GCA10

I'm not sure we can really say "smart consumers aware of the risk." Isn't it more like "Opportunistic customers who hoped the risks were immaterial beat a path . . . "

Out of morbid curiosity, during a long drive this weekend, I listened to 20 minutes of an AM radio guy's pitch for some retirement annuity system that sounded quite sweet at first. As he kept talking, though, I realized that he was being very evasive about what happens if you die early. Connecting the dots - he keeps all your assets. No survivor benefits at all.

I used to do financial investigative reporting. I was looking for the catch. And it nearly glided past me. Ditto for disclosing the full details about the maximum caps on your electricity charges.

These promoters are masters at smooth, low-candor discussions of risk. They're what make the pendulum keep swinging back and forth between deregulation and re-regulation.

Agreed that a lot of people do things that are appealing now and not so wise later. But I think we'll get farther if we talk about this as a "short horizon" problem, rather than assailing their mental capacity.

It's all a variant of "candy today; diabetes in 20 years." Public health experts have probably thought the hardest about how to get people to take the long term into account. There must be something in their playbook that could benefit the anti-surveillance cause.

Dash cam footage! Why has dash-cam footage become a thing on YouTube? Why aren't people demanding that it be shut down?

Even security cameras are now part of performance culture

In today's society, the desire to be noticed is easily 50x the level of anxiety about being in a surveillance state.

We could start with the nonstop, look-at-me nature of Instagram (or any other social site). They satisfy a deep craving that just keeps growing. We could marvel at the Jan. 6 rioters posting their moments in history for all to see. It's endless, and it isn't slowing down.

Yes, there's a powerful argument to be made that nonstop surveillance could work out badly. But after 15 years of seeing such pieces thunder into obscurity, rehashing the same arguments in isolation seems futile.

Anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation needs to spend serious time thinking about the reasons why so many people want strangers to know about them. It's a deep-felt desire. For a lot of people, the dread of being unknown/un-noticed/ignored is greater than the risks that come from being noticed. Once we understand why that's so, we might be able to move forward.

I'd much rather see these sorts of posts as flow charts, with lots of If/Then functions along the way. For example: - Are you entering a regulated market with unbendable safety standards? If yes, take time to get it right. If not, proceed faster. - Do you need to hit the next milestone fast to get more money. If so, launch rapidly with what you've got. If not, consider taking more time to get it right

Individual anecdotes are often charming and sometimes inspiring. But with so many decision points, a series of "succeed like me" single-example posts, all with different messages, start to blur.

I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place.

AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.)

If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.

Freedom of speech isn't the same as freedom of distribution. There are lots of edgy things that you can say somewhere. You just can't say them everywhere.

We can have lots of lively debate about how to draw the boundaries. But we'll get a lot farther if we can move beyond the two-state absolutism of "allowable everywhere" vs. "outright banned with breath-taking severity."

I'm looking at the first 100,000 digits of pi. Lo and behold, 00000 shows up once. So does 11111. What are the odds of each of those happening? It's 1:100,000!

Absolutely astonishing.

As an aside, the inevitability of weird flukes in large sample sizes really sinks in if you've ever wasted part of a year multi-tabling online poker. You'll see some hands play out in totally WTF fashion, as 1:100 and 1:1,000 probabilities come good.

The lesson, of course, is that when you play thousands of hands, encountering such oddities with your money at stake is no longer nearly impossible. It's moved into the zone of nearly certain.

Nobody gets enduringly rich being a roulette player.

But it's surprising how lucrative it can be to set yourself up as a Roulette Coach.

Excellent question, and I'll offer you a frustrating answer that splits the difference.

Because McKinsey works in so many areas, it has a huge portfolio of outcomes. There's not a lot of public visibility into what each exact outcome might be. So the firm (and others like it) are able to benefit from this opacity.

To wit: top consulting firms are able to present prospective clients with a recap of their best engagements and wins. Is that representative? Cherry picked? No one ever knows.

Couldn't resist the temptation. I grabbed the opening paragraph of Hemingway's own short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- and put it to the test.

Danger alert! Danger alert!

The master himself opens with a 110-word, two-sentence paragraph. The first sentence is flagged yellow. The second one is flagged red. By the software's system, Hemingway's own writing is in trouble.

