Calling out women separately and grouping them with "freshman" is pretty messed up. No one mentioned gender and women could be part of seniority.
Pretty sure he meant "freshman or freshwoman"
Readit Newsconnoredel commented on The Case of the Mysterious Date-Nut Bars (2007) seriouseats.com/2007/02/m... · Posted by u/elil17
I moved to SF two years ago after living in NYC for 4 years. When people here ask me if I miss New York, I tell them I miss aspects of it -- the bars, restaurants, nightlife, art, fashion. But increasingly it's the little things about daily life in New York that I miss. I saw a video on Reddit of someone doing something dumb in the subway (a daily occurrence), and I almost cried. Similarly, this story choked me up. I had also seen those bars. I always figured they were meant for some other anonymous New Yorkers, not for me.
connoredel commented on An office building in Seattle that doesn't have air conditioning kuow.org/post/modern-seat... · Posted by u/dsr12
This is why paperweights exist. Office buildings all used to have ventilator shafts which effectively created lower pressure in the interior of the building. In order to make it work, you needed to have your office window open AND an interior window open (typically above your office door, so you could still keep your door closed).
As you can imagine, there was a lot of wind whipping through offices. This is why the paperweight was invented -- and also why no one uses paperweights anymore.
connoredel commented on Why it's hard to answer “when to raise a series A” blog.ycombinator.com/when... · Posted by u/akharris
TLDR
"...this doesn’t provide the sort of certainty I know founders want in answering the question of when to raise. However, I think that knowing that there is no clean answer is important because it provides a framework for thinking through the relative advantages you have when thinking about a raise."
In my experience, finding a framework when you're searching for a solution is not a consolation prize. When the consolation prize is the only prize, it feels like the first place trophy -- and it is, at that time. The solution doesn't actually exist yet, but now you have the tool to find it.
About a year ago, I had this inescapable feeling that I was spending my time poorly (not daily productivity but on a larger scale), and it was causing me a lot of anxiety. Then I read How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I walked away with a framework for finding out what I want to be productive towards, even though that thing -- whatever it is -- was no more clear to me. My anxiety disappeared, which is what I wanted all along!
It has been drilled into me that the #1 rule of investing is proper diversification. If that is true, startup equity kind of goes against that grain? It's asking to place all the eggs (your productive time) into one basket. That's not much different than a salary except much higher risk without diversification.
Even ycombinator does not fall for that, they invest in thousands of companies and they have a lot less to lose than many employees.
Here's the way I look at it. Once your 401k or other retirement savings are on track to give you a comfortable retirement, that's like an option -- you are effectively guaranteed a minimum lifestyle. Within this bucket, you should certainly be balancing the expected value and risk "by the book" (diversifying, etc.).
How do you increase the value of an option? Increase the volatility. Continuing to minimize risk is not going to meaningfully change your lifestyle. Your call option already protects you on the downside, so you should try to blow it out on the upside, and take a risk.
You can also view your experience and skills (and the minimum salary it allows you to command in the market) as the same thing. After a certain point, try for something that will meaningfully change your lifestyle. Worst case, you can fall back to that floor salary.
The key insight is that you are unlikely to be experiencing the thing at a special time in its life. This is the Copernican principle (which J. Richard Gott uses in his version of this that Wikipedia mentions), which was basically "we (on Earth) are unlikely to occupy a special place in the solar system -- it's much more likely that some other object is the center."
Gott says you can be 95% confident that you're experiencing the thing in the middle 95% of its life. Let's say x is its life so far. If x is 2.5% of its eventual life (one extreme of the middle 95%), then the thing still has 39x to go. If you're at 97.5% (the other extreme), then the thing only has x/39 left. So the 95% confidence interval is between x/39 and 39x
Of course, 5% of the time you actually are experiencing something at the very beginning or very end of its life (outside the middle 95%), which is a unique thing. But that's why it's a confidence interval < 100% :)
I prefer this form of the principle a lot more than "the expected life is equal to 2X, always."
Side note: I took J. Richard Gott's class in college called The Universe. Maybe not the best use of a credit in hindsight, but we studied some really interesting things like this.
connoredel commented on The Average Student Does Not Exist blog.gradescope.com/the-a... · Posted by u/ibrahima
There is an analogy to clustering (an unsupervised learning technique) here.
Take the simple case of 2 dimensions (each observation is plotted in 2D space) with possible values of 0-10. Let's say the extreme (far from average) space is within 5% of the border. The total extreme area is (10x10)-(9x9) = 19 (i.e. 19%). Now add a 3rd dimension. The extreme "volume" in 3d space is now (10x10x10)-(9x9x9) = 271 (i.e. 27%). You can see where this is trending. Add enough dimensions, and every observation is now "extreme." They become so far apart that each observation almost deserves its own cluster, and you lose any idea of similarity.
Back to this particular article: when you _add_ (or average) all of the dimensions -- like you do on an exam -- suddenly they are close again.
connoredel commented on Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month blog.oldgeekjobs.com/from... · Posted by u/johnwheeler
They do it because it works.
That's a hilarious comment, and a good point. But you can tell when your ad blocker is messing with site functionality beyond just blocking ads (i.e., the false positives your parent comment mentions). And at a certain point, this is a differentiator among the ad blockers.
So people are using it as a store of value, rather than a medium of exchange? This would count against it being used just to buy drugs etc wouldn't it?