IsaacL

When I see things like, I try to actually answer the question "why don't they fix this"? Often it's not because the company in question is dumb, but because they're operating within certain design constraints.

Think of the design space here:

Given: 1. Facebook has close to a billion profiles linked to people's real names. 2. By default, these profiles are publicly searchable.

You want to design messaging so that: 3. People can message people they're not friends with. 4. But you don't want to encourage spammers in any way.

3 & 4 are hard to reconcile. If you have what is essentially a global telephone directory, letting people message anyone is going to lead to horrendous spam. By the sounds of the article, they do some clever filtering to let you know if your message gets through, but it seems they still have to learn towards too-strict filtering. (It's not just viagra and penis enlargement pills - probably most FB spam would be "LIKE our page for the BEST student events in Reno" or "hey girl u look fine u got bf?")

Maybe the pay-a-dollar-and-get-refunded-if-they-reply feature could work, I don't know.

I was reading this very interesting thread, and had to jump in here as well. I actually worked (briefly) on a very similar idea last year - basically an Exec clone for the UK. We scrapped the idea after a month, since we realised that you're basically competing directly with existing service firms, and the unique niche of a "mobile tasks marketplace" is tasks that are:

- not doable by a specialised company (cleaning, gardening)

- have a physical component (else they could be done by a VA)

- are more efficient to outsource than do yourself (which seems to rule out pretty much everything)

I came to the conclusion that the only way to go would be to build a specialised services firm, which seems to be what Exec has done (they now seem to just do cleaning). Which is cool, but maybe I'm missing something, since I don't see how they're really a tech startup as they don't really leverage tech in the way that Uber does. But straight services firms make tons of money anyway, so Justin Kan deserves applause for persuading pg to invest in a cleaning company.

Anyway my points to grandparent are:

- I agree, figure out a niche skillset first, then expand

- don't get seduced by the "on-demand mobile workforce" element. It sounds cool, but your target market probably doesn't care about cool. You have to answer the question "who really wants a dogsbody to do generic tasks?"

- Though the social aspect of this kind of business is nice, nailing the supply side is really easy. Unskilled and semi-skilled labour is really cheap, if you haven't noticed. 90% of your focus should be on nailing the demand side.

- read everything you can get your hands on about Exec/TaskRabbit/all their many clones.

- agree with parent's plan. Most local services firms probably suck at online marketing. If you can figure out a way to reliably get online customers for service X, you can then go to all the local firms that offer service X and offer a 10% affiliate deal. I'd focus more on nailing the marketing channel before the product (SEO, AdWords, whatever works - find out if there's underpriced search terms like "best window cleaning firms in Cambridge" and go from there).

And yeah, I've become a big fan of the patio11/tptacek approach. Just need to put it into action myself...

I hear this a lot, but I disagree.

1. Firstly, take startups where the founders had an original idea, but they pitch it as "X for Y". Is this a bad thing? Many people will say that they should pitch it on its own merits. The thing is human communication is all about reducing an idea to concepts the listener already understands. I used to work on a startup that was an online freelancer marketplace based around social connections. I could also describe it as "eLance meets Linkedin". The latter gets the idea across even though it's not a perfect description. Doesn't matter. If I'm dealing with someone who hears a lot of startup ideas, or has a low attention span (eg the typical investor), brevity trumps accuracy.

2. What about startups that use the "X for Y" template to generate business ideas? This might seem a bit more questionable. But if a certain model worked for one industry, why can't it be adapted for another? Uber's model of combining the best features of a marketplace and a high quality service firm worked well for taxis. Could it work for other markets? onefinestay is Uber meets AirBNB. Exec is Uber meets TaskRabbit. You get the idea. And it's clearly not true that Uber are the company best positioned to succeed in those markets, as they have no business selling hotels or personal services.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for the counter-example.

An absolutely corrupt elite that made their tiny city state one of the most prosperous and stable countries in south-east Asia. Lee Kuan Yew is probably one of my favourite political figures - studying Asian leaders like him, or China's Deng Xiaoping, can be perception-shattering.

I still think democracy is important, but the order of priorities for a country should go something like stability -> rule of law -> economic prosperity -> democracy. If you mix up the order, you're gonna have a bad time.