Truth is, this app is a nifty diagnostic tool that will help you avoid some writing goofs, if you use it judiciously. But if you let it dictate every change, you'll lose the full rhythms of good writing.

Even a master of lean writing (Hemingway himself) knew when to bulk up, even for just a moment, to create a cadence that could surprise and intrigue us.

Step 0 is admirable. I've come across business cultures where people got ahead (really!) by "outrunning their mistakes." Lots of rapid promotions and job transfers, leaving messes behind them -- and then blaming problems on their inept successors, or other saboteurs, etc. No accepting of responsibility.

Most of those places eventually go bust, but they can ruin a lot of people's lives before the final collapse happens.

Step 3.2 feels forced and a little Orwellian. Even something as hazy as invoking "bad judgment" -- and leaving the scene -- is often sufficient, at least at first. If errant people need a bit more time to process reality's sudden slap in the face, I'm in favor of giving it to them.

Eventually a lot of them do reach a fuller understanding. Or they redeem themselves in other ways. In the right settings, a little bit of mercy can be very powerful

The analysis here is so spot-on that I'd argue it sometimes applies even to Wikipedia as well. (OP offers up Wikipedia as a service that can "reorganize to reflect its understanding" of what's changed as new features keep getting added.)

Often, yes, especially on relatively simple pages that relate to geography, mildly famous people, etc. But take a look at Wikipedia's page on Facebook, which is now a 539-source accretion of diverse headlines as they happened, now held together only by subject headers that are the digital equivalent of very large paperclips. Or a ship's log.

Fixing this would be brutally tough! We're talking about what's now a "semi-protected article," alterable only by trusted players, because otherwise it's more likely to be defaced than improved.

In fact, looking at the Talk section for the Facebook article, it looks as if it was deemed a "good article" from 2006-2011 but then lost this status.

A telling comment at the time: "Compared with the latest reviewed version of the article, the prose is very choppy and unclear. In some sections, every sentence seems to function as its own paragraph, while in other sections there are random paragraph separations where there shouldn't be. The entire Website section is a mass conglomeration of Facebook features that needs to be sorted out in some way."

What's visible now is beyond the stage where incremental fixes (or additions) can fix things. Meaningful improvement will come only from a top-to-bottom rewrite and rethinking of the article, so that Facebook's role, history and features are presented with the clarity and insight of author(s) who can put all the pieces together in a framework that's strong enough to overcome the "ship's log" problem.

I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look.

The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.

One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.

I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.

Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.

I'll nominate GoPro as case where bootstrapping's quirky virtues helped make everything click. Doug Woodman's basic idea dates back to 2002 or maybe earlier. His early iterations of ultra-mobile cameras were slightly successful but not yet the winning version.

By poking around, subject to the uniquely loose/tight constraints of what he could fund selling beads (!) and early prototypes, he bought himself a lot of time to try to get it right. Perhaps it was a case of available technology needing the better part of a decade to catch up to his vision.

With a big, impatient burst of SV funding at the start, version 1.0 of GoPro might have been a Segway-like flop.

Presumably DOTB and DBNT should be pitched to investors -- and funded -- in very different ways.

Doing old things better is very amenable to metrics, lifetime value of customer, market-adoption forecasts, cost of customer acquisition, etc. This is the land of venture money with milestones and ever-growing rounds as success unfolds. (Or asphyxiation if success doesn't happen.)

Doing brand new things probably is far more likely to start via bootstrapping, passion projects, university research and other areas where open-ended curious inquiry is tolerated better. Dixon (OP) loosely acknowledges this when he writes that entrepreneurs "usually spend many years deeply immersed in the underlying technology before they have their key insights."

Eventually the path forward will be clear enough that the VC/metrics folks can show up for later financing rounds and do their thing. But I'll argue that venture's metrics-driven feed-or-starve system is more likely to mess up this early exploration than to help it.

Even though VCs will insist that they are equally good at both.

This is petty, but should I believe the Wikipedia article when it says "the barriers are controlled by a supercomputer"?

Unless this is a 1980s-vintage supercomputer, I'm baffled. The barriers' main function is to open or close. Someone needs to assess and predict rising water levels, but a lot of that is surely done by other systems. Add in some speed adjustments and some docking/aligning adjustments to get everything to shut just so -- and it still sounds far simpler than an iPhone camera.

