cpkpad

External forces happen. I've certainly seen businesses shut down for reasons outside of their control. It's just that this happens a minority of the time. Most of the time, businesses shut down either because:

1. High-risk venture. Someone wants to be the next Facebook and takes a 1-in-a-100 gamble at a billion dollars.

2. Stupid idea/business model. Founder is a true believer in some idea which doesn't match reality.

3. Poor execution. It's a good idea and business model, but any of the hundred things which can shut down a business do: technology takes 10x as long to develop and is buggy; founder fails to recruit good people; zero external sales/visibility/marketing ("if you build it they will come" or wildly implausible assumptions about viral or similar); costs get out-of-control; etc. Most founders I know can do all of those reasonably, and one or two brilliantly. It's hard for me to emphasize how important (and hard) it is to be at least competent at all of those since messing up any one will shut down a company.

A lot of the more successful entrepreneurs I know operate a lot like Elon Musk. The basic model seems to be to:

* Start a project in spare time

* Validate technology (prototype something)

* Validate market demand (talk to customers)

* Validate business model (estimate costs/revenues/etc.)

* Otherwise mitigate risk as appropriate for the business

Most of these are pretty deep dives; it's not a one-evening project. In most cases, people (like Elon) become minor domain experts. On the other hand, these are also not job-quitting deep dives; one isn't on the street if one fails.

Perhaps for every few dozen such deep dives, something which looks really plausible comes up. From that point, it's largely a matter of good execution.

I think the key difference between my friends and Elon is that Elon tries to do Really Big Things which change the world. My friends might start a business which e.g. applies machine vision to a new vertical, or adds some kind of automation to some industrial process, or similar.

At this point, all have lives, families, etc. and aren't working 70+ hour weeks. Failure rates for their businesses aren't all too high either. Most business they start seem to at least pay the bills for the boss and the employees (with a few much bigger successes, and a few failures).

I'm not saying that's most folks, but that is most folks in my community. But they've universally managed people before, they can code well, they can do math well, they've built out a reasonable network of contacts, etc.

I think you're actually missing the point.

"Competent to execute" is far more important than "working hard enough." Elon Musk splits his life between Tesla, Solarcity (now part of Tesla, but essentially independent), The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He also dabbles in a slew of other projects. That means he works at most 8 hours per week on each of those. Is that working hard? It's hardly working.

Unless you've done a circuit where you've been in many roles in companies, and have experience in tech, marketing, management, sales, finance, legal, etc. running your first startup is almost guaranteed to bomb, but you're also almost guaranteed to pick up some of that experience. The basic model -- many risks, a few successes -- is great for both personal growth and being a successful entrepreneur. Indeed, I'll say Elon is partially successful because he can leverage experience across those companies.

I do agree many people aren't in a position to do this. Restrictive employment agreements, financial obligations, and family obligations certainly can eat you up alive.

You have to look at the other side of the equation too: expenses and family structures.

$200k euros in the bank is a ton if you're a single student. It's a very short runway if you have 6k/month in mortgage, 2k/month in childcare, car costs, educational debt, and so on.

Unfortunately, most people don't have that type of savings until they're also saddled with obligations.

I've seen order-of-magnitude difference in abilities of companies to:

* Build products

* Sell products

* Recruit

* Build rapport with customers

* Evaluate business models

Most of that is ability. Few people have ability in /all/ of those directions. I've seen people who are even competent (not great) at all of those launch successful business after successful business.

By "successful" I don't mean billion dollar unicorn. I mean businesses which employ tens (or hundreds) of people, have millions in revenue, and last indefinitely.

This stuff isn't rocket science. If a Fortune 500 make widgets, and you make higher quality widgets at lower cost and make people aware of that, you'll run a sustainable business.

As a small business, on one hand, you'll have slightly less access to distribution and marketing channels. On the other hand, you'll have a much leaner cost model (no multi-layer executive hierarchies to sustain). Your team will also be much more focused, productive, and agile. You'll also be more risk-tolerant. All of those provide competitive advantages.

Nope. I've seen plenty of successful companies bumble around and have dumb luck. The reverse is also true -- perfect execution is rare and almost guarantees success.

I'll reemphasize that even competent execution is rare; few people can execute perfectly on business AND technology AND marketing AND design AND .... Especially first-time entrepreneurs.

