skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you were to train your own LLM specifically on medicine & medical data

That's a massive "if" that the rest of your argument hinges on. You can't train your own LLM on your own data. You can fine tune it's responses to be more in line with the format or style you want. But this is usually used as a cost saving exercise when you are feeding s big system or inital prompt for lots of queries.

> there's a decent probability it could give some perspective you might not be able to get elsewhere

There's also a decent probability that it will give a wildly incorrect perspective that influences how you approach your possible disease in an unproductive way.

The author has no idea how accurate the tool is. They list no effectiveness measures. They just talk about the cool things it does (again, without accuracy) and their subjective experience with it.

It's the same pattern with LLM based tools we see so often: someone gets lucky with a useful result that no one else has done yet, they assume it will work just as well for all inputs, they build an app around it. You _have_ to measure effectiveness across a wide variety and quantity of inputs because of how inconsistent LLMs still are.
Wonder how much of that was wasted by poor Firefox users.
There're also cases when a nickname stems from the full name which no one has anymore.

In Kievan Rus, the common form of Vladimir was Volodimir. Ukraine still has this form (Volodymyr Zelensky).

The diminutive of Volodimir was Vova, which makes sense. Later, in Russia, Volodimir was replaced with the Church Slavonic form, Vladimir.

So today diminutive of Vladimir is Vova (not Vlad, a common mistake in the West to call Putin Vlad).
In many American weddings it is still traditional for the bride's father to "give her away" to the groom, thus transferring chattel ownership.
This one is just silly since it's not making any serious money to manufacturer.

That said we shouldn't stop car evolution because one shitty manufacturer fucked up. If you wan't one - you can always buy a Lada, they were perfect since 70s...
I run a bootstrapped cheminformatics company that’s been gaining traction, and I currently own it outright. I’m genuinely interested in a model like you’re describing—something that aligns everyone’s incentives and keeps them at the top of their game, not just waiting to vest or check out once they do.

In my experience, equity alone can become more of a distraction than a motivator. It sometimes encourages people to mark time rather than consistently push the envelope. I’m wondering if a profit-sharing model, possibly combined with some consulting-group best practices, might be more effective at sustaining high performance over the long haul.

If you know of a proven employee-owned approach that doesn’t dilute accountability—and actually ensures teams stay fully engaged—I’d love to explore it. My goal is to bring in the best talent, focus everyone on building the best product, and reward them in a way that keeps us all hungry for continued success.
Puerto Rico would be a better American analogue for Greenland, California would be more like Syddanmark.
Investors want ownership, so to be completely employee owned means completely employee funded.

So unless you have 5-10 employees willing to work for free until profitability PLUS paying infrastructure costs in the meantime, you are constrained to activities that can be profitable from day one.

This is why you can see employee owned consulting and services companies but not major development projects.
I never understood who takes up these offers. You want me to give up my $220k+ salary plus RSU (let's say worth $60k/yr), to join a startup and take $100k/yr salary.

In effect, I'd be "investing" $180k/yr and putting in crazy hours for a 1% equity that gets diluted to nearly nothing in a few funding rounds. How does that make sense?

You can only invest your time and salary cut into a single company, while angel and VC investor can invest their time and money into many companies. They only need 1 of those investments to skyrocket. You need 100% of your investments (size 1) to skyrocket for it to make sense.

Sure, if you hit the jackpot and join Facebook, then you're set for life. But that's an extreme outlier, otherwise I wouldn't be using it as an example.
Your comment is typical of those I see on these new weight loss drugs.

Not everyone can control their health issues through lifestyle changes alone. I successfully controlled hypertension with an hour a day of running but that's just not sustainable and I barely controlled it anyway. As I reached 50, my genetics and age caught up with me. My father and all my siblings take drugs for hypertension and now I do too.

Similarly, my wife, who I've known since we were teenagers, fought her weight as long as we've been together. No amount of weight watchers, calorie counting, eating well and exercise allowed her to maintain a healthy weight. It's also exhausting being hungry all the time and fighting against your increasing weight. About two years ago she started Wagovy for legitimate health reasons. It's changed her life. She still exercises, eats well, and counts calories. What the Wagovy has enabled is for it not to be a constant battle with herself. She's not hungry all the time now maintaining a healthy weight.

Unless you've really fought these battles, you don't know what other people are going through.
What here is disinformation?
Smoot-Hawley was passed while America was a net exporter of industrial products and hurt American manufacturers. I don't see any way to skew it as having helped win WW2.
Aside from some of the long gaps between text I didn't think it was so bad. And I wholeheartedly approve of a process that checks the preferences of the target audience even if it's not what I (or they) would pick.

