biren34

I say that the need to start your own thing is a bug not feature. It IS a hard life, with tons of risk, change, and uncertainty. My wife hates the instability of it all. I've missed or worked through many vacations, concerts, and other things over the years.

It's not even clear that it's a good deal, when you factor in opportunity costs, hours worked, and chances of success.

So, it if you don't have to do it, don't do it. You're not going to succeed unless you are just the kind of person who can't be happy going down another path.

It all sounds harsh, but it's actually a lot better than the risk/reward offered in many other fields: acting, writing, sports, etc.

This is just how professions with tournament-style payouts work, and you either buy in or you don't. Know thyself...it never pretended to be anything else.

Huh. Didn't realize I had those two words mixed up. Thanks!

If you haven't heard of it, you've just stated the weak anthropomorphic principle.

I don't understand why so many people who care about greenhouse gases (and so love renewable energy sources) refuse to acknowledge that producing the equipment that generates "renewable" energy required massive energy investment (that came from fossil fuels).

And so there are two payback periods: one financial and the other environmental. This person extended their environmental payback period to achieve "abundance".

I have no problem with that, but the fact that it's considered "free" on the very same dimension that they originally sought to optimize--when it's clearly not free--baffles me.

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.

I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago

Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.

And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.

Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.

Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.

This doesn't have to be true, though it is for many.

If you can find a version of your dreams that pays the rent and puts food on the table, you can still chase them.

Your financial metabolism does go up though, and the total universe of options shrinks. Ramen profitable doesn't mean actual ramen when you've got a spouse and kids.

I found that I've gotten much further in pursuing my dreams after having kids than before. Maybe it's just coincidence, but I feel a lot of the skills I had to learn to be the kind of parent I wanted to be translated almost 1 for 1 to improving my business outcomes.

Okay at the risk of being offensive, all the comments before mine are made by overly intellectual fools.

I'm not usually so insulting--but as a father of two, if my 3 year old and 1.5 year old could only read one book, it would have to be "Oh, the places you'll go" by Dr. Suess.

Sorry to stomp on Das Kapital and its ilk, but if you get only one book, I can't imagine a better first message to convey than the endless possibilities inherent in each of us.

The world is your oyster! Even if you're old and have wasted most of what you were given. Especially today, in some of the most amazing times that have ever existed (even if you didn't draw the long straw). Today is SO much better than most of history.

I see a lot of comments about firing and chaos, but the single most important point to me is "you manage processes and lead people".

So many managers get this wrong that just fixing this one thing probably gets most startups 60% of the way there.

So...this is the kind of spider that bit Peter Parker, right?

I have no idea of what's in this bill or not, but the very concept of "cost" in this case seems misleading.

What's the "cost" of not investing in our nation's infrastructure?

Back in high school (pre-internet), we'd sign up a particular friend every time we saw one of the information collection boxes for 24 hour fitness.

He could never figure out why they just wouldn't stop calling him

I have no idea what's allowed in HN recruiting terms, but I'm working at a company that is very much worried about making sure we deliver value, and we have several positions open.

I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human.

It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.

I work with data a lot, and my main issue with hedonic adjustment is that anytime I've ever made any such adjustment to "improve" a metric that wasn't purely mechanical (like a moving average or a ratio to another number), it's just one step away from making the number say anything I want it to.

The entire concept of "fixing" a metric relies on an inhuman level of self-truthfulness to not just lead you down the path of hearing only what you want to hear.

The point of metrics is that they should slap you in the face with objective reality, and improvement is just too subjective a concept.

I think this is just an obvious example of a much larger phenomenon. The trend over the past 40 years has been to put efficiency above all--but that means there is no excess capacity left to ensure robustness. Even "normal" variation in patterns can cause outsized disruptions, especially of the extreme edge of the range only occurs on a timeframe much longer than the optimization cycles used to achieve efficiency.

Efficiency also tends favor exactly one configuration over all others, so any changes that impact the viability of that one path leave the system with few, if any, alternatives--and those tend to have been atrophied.

In each case, the specifics can be quite different, but the general principal is that, in order to avoid such periods of supply chaos and constraint, someone has to be willing to pay a higher price so that more than just the lowest-cost suppliers can survive for when they're needed.

In most situations, the periodic supply crunch may actually be preferable to the consequences of subsidizing the existence of less efficient players. But the costs of efficiency are just as real as the costs of robustness, they just tend to be paid out via a very short period of large excess of profits, as opposed to a long period of slightly better margins.

I'm not sure if the areas under the curve end up being equal, but "efficiency" can certainly be overdone to the point of being inefficient over the full cycle.

Fair enough.

So...you get to arbitrate my parents' experience of poverty?

I'll let my mom know that she wasn't poor when my parents spent an entire year eating nothing but cabbage, and they weren't poor when they had to leave me with my grandparent for 15 months (back when there were no video calls and long-distance was too expensive) because they couldn't support a child and build a new life. That they weren't too poor when my dad was working 2 jobs while studying for his license and had to live in a tiny apartment with roommates and borrow money to meet basic expenses.

