I'm a little puzzled by what this actually is supposed to be. The marketing material on this website suggests that it's meant to be used with a firm's Gemini or Claude API keys. ("A chat interface that reads your documents, cites verbatim, runs multi-step workflows, and drafts and edits contracts end-to-end. Plug in your own Claude or Gemini keys, and keep full control of the models you use.").
If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?
It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.
These firms have enterprise relationships that dictate all of that. This is presumably just a frontend that takes the key as an input and plugs into that infrastructure.
Hard disagree. The iPad is a fantastic mac replacement for many purposes. I use the iPad Pro w/ the “magic keyboard” case for working essentially whenever I’m not physically in home or office in similar ways that I do my Mac, for two really big reasons:
(1) The (11-inch) size is fantastic: you get enough screen real estate to see what you’re reading and writing, but it still fits into an arbitrarily small bag and is light enough that you can comfortably walk around all day with it. The death of the original tiny MacBook Air was a huge fail for apple
(2) CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY FOR GOD’S SAKE CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY. Yes, you can always hotspot your phone, however, that’s still not nearly so reliable as a device with its own connectivity, some providers still limit bandwidth there, plus the last thing I need is extra battery drain on my phone when I’m already stressed about it.
TBF, if Apple ever brought back the original MacBook Air with modern specs and with a cellular chip, I would just take gigantic buckets full of money and throw them in the general direction of Cupertino until I got one, like, instantly. And there are definitely still compromises—-as an academic, I’ve been meaning to just write a command line front end to zotero and fling it onto a digital ocean server or something, because its iPad app is so godawful. But on the whole, I still reach for my iPad much much much more than my MacBook, for those two killer features.
I don't use it (or need it) myself, but when I was working for a sporting equipment manufacturer a number of years ago, every salesman had a cellular dongle for their laptop. We had to remind them they had direct ethernet connections when they were in the office.
Fun fact, I once bought a reconditionned laptop and the sim card of the previous owner was still on the slot. More interestingly I could use it to connect to the mobile network for at least 2 years without even knowing the PIN (and having reinstalled to linux).
Do people really not use it? I use my iPad cellular all the time. Constantly.
One of these days I'm going to buy one of those old MS Surfaces with cellular and stick Linux on it. But for the installation/drivers hassles I'd have already done so.
It really depends how frequently one is outside. I have had many laptops with cell chips and sim slot but never bothered to pay for a sim when I could just tether my smartphone connection, even when using the train. I usually plug the phone to the laptop if I need to charge the phone.
Uh, can someone explain this to me like I’m 5, but somehow still have money invested in index funds? It makes me sound like my invested-in-vanguard-total-market-indexes-and-fidelity-target-date-funds money is going to be mechanically dumped into Elon Stock because of FinanceWord FinanceWord FinanceWord gobbledgook FinanceWord but is that the correct reading?
Index funds divvy up money into stocks, in this case weighted by market cap. More market cap = bigger slice of the pie.
SpaceX wants to instantly jump near the top of the pie - capturing tons of the money in index funds for itself, and also therefore taking it away from other companies stocks.
SpaceX (and others like OpenAI, Anthropic)'s private market cap valuation is so high that if they IPO they would instantly jump to the top of the entire stock market. This has never really happened before. By the rules, funds would have to suddenly start buying a huge weight of SpaceX stock - and sell NVDA/AAPL/GOOGL/everything else - to achieve the new balance.
Normally there are rules on how fast a new company can get included in the index. You usually have to be on the market for some time, demonstrate consistently high valuation, etc etc. SpaceX wants to skirt this and jump straight onto the index (near the top).
Further, the rules also usually weight you according to how much of your stock is actually on the market. If you only sell 5% of your company, you only get weighted at 5% of your market cap. SpaceX wants a bonus multiplier so even though they'll only make 5% of their stock available for sale, they want to be weighted in the index as if it was say 15% available. Aka over-bought / boosted price.
This creates both mechanical forced buying and artificially constrained supply. Likely sending the price to the moon, not based on fundamentals but based on gaming the index rules.
Then, once insider lock-up periods are over in a few months, SpaceX can choose to release even more shares - say jumping the available shares from 5% to 100% - which will unleash their full market cap (now even further inflated) and thus capturing even more of the money in index funds.
