We're missing the desire of Apple & Google to make this happen. Apple won't let Safari compete with its app store and Google won't let Chrome compete with its app store.
Investors lose only a small portion of their assets and most importantly they don't have to lose time. Whether 2% of my liquid assets is more valuable than 4 years of someone's life is debatable, but I can certainly say the loss of those 2% won't make any impact on my life, while that worker won't ever recover his 4 years.
My takeaways from the article: (1) VC is a casino for the rich and just like gamblers in casinos they have no idea what they are doing; (2) VCs have discovered that standard deviation shrinks like the square root of the sample size, however their understanding of stats seems to be just enough to run a monte-carlo simulation.
Edit: the 3rd takeaway is advice to those who're considering to join a "startup" - if VC needs 500 investments to make a 15% return on average, you need 5000 years to get the sames returns as a line worker.
Perhaps they don't want to say in the court that Snowden was right. This might matter if things turn around in the future and the key people involved in the surveillance will be tried in a court for "crimes against humanity".
On paper, I'd be a felon for serious offences on at least 4 episodes. If the law was followed to the letter, and if somebody nosy had enough access and time to inspect the past 15 years of my life, I'd be serving at least two life sentences. The smallest offence is carrying a hunter's knife in my car: that's a 3rd degree felony as I'd discovered recently. In practice, though, if the law was followed to the letter, 90% of males would be serving life right after high school for reasons I probably don't need to explain.
You guys are so boring. I was referring to a joke which tells that when science discovers a way to extract energy out of irregularities in spacetime manifold, the reactor would still boil water to make electricity.
About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc.
The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life.
A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
Comments on HN is an example of how this cooling effect works. It takes only a few upset readers to take your comment down, so if what you say deviates even slightly, by 0.01 sigma, from the boring mainstream viewpoint, you'll upset at least a few readers.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
That's probably because the 3 paths are orthogonal: becoming a better IC would make one a worse manager; and becoming a better manager wouldn't make one a better exec. Just like an exec wouldn't turn into the business owner no matter how hard one tries. The ladders that connect ICs with execs exist, but they are outside of the building.
The thing is US has its own TikToks: if US bans TikTok, CCP will use its influence to undermine FB, WhatsApp, IG, Snapchat, etc. CCP is pretty much saying: "we know you're spying on the entire world and we want to do the same; if you torpedo our secret submarine, we'll do the same to yours."
This matters for senior management only, i.e. those who make decisions. This doesn't matter for middle management (even though they act as if they are senior managers) and that's completely irrelevant for line workers who don't need to "read body language" to get their linear work done.
I think all those investors and the tech activity in the SV area is a side effect of one big DoD's initiative: to build a world-class surveillance network with all the infra around it. They expressed this desire to spend trillions on this and a few companies who made it happen are now valued at 1-2 trillions. Attempts to replicate SV by "investing into startups" is like crafting a wooden airplane to summon goods.
T is indeed independent from R, but how do we know that F and R are also independent? Would theory fall apart if we try to model F as microscopic modulations of R?
I'm trying to look at R and F from the signal processing point of view: if we apply Fourier transform to both, we'd see that R is described by low frequency band (planetary scale distortions), while F would be ideally described by a high frequency band.
We'd use regular photons or electrons to produce the interference image (assuming they would "fit" in those micro-slits), while the gravitational waves would modulate the distance between the two slits. Your crystal lattice would be a generalization of my idea.
In the two black holes example, the gravitational wave oscillates at 50 Hz. Its spatial speed is irrelevant. This means that the distance between the two micro-slits would be modulated at 50 Hz with the micro-amplitude of that gravitational wave.
Let's say the distance between the two slits is L, it's modulated in the L0.9..L1.1 range at 50 Hz, the screen that captures the interference image is at 100L distance, to magnify the pattern 100x. This won't work if the modulation amplitude is L1e-60 or something on that scale, as we can't magnify the image 10^60 times.
Without leverage these negotiating techniques are empty bluff. I mean, they could help to get a 5k/year pay bump, but they won't get you from 150k to 750k. The really important ingredient is stakes, insider knowledge, network of high rank friends who help you behind the scenes. But once you have that, the negotiating skills will come naturally: even if you aren't as fluent in business-talk like the author, even if what you say sounds clumsy, the fluent and experienced negotiator on the other side of the table will quickly notice that lazy tricks don't work on you, that you see his bluff and most importantly that you actually have other options. In my experience, in many times my firm negotiating position ended up with offer being withdrawn (from reputable, not FANG, but very well known firms).
If R is the shape of space, is it fair to say that gravity waves from a black holes merger are large waves in R, like large waves in a lake we could surf on; while there are also tiny ripples that we describe with F? In other words, F is really R with large waves subtracted.
Sure, but what would actually happen in the experiment I've described? I admit that perhaps those gravity waves are so tiny that even a nanometer-scale double-slit device would be too large, but if we had some hypothetical material (not atom based with those fat electron orbitals), that we could construct a 0.001nm wide device with two 0.000001nm wide slits, would it produce the interference image?
Can we just use a variation of the double-slit experiment? Gravity waves modulate distance between two quantum-scale slits and that in turn changes the interference image, that can be captured at a relatively large distance to magnify the otherwise quantum-scale pattern.
I believe GoL is easily solvable by ML if the task was to find parameters of the update rules with the constraint that the rules are simple.
For example, if we were presented a highly sophisticated repetitive pattern and were tasked to figure the underlying tesselation rules that generate it, we would enumerate rulesets that we know already and then try to find parameters for them with the assumption that those parameters are simple.
Again, my point is that to solve GoL, the ML model needs to be given two things: 1) a few rulesets to choose from; 2) an upper limit on complexity of ruleset parameters.
That's a valid point, but if we think about it, what does the founder do with that instant $1M grant? Most likely the founder spreads this $1M over the next few years on employees and other expenses according to his plan, hoping to get the next, bigger, grant. In other words, there is no advantage of having the entire amount upfront (except maybe the lost possibility to invest into short term treasuries with tiny return).
The funny thing that all this might be funded by the big corps who don't really need any startups and competitors around: it's easier to invest 20-30 billions into destroying the reputation of the startup concept, than to continue buying them at 1-15 billions each.
I think time is quite liquid. Let's say I get 500k/year on my current job and someone asks me to join his company for peanuts, but with a good chunk of stock. We could calculate the difference between 500k and peanuts and say that instead of joining that company, I'd pay him this difference every year. That difference would be enough to hire a small team for a small salary, but with stock options. The problem that most founders have is the unspoken refusal to accept that my time is worth this much.
Yup, that's the reason I've turned down all startup offers so far and some of them offered 2-3%. They like to hand wave about how much these 50,000 shares are going to cost or how rich I'm surely going to be even after dilution of these 2-3%, but when I tell them point blank that with my current compensation, over the course of 4 years I'm going to lose at least $1M, and ask them what I would get for a $1M investment, they suddenly struggle to find words. The reality is that, once you reach this level of miniature wealth and competence (and that happens quickly), the only next step is to start your own company. Startups don't really see employees as partners.