people accountable to the goals they set.” And I’m happy to give him decades, he still won’t achieve transhumanism, Mars travel, and the like.

Musk said the first passengers could go to Mars in 2024, which is 4 years from now. So I’m being generous. Hasn’t he repeatedly proved everyone wrong? Where does the quote “Never bet against Elon” come from? I’m being quite bold.

But you’re right on the other points —- I’m willing to extend the timeframe for self driving to 10 years and transhumanism to 20. And to be even bolder, I’ll let you pick a timeline for the Hyperloop.

Like I said, they’re fine companies. And they’re doing innovative things!

But you’ll have forgive me if I hold Musk to public promises he’s made, especially regarding self driving cars & Mars. At a certain point, what’s the difference between making a bold promise and telling a lie? It’s difficult to judge people’s intentions.

I agree with you that they’re working towards these goals. And there’s obviously a ton of daylight between Musk and Milton.

But the point I’m making is more specific than that: you can’t call them successes because they haven’t achieved their goals yet. (But they haven’t failed yet, either. The jury is still out.)

How are you judging SpaceX, Neuralink, & Boring to be successes? They’re fine companies with good products, but none of them have fulfilled Musk’s original stated goals: going to Mars, transhumanism, and networks of tunnels for mass transit, respectively. When people say those companies will fail, I imagine the argument is that they won’t achieve these goals. Which, for the time being, is still true. Although it’s true that at least Musk actually builds things.

(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)

Palantir lost half a billion dollars last year & are notorious for overpromising to clients but ultimately under-delivering.

I'd say they're still a Silicon Valley company at heart.

> cheerleading for mass arrests and martial law

One of the darkly hilarious parts of the latest "Q" drops was that the entire cast of Friends had been arrested and executed. (Why? One can only imagine it had something to do with laugh tracks.)

It feels like "Q" predicts "marshall" law (his acolytes can never get the spelling right), executions of public figures, or impending power grabs/coups every month or so. None of them pan out, but his followers will usually call those predictions "intentional disinfo."

I imagine the only way this kind of hysteria ends is with a new conspiracy theory. And that gets uprooted by yet another conspiracy theory. And so on until the heat death of the universe.

My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which looks good).

All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.

It’s like eating a cake made purely out of frosting -- fun at first, but then it just becomes too much after a hundred pages or so.

The book is ok — it has plenty of interesting stories about Facebook during its heady IPO ish era. And a bunch of great startup-y tales.

But what kills the reading experience for me are the constant metaphors/analogies/similes/parentheticals/whatever the author keeps making. It’s funny if it’s done sparingly, but he just interlards every passage with them. Like so:

“After my day of interviews, I had imagined that MRM and Facebook would get along about as well as a Berkeley hippie and a Marine scout sniper, and I was right.”

It’s funny, but imagine an entire book (that’s otherwise a good read) filled with these sometimes successful attempts at humor. It gets tiring after a few chapters.

Just 50% less of it would’ve made the book waaay better IMO. Plus humor like that usually lands better if you use it sparingly.

There are 212 job openings listed on Stripe's careers page as either located in the United States or remote. Of those, 17 are remote (~8%) & the rest are not. So even excluding non-US listings, it's a small percentage -- Seattle has ~30%, SF has ~50%, NYC has ~11%.

Even though a single job listing can/does represent multiple job openings, that's true for all the listings as well. So all other things being equal, I would expect Stripe to have way more remote listings if it's been as successful as this post implies. Which leads me to believe the reality is much more nuanced and that the blog post is a bit heavy with PR fluff (no shame!).

Also, big fan.

It’s at least 12 separate articles — I can see your submission history

For the past two months, you’ve been frenetically posting about how Bill Gates planned coronavirus to institute some new world order. I think your posts are getting flagged because they’re starting to verge on spam.

Most people on this site couldn't imagine it back then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850

Worth noting that elite universities aren't elite because they impart special knowledge that you couldn't reasonably get elsewhere. They're elite because they get the pick of the litter from each graduating class. And top students want to attend, because the schools are considered elite (by parents, employers, other students, whatever), creating a virtuous/vicious cycle. Your degree signals your elevated status & improves your career prospects -- you were always intelligent but lacked the pedigree that would open the right doors.

So any competing "elite" university gets hobbled from the start simply by being "competing." Because a university degree is more social signaling and branding than a mere education. It's a really powerful bit of marketing: people will read this & generally agree (I hope). But then send their kids to elite schools anyway, which is the point.

A lot of people will point to Lambda School or equivalents as competitors of elite universities. The thinking goes that the Lambda School model (income share agreements + teaching practical knowledge, like knowing how to code) will replace universities. That is -- and I say this respectfully -- a brain dead take. I don't doubt that LS and others will be somewhat successful, but they won't even come close to threatening the value of an elite degree.

It's like thinking that people won't buy Apple products because they're too expensive and not really innovative. True in the facts (maybe, I don't really have strong opinions on Apple), but totally wrong in the conclusion. People miss the importance of perceived value.