The civil engineering challenge is huge. But I'm not seeing a huge need for the very high end of modern computing power to make it all work.

There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/

We should start a thread with other lessons from supposedly dead-end jobs. I'll offer the following from a couple teenage summers as a hardware-store clerk at minimum wage:

- Start out friendly when you're interacting with someone you've never met before. It usually works out well.

- Don't spew BS answers when you don't know something. Seriously. Just own up to your knowledge gap and see if someone else can help.

This is a useful distinction, but it this misses what's actually hard about "hard work." The risk of failure is only 20% of the issue.

What's central is the fact that do hard work well, you need to temporarily tear apart the solution-forming systems that have served you adequately so far -- and put them back together in a different way. In the midst of this, there's genuine discomfort and nausea. Even if you know you'll eventually get it right, having everything in pieces on the floor is very jarring.

Finding your way through a lot of missteps, near misses and roadblocks takes a special sort of perseverance. I've done this long enough in my work that I get mordant joy from tracking the misses. Versions 2, 2A, 2B and 2C were dead-ends. It's on to Versions 3, 3A, etc.

Usually version 4E or so gets the job done. And it's elegant and I'm happy again. I had one epic struggle that went into the 7s. I ended up cracking it in a borrowed lab in Arizona, because the usual settings in NYC and CT were not getting me there.

Being patient and persistent at times like that is hard.

Actually, the information asymmetries in public vs. private can be huge -- and I don't mind a little SEC paternalism at all.

I had an OMG experience trying to look up a very interesting non-public software company on SharePost a week ago. They will offer me a chance to buy something. I don't get any clarity on the cap table, so I'd be completely in the dark on preferences, dilution, etc. I'm being asked to offer a price range before seeing any trading history. And there's no availability (at first) of any financial history.

There's potential here to make a uniquely bad investment in what might be a uniquely great company. We won't cry a lot of tears for rich people who make some bad investments in the dark. For people living closer to the edge, having them get fleeced has spillover effects that are ugly enough to argue against letting it all play out with total laissez-faire.

Especially if lax rules invite the hustlers to overwhelm the market. (Gresham's law)

We already have extensive experience in the U.S. with a particular type of wealth tax -- called property taxes. I've been paying them in California for 23 years, and they haven't ruined me yet. (The nominal rate on those tends to be about 1%, too.)

Many people with personal wealth of $50m+ start steering significant money into foundations of their own devising. There's a good debate to be had about whether society is better off with the richest people creating their own philanthropy and social-reform strategies, or having them hand over the $$ to the government for its version.

I'd rather see individual strategies proliferate, on the belief that the government doesn't always know best. But the idea that a 1% tax will bring ruin on successful entrepreneurs grossly underestimates the way that fortunes keep growing.

OP sounds like someone who's unhappy working on big software projects. That's understandable. But once you're on a big project, you can't keep it all in your head. You can't make your own clever adjustments when problems arise without documenting everything and then taking it through channels.

For what it's worth, sales people have the exact same complaint. They can get testy, too, about executives using software-oversight tools to take away the soul of what they really do. Allow me to change 15% of the words in this piece, and it could become a rebuke of Salesforce and its siblings, as applied to large sales organizations. So the brief allusion to sales seemed way off base.

Process can be exasperating, until you've worked in a big place where there's no coherent process.

I wish these sorts of insta-surveys would disclose more about how the polling was done. The cheapest way to do polling is via a pop-up notifcation on a heavily trafficked digital property, with online button-clicking to follow.

But then you aren't really getting data on all Americans. You're getting data on people who happened to be hanging out on cnn.com, smokinggun.com or whatever. And that's going to skew quite severely to people who have above average digital activity.

Same problem if they're using a ready-built panel of people who like to take online polls.

They might be surveying differently, and spending more money. But given that the publishing organization, decisiondata.org, is in the business of guiding people on their ISP choices, I don't think this is likely to be a demographically balanced phone survey, let alone Census-grade field work.

Sure, lots of us do rely on home internet to do a lot of work, especially now. But any effort to quantify this really ought to avoid big-time sampling problems.

It's worth taking a moment to identify what's so bad about micromanaging -- which turns out to be a serious fail for multiple reasons.

First is the obvious day-to-day impact on the subordinate, who finds it exasperating to be second-guessed so much on little stuff, or to burn up so much time briefing the boss on things that don't deeply matter.

