TravisDirks

Seldn, inc - Warning None standard offer: Creative Sabbatical in Maui, Hawaii

We have decided to sponsor a creative sabbatical for a front end developer or data scientist to come work on our AI startup (= Seldn) for this period. Seldn will sponsor airfare (from the US) and stay in return for their spirited help at Seldn, intellectual company & commitment to enjoying Hawaii/life. That's it -- no catch. We'd be open to opportunities for them to continue working with us after that but no commitment required.

Please pass this opportunity on to the coolest front-end Developers/Data scientists you know! More details:

Creative Sabbatical: Data Scientist/ Developer? Come work on an AI startup in Hawaii

About Us: Seldn is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can automatically predict global macro risks. Our core technology uses complexity-physics inspired machine learning algorithms and Big Data to provide a SaaS platform geared toward predicting political, financial and social macro risks – think economic crashes, labor strikes, riots, etc.

Very neat stuff and definitely ambitious. Our first focus is enterprise s/w catered toward supply chain disruptions. We are a very early stage stealth startup, normally based in Palo Alto, CA.

Sabbatical: Seldn is sponsoring a creative sabbatical for a data scientist and a front-end developer to come spend the summer Hawaii working with us on our meaningful world-changing AI platform.

Dates: July 10 – Aug 27, 2015 (negotiable but minimum 5 weeks) Location: Maui, Hawaii. What’s covered: Roundtrip Airfare (from US) & stay. Commitment: Spirited help at Seldn, shared responsibilities at the community house and enjoying Hawaii. Eligibility: Limited spots open for 1. Super smart data scientist with experience in data wrangling, algorithm development, machine learning, python, cloud deployment 2. Front end developer with production experience in HTML5, CSS, at least one JavaScript framework (Angular/Backbone/Ember) and building next-gen enterprise SaaS products. More details on our ideal dev.

To Apply: Email [email protected] with: 1. your resume 2. brief description on why we should pick you and 3. a superpower you wish you had

That's it -- no catch. This could turn into a long-term career opportunities at Seldn, but no commitment required.

I originally wrote this up for friends and family, but thought the crowd here might find valuable to hear from someone who thinks similarity.

As Bruce Lee said so well: Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.

Hope it helps someone and Happy New Year!

I wrote this up for friends and family, but thought this crowd might find it valuable to hear from someone who maybe thinks similarly.

As Bruce Lee put it: Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.

Hope it helps someone and Happy New Year!

Does ruling impact the DHS discussion from a couple days ago? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321036 http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty...

"Using data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the ACLU has determined that nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders."

From:http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty...

Population is concentrated on the coasts. Has anyone worked out what fraction of US Citizens have lost their 4th amendment rights?

I think the author may have misunderstood the claim. Intel was probably referring literally to low power computing (what happens inside Intel's chips) not to low power any-thing-you-can-do-with-a-computer(display, communicate with others, etc). In other words the processor.

Nearly all the power and heat problems in processors has to do with impedance mismatches between materials in the circuit. It's been about 5 years since I went to a conference called Beyond Moore's Law, but I remember a brilliant talk on a 5-6 order of magnitude decrease in power that is possible though impedance matching. (I couldn't find a link online, sorry!)

I suspect (rather arrogantly, since I have not seen intel's article directly) that this is what Intel was talking about.

This has been driving me insane lately. Every site I follow a link to gives me an app splash page. What is particularly frustrating is that usually its a complete waste of both of our time since I already have the app. LinkedIn in particular drives me nuts with this.

I think you'll find that this is not a useful way of thinking. There is always something else you could try and account for. To save your thinking until you can account for everything simply results in no thinking. It's far better to fully understand the simplest model possible and add complication as nessisary, than to start with the hardest system. That is how science moves forward.

If I understand the article correctly the argument is that ZD strategies don't do well against each other, so they can never dominate a population. Therefore they will not exist evolutionarily. 

I don think that conclusion follows. I would expect the strategy to wax and wane around an equilibrium in which the proportion of other ZD players drops the value of the strategy to that of other good strategies. It's similar to many investing strategies that work well when a few people are using them but not when everyone is. These strategies never die, they oscillate from feast to famine. 

I doubt this is as big a problem as you think. If you have any interbreeding at all the general conclusion holds. I would guess that even extremly low estimates of interbreeding rates wouldn't change the result much.

Very interesting! If I didn't misread, a better title would be "In 3000 years almost everyone alive today will be a common ancestor of all humanity."

From the story: "In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on - in other words, people who were genetic dead-ends."