Index funds being 'passive' guarantees there will be buyers for SpaceX employees and executives to sell their shares to, likely at exorbitantly over-valued prices. At which point they wash their hands of the valuation and your retirement account becomes the new bag holder who has to worry about whether SpaceX is actually worth what you just paid for it.
> Just buy everything you can on day1 and go along for the ride?
What does adding demand to something with a very limited supply do to the price? You won't be subverting anyone's plan here - you're just hoping for a greater fool[1] will buy from you later, if you buy at inflated prices on day 1.
Maybe use your lunch money to buy day 1 and sell just before the lockup period expires? And rebalance your actual retirement accounts into funds that will not get forced into this game.
So the next question becomes: is there anything out there that’s like an almost-index? Like something that acts like a passive index fund, except when acting like an index fund would be obviously idiotic (for e.g. if following the rules suddenly becomes “invest everything in Elon Musk and pray he doesn’t bankrupt you with a tweet), the person in charge has the discretion to say “doing that would be stupid, no?”
If you are an index investor, it is probably not worth your time and energy to make any drastic changes because of this particular incident. Space X will comprise a small percentage of the indexes in question, and any impact on your portfolio will likely be imperceptible. And if your holdings are in a taxable account, the tax hit from selling are probably not worth it.
Longer term, folks should be aware that Wall Street has fully caught on to the normalization of index investing and have been looking at ways to use passive investors as exit liquidity. Private equity and private credit are the two recent high profile examples. There was an executive order recently that directed the federal government to consider allowing these asset classes into 401k's. And these sectors have been increasingly making there way into the public markets in various ways (which is ironic considering the name of the asset class). Same story with crypto.
In the past, most passive index investors worried about fees and portfolio composition and diversity. But moving forward it is probably worth thinking about index governance as well. For example the S&P500 has a one year waiting period before an public company can be considered.
Do you have specific recommendations for particularly well-governed indexes? Is something like ESGV insulated from such manipulation? Or is it time for investors to start building their own direct/custom indexing with something like Frec
I have stopped doing index investing and have switched to actively managing my portfolio, so I haven't spent much time looking into it. I have seen a few posts on reddit (r/bogleheads in particular) and it looks like there are some names getting thrown out over there, as well as discussion about particular ETF's rules regarding these types of changes.
My recommendation is do not take investing advise from any post on HN. They are notoriously bad about understanding capital markets. There are a few good posters here but they are boring [factual] with 0 replies.
My understanding: It depends on what index the fund is tracking. QQQ tracks the Nasdaq-100 so QQQ is vulnerable. VT tracks the FTSE Global All Cap Index so VT is not directly affected by Nasdaq’s choices but is still exposed to some extent because spacex is likely going to be in the aforementioned FTSE index, Nasdaq’s actions impact spacex’s market cap, and thus Nasdaq’s actions impact spacex’s position in the aforementioned FTSE index which in turn affects VT’s composition (to a smaller extent than QQQ’s).
EDIT: to be clear the above are just examples with two funds (QQQ and VT)
Based on the comment from [1] it seems like the issue with nasdaq is that anyone tracking it is contractually obligated to include spacex? What about for other funds? VIFAX description says
>The Global Equity Index Management team applies disciplined portfolio construction and efficient trading techniques designed to help minimize tracking error and maintain close alignment with benchmark characteristics [of S&P 500].
So given that this only affects NASDAQ i'm guessing they aren't affected? And even if S&p 500 started to play the same games, why can't their supposedly disciplined "Global Equity Index Management team" simply opt not to play along with these shenanigans? Or if they simply do mechanically track the s&p 500, what exactly is the "management fee" paying for?
There’s a lot to address here but in short: VFIAX is an index fund, it tracks the S&P500 index, it’s not actively managed, SpaceX will likely be in the S&P500, so my comment around VT applies to VFIAX (as far as the question of exposure is concerned) but to a greater extent than VT (see VT’s composition vs VFIAX’s composition).
Obligatory not financial advice, I’m not an expert, don’t make any financial decisions based on hacker news comments, etc
The claim is that Nasdaq is going to artificially admit SpaceX to the Nasdaq-100, an index they control, in order to win their business away from NYSE. If the index you invest in is derived from the Nasdaq-100, that's problematic.