However I can't imagine anyone tests well with the video content. The discussion on teachers using AI generated slides (lesson 2) was really interesting, but it had to fight my desire to stop that awful audio. Clearly the sound recording didn't go well and you have what you have, but at least edit it so the three talkers are at some sort of consistent volume. I was raising and lowering trying to make out what was said from one speaker then being deafened by the next.

(To combat the poor sound, and make it more accessible, could be worth looking at adding subtitles. A fun opportunity to play with AI subtitling systems maybe ;) )
By that logic preventative anything is useless, the whole point is to know if what I'm doing right now is going in the right direction or not.

Better catch diabetes or cholesterol when it's not a problem yet, when the symptoms are bad enough for you to notice by yourself you're already in deep shit.
LLMs can reason they just don’t always reason.

That’s the claim everyone makes. That is a human definition if it reasoned one time correctly. That is the colloquial definition.

Someone who has brain damage can reason correctly on certain subjects and incorrectly on other subjects. This is an immensely reasonable definition. I’m not being pedantic or out of line here when I say LLMs can reason while using this definition.

Nobody is making the claim that LLMs reason like humans or are human or reason perfectly every time. Again the claim is: LLMs are capable of reasoning.
>Now both of those obviously contain a kernel of truth

It is not obvious to this observer that either of your claims contain any truth whatsoever, let alone a mere "kernel." In fact, to this observe, both of these claims seem quite ludicrous
"It’s unfair"

... I empathize, but it's a voluntary market, so clearly people think it is worthwhile.

The article misses a few details that explain some of the difference. Founders have a lot of responsibility beyond engineering. E.g. they need to raise funds, hire, and go through 20 years of stress in 12 months to make sure the business gets off the ground. They often do not take a salary to make it work out, etc.

A common ratio is ~10% first 10 employees, 10% next 100, 10% next 1000. If the investors take ~30%, and 30% is going to employee equity, then that leaves (with some wiggle room) 30% for founders. It is entirely fair to say that the first 10 engineers take on a huge risk, and deserve more than 1%, but you very quickly run out of company to hand out. For a good founder, it is not worth the loss of family time, stress, and opportunity cost to exit with ~5% equity.
If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?
Huh. UK doesn't allow you to register a company name containing "bank" unless you are in fact a bank.
> We don't have the money, technicians, or machines to run an MRI on everyone who shows up to the doctor with a problem that has a 1/50,000 chance of being cancer.

A guy launched a car into space; I think we have all this stuff but we — as a society — just don’t find the business case for “poor people being alive” very compelling.
"If you've got a nazi sitting at a table and 10 people sitting around talking to him, then you've got a table with 11 nazis."
I can't answer those questions, but I have some comments. My question, which you quoted, was intended to be rhetorical and perhaps your questions are as well.

There is nothing exclusive about being atheist with regards to those questions. Belief in God (especially a deist or non-interventionist God) doesn't provide any clear answer. You may be thinking about a specific religion or spiritual dogma proposing answers to that question, but that would require some kind of revelation in the form of a prophet, inspired scripture, mystical/divine encounter, etc.

Another idea that pops to mind is again related to the Vedas, the oldest spiritual texts that I am aware of. I couldn't find the exact percentage but most commentaries I have read indicate that a significantly large portion of those scriptures are dedicated to ritual observance. Things like weddings, births, funerals, etc.

Some of the oldest archeological sites, like the notorious Göbekli Tepe, appear to be ritual sites. There is a lot of work to do there so I don't think our understanding is definitive at this point. But it does show how far back in our history that rituals appear to go (several thousands of years). It might even be worth pondering the question: what came first, ritual or a belief in god(s)?

So it is not really surprising that the shadow of ritual appears even within the most secular and rationalist modern contexts. What that means and how it should effect your own decisions is something I believe is a personal matter.
Code architecture, component architecture, physical architecture as fully deployed. Data architecture. The design of adding ljkely new features. So many things to decide and communicate. So many presentations with at best one thing explained.
As someone who works in finance, I would disagree. I asked ChatGPT:

Is the noun spend rare?

ChatGPT said:
The noun "spend" is relatively rare compared to its more common form as a verb. While "spend" is widely used as a verb (meaning to give money or time for something), as a noun, it refers to an expenditure or the act of spending, and it’s not as commonly encountered.

In most contexts, people would use alternatives like "expenditure," "spending," or "outlay" instead of "spend" as a noun. That said, it is still used occasionally in certain contexts, especially in financial or informal language.
A mentor I respect memorably explained to young me that “it doesn’t matter how big the pot of soup, you can use the same size spoon to taste it.”
Ageist and just parroting what the media says.

