Aren't their secondary markets for this? My wife gets offers constantly for her options even though they're not public yet and the offers are higher then what she was awarded them at. Maybe it's scams? we never took any of them up on it.
Yes, you might need approval, but if there's regular secondary sale does it matter?
> OpenAI has finalized a secondary share sale totaling $6.6 billion, allowing current and former employees to sell stock at a record $500 billion valuation, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Again, that doesn’t make the assets particularly liquid. They did this and that’s fine, but if they hadn’t done this you’d be stuck with a piece of paper even after the lockup period ends.
Until traditional RSUs that once they are vested you can sell them, with few exceptions
Indeed, it's not guaranteed. But now it seems to be expected for those large private companies to unlock employee equity at regular intervals (I'm not sure it was the case 5-10y ago).
The article talks about averages, but what I want know is the median. The usual situation, and I have zero reason to believe OpenAI is different, is that stock options are top heavy leaning heavily toward executives.
I want to know rank and file salaries as opposed to stock options
Business & back office employee salaries are standard but not impressive. Similarly, stock grants are better than most places but not wildly high unless you're in specific engineering & research functions. This is the same at Anthropic, too (I recently interviewed for director level business roles at both).
I think the simpler answer (and thus more likely) is that statistics education in the US is very bad (they should teach stats in high school, not calculus), and reporters just don't understand it. And the ones who do, believe (correctly) that their audience does not understand it.
They do, but you sell forward contracts instead. This is perfectly legal, and the approach I've seen. There are a few companies, and even funds that will engage in this, in an effort to attain future upside.
The various valuations you see for OpenAI are overwhelmingly based on the prices offered for shares in their employee tender offers so I’d say for OpenAI and SpaceX at a minimum (which has a similar setup for its employees) we have a pretty good idea of what employees are getting for their equity compensation if they so choose.
They've changed the laws recently which makes it far easier - I believe you'd still need to be accredited but for most of HN, that's a low bar. For OpenAI specifically, they've allowed employees to participate in the funding rounds and they did a separate tender offer with Softbank to provide liquidity to early employees as well;
Though you are now buying into the Rogan worldview with his show, which is its own set of issues, namely he’s routinely proven that he’s unwilling to press people on real concrete issues or criticisms if it means he might be in even a small amount of hot water with whatever in group he’s catering to
You cannot update the registration on your car if you have outstanding fines (at least in CA, but probably in most states).
Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.
In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.
>In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.
Because there isn't support for the iron fisted rules enforcement a lot of HN favors and if the .gov just did it anyway the people would elect politicians who promise to reign that in. Keeping the power on the books and rarely using it is what benefits .gov the most so it's what they do.
the issue is that the HOV lanes are currently full of people who have fast pass but just set it to say they have 3 in the car.
i truly see enough people doing this when i commute that at $500/ticket i could cover my entire state income tax in 1-2 days. seems obviously economical to enforce this.
Wouldn’t fast efficient light rail been generally better? From a social and economic perspective it would be more efficient. The real problem with that only tends to be political, namely there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure
I think effective light rail is really hard to get right in the US. Think about Houston, its already a a massive asphalt parking lot nightmare, its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer. It simply won't work in most of the US. This is not a build it and they will come situation.
> its not very walk-able, it gets hot and humid in the summer.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Having spent time outside in both Tokyo and Houston in July, Tokyo might be slightly cooler but the humidity makes it more unbearable than Houston (even though Houston is already very humid).
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
Houstonites do not want to live in dense cities. “Just live like East Asians” doesn’t work when the people you are talking to despise the lifestyle of East Asians.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
Yes, they'd rather spend 2 hours a day commuting and then grow fat and die young from heart disease. And before anyone says anything: I used to live in Houston. Truly an awful, awful place to live. It's not even a concrete jungle, it's more like a concrete prairie.
I'm going to blow your mind: people are different! I have lived in several cities in the PNW and New England and now live in Houston metro by choice. It is far easier, more efficient, and more economical for my family which are our priorities. (Also infinitely more diverse, which is a big plus, but doesn't really have anything to do with urban planning). We like it a lot here.