It seems kind of likely that SpaceX would make it into most of the major indices on the merits, relatively quickly (the S&P has a 1-year waiting period), just based on its likely size and liquidity.
Yeah the ETFs have sold off their trust quite a bit in the past year. No longer can anyone with skin in the game trust the stewardship of the fiduciaries. They are simply showing that they are bad at what they do and people should not entrust their future to them.
Pull your money out of the target date funds and into a responsible mix of indexes.
I think you have it backwards. Many (most?) funds underperform the market as a whole, showing they really don't know anything. ETFs that mirror indexes exist exactly because of this... their managers don't make trades based on their insight of the market, they are contractually obligated to mirror the index, period.
The article shows that at least some ETFs -- NASDAQ index funds -- will now be undermined by this SpaceX scam using those contractual obligations to extract money from ETF investors.
Good question. I don't know, but I'll point out that different indexes have different rules, so someone would need to check if a change to the rules for Nasdaq indexes affects the others you mention. (Perhaps they follow what Nasdaq does somehow?)
Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.
I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.
This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!
I love this. I use various text editors mostly used by devs (moving back and forth between emacs and sublime on mac and textastic on ipad) for serious longform writing all the time, usually using markdown +
pandoc, and it has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.
IME the main advantages are (1) not having to fight with useless Microsoft word (and similar) behavior, bloat, bugs, etc. and (2) being able to mix in a spot of code as needed, for example compiling different sections together, doing a bit of text replacement and templating etc.
The main disadvantage is that the tooling isn't really there. I've done a stupid amount of yak shaving trying to get things like footnote folding in emacs, word count, etc., the spell checking is waaay behind, outline formats don't really work right (though they also don't really work right in word etc.)
So three cheers for anyone working on making the tooling problem better!!
> Seniority here also unfortunately often correlates with age. The best startup employee will usually be someone early in their career who doesn’t have as many responsibilities or as much need for consistency due to having more dependents. They may have fewer immediate cash flow constraints, fewer “adult responsibilities.” Kids need braces and karate classes, and if Mom is doing 996 at a ten-person company paying her peanuts, offering a crappy health care plan, promising an epic payout ten years from now, that’s a real mismatch. Startups are an extreme sport, and generally inadvisable for anybody who’s not in a safe position to speculate on their career for several years.
Oooof. Following this paragraph is a recipe for age and family status discrimination lawsuits. (A number of states prohibit both, and federal law prohibits the former above 40). Quite possibly sex discrimination lawsuits as well if a court quite plausibly concludes that someone who makes decisions this way will also be averse from hiring women of childbearing age or life stage.
Also, anecdotally false. The highest performers were often late 30s-55 yo at both startups I've worked (acquired and 'unicorn'). The young had tons of energy, but their output didn't meet any engineering rigor for working in a hardware startup. Maybe the mobile/web guys have a different story. But here in hardware, firmware, electrical engineering "The Best" had families, children, dogs, homes, heli-ski'd, bicycled from Mill Valley to SF, and were absolutely surgical with their work.
These people were exceptional and I would easily call them The Best any day.
the author almost realizes that hiring cheap talent is like looking for a stock to invest in ... the trick is to identify undervaluation. then he shortstops and overvalues the usual metrics like low age just as everybody else. some people miss the forest for the trees.
More charitably, someone who is older and exceptional has probably had a chance to find equilibrium with the market, i.e. they know exactly how much they are worth and as a little startup you're less likely to end up landing them.
It's also completely incorrect. The average age of startup founders is 45, many of the best engineers in the market right now are older Millennials and GenX because they grew up in a time when you could still gain legible access to every aspect of computing in a home setting with PCs, which gave them an exceptional fundamentals basis which allows them to have a broader scope than specialists.
As someone who spent almost my entire career, until fairly recently, in startups, I would not consider age in any way a determining factor /especially/ for early hires. You need "adults in the room", because they will help to establish the bar for the remainder of the team as you grow, act as technical leads, and have a very broad scope of responsibility. The more experienced and capable they are, the better the quality of your future hires and the less technical debt you incur in the process of getting to product-market fit and growing to profitability/critical mass.
You should not (legally) have an age bias at all, but if you were going to apply one, the reverse bias is more rational.
The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive of what one sees in the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank you for the feedback.
If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?
It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.
reply