I'm surprised you didn't throw in jabs like "racist misogynistic eugenicist" like some reports...
This might tempt me to consider moving back to California someday (though it'd have to be somewhere in the wet, green northwest corner).
Risk is important, but the value of something is a function of its opportunity cost. In other words, if you think a role is not worth the compensation, simply found your own company. Presumably, if the founding engineer compensation is mispriced, your new company will have an advantage over the others. I suspect most will find that founding a company is actually much harder than being a founding engineer.

Frankly, one of the satisfying things about a free market is that we don't have to rationalize these numbers at all. If the numbers are wrong, the market will select for better theories.
not a chance
I'm not sure I follow your idea that correctness emerges from belief, but that could get epistemological quickly.

What I can address is that the role of a statistician is to interpret the statements made by data towards the objective (an unobtainable notion), not vice versa. I don't know any statistician, myself included, who isn't aware of the limitations of sampling, and thus the impossibility of dealing in objectivity -- hence why conclusions are often posited in speculative terms, such as probabilities or even hypotheses. Having the ability to reach those conclusions from the recorded observations of real phenomena is why statisticians tend to operate within subject matters.

Towards that end, I do agree that any statistician worth their salt would not take too much at face value on a two dimensional chart, and that this whole matter bears more investigation. But the idea that no respectable statisticians draw conclusions from data... I'm left to assume that you respect no statisticians.
Are you asking why startups need investors? Seriously?

Yeah, if a company is profitable from day one, there is no reason to take investors money. However that happens rarely. And while some people are happy to work without salary in the beginning if they get equity, for others with different risk preferences or life situation it is a big no-go, therefore also different shares of equity and different compensation...
Probably. Could have two classes for forward visibility, one that didn't and one that did.

I wouldn't make the camera a free for all though, it makes sense for pretty good direct visibility to be a design priority (so the camera would be required on cars that had okay but not great forward visibility and it wouldn't be allowed to build anything else).
If the company is employee owned, how do you propose that an investor even could back it? Investment results in an ownership stake.
BTW, the third word "had" was a typo. She is very much alive and very much living with EDS and its complications.
Let me know if you need any help. Not it is still raw but I hope I'll polish it soon.
Im rebuilding both from the ground up for fun:

- no funding

- no ads

- etc... just an idea I had while locked up in SF county.

https://us.medicare.dev

https://nhs.dev

Its nothing that will fix healthcare or anything like that, but it's been fun learning about things like "Digital Twins", "FHIR" etc... and it actually works; meaning the Agent can help you achieve a desired health outcome (sometimes)
It reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1425/

In the same way now with today's AI models the task is easily achievable.
It's to gaslight you into thinking the nineteenth shitty enterprise SaaS for ultra-niche market is going to make you a billionaire. In reality, you're just cheap labor for lining the pockets of the VCs who will sell off their shares to the next sucker at the first chance they get.
To be fair, I missed the double negative in "isn't a nickname nobody has any more" too until I saw this comment and looked closer.
Sure. And that's why SWEs will be fine in the world of AI, as the rote work is more easily automated.

The contrast is that for a lot of other jobs, the rote tasks are not routinely solvable with free online content in text form.
Good catch! Fixed it, thanks.
It would be very hard to find talent willing to do that
I read the original Kaspersky analysis and found it very weird that such a cyber security company that works with the Russian government closely allows US made phones accessing their networks as late as 2023 Dec.
I agree that early employees need to share in the win. However, this approach has several fundamental problems:

(1) 10 years in, your founding engineers won't have had much more impact than number 4, or 5, or 10. I think you'll have a real problem on your hands when two peers have 100x different equity stake and their tenures are just 1 year apart.

(2) In fact, your founding engineers probably won't be your best or highest impact folks. I much prefer the approach where you give very generous re-ups to your high performers.

(3) Founders and founding engineers are not the same.

(3a) Founding engineers eventually will require market compensation. Founders will not.

(3b) Founding engineers can leave at any time without inflecting the direction of the company. In fact they leave all the time: I've never seen a company where all the founding engs are around 10 years in.

(3c) Founding engineers do not have the investor, customer, and executive relationships that the founders have. An I'm sorry to tell you that those are much more important than engineering prowess.

FWIW, I like Sam Altman's recommendation of 10% for the first 10 employees (https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity). It's more than most companies do today...
It’s water tight if the claim is only LLMs CAN reason.

No one is making the claim that LLMs reason like humans or always reason correctly. Ask anyone who makes a claim similar to mine. We are all ONLY making the claim that LLMs can reason correctly. That is a small claim.

The counterclaim is LLMs can’t reason and that is a vastly expansive claim that is ludicrously unprovable.
> They say: “the progresses we are seeing are due to the fact that models like OpenAI o1 or DeepSeek R1 are not just LLMs”.