Houston can be very cheap, but it comes with the steep cost of having to live in Houston.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I live in the area and agree it's quite miserable in some ways. Anything inside 610 is effectively a no-go zone for people who have the capacity to participate on HN. The entire point of Houston is that it's approximately the cheapest place you can live that still has things like an international airport and an Apple Store.
You don’t have to agree with them, but yea, that is legitimately the way they want to spend their life. I think that’s the issue with these urbanism discussions. Your preferences are so different that you can’t even comprehend them so you end up talking past each other.
And I can respect that - the problem is that urbanism, at it's core, is an organization problem. It internetly involves other people, regardless of if any one of them wants it to or not.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
Of course there are trade offs. Suburbanites are just happy to spend time commuting in exchange for a big house with a big yard. You are still talking like they don’t realize the tradeoff they’re making instead of accepting that they’ve considered that and come to the conclusion that it’s worth it. They think living in apartments with no personal space sucks more than commuting.
I'm talking like that because even you're not understanding the tradeoff.
The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.
But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.
When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.
So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.
Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.
I lived in Chicago for 30 years. I didnt own a car for a decade. I’ve been to east Asia. There are massive downsides to living in cities even when done well. People in Tokyo live in tiny spaces compared to American suburbanites. In the parts of Chicago where you don’t really need a car no one has a yard. Public parks are not the same as private yards. People in New York who aren’t Uber wealthy live lifestyles that I personally can not stand. I got out of nyc as soon as I could because I hated living there. Seriously nyc is by far my least favorite of places I have lived. Going back to anything like that is unimaginable for me. I don’t like Houston either but I understand why people do and it’s not because they’re deluding themselves or because they’re close minded to the wonders of urbanism.
Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
Lots of healthy people that live in Houston too. Your lack of being able to see that the world is diverse and people have different preferences is a shame.
Look, I'm not looking down at your life choices, I'm just saying it probably sucks and you would probably prefer it if it wasn't like that.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
I live in NYC and for the majority of my trips the subway gets me there faster than a car would.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
OK, you live in the one and only city in the entire USA that is dense enough to make the subway a better option.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
You're welcome to try to Trail of Tears everybody into your preferred walled cities, but the attempt would go badly for you.
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
> Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
i am pro-rail and also pro toll/congestion pricing. i think we need to be realistic that rail is not a solution to all of our problems, and also not really feasible in many parts of the US until we fix the union+environmental review problem.
>there is a strange aversion to properly built public infrastructure
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
In the medical scenario, having medical workers sit around waiting for the train after they've driven to the station would be a problem if their presence is needed quickly. Or did you also want everyone to cram into high rises clustered around stations?
Idk, man, Europe and like... half of Asia seem to have figured this out, and their healthcare outcomes are better. But sure, this contrived pro-car scenario is why trains don't work.
Better way to look at it: why are people so afraid of losing their job, and how do we reasonably remove the fear of losing one? Denmark may provide some good guidance here, as they have a good balance between social welfare and protections and fostering a robust business environment
I suspect a major way for the U.S. would be the one mentioned in the article: make it so that losing your job doesn't mean losing your health insurance. That's a major additional stressor, particularly if someone loses their job because of an illness.
Of course, there's about a negative one thousand percent chance of something like that passing in the current political climate.
If you believe a person can drive another person suicide through how they act, I don’t see how this would be any different, especially since they both rely on power asymmetry. If we don’t want to hook MongoDB responsible in some manner than we need to remove that asymmetry
Define "drive". Correlation is not causation. It's difficult to anticipate the trigger for a particular action or choice when other circumstances or stressors may have more significant factors that contributed to the decision. After all, many have lost jobs without ending their own lives and many have killed themselves despite high-profile, gainful employment. Instead, holding MongoDB responsible risks incentivizing this company and others to turn away and preemptively furlough anyone remotely approaching the statistical profile of a suicide risk.
NLP, natural language processing for the unfamiliar. LLMs are tailor made for this work particularly well. They're great tokenizers of structured rules. Its why they're also halfway decent at generating code in some situations.
I think the fall down you see is in logical domains of that rely on relative complexity and contextual awareness in a different way. I've had less luck, for example, having AI systems parse and break down a spreadsheet with complex rules. Thats simply recent memory
Healthcare, like real estate, is a dysfunctional marketplace lacking real competition
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