astrofinch

I think from a harm minimization perspective, it makes sense to treat complaints of sexism from the minority faction more seriously than complaints of sexism from the majority faction.

Also, I disagree that people would complain if the same stuff was written by a guy working in nursing.

See also: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-goode...

This doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, if you're going to succeed big, it helps to have a startup idea that everyone else thinks is bad. But this seems like only one of many factors that goes in to succeeding big. I'm inclined to agree with Jared Diamond: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."

I'm not an expert on any of Facebook, Dropbox, or Airbnb, but I've heard about competitors for all of them, including some rather early-seeming competitors. Was being first-to-market really the single, crucial factor in the success of all three? Or is there some other advantage, not related to being first-to-market, that having a crazy-seeming idea brings that I'm missing?

Additionally, Paul doesn't mention another way to be first-to-market: Come up with something so original that few others have thought of it. This could be another way to avoid competition, right? It's not obvious to me that wildly original ideas will always seem bad.

My take: Reality is a complicated place and reliable generalizations are few and far between :)

I don't think we can say much about what it takes to be a big success because there's so little data.

IMO, too much money is being spent attacking the proximate causes of death (cancer, heart disease, etc.) but not enough is being spent attacking the root cause: aging. Yeah, if we cure cancer then life expectancy will go up some. But those who would have died of cancer are still going to grow older, become weak, and die of something. It seems like a more efficient use of resources to fight aging than to fight all the problems it causes individually.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

Aaron vs Aaron: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/easywayout

Here's a shitty (no CSS) mirror of the actual AMA page: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3235979/I%20am%20Barack%20Obama%2C%2...

Great post. Whenever I remember, I try to thank people who criticize me, so they'll be willing to do it again. They really are taking a risk.

Yep, people tend to assume that everyone knows what they know by default. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...

Looks like they don't have much in the way of security yet, but they're working on it: http://meteor.com/faq/does-meteor-have-an-authentication-sys...

Your comment was bad and you should feel bad! :P

There's obvious sampling bias here. The companies in CrunchBase are not chosen according to objective criteria. They're chosen because someone visited the CrunchBase website and added them.

It's not a big surprise that the only semiconductor companies anyone bothers to add tend to be the successful ones.

And, your company can be a cash cow even if it never gets acquired or has an IPO. I suspect this applies to a lot of consulting companies, but what would I know?

Give the guy a break. He's clearly trying really hard to be friendly and not offend anyone... and self-deprecation is a good way to do this.

Malaysia may not constitute good evidence for it being a cultural thing. Reason: a young male social outcast in Malaysia can't teach himself computer programming the way a young male social outcast in the United States can. So all programmers are college taught, which results in an even gender split. Whereas in the US, male geeks get a head start as kids and intimidate women in college with their accumulated skills.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062243

Agreed. If anyone politely asks you to stop what you're doing, you should seriously reconsider it, period. Women complaining about behavior they find creepy is just a special case of this general rule.

I'm pretty sure that "re-factoring" could've been accomplished equally fast with the mouse. In most editors, you can double-click to select a token and triple-click to select a line. So the mouse version would be: double-click 10, copy, double-click ten, paste, triple click the line you want to delete, press delete. Pretty fast, really; especially if you're using a laptop where the cost of moving your hand to the mouse is negligible.

I tried Vim for several months and got reasonably competent. But then I timed myself doing the Vim tutorial with Vim and Gedit, and Gedit won handily. For this reason I'm convinced that Vim is only popular because using it gives you hacker cred.

I'm open to changing my mind based on solid experimental evidence, but for now I only use Vim occasionally, for the macros.

Okay, so why don't you put your money where your mouth is and actually link to this competitor of yours you're talking about?

Agreed. This system rewards getting attention from the public, not necessarily adding lots of valuable features.

Society's stereotype is that straight white men have it easy, but I haven't seen any careful analysis supporting this conclusion.

For example, I would guess that gay men have an easier time getting laid. Was that factored in? See also "female privilege" lists like this one: http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privil...

Is there any point in arguing which faction has it the worst? Let's just help each other out without regard to demographics, eh?

How much of this could be due to the fact that Americans got all their genetic material from immigrants?

It seems possible that the task of optimizing when to ask for ratings is nontrivial.

In any case, I'd be more interested if the rating widget looked better.

The CEO of Stratfor wrote a book called "The Coming War with Japan" in 1991:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Friedman

After I told him this a few months ago when we were talking about this article, my dad read it a little more critically and found at least one blatant factual error. So take it with a grain of salt.

>if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Then why are you getting paid for it? Clearly someone cares about it, roughly in proportion to the amount you're getting paid.

Consider these three jobs: making nails for local carpenters, operating machinery in a nail factory, designing machinery for nail factories. Designing machinery for nail factories helps carpenters the most, but feels least helpful.

Surprise surprise, reading children's books is not a good way to estimate the value delivered by people working in various occupations.

My question is what industries these dysfunctional enterprise companies who buy terrible software are in and whether those industries could be disrupted.

The funny thing is, you totally can catch up. I have two friends who learned to code after college, both with the explicit aim of getting programming jobs. Both are now working for Silicon Valley startups.

Programming seriously isn't that hard for anyone who has the necessary general intelligence. It's easier than calculus, for instance.

Lots of startups have tried to popularize Bitcoin. What's different about this one?

Well, Microsoft sold an interpreter they had not written yet...

But yeah, I'm having a hard time coming up with many famous entrepreneurs who seem like a good fit for the hustler stereotype. My guess is that you need a certain amount of hustle to be in the game at all, but you don't need the high level implied by the term "hustler".

Makes sense.

>advertising rates were/are incredibly high

How did you learn this?

>"There's more lines of code in a Ford [car] than Facebook and Twitter combined," Cannon-Brookes said.

If this is true, it's evidence that Ford can't hire software engineers.

These guys make a good argument that you can do just as much good or more by working a conventional job and donating money to nonprofits than by working for a nonprofit directly:

http://vimeo.com/32787159