I agree that from the perspective of a business owner this would seem very normal. "I need legal services for X, and I happen to know and trust a very good outside counsel for this" is very normal. Additionally, law firms have super robust conflict of interest policies so you can expect this would have been reviewed in details.
However, I think this story brings up two important topics:
1. It is important that high level government officials avoid not just actual conflicts of interest but also the APPEARANCE of a conflict of interest.
2. The Trump administration has taken a much more liberal approach to conflicts of interest than most admins, and this has undermined trust in government. The fact that this story got people so riled up is a great illustration of it. This is not good for the country!
This is just third world level of open corruption. If nothing is done against it, things will just get worse and not better.
First it will signal to all the lower level officials that corruption is ok. The next step isn't just corruption is ok, but it is expected. No corruption means you won't get far in your career.
The demand signals never allocated the resources, a small number of people always did. Those people react to the demand signals (and they still do).
IMO a more important question is: what happens when the market power of a segment of society grows much greater than the rest? In a "K-shaped" economy, the top 20% have so much spending power (and even more future spending power) than their demand signals can overwhelm the rest. Then IMO the market won't respond to the demand signals of the bottom 20% and capitalism stops working for all. Add to that the possibility of AI automating more and more work and you have a system that only works for folks at the tops.
This isn't a resource allocation problem! it's a purchasing power distribution problem.
This doesn’t strike me as a problem. There are sufficient entrepreneurs that market need common to a total 20% of the population will be met. In the USA that 70 million is a sufficiently large number. After all, that’s $700 million of MRR at $10/month.
The things limiting provision of services are physical limits like the audience being widely dispersed or just characteristics like not all sharing the same needs and therefore not actually being addressable.
You obviously are well aware that addressability does not track with income category automatically but it does for many businesses. E.g. payday loans, rent to own, check cashing, dollar stores.
Since a large section of this group is in use of government credits, at the least businesses will evolve to meet the use of those. EBT grocers, Medicaid-focused care, etc.
The majority of the effort will be spent where the greatest economic opportunity is, but entrepreneurs will match their ability to address the market to their audience. It’s not possible for a dollar store to sell GPUs to Baseten. They don’t have the capability to do something useful there.
Have you guys been having a good experience with OpenRouter? I tried it out recently with Claude, and it cached no tokens, charging me $200 for one conversation of 11 messages.
I tried using deepseek v4 flash with OpenRouter. It switches between providers too eagerly which resets the cache. Then, each provider begins to rate limit me for providing so many uncached tokens, so it just keeps on switching providers. I'm paying for every token... why rate limit me? It was unusable compared to just using the official Deepseek provider which has a much better cache rate.
I have seen you advertise your website a few times. I like the idea of not having to trust the router, so I took some time out of my day to critique your website: https://files.catbox.moe/v68cf7.png
My visit to your website went like this:
1. Visit models page
2. Try to find GLM-5.3-Flash (which is among the ~5 models that 90% of people currently care about)
3. Give up scrolling (which would have taken OVER 50 SCROLLS!!!) and use Ctrl + F
4. Try to find input/output/cached price
5. Scroll all the way up to find out which column is what
6. Notice that output price is cut off
7. Notice that the scroll bar is over 100 scrolls further down the page
8. Use Shift + Wheel to scroll horizontally (most visitors probably won't know this trick)
9. Notice that cached price is missing
10. Conclude that this is probably not a serious offering and bounce
There are probably more issues later on, but this is how far I got.
I would suggest you to:
- Deslopify all pages that a user may visit before conversion
- List important models first (see OpenRouter rankings)
- Move the most important information (model name/input/output/cached price) to the left
- Disaggregate the prices per provider (maybe subtables per model? not sure)
- Measure cache hit rate and compute effective price per provider (see OpenRouter)
(- Optional: Fix the broken link on your HN profile page. Currently, the only way to get from this comment to your website is a search engine.)
How am I supposed to navigate around there? For example the pricing page is empty or is that how it was supposed to look? On models and providers pages there are lists but no way to filter or get any kind of meaningful info. Or is this a WIP/POC?
I think most business will decline to do any further business with you after you threaten to sue them. There are even patent licenses that automatically get voided in the event you sue your counterparty for any reason.
I’ve seen many people climb the SWE ladder or build a YC company (having done both myself), and trust me the founder route is not the most efficient. You only believe this because you didn’t see the 2 failed startups and 10 year journey grinding 80h weeks almost running out of cash a few times.
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
This. I saw way more people build a few millions of retirement nest egg reliably in 10-20 years, by working on a boring good swe job and manage their investment a bit better. It's a much safer route.
Nobody in their right mind should start a company up to some equilibrium. As a society we should fund the appetite of experimental founders to put more pressure on quality than what natural conditions might allow.
I would say closer to a skilled black jack player. You can’t really change the odds in lottery but a good player can improve their chances in gambling.
What part of "start a company" requires "grinding 80h weeks"?
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong. (That is also a bit related to the explosion of gambling and gambling-alike stuff such as "prediction markets"...)
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
However, I think this story brings up two important topics:
1. It is important that high level government officials avoid not just actual conflicts of interest but also the APPEARANCE of a conflict of interest.
2. The Trump administration has taken a much more liberal approach to conflicts of interest than most admins, and this has undermined trust in government. The fact that this story got people so riled up is a great illustration of it. This is not good for the country!
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