Hacker News Reader

ytxon Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

ytxon A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments

Specifically meant in-person chess clubs as opposed to only playing lichess from home for hours every day. I'd probably have a less negative view of "time wasting" if video games were played more in-person too.

I have fond memories of LAN parties growing up, where socializing was as big a part as the actual gaming - it's not like we were sitting there harvesting wood for hours on end!

ytxon Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

I wholeheartedly agree that the dark patterns around consent are atrocious. But I also think hn is probably biased in its valuation of an individual's data.

If companies offered say a $50/month discount on car insurance premiums in exchange for gathering data, I imagine a large proportion of people would indeed opt in to that (setting aside issues of selection bias or trust in this ideal world)

ytxon A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments

But in terms of other benefits of that time spent, (imo) they're probably somewhat better than micro-transaction-gambling-mobile games (or just plain gambling), but likely worse than a sports league or chess club.

Not sure how it'd compare against similar amounts of youtube/netflix though.

ytxon Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

  > "More specifically, automakers are selling access to the data to Lexis Nexis, which is then crafting “risk scores” insurance companies then use to adjust rates. Usually upward"

In an ideal world, such data-harvesting might lead to cheaper prices / a more efficient insurance market - which would make the privacy loss worth considering from a trade-off standpoint, at least in theory.

Unfortunately it's instead likely to just lead to higher margins for insurance companies. And the only way to compete would be to harvest more data for better predictions.

ytxon Detect when your installed Chrome extensions have changed owners

Also there's not much practical defense to an unscrupulous extension author "exiting" with an under-the-table password transfer or "oops we got hacked" to a shady buyer.

<tinfoil hat> One could imagine a nefarious state actor offering the author of e.g. uBlock $XX million to get access to a lot of browsers. Not sure about the economics, but more niche extensions could probably be targeted for a lot cheaper.

ytxon Leaving LinkedIn

Especially if he wasn't rewarded commensurately for that feat.

ytxon Sell for half a billion and get nothing (2021)

But is there any recourse to the founders telling you one thing and then raising differently later because "circumstances have changed?"

ytxon Sell for half a billion and get nothing (2021)

Right, I suspect many people (including me) wouldn't even know what terms look up to research such things. I get a lot of my knowledge by osmosis from the hn comment section, for better or worse :P

ytxon Sell for half a billion and get nothing (2021)

Very enlightening thanks! I wonder if there is or could be some notion of "vesting" over time of the investment such that (1) could not happen. So if the founder tried to sell tomorrow, the investor would get back 1x, but that 1x decays to 0.2x over 5 years or something.

But I guess VCs generally have the leverage and wouldn't want such terms.

ytxon Money bubble

https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical...

I did not - adding an optimistic 2% dividend didn't change much for the S&P, but slightly reduced the underwater counts for the Nikkei (max 23, average ~7.5)

ytxon Money bubble

I don't have monthly data, but as an approximation here's a rough test where you make a one time investment of $1000, either all at once, or equally spaced over 2 or 5 years. This is simulated starting at each year from 1985 to 2005, and we count the number of years underwater starting 5 years after the first year (after $1000 has been put in for all 3 "strategies") up until 2023.

  S&P:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean    0.7      0.8      0.7
  std     1.8      1.5      1.1
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max     8.0      6.0      3.0

  Nikkei:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean   11.4     11.5     11.8
  std     9.1      9.5      9.4
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max    29.0     29.0     28.0

So investing at once, the max number of years underwater for the S&P was 8, versus 3 when "dca"ing over 5 years. The average number of years underwater (averaged over when you would've invested) is quite low, while for the Nikkei all metrics look much worse.

ytxon Money bubble

My knee-jerk reaction is to point out that "even if you bought the S&P at the height of the dotcom bubble, the annualized return over the past 24 years was ~5.5% (not including dividends)"

And while I think this line of thinking is still more correct than not, I wonder how much I (and a lot of other folks in the US) are discounting the possibility of a prolonged period without growth.

Despite shocks like in 2000 and 2008, the S&P has spent very little time "underwater" over the past 50 years. But that's not the case if you look at something like the Nikkei, which took until this year to get back to its 1990 peak.

ytxon Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

I'm curious what would've happened had the bill been for 10k or 1k? Would it still have been reduced, would OP have paid instead of posting on reddit/hn, would it have gotten as much attention?

ytxon What a major solar storm could do

Perhaps that's what people are actually reading the new yorker for :P

ytxon Ending the Ivy League's Tax Dodge

Fair, by that metric it is indeed 4-5x "easier" to get into UVA/Michigan than Harvard/MIT. But it's also undeniable that former still excludes the large majority of applicants. And if everyone in America suddenly wanted to start going to UVA, and its admission rate dropped precipitously, would it not then also fit the definition of being "elitist"?

ytxon Ending the Ivy League's Tax Dodge

Every institution with a limited number of slots is exclusionary. Berkeley's admit rate is around 15%, 20% for Michigan and UVA, versus Harvard/MIT around 5%, so in terms of "excluding" the vast majority of applicants, there doesn't seem to be much difference.

ytxon Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

One relevant question is would the fired person have been better off had they not been hired or the job didn't exist in in the first place? It's far from clear to me, but admittedly doesn't soften the blow either way.

ytxon Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

We've got about ~200-2000 years of rationality and ~200k-2m years of "outgroup bad"

ytxon Yale will again require standardized test scores for admission

since we're not talking causality, maybe it's students' future success that predicts parents level of educational attainment!

ytxon Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

> Security measures deter criminals, they can never stop them.

Right, but in practice deterrence and incentives can be much more effective (from a cost and practical standpoint). I imagine the government would have a much harder time stopping people from randomly chaining vehicles than tracking stolen ones. There just doesn't happen to much incentive for the former.

ytxon Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

I think it's partially a size/scale problem. If 1000 people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of an unethical actor might be low, and normative ethics may be enough. But if 1 million people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of at least 1 bad actor is high, and laws/enforcement/deterrents must be enacted, even if the baseline ethical rate is still high.

ytxon Stable pseudonyms create a more civil environment than real names: study (2021)

Anonymity isn't the underlying cause of hostile behavior, it's the expectation that you will not interact or need help from the person with whom you are having a negative interaction. Cooperation is evolutionarily successful because of repeated, mutually beneficial interactions.

This is antithetical to much of the internet, and anonymity is definitely a factor, but it's also just what happens when you interact with a much larger amount of people, since the chances of repeated, meaningful interactions is much lower. I would posit that road-rage would decrease if you knew that you would be driving behind/next to the same people every day - in fact, you would probably end up with some form of cooperative driving!

ytxon The wealthy are cutting the line at the airport, Disney World and ski resorts

I think part of the problem is that value of their ticket is degraded because of the longer wait times. For someone unable or unwilling to pay $$$ for skip-the-line tickets, it would perhaps be preferable for all tickets to cost $$, but remain "fair."

At the end of the day it's a simple supply-demand problem, and prices probably should have gone up anyway if lines are getting longer. It's just that businesses seem to find it more profitable to charge extra for premium tickets versus raising all ticket prices.

ytxon The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though).

I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).

So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.

ytxon The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)