thanks for hosting the model! i created an account to try it out, you started emailing me with “important notice: low account balance - action required” and now it seems like there’s no way for me to unsubscribe or delete my account. is that the case? thanks!
Yep, very odd, my guess would be this was sent to the reporter by their comms contact at Softbank and they literally copy/pasted it.
For context, here’s the full paragraph. The positive framing (“a GAIN”, and “significantly less…”) makes me think this came from someone spinning on Softbank’s behalf.
> For your piece, the Vision Funds actually posted a GAIN for the quarter of $0.8 billion, including shared assets such as its ARM holdings. Stripping out shared assets, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million) — significantly less than the 2,919 billion yen loss a year ago ($20 billion).
A daily whimsical rhyming word game that uses generative AI. We’ve got a pretty dedicated base of users by this point through other channels but it’s never really taken off on HN. A great case for generative AI augmenting rather than replacing human creativity IMO :)
It’s fine to view the hiring process from recruiters’ perspective, but man, some parts of this article.
> The job she posted listed its selling points — the business had 400 percent growth a year, the backing of a legendary venture capitalist, no limit to personal vacation days, full coverage of employee health-care premiums and the option to work remote or locally.
> Dyba estimates that she sent the listing to about 75 prospective hires and received back maybe five responses, three of which were either a brief “no thanks” or the simple declination of her InMail message. A declination — that’s LinkedIn language for “Please, stop throwing all these jobs at me with employer-paid health-insurance premiums and unlimited vacation time.”
Sorry, what? As an in-demand tech work, I feel incredibly fortunate to be compensated far above many others who work harder at in my view more significant work (e.g. teachers, or nurses). I would certainly not defend tech compensation relative to many other sectors of our economy.
At the same time, there has been an explosion in value creation and wealth in technology over the past few years (from an already high baseline). I think part of what we’re seeing is a larger percentage of that value flow to software engineers and other technology workers. And still that percentage of the overall value created pales in comparison to the value that’s accruing to tech executives and venture capitalists.
When I read passages like the one quoted above (which by the way is written by the reporter! not even quoting someone), it’s as if the article is written by a tech exec or VC who’s outraged that they have to spend an additional 1% of their market cap paying engineers.
The article mentions high gas fees impacting refunds, and I was wondering what the extent of that impact was. The article doesn’t answer that question, but it does link to a tweet which links to a page of stats about ConstitutionDAO that does: https://dune.xyz/ilemi/ConstitutionDAO-Funding-Tracker
55.78% of funds returned! Truly an incredible accomplishment, and not in a positive way.
(edit: On second thought, does the 44% of original funds remaining include people who haven’t tried getting refunds? Curious if there’s an estimate of ETH lost purely to transaction fees.)
Yea, if you don’t request a refund, you don’t get it so yes, that % includes people who haven’t requested a refund.
Also, this token became a “meme coin” in the weeks that followed the auction loss, returning something like 10x or more on Uniswap. More sophisticated users traded their tokens there, rather than going through the official refund process.
Another reason people wouldn't request a refund would be that they would actually lose money by doing so if their original spend was under 200$ because of "gas fees".
I might have the query wrong, but I am seeing 0.8% of redeemed fees were lost to transaction fees. I'm sure someone could also generate something that looks better into the effects of redeemtion size & whether people are just not redeeming because too much would be lost in txn fees.
Anyway here's the query:
```
WITH
burnt as (
SELECT
SUM(gas_used * (gas_price + priority_fee_per_gas))/1e18 as eth_burnt
FROM ethereum."transactions"
WHERE SUBSTRING("data",1,4) = '\x3015a5b5' --redeem
AND "to" = '\xd569d3cce55b71a8a3f3c418c329a66e5f714431'
AND SUBSTRING("data", 37,32) = '\x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000024' --constitutiondao projectid ),
),
returned as (
SELECT
SUM(bytea2numeric(SUBSTRING("data", 101,32))/1e18) as returned
FROM ethereum."transactions"
WHERE SUBSTRING("data",1,4) = '\x3015a5b5' --redeem
AND "to" = '\xd569d3cce55b71a8a3f3c418c329a66e5f714431'
AND SUBSTRING("data", 37,32) = '\x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000024' --constitutiondao projectid
AND "success"
)
SELECT (SELECT * FROM burnt)/(SELECT * FROM returned)*100
```
Thanks for leaving the post up and for responding here. I’m curious if and how your approach to writing has changed since you wrote the piece. What strikes me about the piece is the certainty and lack of caveats in it, especially given it’s about an area in which I assume you don’t have any particular expertise (blood testing — please correct me if I’m mistaken).