Fortunately, the other guy's deeply imperfect too. In capitalism, you just have to be better than the other guy. It's pretty hard -- the other guy has been at it for a while and you're just starting out, but it's far from impossible. Most businesses execute very poorly.

Fortunately, each time you try to execute, you get a little bit better at all of those, so after a few tries, you can out-execute. You also learn the advantages smaller, more agile players have over bigger ones.

I agree with the persistence bias argument 100%.

Open edX

It almost certainly is, and I sure hope the Apache Foundation starts to enforce their trademark. Otherwise, they might lose it.

They have a trademark on "Apache" and even a lot of software under the "Apache Commons" brand. This is extremely confusing and clearly dilutes their branding.

I have no problem with Redis Labs prioritizing (although I think an AGPL dual license would be more appropriate). I have a serious, serious problem with the intentional confusion they're spreading.

On the whole, I think this will backfire. Redis Labs undercut their credibility. I'm unlikely to do business with a company I don't trust. The main value-add of being the official developer of an open source product is that trust. A lot of that is likely to spill over on Redis itself.

It also does signal a financially weak position.

I don't think that's what's being suggested. The idea that redlining should be reexamined by the courts every half century or so is what's being suggested. In 2018, courts ought to find its still illegal give facebook a book fine. In 2118? Hopefully we'll be past racism and courts will find the concept obsolete and antiquated. Or they may find racism is common but the tools needed to manage it are different.

The Internet has a great search for secret closet racists, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, it makes sense to give people the benefit of the doubt.

To be fair, the system works pretty well on the whole. One of the reasons I switch to Uber/Lyft because of the extreme attention on customer service. Drivers are very motivated to keep customers happy. That's a big difference to cab rides.

I've had many one-star cab rides (joy ride several times as long, verbally abusive, etc.). I've only had one bad experience on a Lyft/Uber. But the quality of the typical experience is much higher too.

It's imperfect, but I think the problem is more with:

* unreasonable performance thresholds; * misuse of statistical significance; * use of data in isolation; and * misuse of data

The other issues described mostly wash out after a few hundred rides. On the other hand, automatically firing people who fall below 4.6 stars without so much as a conversation is a little bit insane. On the other hand, many human managers do things which are insane too; nothing's perfect.

On the whole, eBay has been pretty reliable for me due to ratings, but I did get cheated twice because of similar misuse.

In one case, I ordered a premium item for about 50 bucks. They sent a low-end item which costs about 10 bucks. It wasn't obvious; for the most part, people wouldn't realize it until months later. Most ratings were high, with maybe 1 in 100 people pointing out the item was not as advertised.

eBay wasn't concerned. Credit card required an expert appraisal. Federal trade commission doesn't deal with this sort of thing. Seller appeared to be raking in about $500k per year profit on fraud. After no one cared, I decided to follow eBay's, credit card's, and FTC's lead, and say that for $50, it wasn't worth my time either.

But I stopped shopping for anything which could be forged on eBay (chemicals, fabrics, materials, jewelry, SD cards, etc.).

If eBay combined normal mechanisms with ratings, it'd be pretty easy to stay reliable. Alibaba does this -- there's a real conflict resolution process.

I have similar use cases. Startup time starts to matter once you either want to build test cases or put scripts in loops. If I have a script that parses one big data file, and I decide to parse 1000, it's often helpful if I can run that script a thousand times rather than refactor it to handle file lists. Or if you want to optimize some parameter.

.... Or they could have made play areas kids wanted to go to (when I was a child, going to Toys-r-Us was the ultimate thing), and sold toys people wanted (instead of branded sensory-overload crap).

They failed to adapt to consumers of 2018.

People hate Circuit City. Not quite clear why you'd want to start with a hated brandname. There was the whole restocking fee thing, the DMCA thing, and a whole bunch of others. I don't quite recall them all. Plus, it was always overpriced.

No brand is better than bad brand.

I would have much the same feeling if I didn't have a child myself. There are many good toy stores around. Toys-R-Us just isn't one of them anymore. At some point between when I was a child and now, someone cannibalized that whole business for short-term profit, and that seems to have come due.

Last time I was there, there were zero toys at Toys-R-Us I'd want to buy for my kid. That's not a commentary on socioeconomic status either; I'm pretty poor. But I can get high-quality educational toys elsewhere cheap.

8-year study of progressive education from a hundred years ago is probably the oldest result showing project-based learning works well. Miki Chi's ICAP is the current one. You have the same result repeated with a new methodology every couple decades in education research.