I get it. There are people who have been and are currently worse-off. The idea that everything should always and everywhere be measured in relation to the extreme reach of the left-tail is batsh*t.

The whole point of the comment that I replied to was that the commentor felt that the article needed to be aware of and somehow speak to his experience--while he's a stranger on the internet who the original author could not possibly know anything about.

I have specifically detailed some of my mom's experience of poverty to you, and you claim the right to deny it--what, because they were not the worst-off people in recent human history? If I had said, "my parents were rich because we had X,Y,Z", would you have commented "No, your parents were not rich because they did not also possess a chateau and a private jet?"

Is this it? Any and every judgement of a comment and denial of experience can be "okay", as long as it's approached from the left-tail? Does this not strike you as mad?

The comment was that the points about money "are, frankly, insulting".

I'd call yours a radical interpretation of the text.

I have no particular beef with you, so please don't take it that way--but "the absolute reality that is the importance of money to survival" is a subjective assessment that does not have to be (and is not) shared by 100% of the population.

Again, in extremis: Buddhist monks. And if Buddhist monks exist (and don't care about money), then surely there can be a spectrum of what money means to different people?

Maybe there's even a more successful attitude for earning money than maintaining a singular focus on monotonically-increasing your inventory of it? Maybe past a certain point, the best thing to do with money is to risk it? (Which doesn't even imply forgetting or debating its importance?)

You would be fair to say "this advice doesn't apply to me" or "this advice only applies when conditions X, Y, and Z have been met" or even "this advice is wrong". However, the statement that this advice is "insulting" creates a toxic environment.

No one will ever be able to anticipate all the ways they might cross/deny/fail to recognize someone else's experience or what they "know to be true". Nor is that anyone's job. After all, we're all just stumbling through this thing-called-life trying to do our best. If people persist in taking offense to comments made by strangers on the internet who have never heard of them, the only logical outcome is to exclude those people from the discussion. Is this what you would choose for yourself?

At best, this makes it harder to for me to find like-minded people to have the discussions I want to have--and at worst, it deprives people from being exposed to things that they might find valuable in those discussions, because those discussions are no longer being had in the open where they could be stumbled upon.

Whatever you choose to do from this point forward is no skin off my back. My point is that, in the face of such reactions, my response is to take my very important (to me), real-world discussions about maximizing my life-given-my-circumstances away from the people who would comment in this way.

Anyway, this is not a debate I need to win. Maybe you want to hear this stuff, maybe you don't.

Many poor people have totally different experiences. My mother, for example, was only able to continue past 4th grade in India because one of her uncles supported her while making her create a budget for the entire school year down to the last pencil. This was while she helped her mom care for her 6 brothers and sisters in a house that didn't have running water or paved streets. She and my dad (who grew up not-quite-so-poor-but-still-pretty-poor) moved to the US and built up a very nice life for me and my sister.

Not that their experiences are any more representative of "poor" than what people here write about, but there are clearly different experiences and different outcomes. Again, this is not to shame anyone--but the fact that I have to caveat an accurate description of my parents' life to assuage some unknown reader's sensibility is just crazy to me.

But for the sake of argument, I'll concede everything you've described about the "poor experience" and the emotional consequences faced by this group.

Given that, does that mean that any and every discussion among the people not in that group must be couched in ways in order to not offend the sensitive group? How / where should non-deprived people discuss the best way to play the cards they were lucky enough to be dealt?

In extremis, do we need to segregate ourselves away from the sensitive group in order to protect their delicate constitutions?

Complaining about the the "privilege" that the median HN reader/commenter is born with is like if I stumbled on to a message board for 6'8" super-athletic 18-year olds and spent all my time lecturing them about how they need to consider 5'8" kinda-athletic-once-but-now-middle-aged-me in all their discussions. Of course a programmer-centric newsboard is going to have a bunch of well-off people in it.

Now, people shouldn't be jerks--but nothing in the posted article can be construed in the least-bit mean-spirited. The goal posts seemed to have moved from "don't be a dick" to "pretend you're in a support group for X all the time". Is this where we're going?

In most every discussion I've come across that touches on money advice, I've see a variant of this comment "This world view doesn't incorporate (my) reality of the poorest of the Western world and is so in invalid and offensive".

I'm not sure what motivates this. If you invert the situation and someone made a list with stuff like "use coupons", would rich people come by and say "this is dumb because it only saves you $0.50 and I (as a rich person) don't care about $0.50"?

People have different starting conditions and different current situations, if what's described isn't relevant to yours--why does it bother you so? Let the people who find value in it find value in it.

First, ambitious people will find ways to figure out if they're succeeding. There are good ways and bad ways.

Second, objective rank ordering does exist. You can deny it or dismiss it, but it's there:

- Who's fitter? - Who's prettier? - Who can run/swim/bike farther? - Who makes more money? - Who got in to a "better" school / got the better job / got promoted faster? - Who's got more friends?