As for this case in particular, it sounds more like lobbying by the newspaper industry than any campaign to suppress free speech.

The title might as well be "COBOL vs. FORTRAN: which programming language makes you more productive?", if you catch my drift. Why limit yourself to 2nd circuit depressants or 3rd circuit stimulants?

Indeed, I think the analogy hides circular reasoning - OP simply assumes what she wants to prove (men have a steady rise to the top).

Just looking at two other comment threads today - the guy on the doomed project and the guy sacked from Facebook within his first six months (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5784751 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5785759) - I have an alternative analogy. Y'all can let me know if this is more accurate:

There's a whole row of elevators. Some slowly head upwards, some downwards, some don't move at all - however, elevators can change speed or direction at any time. More often than not the change is in the downwards direction. Some of the faster-moving upwards elevators have velvet ropes or guards blocking them. It's hard to tell, because you can't really see more than one or two elevators at a time, and the guards are inconsistent, but it seems that to get onto the upward-moving elevators it helps to be straight, white and male. But to get on the really fast moving upwards elevators it's more helpful to be rich, well-educated, socially polished, and connected.

Complicating the picture is the shit cannons. Patrolling the top of the elevators are grinning guys in suits holding super-soakers filled with raw sewage. They blast the climbers at random. A few climbers make it to the top from their own efforts, fortunately avoiding any shit. They believe their success was down to hard work - onlookers say that they merely got lucky. What they really mean is that they weren't unlucky enough to be blasted in the chest with enough shit to send them back down to the bottom. Some people get blasted with a weaker, endurable stream of shit - these people often say that shit sucks but that you just have to deal with it. If you thought that it was grossly unfair that some people had access to the super high speed escalators, keep in mind that these escalators also feature the most brutal and indiscriminate shit cannons. A lot of the shit guards intentionally target women, though a few intentionally leave women alone. Others have other prejudices. It's pretty arbitrary.

Sometimes an entire escalator collapses. Everyone falls to the bottom and has to start again. Except the guys at the top, they're safe.

It's generally agreed that in the past, many more escalators moved upwards. With a few exceptions, a lot of escalators have collapsed or starting moving downwards in recent years. Still, everyone agrees that they're luckier than the guys born far away, who have to fight desperately just to get access to the least desirable escalators.

Is anyone else reminded of the "charter city" they were going to build in Honduras? (Paul Romer had the idea, inspired by Shenzhen, of having third world countries set aside land to be under the jurisdiction of first world countries with more stable legal regimes. The plan being that this would attract international businesses and then bootstrap the rest of the countries development). In Honduras they ended up cancelling the idea, to the cheers of many in the Western press who thought it had echoes of colonialism. I doubt this Chinese city will get the same negative backlash.

I read it the opposite way - your chances of having a big impact are low, so stop worrying and start a company anyway. This might sound paradoxical, but for a lot of people (myself included) being told "don't waste your time on something trivial" can be paralysing. You end up questioning every idea and never being able to settle on one.

You can (and should) get a sense of which ideas are worthwhile, but you'll never know for sure. Maybe your potential cure for cancer won't work. Maybe your todo list app will help 100 medical non-profits each be 5% more efficient, in effect having 5 non-profit's worth of impact. With that in mind, the best you can do is pick something that you can probably make work, that people probably want, and that will probably have a positive impact on society. Whether or not you change the world is up to the gods.

Random theory I have (hopefully some HN-ers with actual military knowledge can weigh in): modern militaries need less technology and more manpower. It seems since I was a kid politicians have been saying that armed forces should become smaller and more high-tech. That means less bodies sent home in coffins and also more contracts for BAE Systems, so it's a popular message.

That all works well (very well) when you're invading countries. Doesn't work so well when you decide you need to build a new country out of the ruins. Maybe we'd do better if instead of spending billions on flying robot assassins to fight tribal hill-farmers, we simply enlisted more humans to take command.

The only other option I can see is to start running the American empire British-style - they ran very efficient colonies by exploiting existing tribal divisions, usually by recruiting some existing elite as their colonial administrators. Not trying to implement democracy in tribal regions that don't yet have stable institutions or the rule of law would probably also help.