One takeaway from the Theranos saga for me was that the type of fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes can have very real consequences on people’s lives beyond some rich investors losing their money. The stories about people receiving incorrect test results, the irresponsibility with which Theranos ran their lab, not to mention Holmes using David Boies to attack the brave whistleblowers in my mind go far beyond the “fake it till you make it” / “mistakes were made” framing of the case.
If I had played a role in supporting that type of behavior, however small, I would probably have a different takeaway than “got this specific example wrong! but my core point was correct”.
This has been my experience as well. At a prior job, we experimented with deferring reporting/tracking functions until the browser was idle, and then firing the remaining tracking events on unload and found that a non-trivial number of events were just dropped (I believe due to this issue).
Funny, because that was almost exactly my use-case as well. I guess sending network requests during the onload event doesn't work well, but maybe for local things it works better, who knows.
If I were you, I’d go with Vanguard index funds, which have the lowest fees in the industry.
I would pick a fund/funds that matches my risk target/preferences (e.g. equity funds riskier than bonds, small cap riskier than large cap/overall market, foreign riskier than domestic). If I had a very large risk tolerance, I might also allocate a small percentage of your portfolio to single name stocks.
Lastly, I’d just keep in mind the risk you’re taking with your investments. A five year time horizon doesn’t strike me as particularly long or compatible with having a high risk tolerance. Investing in equities can give you high returns over a long time horizon, but their volatility means that you can have large negative returns over a short time period (e.g. the S&P had a max decline from its peak of almost 60% during the 2008-9 financial crisis).
(Standard disclaimer about investing being risky, please do your own research as well.) Good luck!
Fund manager here -- I _also_ recommend going with Vanguard index funds, but a five year horizon is _very_ short. Many of the top investors world-wide think there is going to be a relatively imminent crash, an index fund (if it were me I would do S&P500) and you'll be fine in the long run but the short term (5 years is short) is very up in the air.
I'm curious why one wouldn't just move 100% into cash if you are expecting a crash. The S&P500 index fund would go down for a while in the case of a crash, right? I'm struggling with this now so any insight would be helpful.
> I'm curious why one wouldn't just move 100% into cash if you are expecting a crash. The S&P500 index fund would go down for a while in the case of a crash, right? I'm struggling with this now so any
If you knew exactly when the crash was going to happen, yes, that's what you should do. It's very hard to predict though, since you have to be accurate multiple times:
(1) When the crash starts
(2) How long it's going to last
(3) Whether it's inflationary or deflationary
You could for example have a crash in real terms (inflationary), for example, where cash is worse than the market - let's say the market goes up 5%, but inflation runs at 15%: that's actually a drop of 10% in real value, but cash actually drops 15% in real value, so stocks are still "the better loser" in that case.
In a nominal (deflationary) crash, it is better to go to cash, but you still have problems (1) and (2) to deal with that make timing things very difficult. You could, for example have said in April 1998 that "there was going to be a crash in tech soon" - and you'd be right, but only after sitting on your hands through 2 more years of craziness and missing out on 150% more gains before the crash actually came. Most people wouldn't be able to handle that.
Putting away a little every month will get you better returns than having cash on the sidelines waiting for the dip, even if you know when the dip will happen ahead of time:
Of course you don't know when the dip is going to come. So you have to pull out some time before (close to) the exact day that things start tanking. And then you have to get in on the exact day of the bottom, because the 'best days' for returns are often soon after the 'worst' days. And if you miss just a handful of the best days, your returns tank:
Of course once people are (usually completely) out of the market, they have a hard time jumping back in psychologically, and there's an opportunity cost to sitting on the sidelines:
I don't believe anyone can time the market continually well. The book "Anti-Fragile" by Nicholas Taleb does a good job of illustrating the idea that you want a portfolio that will _increase_ by randomness. I do have a large percentage of the portfolio in anti-fragile areas (a type of hedging).