Then, the biggest zinger of them of all: who has more status?

Humans may never know the entire leaderboard, but we're exceeding good at knowing our local neighborhood on these kinds of ordering systems.

You can say that these things "don't matter", but to a vast fraction of humanity, they do matter. And as social animals, I'd argue that humans are more or less programmed to care about these things. Maybe not everyone, but imo, social status is core driver of human behavior, just like hunger and sex. And status is all about rank ordering.

This is super interesting to me.

Several comments to this thread show that the poster is mixing up the will to power with a specific value system.

The will to power--and the skills to go with it--are a pure good in my mind. It's the stuff let makes babies get up and learn to walk. It's the curiosity that makes kids ask "why?" about everything in the world. It's the fire in humanity that let us put 7+ Billion on this little blue planet while generating amazing standards of living for so many of them.

That will to power can be aimed at whatever target you choose. If Porshe's and Gucci bags and trophy wifes, okay. It can just as easily be a good-paying job that puts a roof over your head and feeds your family, while leaving you plenty of time to be present in everyone's life. It can easily be starting a charity that feeds the homeless or shelters battered women.

The will to power--and the skills that go with it--are the ability to shape your world in to whatever you want. There's nothing in there that forces you to pick ugly shapes.

How I wish I could link to another comment.

Here's my answer to that, with some of it repeated from a comment posted to another comment above:

I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses. It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.

I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.

I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.

Given the above, I DON'T deem to know the right path for my children. They are their own people with their own passions, skills, and motivations. They're still young, but I hope that, if one day, one of them wants to drop out of college and pursue acting full time, I'll be supportive.

My goal is to give them the skills and emotional strength to go out there and be the best version of themselves, and in my opinion, knowing how to succeed--and how to see other are farther along than you and still keep going--it crucial.

At the same time, there's a reason I couched this conversation in terms of what I'd tell my kids. I'm not claiming any universal truth. This is me, my values, my biases. I think I'm right, but I'm just another schmoe doing the best I can. And fortunately, it's my right to screw up my kids in my own way :)

I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses.

It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.

I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.

I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.

If I had to guess--and I don't know you well enough to do anything but guess--you're confusing America's value of extreme individualism and a proper focus on internal control and self-improvement in order to be able to succeed.

There's a very subtle distinction here, and you're right, I didn't articulate it well.

I'm not advocating ignoring the leaderboards (especially for things like chess where they're essential to determining skill).

But you don't focus on the leaderboard. It's not the center of your world--just one data point in a complex web of feedback.

To take the chess example, sitting there and saying "I'm 1063rd and I want to be better" is barely a start. You have to do a lot of evaluation of your internal strengths and weaknesses as a chess player: do you get bored/hyperaggressive? Do you get too cautious? Do you lose focus after X hours?

Then address those with a process in order to move up on the leaderboard. If you define "success" as executing that process, as opposed to winning the game, that's the ticket to both feeling good about yourself regardless of the result AND winning more games over time.

First, I'm not looking for excuses for poor performance, and I don't want my kids doing that either. You screw up then own it. It's okay. You don't have to be perfect, no one is. But don't be a coward and hide from your own limitations.

Second, I think you're glossing over the part about process-oriented goals.

If one stays stuck on results-oriented goals, then your comment is pretty much on point. It doesn't matter who I'm competing with, I'll have bad days.

But with process-oriented goals, the focus switches how you do what you're doing, and that's something purely in your control.

To put it in exercise terms, you won't always be able to lift more than you did yesterday or run faster than you did 5 years ago--but you can always actually get off the coach and do it, you can always focus on your form, you can always push for that last rep or work hard into the last sprint.

It's really about an internal focus PLUS a process-oriented approach. Not just one or the other.

Okay, this brings up a really pivotal point that took me way too long to learn:

ALL advice MUST be tailored to the individual.

This entire discussion is moot for some fraction of the population whether due to internal traits or external circumstances.

So, if you are living option #4, good luck to you. If someone is not living option #4, there are likely internal drives they need to learn to control/manage, and just pointing out that other people are able to live option #4 isn't useful to them.

The example you give is true. However, it's a toy example that doesn't usually relate to real world data sets.

In most cases, with the amount of data you have, the rounding washes out any real impact of the effect, and you often have measurement error far larger than it anyway.

But yeah, if you're ranking 9 people on an easily knowable stat, then technical 4/9 are below median, 4/9 above, and 1 is exactly median.

With the IQ example you gave, it's just that people don't speak with that level of precision about most things--also, that level of precision is very rarely useful.

So, you're not wrong, but kind of sideways to the discussion at hand. It's actually a common problem in business, where really detail-oriented analysts miss the forest for the trees over stuff like this.

Regarding median vs mean vs average (as the 1st reply to your comment mentioned), median and mean are generally equal as long the values being measure are symmetrically dispersed around the "average". If you get a fat tail in one direction or the other, the mean will be skewed in the direction of that tail, and you need to be careful.

In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.