The original meaning came from one of the stories of Baron Münchhausen where he supposedly fell into a bog but escaped by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. So the basic concept of self-sufficiency gives you the meaning of bootstrapping a compiler, or your OS's bootstrap loader, or a bootstrapped startup. Stuff like Twitter Bootstrap does stretch the meaning somewhat (I guess the idea is that's it's an easy way to get started on your website).

There are tons of mental blocks we can have that prevent us working on our own stuff.

Some people don't have any of these blocks (or at least, none strong enough to stop them). These people are the ones who say "just do it", because for them, the only trick is to stop thinking and roll up their sleeves. But many people can't "just do it".

Some people only have one or two things blocking them. They fix those things, and suddenly they become highly productive. These are the people who will go around saying that they have finally found the magic bullet that solves their productivity problems.

Some people have a ton of mental blocks. Often these are beliefs that work as cross-purposes.

For example, it sounds like you have the belief "if someone else makes something that I had the idea for, that's terrible". This pushes the "knot inside you to inarticulately roar". Trick is it's not that you want to work on something cool, it's that you don't want to not have worked on something cool (subtle, but important difference - negative motivation is very poor at driving creative work).

Another belief is "all I want is to get something finished, these things hold me up on things that I know should be almost trivially easy". This one is familiar to me. This conflicts badly with belief number #1, since one part of your brain is telling you you have to get coding, and another part is flashing warning bells telling you that whatever you are doing can't be worthwhile because it's so hard. Result: paralysis.

The good news is you can debug these different blocking beliefs.

I learned most of this stuff from PJ Eby's site: trouble is he uses an offputting sales-letter/self-helpy language, but the ideas are golden. http://pjeby.com/ http://thinkingthingsdone.com/ are your starting points. Email me (isaac@i.saac.me) if you (or anyone else) wants to talk more; I'm thinking of starting a site which communicates some of these ideas.

"People poke fun at each other. It's how we establish groups. It's how we operate. We pick a trait and converge around it, as soon as we see a member of the species who does not have that trait, we make fun of them and maybe, just maybe, we eventually let them join the group."

That's true. But the traits chosen are not arbitrary. There are some traits which are consistently used to exclude people from certain groups. As a lifestyle entrepreneur, people on HN look down on me. 99% of the population don't care. Whereas if I was female, or black, or whatever, suddenly I find myself excluded from a lot more groups.

Yes, there is much worse sexism in the world, but I can't think of many people who would think shouting sexual abuse at your manager as anything other than sexism. You seem like an intelligent guy, but you seem to have already reached the conclusion that this isn't sexism and are now trying to justify that conclusion.

You seem to be all over this thread saying "oh well this is bad but men also have it equally bad sexism is exaggerated etc etc".

I agree that women can be shitty to men. But men, in general, can be far shittier to women. Being patronised by your female relatives is a completely different league to having sexual abuse shouted at you by strangers (strangers who should be subordinate to your professional expertise).

And yes, I've worked in blue collar jobs (factories, as a cleaner, as a binman), and I too found it hard to fit in with that culture. But I had it nowhere near as bad as this woman did.

Does anyone actually believe that online dating algorithms reliably predict relationship success? I've always seen it as merely a weak signal of compatibility, and I imagined other dating site users saw it the same way.

It seems lots of people who don't use dating sites are under the impression that everything is "automated". It's not like you entrust your entire relationship to the algorithm, only dating the person with the highest match %. Rather you look at a ton of profiles, many with a high match %, but some with a low match %, and message the ones you like the look/sound of. From that point we're back to the old monkey-brain dating algorithms that have been around since the paleolithic. (But fair play to OKCupid, they have a decent idea of my tastes - the people with whom I share the highest match % seem consistently interesting).

Adding "identity" seems to be the exact opposite of what every dating site user wants. Women would probably like more safety features, but I don't think anyone wants a "log in with Facebook" button.

