arbitrage314

What about breastfeeding from the nipple vs drinking pumped breast milk?

Or breastfeeding from a wet nurse vs breastfeeding from one's biological mother?

Sounds like we still know so little, but I'd be curious about these two questions as well.

Actually, one small correction to your math.

You should adjust, for cost of living, only the part of your paycheck that you will be spending while living in that area.

E.g., supposed SF is twice as expensive as Dallas. If you make $100k in Dallas, and you typically spend $70k of it in Dallas while saving $30k (to spend later in life somewhere else), you would need to make $70k x 2 + $30k = $170k in SF (for an overall adjustment of 1.7) rather than $100k x 2 = $200k in SF (for an overall adjustment of 2).

Then again, if you're planning on living somewhere for the rest of your life, it's safe to assume that whatever money you make in that place, you'll also be spending in that place. Therefore, in that situation, multiplying by 2 would be correct after all.

I used a Pensco self-directed IRA:

https://www.pensco.com/

You bring up a good and interesting point.

From what I've seen, startups almost always pay less than market, but they make up for it in four different ways:

1. Quality of life and work: employees at startups get to touch more things, work on more exciting projects, eat free food, play ping pong, be a part of a tight-knit culture, etc. A lot of people highly value this, and I don't blame them!

2. Employees mistakenly overestimating the value of their options, their probability of success, and the uniqueness of the startup culture.

3. Related to both #1 and #2, hiring employees that don't care about money and/or haven't taken finance 101.

4. Related to #1, #2, and #3: hiring employees that are so excited about the startup that they don't care about the deal they're getting.

I've NEVER seen a good engineer get a better offer at a startup than he/she would've gotten at a large company, but it's certainly possible.

I'm 30 years old, and my rent is about $1200/month (I'm married, which helps cut down on costs).

After taxes, $250k becomes $150k. After rent, food, staying alive, some travel, etc., I'm left with about $100k disposable per year. Like most of you, I don't really have nice things, fancy clothes, etc.

I would continue to max out contributions to retirement accounts, though! You can invest in startups via IRAs and Roth-IRAs (I have done it).

Yeah, typically you have to make at least $200k/year or have a net worth of $500k (the term is "accredited investor").

Thanks to a new law, though, you no longer have to be accredited to invest small amounts.

Ah, sorry I didn't respond before.

I live and work in SF at a large company (not Netflix, but something pretty similar). I'm 80% a coder, 10% a manager, and 10% a data scientist, and I love my job. $250k salaries are very common at large companies these days--you just need to stick around and work hard for a few years.

Even if you make $150k, my advice stands, but you should probably invest smaller amounts than $100k, obviously.

Yeah, good point--I'd recommend investing only $10k or $20k if possible.

One of my points, though, is that you are effectively investing $100k in the company by taking a crap deal to work there (e.g., via a $25k pay cut over 4 years of work). For that $100k, you're getting much less than you would get by simply straight-up investing $100k.

I was a small contributor in a later round (series A or B).

Yes, in addition to the amazing tax benefits of investing rather than being an employee, you get preferred shares.

I also want to add that I know of a startup which allowed employees to trade off salary for equity in a way that completely screwed their employees. E.g., they gave their engineers something like either 0.2% and $150k, or 0.3% and $100k.

This implied a valuation of $200 million (since an employee would trade off 0.1% of the company for four years of $150k instead of $100k--for an added $200k bonus, and $200k / 0.1% is $200 million).

At the time, though, the company was selling shares to investors at a valuation of $50 million.

In other words, they were charging employees quadruple the price for equity. I'm thinking about writing a blog post on it.

Most startups are more than happy to take your money. Just email or meet with the founders, explain your enthusiasm for the company, and you're usually good to go!

For higher-profile deals, though--e.g., Uber--you wouldn't be able to invest such a small amount.

I'm going to keep repeating this comment until the world hears it--I think most people joining startups are being taken advantage of without realizing it. Sorry to be repeating myself:

If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup.

If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever.

I've considered lots of startup jobs because I believed strongly in the companies. Every single time, however, I was able to get a larger chunk of the company by keeping my current job and simply investing.

To give an example, my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary. This $150k + startup equity was a better deal than the startup was offering in both salary and equity (BY FAR). Plus, equity bought as an investor is much less tax toxic than equity options received as an employee of a startup.

On the other hand, most people who work at startups aren't interested in money. If that's you, that's totally cool!