Second is the inability of both boss and manager to focus on the big picture. Ten tiny tweaks on a misconceived project measure up poorly vs. one bold decision to redefine (or kill!) that project.

The third factor is subtler but perhaps even more important. People grow by making a certain number of fixable -- or unfixable -- mistakes on their own and then figuring out what to do next. That's how we build up a full repertoire of tacit knowledge that lets us make good decisions going forward. If we're getting micro-calibrations all the time from someone else, our ability to have confidence in our own decision trees never takes shape.

I spent three years in my 20s working on a big U.S. company's expansion into Europe that had only middling results. Our targets were high and the bosses had only a faint idea of what initiatives we were trying. That meant there was unlimited room for learning by doing. I came out of that with an enduring sense of "Yeah, that usually works," or "No, you're going to add a week of redo to the project if you try that."

And no amount of micromanaging would have got me there.

Lots of great ideas here -- but in keeping with all top-vintage Paul Graham essays, he takes his best points to about 130% of their validity.

So I'd like to weigh in on this assertion: "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong."

Not so. To be a successful scientist, you need to be orderly, fast and well-connected in finding all the rest of the Next Rights, once a few of your peers (or you) have opened up a whole new river of truth by finding the first right. (See James Watson, Ernest Lawrence, etc.)

You can see this in the evolution of practically every exciting field, whether it's subatomic physics, molecular biology, paleontology, etc.

This dynamic requires a fifth state in Graham's admirably simple 2x2 grid. We need to recognize people that can be defiant non-conformists when the moment presents itself -- and then work within the system to make the most of their second and third-order insights as the world embraces their big idea.

The concept of the brilliant, isolated, irritable genius is a mainstay of a certain kind of movie or novel. But in real life, the most effective disrupters are just as good at forming large teams that lead the charge toward the next right (once they've found their breakthrough idea) as in coming up with that breathtakingly strange new idea in the first place.

There's a Burning Man analogy in the Twitter comments that struck me as quite apt. In fact, it holds for everything from vacation destinations to multi-decade music acts.

People who were there at the beginning feel that something magical has slowly been corrupted by success and all the bigness issues that come with it. They aren't totally wrong. But people who get there later still find something of value, and everything is now sturdy enough to support wider participation.

I'm okay with seeing it both ways.

Media guy here. Lots of NYC readers/viewers either live in luxury condos or have a point of view about people who do. For people who do live in such places, the $$$ that they've paid to be there is meant to create a safe and elegant island from all the clatter and chaos of NYC street life.

Murders in such settings instantly trip the "fear alert." Now all of our LC residents need to know how the deed was done and if there's anything about their safe-island assumptions that must be revisited or repaired.

The result: a story that people can't stop talking about. It's fashionable to decry business pressures that force journalists to do this, but the truth is sheer desire for recognition is a sufficient driver, no matter what the business model.

Fascinating! Just to keep the conversation going, I'll argue that HN's current format works much better for me.

I appreciate newspaper formats when dozens of stories have roughly equal appeal to me, and I get value out of lingering on each one for 5-30 seconds before moving on.

HN, for me, is intensely bimodal. The bare-bones listing of headlines lets me skim very fast past the 93% that don't quite work for me -- and dive into the 7% that are today's gems. Those then deserve a close read and many minutes in the comments.

So I'd be very frustrated if HN switched to newspaper mode. But everyone's tastes are different, and having both formats available would be cool.

Lots of great discussion here about the Segway's severe problems with product-market fit. It's all true, and it's all quite poignant.

But in the spirit of completeness, let's take a moment to think about the messed-up people dynamics, too. After all, it's still worth wondering why a visionary CEO and some very smart engineers could go so far off course.

There's a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of Segway's origins in "Code Name Ginger," a 2003 book by Steve Kemper. (Review is here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105581785554884900) Two key insights:

Founder Dean Kamen sounds like an A+ visionary but a quite terrifying PM, with many sudden, late changes that took a toll on the project.

Also, having both Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs as investors -- who would weigh in (at the same meeting!) with ideas about how to fix everything -- sounds a lot like putting your wet fingers in a wall socket. Or swallowing an 90-day supply of meds all at once. Too much genius, in too many directions, is a peril in its own right