A useful thought exercise (not mine). You're stuck on an island with a lot of raw materials. Would you rather have (1) a degree in boat-building from Princeton without the actual knowledge or (2) no degree, but full knowledge of how to build a boat? Most people, without thinking, choose (2).

Would you rather have (1) a degree in chemical engineering from Princeton, with none of the knowledge, or (2) all of that knowledge, but no degree? The fact that most people even hesitate to choose is pretty strong proof that the degree's primary value is marketing. Hypothetically, if you had (1), you could parlay that into a lucrative non-chemical-engineering field to hide your lack of knowledge. After all, you did go to Princeton :)

I'm talking about the US of course, no (informed) idea of how it is in other countries.

Of course the planet will be fine, it’s the people we’re all worried about

Car accidents do not pose systemic risk, a super contagious virus with a fatality rate of ~1-2% definitely does. I think a misunderstanding of this phenomenon (risk comes in different flavors!!) combined with an inability to grok exponential growth is really gonna screw us over, both in the next few months and more generally as a species.

The top comment above, for example. I think people are generally terrible at understanding exponential growth & systemic vs. one-off risk.

All public Trello power-ups have to be GDPR compliant, for example. The requirements are laid out on their developer documentation page [1]. You have to poll an endpoint every 14 days to remain compliant, delete data on request, etc. If you're building a power-up for free/fun, it might make you think twice (just because of the payoff/effort ratio). But I'm going to charge money for my power-up, so something like this isn't really a big deal.

If you have time/money or plan to make money, GDPR compliance isn't terribly difficult. But free/cash-strapped service providers would probably think twice before becoming compliant (which is why a lot of local US news websites just don't allow European visitors -- compliance is somewhat expensive, and local news in the US isn't doing too great right now).

[1] https://developers.trello.com/docs/personal-data-storage

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but those numbers are extremely misleading. I can tell you from close personal observation that this low divorce rate is almost certainly because divorce is extremely taboo in the kinds of societies that have a lot of arranged marriages. The kind of culture that sees an arranged marriage as OK is also very likely one that judges divorcees harshly. See also: the Hasan Minhaj bit about the "What will people say?" attitude in South Asian cultures.

Also, the super low divorce rate should make you suspicious -- it would be more believable if it was slightly lower (like 30% or whatever), but 6%? There's clearly something else going on, and if you look closely you'll realize why.

I agree with you -- I just think it's funny how these two completely different sources dunked on McNamara. Bobby Baker seems like he wanted to redeem his image (and Lyndon Johnson's image, too, I think), so you can see this as an attempt to shift blame.

Bobby Baker, who was one of Lyndon Johnson's closest aides, had this to say about Robert McNamara (who was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War):

"The biggest disaster in the history of this country was [Robert] McNamara. Henry Ford was my good friend and he said, “The best thing that ever happened to me was getting rid of that bastard.” He almost wrecked Ford back then, and he really wrecked the Defense Department. The Vietnam War - President Johnson did not know how to get out - that was the greatest tragedy of his Presidency."

Source: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/836424-baker-text.ht...

(The whole interview is really worth reading and is full of sordid tales about the Senate in the 1960s).

The economics of venture capital don't work out if you invest in companies that you think will be worth less than a billion dollars. There's a really enlightening blog post that goes through all the numbers (maybe someone can find it again for me), but it basically comes down to this:

90% of all companies funded by this VC will fail. Of the remaining 10%, some will be middling successes. One or two companies will be really great. But the VC has a problem: his LPs expect a return over 10 years (or whatever the lifetime is) that is as good as the market (simplifying, but this is basically true). If the one or two companies that succeed only become worth a few hundred million, he's actually delivered a sub-par return for his LPs. So the one or two companies that succeed must _really_ succeed, or else the VC is going to have trouble with their next fund. Someone did the math and showed that a 10x return on those successful investments is the minimum for the fund as a whole to provide a good return for its LPs.

All this means that when a VC looks for deals, he can't waste time on lifestyle businesses and the like. Billion dollar companies or bust. Keep in mind that this is not true for people who write smaller checks (like angels).

How does it solve curation & search?

Edit: I'm asking because I suspect your answer is going to be "it doesn't/that's not the point/who cares?" But people who read blogs will just flock to the centralized services that solve curation & search quite effectively and keep users reading. And then this centralized service will have strong incentives to become _more_ centralized, not less, and decentralized solutions like this one never really gain traction and become functionally irrelevant.

So what happens to Kik now? Funding-wise, I mean.

The press release says that: "the company’s management predicted internally that it would run out of money in 2017. In early 2017, the company sought to pivot to a new type of business, which it financed through the sale of one trillion digital tokens."

I'm guessing that they spent a decent amount of the money they raised through the ICO. If they have to give it back, will they have to take on even more funding from a VC at even worse terms?