theoryofx

"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE]

This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.

"It's an industry standard because other compensation methods for salespeople that pay them like all the other non-salespeople don't work ..."

[citation needed]

I think it's more accurate to say that it's an industry standard because it works, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality and (much more reasonably) risk aversion when it comes to messing with revenue generation.

Sales people that don't sell just get fired, that's the thing about being such a quantifiable role. So in practice at a startup with a hot product you end up with a team of sales people receiving huge amounts of cash comp.

Everyone in in a well run startup org gets performance based compensation in the form of increases in salary, bonus, and equity.

There's no reason sales people couldn't be compensated in the same way. The reason they're not is just that it's considered an 'industry standard' to reward instantly with cash.

Sales people have themselves a sweet deal they're loath to give it up whether or not it's in the best long-term interests of the company or even themselves. It's not a terrible thing but it does seem an anachronism that will go away.

Yeah no doubt you have to have performance based compensation but that's exactly what equity and bonuses are for everyone else. Sales people are special in getting large amounts of cash comp in addition to equity.

"this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..."

For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.

The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event.

The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.

The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.

"The updates often come from US based FTP servers."

Almost never FTP and it's not a significant difference if the Chinese company uploads it to S3 and the device downloads it from there.

One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.

On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.

But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.

At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.

It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.

Good luck and thanks!

The massive problem as I see is that Chinese intelligence has the incentive and capability to do this and yet no one seems to be doing anything about it.