This puts a whole new perspective on the often quotes statistics about Genghis Khan's progeny.

Was thinking the same thing. Way to many periods and not enough question marks.

Sounds good. I was over optimistic promising today, though. Look for it next week. I'll post a comment hear when its up.

Thank you everyone for the Up votes and the conversation! We reached six or seven on HN on the same say Seth Godin sent out a blog post mentioning how unlikely it is to reach the front page of HN. That was a treat!

I'd love to keep it going, but its late here (I'm traveling in Holland at the moment). So I think what I'll do is work on a post to try to address the most common questions and get back tomorrow.

As a HN newbie I would appreciate advice on whether it is better to post this in the comments, or start a new post.

Thank you! That is great to hear!

Ah the three person system! You can really understand a lot of this by digging into it, so you are thinking along the right track! If you like we can have a chat by phone. Otherwise I think I can answer a lot of your questions and others by writing a post on the three person example, so you could wait for that too.

But a brief answer: 1) Whether each gets one vote depends on the LLC. It should outlined in the operating agreement. (Our company is considering adopting a voting system that actually equalizes ownership and control, a surprisingly hard thing to engineer! but once you've decided on it you can just amend the operating agreement.) 2) Lets say that is true, each of the three people gets one vote. Then you are right that they each have equal power, but if memory serves it actually amounts to 50%, not 33%. (un-intuitive right!)Meaning each person has a deciding/swing vote in half of the 8 possible outcomes.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have been consulted by law firms employed by major activist investors litigating fortune 500 companies.

The short of it is, if your worried about actually controlling a company this is the control you need and I would suggest talking to me. If you are going to court, I would suggest talking to a lawyer (who may well want to talk to me :P).

Great! I'd love to hear what reaction you get!

It is counter initiative! I done lots of these analyses and I've learned to just run the numbers, because intuition is often wrong ( though you can usually understand it in retrospect )

On control and ownership, if you tell me one shareholders percentage ownership, I still know nothing about thier control(unless they own more than 50%). So in this sense, a single shareholder's ownership is undelated to thier control. Now if you tell me all the shareholders ownership, then we know about control.

Your right control over an LLC works generally the same way as C Corp. This measure works regardless of corporate structure. We've even used it to measure control on a board of directors. The things that require accounting for are how the voting system works. For example is the criteria to win a vote 50% or 66%. Is it 50% of all shares, or of shares that bother to vote?

Just went over to PIRC, very cool! I'd love to have a short chat some time. I'm interested in the UK market because a very high percentage of the ownership in public companies is known. Nothing like tiny error bars :P

That's an interesting idea with the pension funds. It might cause a hiccup in the analysis bybincreasing the percentage of unknown stockholders, Proxy Solicitor would love it since the retail campaigns are highly profitable.

I've been tossing around the idea of partnering with a website like moxyvote that has retail investors following these issues. I think it would be interesting to let them indicate their intended vote then calculate their collective power. I think it would be motivating and increase turnout.

In answer to you question about the Dow I have not run them as a set, but I've never worked on a company yet that didn't have at least one shareholder that met that criteria.

Email me at [email protected] if you'd like to chat.

Let me know if the ABC example didn't get the job done. The core insight is to understand that it doesn't matter how high the result is. 51% wins just as well as 85%. So how much you win by is irrelevant.

Sorry for the confusion, terminology around this issue can be VERY confusing. The word control in particular is nearly always abused.

Control is itself an objective number without assumptions beyond a shareholder-list / Cap-table. Control is literally the percent of all possible outcomes in which the result of the vote/election is decided by the shareholder's vote.

In the link you will find a second graph, in which I give the chances of winning a shareholder vote. Here there is an assumption that each shareholder is as likely to vote one way as another. There is no doubt it is a softer number, but I report it because people can understand what it means much faster than control.

Now these issues of psychology and feelings about particular issues can be accounted for, as you can imagine its necessary when working on the activist situations we cut our teeth on, but there we generally have public statements about which way particular shareholders plan to vote, or how they feel. When looking at a founders long term control, its best to leave out these issue. Less good information is better than more so-so information.

If you want to know a about founders ability to do something specific that would polarize shareholders around common interests, such as sell the company at a price that is personally rewarding, but not great for the investors, that calculation can be done. I just think it should be thought of separately from a founders general control.

Sorry for the length and hope this helps!

Bingo! I call this the Crazy Uncle Charlie example:).

One tiny correction: when any vote, important or otherwise, comes up C's vote is just as important as A or B.