If you're going to work at a startup, ask for two things:

1. No employee equity whatsoever, but a slightly higher salary to make up for it 2. The ability to invest in the the next round

I've worked at a startup and done #1 and #2 above, and it's working out great. I'm very happy to be owning preferred shares.

I wouldn't want to stay anywhere long if I was the big fish simply because I enjoy learning new things so much.

That being said, at this point in my life/career, I'm not worried about being a big fish at either Google or Goldman Sachs.

It usually requires a bit of networking, but that's all--most startups are more than happy to take your money! (And they will usually try to hire you as well.)

I've been out of school 3-4 years, and I work at a large company. I'm about 10% a manager, 10% a resident data scientist, and 80% a coder, and I love my job.

I've made this point before, but since it's a bit relevant here, I'll make it again (sorry to repeat):

If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup.

If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever.

I've considered lots of startup jobs because I believed strongly in the companies. Every single time, however, I was able to get a larger chunk of the company by keeping my current job and simply investing.

To give an example, my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary. This $150k + startup equity was a better deal than the startup was offering in both salary and equity (BY FAR). Plus, equity bought as an investor is much less tax toxic than equity options received as an employee of a startup.

On the other hand, most people who work at startups aren't interested in money. If that's you, that's totally cool!

If accurate (which it seems to be), a very disappointing handling by Facebook.

This happens in other futures markets all of the time. The price/month of a long-term lease ends up being a bit more than the price/month of a short-term lease.

The same thing happens in interest rate markets: if you want to borrow money short-term, the interest rate is pretty low; long-term borrowing is scarier for the lender, though, so the rate charged is much higher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_curve).

Why is that? You might be right, but your argument isn't intuitive to me.

Landlords are afraid of rent going down, and renters are afraid of rent going up, so a long-term contract would be nice because it could simultaneously reduce stress for both of them.

These are the trades that create value--trades that reduce risk for everyone!

Good point. If you're interested in living in the same place continuously, signing a longer lease is perfect.

I think a futures exchange is a bit more flexible though because: 1. Longer leases are often not available 2. People often want to move apartments after, e.g., having a baby

If you want rents to go down, you need to incentivize builders to build more property.

Some regulation is good, but if there's too much in favor of the tenants, building more property becomes unprofitable, and you're stuck with the same problem.

I'm in full support of some housing/rental market regulation, but such regulation is not without its cons.

Similar to Berlin, in New York, tenants have very strong rights. For instance, if a tenant stops paying rent, the landlord can't evict that tenant for 6 months. This sounds nice--helping someone in need instead of the greedy landlord--but the overall effect is largely negated (as usual, the market seems to always adjust when you mess with it). It's now MUCH harder to get an apartment in New York in the first place. You need a large income, guarantors, or lots of savings, in addition to credit checks, bank staements, tax statements, etc. I'm pretty sure the same people that the law was meant to help are now unable to rent in the first place.

One idea I have is, instead of messing with the free market, create a futures exchange whereby renters and landlords can lock in rent. This market is possible because there are just as many people concerned about rent going up as there are rent going down.

If you want to keep renting, but you don't want to hedge yourself via the futures market or via buying a place, you'll just have to accept the risk that you'll be priced out of your neighborhood someday.

Whenever I buy or sell bitcoins on Coinbase, I pay a lot both directly (via coinbase commission) and indirectly (via their super wide spreads).

If I get this card, am I going to still get screwed, or will it suddenly be cheaper to transact?

For me, it still doesn't get any better than http://robozzle.com/, but I have yet to try out Empire of Code.

An interesting tool, but I assumed that facebook did this sort of thing automatically anyway--seems like most people would want to see a tad less of a new ex.

Thanks for the interesting comparison!

I'm a math geek, but I'm also a mostly self-taught data scientist.

"The Elements of Statistical Learning" (https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/OLD/ESLI...) is far and away the best book I've seen.

It took me hundreds of hours to get through it, but if you're looking to understand things at a pretty deep level, I'd say it's well-worth it.

Even if you stop at chapter 3, you'll still know more than most people, and you'll have a great foundation.

Hope this helps!

Like most of you, I think mass surveillance is a fairly big problem.

Even so, how do we KNOW that there haven't been any major terrorist attacks thwarted? If I were the government, I would keep my thwarting as secret as possible (up until the point where the public turns against me enough to start trying to shut me down).