My impression is sometimes people see a certain topic and want to talk about it and upvote. Regardless of it being high quality article or novel. Not saying that's right but it happens.
And sometimes low-quality content gets a better signal, because people want to pick it apart in the comments. Which looks engaging to the ranking rules.
Still better than the breaking news of someone "about to drop documents maybe next week". "The entire world is watching that suitcase full of nasty nasty documents, when will it open?".
I think the rhetoric is a very sophisticated way to market the fund. (1) make highly generalized pronouncements that sound wise and get headlines because they make for good journalistic copy (2) make the business seem like it's driven by principles - eg, a system - and not just a few great PMs running it (founders).
Any developers from BW on hacker news? Curious to know what your experience is like.
How did the experience of shipping software compare to a "conventional" company, either a big corporation or a silicon valley type company? I get the sense the tendency to talk in big picture abstract would allow a lot of folks to bluster through. True SMEs would have to contend with the culture in order to get results in tech.
What you’re saying might as well be true, but I found his YouTube videos on the economic machine to be brilliant. I took a few semesters of Econ in college, and even then, I didn’t have my head wrapped around the bigger picture.
His management system seems similar to nonviolent communication. He uses radical honesty among employees where everyone’s rating each other. That’s extreme but it probably has benefit.
> One stylized model for thinking about Bridgewater is that it is run by the computer with absolute logic and efficiency; in this model, the computer's main problem is keeping the 1,500 human employees busy so that they don't interfere with its perfect rationality. [1]
> On this theory, the computer might have gotten fed up with Dalio -- who by even his own account can be a bit much, as a manager -- and given him some carefully calibrated hints to make himself scarce. "Hey Ray," Bridgetron 4000 probably said, "your insights are so good, you should really put them in a book. And a TED talk. You deserve it. Don't worry about the investing stuff, I'll handle that." [2]
Yes, what you think you know about the "radical honesty" culture is absolutly true. Prior to printing his book, it was mandatory reading for ALL BW employees. At some point Ray decided to release the principles to the public, but they had been available for employees long before that.
I miss the culture, and that is the honest truth. While it has some difficulties at times, it is far ahead of anywhere else i have worked (4 major banks). It clearly is not for everyone, but if you are the type who likes transparency, it is for you.
Software/tech stack - They are mostly a windows shop... not sure that answers your question, but i dont want to get into it in detail.
Piggybacking on this, it seems like a lot of folks in finance who have reached the top of the mountain during previous economic conditions that no longer exist are trying to take that (mostly) luck, (some) wisdom, and wealth, and parlay it in to status [1] because there's not much left to grasp for when you're a billionaire (Buffet, Dalio, etc) and you want to hold on to relevance as the sun sets.
I admit I bought Dalio's book Principles (you got a free gift card for charity in the amount of the book, so why not) and I was not impressed with the ideology conveyed as keys to success.
His book reads like a financier who thinks he’s a philosopher, or desperately wants to be perceived as one. I suppose that’s inevitable in a world that worships money.
Going the whole marcus aurelius route, but marcus aurelius had some genuinely unique thoughts and viewpoints. Financiers are much less interesting than they think they are, purely because money attracts an audience regardless of value.
>but marcus aurelius had some genuinely unique thoughts and viewpoints.
The thing is though, Marcus Aurelius's thoughts were never intend to be made public. It was his own personal notes to himself and therefore has little to no conflict of interest. Where as Ray Dalio is selling books and influence. While the first part may be a sum that is meaningless to him, the latter part could not be easily discounted.
For #3 you can go to their profile and block them if they're really worth it. I think you only get like 100 blocks and then you just have to suffer through the motivational inspiration-porn quotes :)
Is there a legal designation or meaning to currency-manipulator I'm unaware of, or is this basically like the Chinese designating Trump a "name-caller."
"The three assessment criteria are: “(1) a significant bilateral trade surplus with the United States is one that is at least $20 billion; (2) a material current account surplus is one that is at least 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); and (3) persistent, one-sided intervention occurs when net purchases of foreign currency are conducted repeatedly and total at least 2 percent of an economy’s GDP over a 12-month period.”[1]
Up 56% since December. Given their lack of cash and assets, shares ($16 billion market cap) are indeed the better option for compensating the people that they've harmed.
One share per person at a present $139, would almost work out (120m share float).
There's like one sentence of "because I said so" analysis in this article. The idea that Facebook is dying because MAU is growing faster than DAU is basically ... dumb. Both numbers are going up. Facebook users are growing. Feels like people just like upvoting anything anti-Facebook even if the content doesn't really make the case well or at all.
