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I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

Specifically meant in-person chess clubs as opposed to only playing lichess from home for hours every day. I'd probably have a less negative view of "time wasting" if video games were played more in-person too.

I have fond memories of LAN parties growing up, where socializing was as big a part as the actual gaming - it's not like we were sitting there harvesting wood for hours on end!

I wholeheartedly agree that the dark patterns around consent are atrocious. But I also think hn is probably biased in its valuation of an individual's data.

If companies offered say a $50/month discount on car insurance premiums in exchange for gathering data, I imagine a large proportion of people would indeed opt in to that (setting aside issues of selection bias or trust in this ideal world)

But in terms of other benefits of that time spent, (imo) they're probably somewhat better than micro-transaction-gambling-mobile games (or just plain gambling), but likely worse than a sports league or chess club.

Not sure how it'd compare against similar amounts of youtube/netflix though.

  > "More specifically, automakers are selling access to the data to Lexis Nexis, which is then crafting “risk scores” insurance companies then use to adjust rates. Usually upward"

In an ideal world, such data-harvesting might lead to cheaper prices / a more efficient insurance market - which would make the privacy loss worth considering from a trade-off standpoint, at least in theory.

Unfortunately it's instead likely to just lead to higher margins for insurance companies. And the only way to compete would be to harvest more data for better predictions.

Also there's not much practical defense to an unscrupulous extension author "exiting" with an under-the-table password transfer or "oops we got hacked" to a shady buyer.

<tinfoil hat> One could imagine a nefarious state actor offering the author of e.g. uBlock $XX million to get access to a lot of browsers. Not sure about the economics, but more niche extensions could probably be targeted for a lot cheaper.

Especially if he wasn't rewarded commensurately for that feat.

But is there any recourse to the founders telling you one thing and then raising differently later because "circumstances have changed?"

Right, I suspect many people (including me) wouldn't even know what terms look up to research such things. I get a lot of my knowledge by osmosis from the hn comment section, for better or worse :P

Very enlightening thanks! I wonder if there is or could be some notion of "vesting" over time of the investment such that (1) could not happen. So if the founder tried to sell tomorrow, the investor would get back 1x, but that 1x decays to 0.2x over 5 years or something.

But I guess VCs generally have the leverage and wouldn't want such terms.

I don't have monthly data, but as an approximation here's a rough test where you make a one time investment of $1000, either all at once, or equally spaced over 2 or 5 years. This is simulated starting at each year from 1985 to 2005, and we count the number of years underwater starting 5 years after the first year (after $1000 has been put in for all 3 "strategies") up until 2023.

  S&P:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean    0.7      0.8      0.7
  std     1.8      1.5      1.1
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max     8.0      6.0      3.0

  Nikkei:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean   11.4     11.5     11.8
  std     9.1      9.5      9.4
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max    29.0     29.0     28.0

So investing at once, the max number of years underwater for the S&P was 8, versus 3 when "dca"ing over 5 years. The average number of years underwater (averaged over when you would've invested) is quite low, while for the Nikkei all metrics look much worse.

My knee-jerk reaction is to point out that "even if you bought the S&P at the height of the dotcom bubble, the annualized return over the past 24 years was ~5.5% (not including dividends)"

And while I think this line of thinking is still more correct than not, I wonder how much I (and a lot of other folks in the US) are discounting the possibility of a prolonged period without growth.

Despite shocks like in 2000 and 2008, the S&P has spent very little time "underwater" over the past 50 years. But that's not the case if you look at something like the Nikkei, which took until this year to get back to its 1990 peak.

I'm curious what would've happened had the bill been for 10k or 1k? Would it still have been reduced, would OP have paid instead of posting on reddit/hn, would it have gotten as much attention?