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.
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.
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!
Socialising is still a very important part of games (eSports, dungeons and raids, Discord / TeamSpeak / Ventrilo, forums, guilds, etc), especially for MMOs.
Much more than chess which is mostly a individually played game whereas an MMO is a cooperative game.
> "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.
> 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.
In an ideal world (read: perfect information knowledge), this would lead to insurance being a bad deal for every consumer of it. In the theoretical position where insurance companies can accurately price each individual customer based on their habits, they will charge them exactly what they cost _plus_ a margin.
This is only useful for a consumer if they cannot access cash or a credit line to pay for a sudden large expense. Instead, insurance effectively becomes paying the credit line ahead of time.
> This is only useful for a consumer if they cannot access cash or a credit line to pay for a sudden large expense.
Isn't that the main point of insurance?
Insurance can also socially redistribute bad things. Which fair enough it is in practice a result of insurance but I don't think that's what it was invented for. And indeed the better the insurer's crystal ball the smaller this effect is.
Although in practice I don't think there ever will be a crystal ball good enough to make insurance a bad deal for everyone like that. You always have to insure against another driver being bad or just plain bad luck.
Again, that’s the point of insurance. Most of us will pay more in premiums than we ever get paid in claims. A few of us will avoid bankruptcy because insurance will pay out a claim we can’t otherwise afford either through cash or any line of credit we could get.
The trick is no one can know which side of the ledger we’ll fall on. You can be the world’s safest and best driver and still get t-boned by a driver with no assets and no insurance.
No, the point of buying insurance is to reduce your individual variance even though your average cost goes up. It's not an individual savings plan, but rather shared pooling of risk.
In a perfect information world, there is no shared pooling of risk. You are paying exactly what you will cost, plus margin. That is the point im trying to make.
By "perfect information" do you mean the ability to predict the future? Because that is what is necessary to make your statement true.
Because in general no, people buying insurance do not pay in what they will individually cost (plus margin). Rather most will be paying in much more than they will ever cost, whereas some will cost much more than they have, or ever will have, pay in. One total property loss or serious at-fault auto collision (say ~$400k) will dwarf a lifetime of premiums ($2k/year for 50 years?).
The point is that such things are rare, so most people will have zero of them over their lifetime. But even perfectly knowing the a priori chance that each person may suffer a catastrophic loss, you can't know which specific people it will be.
In an ideal world, such data harvesting would be illegal, with liability adhering to the executives pushing for and approving the initiative as well as any legal counsel involved. Acquiring the data should require explicit, truly informed, and revocable consent not buried in a bunch of BS and not required for the purchase of a vehicle or insurance.
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)
People should be free to do that. My objection is to the fact that currently just existing in modern society (in the US) means you're being spied on by everyone from the manufacturer of your tv to the grocery store, and huge amounts of your personal data is sold to anyone who wants it.
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.
True, but at least it would require the exiting party to not have any illusions about what they are doing. I'd be surprised to hear that most extension takeover bids are open about their plans.
My guess is that most extension takeovers happen because the developer was making no money from the extension, not a lot of money at their dayjob, maintaining the extension was sucking up all their free time and maybe they also got an unexpected bill or were hurting for cash.
Not that those are good reasons to sell out your users, but they’re the kinds of circumstances that you can easily imagine happening.
Nothing of that changes their desire to avoid selling to the worst abuser. What circumstances can do is making them sell despite that despite.
That's why it's so important to have a clean handover way that does not involve handing over credentials: it allows circumstantial sellers to pick a least bad buyer, if it exists. The more visible the existence of a clean path (as in "advertised in the UI vs getting someone at Google on the phone") is the more difficult it becomes to pretend that the shady path is clean. There might even be some "conscience arbitrage", perhaps unintended: buyers who buy through regular handover mechanism, with a believable story of confidence in being able to make clean money (which they may or may not believe themselves), but who then sell dirty. Less money for the original dev, true, but at least there's one handover on record, eroding trust.
Of course not, but there's a big difference between persistent bad raises and a single one.
Bad terms are raised due to bad founders (not knowing better) but more likely bad company health. (That can include trying to raise 50M series A as we saw in past 2 years.)
A healthy company with good founders (or lawyers) should be able to avoid issues.
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
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.
I've thought about that kind of system before, and it's an interesting approach but it doesn't fully protect against bad actors. E.g. what if the founder raises $5m, puts it into a bank account, moves to Hawaii, and then sells it for $4.9m in 5 years?
There are some ways to make this work, I think (but I agree that time based vesting wouldn't work for the reasons you suggest). I've most commonly seen structures that contemplate something like this referred to as either a "bleed off" or a "kick out".
Bleed Off: set up a participating preferred with 1x liq pref and bleed off between investors A-Zx MOIC. In practice the preferred investors would participate by taking their 1x off the top, then sharing pro rata in proceeds. As the investors implied MOIC reaches the bleed off MOIC range, their participating preference would bleed off or be reduced ratably in the bleed off range until the participating portion approaches 0 (and eventually investor converts to common).
Kick Out: set up as a participating preferred with a 1x liq pref and a Ax kick out. In practice, investors would take their 1x then participate pro rata up until they Ax their capital. After Ax, the investor would collect no additional proceeds unless they convert to common.
I've seen both used, but the latter probably more appropriately works for instances in which there is a bid ask spread and founders want to solve for valuation (with the belief that they'll blow through the preference anyway and it won't matter) and investors want to shift the returns curves to higher probability (lower) equity values.
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.
Whether or not they're discounting the possibility of a prolonged period with little growth, the fundamental issue is that this is essentially unknowable, at least to your average investor. The 2 issues I see with this line of thinking (i.e. comparing it to the Nikkei):
1. You wouldn't want to dump 100% of your money in an S&P 500 index fund. There is a reason to diversify.
2. The point of dollar cost averaging is essentially to reduce the risk of dumping all of your money in (or out) at a bad time. Taking your Nikkei example, I'd be curious to see if you looked at, say, investing the same amount of money on the first of the month over a 2 or 3 year period. The amount of time you'd be under water over the past 4 decades would be much less than just looking at any single instance in time.
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.
Thanks! Curious, how/where did you get the data for this analysis? Also, don't know if you included dividend reinvestment - that has a huge overall impact.
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)
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?
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.