Yep. I'm pretty curious where the overwhelmingly negative FB sentiment on HN comes from. I've never seen so many people pride themselves in never having used / deleting Facebook.
Facebook has had a number of major ethical failures over the years, which have been well covered here and HN readers are more likely to fully appreciate the significance of their privacy invasion (a recurring theme with Google’s lost prestige, too) and undermining important efforts (e.g. abusing MFA phone numbers after saying they wouldn’t, hurting a substantial security improvement).
I would assume HN users have some idea of facebooks business..
that's beside the point. Facebook and its products are growing regardless if you like them/know about their business (as if its some sort of esoteric practice...?), to state otherwise isnt worth discussing much less posting about on here
Microsoft was also hated for their business practices. I find what a company does to be a perfectly good reason to like or hate them, not that my opinion matters. But if you have enough people feeling a certain way it changes things.
For what it’s worth I don’t like FB because of Zuck and his FU attitude towards his user’s privacy (he was quoted early on calling his users “dumb fucks” if I’m remembering correctly).
How would you suggest this post be strongly interpreted? Any interpretation I can come up with conflates their own self discipline with Facebooks doing.
Remember that the original comment was pointing out the extremely vacuous nature of the article, and the confusion is as to why it has been upvoted so much. I wouldn’t call this article a demonstration of the HN community being “in tune”
Yup. Even if the "blue app" is dying, brushing off Instagram and WhatsApp because they are less monetized is dumb. It's exactly because they are less monetized - but FB is extremely experienced in monetizing attention - that they are major levers left to pull from a revenue perspective.
I think the most exciting test for FB is whether it succeeds in monetizing WA and IG without killing engagement. I don't know if there is a comparable story of a mature network absorbing other mature networks (please share examples), but if they succeed it is evidence of a way to keep rolling their data and revenue advantage over from product to product - so who even cares about the blue app.
IG is monetized quite a bit. It could be monetized more, but I doubt we are going to see a major difference from the current trend it is already on. Under $2B rev in 2016. Projecting $14B for 2019.
FBM and WhatsApp (which you mentioned) are the things to see if they can be even semi-monetized. They both have over 1.5B active users. If they can average a couple of dollars per user per year a piece in the next 5 years, that’ll prevent any major blows for the company as a whole. Or say they can only monetize them at a combined $5B rev a year with $2B profit and Facebook l.com profits and revenue decline in equal part while IG grows. That’s not such a big deal. We don’t know what else they can buy or come up with.
And FB as a company right now is the 5th most valuable company in the world. If their market cap, including inflation, drops by 20-25% over the next couple of years...they’ll still be a top 15 company by market cap in the world. If not possibly in the top 10. I haven’t checked this second so I might be off with some, but once you get out of the top 10 largest market cap companies, you get to companies like P&G, Disney, and some financial companies like BoA, MasterCard, maybe Wells Fargo. A bit farther down would be the telecoms like Verizon, Att. All ranging in the $2XXB range. All top 20 or so companies by market cap. FB is at $575B. Their P/E is 33 it seems. If their growth stagnates as a whole and their P/E drops to ~15, they’ll likely still be a $300B+ company.
I’m both those case FB as a whole is still doing pretty damn well.
I see the same. Shocks me how many ads there are. On the other hand, the ads tend to be really good. I have to close the app to prevent myself pissing away money on stuff.
That would surprise me. The only people I know who think about Facebook—the actual product Facebook not its subsidiaries—are those that locked into it during their late teens or early twenties, and have stopped meeting new people. Parents, homeowners, married people, etc.. Granted I'm not part of this demographic, but I imagine if I was, I'd already have it and not be a new discoverer of FB. For casual new connections, it's Snapchat & Insta, maaybe Messenger but those are mostly people who used FB and have just continued using the chat aspect. Otherwise, events are still for some reason coordinated on the website, which is why I don't hear about weddings.
I live in a college town (and so am constantly surrounded by the up and coming generation) and as far as I can tell Facebook is alive and well: essentially _everyone_ uses it; they don't spend a ton of time posting on it (they do that mostly on Instagram), but everyone has an account and a ton of critical information is essentially only ever discovered or disseminated due to people using the two massive local groups (a free and for sale group, and a very awkwardly named meme sharing group) that each have tens of thousands of members. I think a key problem in these discussions is that people like to conflate "posting on timelines" with "using" Facebook, whereas most usage of Facebook is shifting to different use cases.
My impression is sometimes people see a certain topic and want to talk about it and upvote. Regardless of it being high quality article or novel. Not saying that's right but it happens.
And sometimes low-quality content gets a better signal, because people want to pick it apart in the comments. Which looks engaging to the ranking rules.