While I'm certain a crash will happen, it might be another year, which could have a ton of gains in it, or it could be tomorrow.
yup; that's the entire point of index funds: to make a healthy return over a long-enough time horizon
the bogleheads love talking about a four-headed fund to better diversify against risk: 50% index, 25% bonds, 12.5% international indices, 12.5% REITs. that's how I have my IRA and 401(k) set up, and it's worked well over the last few years. (My IRA is a little more speculative (some shares in TSLA, some in LCID), but most of the funds are split up this way.
Indexing does not remove systematic risk as another commenter mentioned, but there are things one can do to help deal with timing, such as dollar-cost-averaging.
Agreed. Set your asset allocation. Buy a small number of diversified funds with low fees. Rebalance once per year to match your asset allocation in response to market fluctuations.
Vanguard funds are excellent at this. Fidelity are good too.
For Vanguard, Total Stock Market, Total Bond Market, Total International Equity. Those three funds based on a mix catering to your own risk tolerance and circumstances and you’re done.
Or you can go with an investment management company that will charge you 1-2% of assets under management, put you in 15 high fee funds that they rebalance you in monthly to generate not only buy/sell fees but also they mark up the price of your buys and mark down the price of your sells. So many horrible companies out there.
Seconding the recommendation for Vanguard funds. And yes, five years is not long enough to amortize away a crash or substantial downturn, so if by "large risk" you mean "I don't mind not getting my original investment back" you might be fine, but if by "large risk" you just mean "I'm not going to panic at a little volatility" then you probably want something safer on a five-year timeline.
Over a sufficiently long term timeline for certain types of investments, the latter often turns into the former. Total-market stock funds on a 30-year timeline are volatile, but are unlikely to lose your money in any scenario in which money continues to have value. Total-market stock funds on a 5-year timeline have a substantial risk of getting out less than you put in, just from an ordinary downturn, let alone a major crash.
(I agree that the term "risk" often conflates a variety of things, and in this context should primarily mean "risk of losing your investment" rather than "day-to-day volatility".)
Risk is uncertainty, it’s not about loss or gain. If I lever my portfolio 2x, I’m taking on twice the risk but if I’m in the money I’ll make twice as much.
I want to echo the other comments here that low expense ratio (<0.25%) funds from Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, etc... are all great stable investments.
My time horizon is longer than 5 years, and I buy broad market index funds split up as follows: 55% US large cap (e.g. VIIIX, VTSAX, SWTSX), 15% US mid cap (e.g. VMCPX), 10% US small cap (e.g. VSCPX), and 20% international (e.g. VTSNX, SWISX, VXUS).
I also highly recommend dollar cost averaging. i.e. buying a fixed amount of your portfolio at fixed periods. I have my bank do this automatically every 2 weeks. The benefit of dollar cost averaging is (1) it takes the emotion out of investing, and (2) over a long time window, more of your assets will be purchased at a low prices than high prices (because you're buying a fixed dollar amount of assets every N days, fewer you will buy fewer assets when prices are high and more assets when prices are low).
since we're all here, what's the 2021 take on dividend funds? it seems nice to get a little paycheck every quarter in addition to your investment going up...
Seems like NL. Do you need the income from dividends? If not, the "growth" sectors have more total growth compared to dividend stocks/etfs.
Note that dividends are also taxed at the company level. So Apple pays USA 15% and then you also get taxed your 15% pre-tax. This doesn't happen when not distributing the dividend.
Congrats to HashiCorp for their IPO and for building an awesome suite of tools.
I attended a Papers We Love meetup back in 2015 where Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp's CTO, gave the main talk on Bloom filters and HyperLogLog (interested parties can watch a recording of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c). It was an awesome, very educational talk (on a topic I was previously unfamiliar with), and based on my very limited impression, Armon struck me as a really smart, intellectually curious and nice person. Great to see Armon/Hashicorp achieve such a huge, positive milestone.