Hear, hear. I spent most of yesterday afternoon reading Cal Newport's blog and the first few chapters of his book "So Good They Can't Ignore You". His thesis is basically that the idea of "following your passion" is incredibly misleading, and that you should instead focus on building "career capital" which will open up better opportunities over time. (Career capital as I see it refers to the combination of skills, relationships and unique insights that you get from working intently in a particular field for a length of time).

It's something that resonates a lot with me, after bumming around a lot asking "is this what I really want to do?" I eventually realised that the whole "do what you love and you will never work a day in your life" is simply a fantasy. Of all the infinite things you could be doing, you will never know if you are doing the best or most important thing. Doesn't matter. Your life is not that important. You will never be able to put an end to the questioning and self-doubt. Doesn't matter. You can learn to enjoy the questioning, and appreciate that you are one of the privileged 0.1% of humans who actually get to choose what they do with their lives.

One other thought: why do people believe they can do it overnight? I think it's because we see (what look like) overnight successes. On closer inspection they are no such thing.

I can't be the only Hacker News reader who, at the age of 19, thought "hey, that Mark Zuckerberg guy made a website that made him rich at age 19, I can make websites, ergo I can be the next Mark Zuckerberg!" But to emulate Zuck you have to look at what he was doing at age 14. Turns out he was building successful tech products for several years before he started working on Facebook. Then you get cases like Nick from Summly, which looks like a combination of rich parents, savvy investors and a desperate buyer (Yahoo). All that is true. Luck and circumstances did play a part in his particular success. But he's still a very smart guy who wouldn't have achieved what he did without intelligence and hard graft.

Funny to see another ex-Warwickian here. Yes, I remember that coursework - I also found in interesting that Hugh Darwin thought SQL was too lax and flexible. I wish I'd taken the chance to ask his opinions on nosql.

I've been addicted to Dice Wars www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html for a while now. Solarmax is cool too http://armorgames.com/play/11965/solarmax. I love these types of games - don't know what you'd call them, but they simplify the concept of a strategy game to map + units + bases. Dice Wars and Solarmax are two of the best, they're surprisingly deep.

I was working on an education idea a few years back in university, something very similar to YC's Lingt. After reading up on the market, I came to the conclusion that education was a sales-driven business, not a product-driven one - ie you can't beat Blackboard with a better product, because they have an army of salespeople and you don't. However, I do think you could "consumerise" edutech products where you sell directly to consumers, and where consumers are willing to pay a lot, like in language learning or professional qualifications. (Which suggests I should have stuck with the Lingt idea, but whatever).

It reads like someone who isn't a native English speaker (not a bad thing, their grammar is very good, but the cadence isn't quite natural), and the design screams "content farm", which makes you perceive the writing style negatively. It's not a great article, but the context makes it look even worse.

This customer sounds like a bad apple and should be fired, but there is some justification for such an idea.

ODesk enforces the use of their time tracking software for hourly projects. Their staff economist, John Joseph-Horton, has some interesting papers about the justification for this. He argues it is actually in the interests of freelancers to have such a system in place.

Basically, freelancers prefer to be paid hourly (or daily, or whatever), rather than per-project, because clients love ratcheting and requesting endless tweaks otherwise. But clients prefer to pay per-project, so they can predict how much stuff will cost and not have to risk paying for freelancers that pad hours. ODesk's solution removes some of the risk for hourly billing, making it a more acceptable solution for clients, which works out for the benefit of freelancers.

A similar concept is how companies benefit from being able to be sued. Because you can sue them if they screw you around, you feel more comfortable dealing with them.

Yeah, I think Harvard is definitely an outlier. Sounds a lot like Oxbridge. I studied at two very good, but still 'second-tier' universities (Warwick and HKUST) and it wasn't much like you describe (both those universities are known for being very over-populated, which might be a factor). At those kinds of places, maybe if you have the confidence and training to push yourself forwards, you could probably build interesting relationships with professors. Most 18-year-olds don't, though.

Median universities (in the UK, former polytechnics, in the US, community colleges) are even worse. Students there seem to be respected about as much as companies respect their minimum-wage employees. Very low tolerance for infractions (like late assignment submissions) that would be forgiven in higher-ranked places, for example. And I know some very smart people who studied at such places.