Would be nice if the author could cite even one example of this as it doesn't match my experience whatsoever.
Open Source Deep Research
During the Super Bowl they put up a stat about the size of the average lineman in SB 1 vs now. In SB1 they were 6’3” and about 248lbs (something like that). And now they are 6’6” and 330lbs.

That old OLine gets killed in P5 college football now.
Innovation in compensation is great, but this feels like a "I want to play with crypto" move rather than a mature revision of an inequitable existing model. Options that don't expire are a huge incentive! Offer that. 10% is a huge incentive! Offer that.

If you know you're turning off smart candidates with crypto shenanigans it's a good sign that this is not a mature or pragmatic team.
PTC still maintain PERC (for some definition of 'maintain'). At least I hope so.
Or it could just be an incredibly effective drug?
I don’t have a model specifically but companies like “Bob’s Red Mill” and “King Arthur” are employee owned and rather succesful. Though those are not tech companies I can’t imagine the base model being drastically different when adapted.
Can I ask a dumb question as an LLM newbie? What is it about Claude that makes it so good at basic software engineering tasks? Do you think it was finely tuned to be good at these tasks? No joke/trolling: A bunch of people have posted on HN in the last 6 months about creating MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) -- usually web apps -- using Claude. As a non-web-app programmer, I think this is amazing progress!
Flax is also really easy to add to a smoothie if you have a decent blender, my recipe: almond milk (any type of milk or yogurt), frozen berries, oats, flax seeds. Just blend it up and eat it for breakfast. Washing blenders after you finish is often easy as you can just add water and a drop of dish soap and then run it once more and then pour it out.
Also the r->z substitution. Charles -> Chaz. Barry -> Baz. Jeremy -> Jez. Caroline -> Caz. etc etc
I'm going to ask maybe a silly question.

Maybe not many people making $220 take these offers?

There has to be a fair number of start ups that really don't "need" a $220k engineer if their business is "uber...but for cleaning your windows".

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of who does take these roles.

Granted "founding engineer" implys a lot so I'm not disagreeing with the premise or article, but sometimes on HN the idea that an engineer costs $200k+ is just assumed where often I think that isn't the case.
You beat me to it. If the equity after vesting is the same as the paycut I take, then I'm taking all the risk here, but no reward.
> This is a utility token that will be deployed under the ERC-20 standard, and live on the Ethereum blockchain. It will be set up so that if the product does well, the price of the token goes up, and if the product does badly, the price of the token goes down. You can read more about the details of the token in a sister article. [0]

Funny enough, that "sister article" appears to be a private google docs link... I was curious how this would even work.

At time of this comment, [0] https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1VvxEQBRexuFJT5qCr9MC...
Reasoning is an abstract term. It doesn’t need to be similar to human reasoning. It just needs to be able to arrive at the answer through a process.

Clearly we used the term reasoning for many varied techniques. The term doesn’t narrow to specifically one form of “human” like reasoning only.
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company

I think this might be selection bias or something along those lines. There are probably more companies than you'd expect that are techy bootstrapped companies, but they don't make the news because they don't have the funding round type of announcements. These companies also tend to do something not centered around AI or socials, so again, they fly below radar. I've worked at more than one
Well, ChatGPT is making the same point. Not well known outside the financial industry.

The majority of audience and posters of ycombinator are not in that industry group, right?
I've noticed that recruiters recently will use euphemisms for crypto/blockchain/etc. companies in their initial DM and the JD. The only hint might be in the third paragraph, where the word "token" or "chain" is buried in the middle.

> Using a crypto token gives our employees a very important, 10x improvement over traditional stock grants. A crypto token enables continuous, 24/7 liquidity within the first months of the startup's life.

That's not altogether bad (I have always lost with traditional ISOs), but what kinds of coworkers are those kinds of crypto token grants going to attract, and where's the sufficiently long alignment for the coworkers who got skittish early?
Why would you assume that ?
What if your comment is a part of a psyop to keep paranoid people (NSA's true target) on their old devices which are even easier to breach?
A buddy won a bet with me by editing the relevant Wikipedia article to agree with his side of the wager.
I doubt my response matters.
Seveneves in case anyone wants to read it. I thought it was okay, certainly captivating enough for me to finish it.
> It finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near the present-day small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of Ukraine.

As anyone following the war in Ukraine closely has long since realized, village names alone are not very useful for identifying where something is in Ukraine. There are just too many places with the same names. e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailivka
No, the President cannot just unilaterally ignore Congressional spending requirements just because "the executive controls foreign policy". That's what got him impeached the first time.

They're also not "pausing" shit, they're cancelling contracts effective immediately & locking up the buildings. Elon tweeted a picture of the sign being removed from the front of the building. You're being dishonest about what is going on.