bzax · HackerTrans

29 days agodiscuss

You could observe future random numbers by taking combat actions, and then reset to the start of the fight and play a line which consumes fewer random numbers in order to manipulate your card rewards. Maybe you could generate the card reward at the start of the fight, but what if they play a card which impacts the card reward, e.g. by creating an extra card reward.

bzax

3 months agodiscuss

Well, once you've derived unary exp and ln you can get subtraction, which then gets you unary negation and you have addition.

bzax

7 months agodiscuss

It doesn't mean anything. The point is that the language of lean, and its proof derivation system, are able to express (and prove) statements that do not correspond to any meaningful mathematics.

bzax

2 years agodiscuss

I feel obliged to mention that this does feature prominently in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. The single most important piece of infrastructure on Mars is a space elevator, but not everyone on the planet is happy with how the owners of the space elevator are running things.

bzax

2 years agodiscuss

https://www.osha.gov/hexavalent-chromium

bzax

2 years agodiscuss

It sure would be great if they just owned the supplier outright and could align incentives that way.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

Not only does Southwest exclusively fly Boeing aircraft, they exclusively fly 737s, which enables their unusual routing style. Essentially every pilot and crew at Southwest can fly any aircraft the company has for them. Presumably this gives Boeing a strong incentive to keep making new 737s that push the engineering envelope, instead of making a new narrowbody aircraft.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

Not just any two couples, one couple was her ex-husband's parents...

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

I should admit I'm being very generous to Peters here - I came to the conclusion that this is what he means only because the math of ergodicity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory#Ergodic_theorem...) talks a lot about "except on a set of measure zero". He provides no explanation of how he moves from "the time average of values in a particular run of the process" (which is ergodicity) to "what does a typical process round do, with probability 1" (which is perhaps what someone computing a utility function cares about).

I asked a friend who is an econ professor "Why does this Peters guy explain this so poorly" and his response was more or less, yes, all of economics has been wondering that too since he first published his Nature Physics paper on this a decade ago.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

The expected value of this distribution goes up with every iteration, there is no such Kelly point. You could try this with

heads: double your money tails: lose all your money

in which case the expected value is always $1, as you have a 1/2^n chance of having $2^n dollars after n rounds, and 0 otherwise.

The point of discussing ergodicity here, however, is whether you can describe the behavior of the iterated distribution deterministically if you exclude a portion of that distribution which has measure zero.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

I believe the entire point of the ergodicity question here is "If you apply this process n times, with n approaching infinity, obviously the result may depend on what point in the n-times iterated distribution you sample, but if you choose a volume of vanishingly small measure to exclude, can you make a single concrete statement about what the process is doing without taking an expected value over the different outcomes"

And the answer is yes - with probability approaching 1 as n increases (ie excluding a portion of the distribution whose measure decreases to 0), the random process matches a deterministic process which is described by "you lose 5% each round".

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

The "average" of the distribution goes up as you increase the number of rounds, but the probability that you get an average or above value when you sample that distribution once goes to zero as the number of rounds increases.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

If you repeat this game n times (as n goes to infinity), you will have Θ(n) pairs of (heads, tails) and O(sqrt(n)) unpaired wins or losses, except for a vanishingly small fraction of the time when the results fall outside of any fixed number of standard deviations.

The point is that you as an individual playing a repeated game don't get to meaningfully sample the expected value of the distribution. You only get to sample once, and you will almost surely (i.e. with probability approaching 1 as n goes to infinity) sample a point in the distribution where you lose nearly all of your money.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

Hey what do you know, I found the lawsuit: "That same week, Bitwarden tasked Mr. Scharf with interviewing a potential employee whose “preferred pronouns” were in contradiction to Mr. Scharf’s religious beliefs. Mr. Scharf conducted the interview in a professional and respectful manner, avoiding the use of pronouns all together. Mr. Scharf assessed the interviewee favorably and recommended that the interviewee advance to the next stage of the interview process. Because of Mr. Scharf’s religious beliefs, in his notes regarding the interview, which were shared internally and not with the interviewee, Mr. Scharf did not use the interviewee’s requested pronouns."

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

Have you ever shared interview notes with anyone? I type mine up... and 'TC' is just as useful in my shorthand as he/she would be.

I agree with you that if these were his personal notes from which he then composed his evaluation of the candidate it wouldn't matter - but I bet you that's not what this was, and I would further bet you that he was informed of the candidates pronouns and did know them.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

> Additionally, Scharf received a reprimand for not using preferred pronouns in notes related to an interview he conducted with a job applicant whose preferred pronouns did not align with their biological gender. Scharf argued in the lawsuit that he refrained from using any pronouns during the interview and only used the applicant’s biological pronouns in internal notes.

It is so easy to just always write "the candidate" in your interview notes, and never need to write any third person pronouns. Certainly he was making a stand, rather than just non-confrontationally abiding by his beliefs. Obviously one wouldn't use any gendered pronouns in the interview since we only have "you" in English - though I imagine "refrained from using any pronouns" is a misreporting.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

Board members have personal liability for payroll in California.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

They certainly can let the old RSUs expire worthless, but holding up the "social contract" (as opposed to the strict legal contract) with their employees (and former employees!) while also not drawing the ire of the IRS may be a challenge.

If you give new RSU grants, what time period do they vest over? What happens to current employees who leave before then, if they are required to re-earn-out their comp? What can you do at all about former employees? Will the IRS still accept that this deferred compensation is subject to "substantial risk of forfeiture" and thus the taxes on it can be deferred (see U.S. Code 409A)?

Stripe is trying to do option b), buy back stock at current valuation. To do so, they need to raise a couple billion dollars. That money will go to the employees (in exchange for some stock) so that the employees can settle up their taxes, though the IRS will "cut out the middleman" so to speak, and requires Stripe to simple withhold the proceeds and remit to the IRS on the employees' behalf.

The $3.5B tax bill is not "corporate tax" owed by Stripe, but employee income tax that will be owed by employees if there is a liquidity event, and which Stripe will be, in practice, required to withhold on their behalf if Stripe arrange that liquidity for them.

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

I don't know why you believe later employees get options. It is true that at public companies, employees often are compensated with options, but at "startup"s where the FMV of a new employee grant would be prohibitively expensive to either early exercise or pay income taxes on, employees get RSUs.

Options are for small companies, and 83b elections when the exercise price can be paid by the employee upfront. RSU are for unicorns. Once the company is public and there is liquidity you can do whatever. Except backdating stock options...

bzax

3 years agodiscuss

If you do an 83b election on RSUs, you'd recognize the entire present value of the RSU grant as income in that year, and pay taxes on it. I believe you're then limited to claiming capital losses on that if you leave before it all vests, or it all ends up worthless.

Stripe was already worth $9B in 2016. If you joined then, it could have been prohibitively expensive to do an 83b election. The whole point of RSUs is that you don't owe anything until there is a liquidity event, unlike options which you may be required to exercise or lose while the company is still private.

However, RSUs only get this favorable treated (i.e. you've been given something of value, but can defer paying taxes on it) because they technically expire worthless if the company does not have a liquidity event in time. Thus far no successful tech company (that I know of) has screwed over its employees by casually choosing not to have a liquidity event and letting years worth of RSUs grants all expire worthless.

Stripe is trying to arrange liquidity for its employees who were granted RSUs in e.g. 2016, and that expire in 2023. Those employees have not had to pay taxes as the RSUs vested, but will have a large tax bill if those RSUs do anything other than expire worthless...

comments