Ah, interesting. One thing that strikes me from reading biographies of people who lived in the past is how different the university system used to be. Of course, old universities were only for aristocratic men, but they also seemed to be a lot less industrialised than they are now.

Much more student/professor interaction (as opposed to now where a professor might lecture a classroom of a few hundred and leave all student interactions to a few overworked PhDs), more academic freedom and less need to cram for exams (even if the exams were tougher, people didn't need to beat the bell curve in the hope of a job at MckGoldmanDeloitte, freeing them to pursue knowledge for the sake of it if so inclined). I'm told Oxford and Cambridge still preserve some aspects of the old system, I don't know about other countries. The current system definitely slows down the smartest people unnecessarily, as the Thiel program has shown.

I imagine there are many more leverage points in the current education system that could enable similar improvements.

I'm surprised with he haven't got the usual HN comments which appear every year when this story is posted. That's a good thing, but here's my "inb4" reply for when those comments finally pop up.

Type 1. Last year there was a comment like "I don’t want to crush dreams. But these kids are being set up to fail. They cannot, and will not, live up to these expectations." Related to this are the complaints that these kids only achieved the things they've achieved prior to the programme because their parents were well-connected and helped them out, etc.

Type 2. Accusing hypocrisy on behalf of Thiel, who has two advanced degrees, and who often advocates for a return to advanced research which couldn't happen without higher education.

I think type 1 comments come from envy, even if they sound like something else. That's understandable, since many HN readers probably have similar smarts to these kids but didn't get the same opportunities in their teens. I know I felt jealous when I first heard of the Thiel program.

But - if you look at history, geniuses seem clustered around particular times and locations - ancient Athens, Renaissance Venice, Victorian London, and a few other cultural hubs. This implies that there were thousands of potential geniuses who died in rice paddies (or were killed in war, or who happened to be members of oppressed minorities, or who lived in an era when all the smartest people worked in investment banking, or whatever). It's not just that these individuals were robbed of their potential, it's also the world that was robbed of their contributions. So any attempt to mitigate that trend can only be a good thing, even if it means that some future Einsteins are still dying in rice paddies.

Part 2 is a more interesting critique. My response: I can't speak for Peter Thiel, but I don't think he believes that university shouldn't be an option. Rather, university shouldn't be the only option.

Thanks for the reply, and yes, that makes sense. What would you predict as the most likely other steps in the filter?

Looking at our own planet, I would guess that it's a combination of a) it being simply infeasible to send large animals to distant stars (we haven't yet colonised the moon or even made a serious attempt to colonise low earth orbit, and we might not do so before we run out of cheap energy) and b) technological singularities.

It would also be a good candidate for the Great Filter - the hidden factor that has stopped the development of all the other intelligent civilisations that would otherwise be out there. That would mean this is good news - we'd rather the Great Filter lies in our past (because that means we've already survived it) than in our future.

I could care less about the correct use of "beg the question".

No. I come here because it's an entertaining distraction, but there are few articles I feel I have to read. So I normally visit every few hours, open a bunch of interesting articles and comment threads on the homepage, start reading one or two, realise I have better things to do than read said articles, close half of them without looking at them, and read/skim the one or two that remain, if they look especially interesting. I also often use the "mark all as read" feature in my RSS reader to get rid of a backlog of articles.

A very interesting article.

Though I felt that this part:

"If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.

The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another."

was the writer interpreting the practice through their own values. "The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment" - do we know that this is what the tribe thinks? To me, the practice sounds more like a mix of punishment and rehabilitation (in a lot of shame-based cultures, having family and friends remind you of your wrongdoing would certainly be seen as a punishment). I'm not saying I'm right, either, just that you have to be wary of the "noble savage" delusion, the idea that more traditional societies show us how our society should be structured.

Very interesting. The big idea, as I see it, is that intelligent systems try to maintain as many possible futures as they can - to keep their options open.

People often think that all living beings are driven by the need to reproduce, but the need to survive - to maintain homeostasis, to keep one's shape in a complex environment - is even more fundamental, I think.

If you extend the idea of living beings attempting to keep their own metabolism and structure fixed, you realise that if they have the capability, they'll also try and keep their environment fixed.