Neither shows project learning is the only thing which works well; just that it works better than the model the author proposes or than traditional classrooms.

The key fallacy the author makes is that free-form project working doesn't work. Let's say I want you to learn machine learning. I need a carefully designed and sequenced series of projects which exercise all the skills along the way. That's not an uncommon fallacy; many progressive schools made the same mistake and basically failed.

The random coding project model, in isolation, as the author described, falls flat on its face just as the author describes. It works pretty well for simple/broad things (e.g. learn an API), but for anything with depth, expert sequencing of knowledge and design of projects/assessments becomes important.

> That implies they must find a lot of suckers to sell to. Stock prices are usually driven by analysts who spend their days analyzing companies to predict future performance. Good luck fooling them all.

It actually indicates something a bit different. CEO's optimize for their own compensation with bonuses and similar set by quarterly goals. They optimize for meeting goals over company performance.

Externally, companies work on perception. Analysts have no way of knowing if good R&D is still going on or if sales figures are getting inflated. They operate only on externally-visible information. Hence, CEOs (who expect an average tenure of three years) optimize for externally-visible information on metrics over long-term performance.

They also optimize for graft to the board members (so they can keep their jobs), but that's a whole different story.

The exception seem to be founder-run companies. Founders have an emotional stake, a more significant long-term financial stake, and have not gone through the corrupting process of becoming a CEO. Which of those is dominant? Your guess is as good as mine.

I'm in favor of ditching usernames. Using real names, though?

If I were to short-list bad idea to kill the site, that'd be pretty close to the top.

In many states, this has already happened due to a different area of law which operates on rumor and innuendo: divorce.

In several states, divorce law was rewritten by feminists and a lobby of divorce lawyers. In those states, the vast majority of divorces are filed for by women. The majority have false accusations of abuse or domestic violence (indeed, in one state where I looked at the statistics in depth, as a man, you have a 12% chance of engaging in domestic violence, and a >25% chance of being accused of it).

It takes a high level of mental will-power not to generalize.

The result, unsurprisingly, is a large body of men who basically don't believe any of these allegations until proven in a court of law. I saw several transform from believing in equal-opportunity to becoming secret and extreme misogynists. Several whom I know personally hold positions of high power in both corporate and government settings.

Women at those organizations run into a secret glass ceiling.

And there is a sort of informal lobby who financially supports anti-women's-rights candidates.

I cannot sufficiently emphasize how true this is.

Source: Intimately familiar with the Media Lab. As with most places, there is a type of conformable non-conformance. Kind of like casual Fridays at work, or office humor. The Media Lab, and Joi in particular, would never reward non-conformance. Now, if a liberal in Saudi Arabia breaks conservative laws, that they would reward. But that's conforming to their standards.

Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug.

I had wanted Amazon to wrap it in something where they managed that complexity for a long time. Looks like they finally did.

Now the only thing Amazon needs to do is expand free tiers on all of their services, or at least very low cost ones. I prototype a lot of things from home for work -- kinda 20% time style projects where I couldn't really budget resources for it. The free tier is great for that. All services ought to have it -- especially RDS. I ought to be able to have a slice of a database (even kilobytes/tens of accesses/not-guaranteed security/shared server) paying nothing or pennies.

There is a scale of insincerity to rudeness. I've been in cultures where each of those is considered respectful and reasonable.

The onus is very much on corporate America to accept diversity. Right now, the only persons of color who are hired are ones who have mastered the culture, for example. That doesn't have much to do with technical skills. That's almost the definition of discrimination.

Respect has to do with how you feel towards a person. People can read through the language used, and as unprofessional as "Fix up your shit NOW" may sound, the details of body language, tone of voice, and facial expression can make that disdainful, angry, respectful, or any of many other things, depending on how you read it.

There were many people greatly superior to Linus technically in the BSD community when Linux was wiping BSD's chronometers.

You're confusing corruption for incompetence.

Ain't gonna happen.

It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it.

Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather than owned. The competition for better homes drives prices astronomical. The only way to actually get affordable housing is to either move people where there is no competition (e.g. desert of Arizona), or to reduce reserve limits.

Fractional reserve banking generates trillions for big banks, and the electorate doesn't get it. It's not going away.

Indeed. The quiz doesn't start with "What does the ANSI C standard guarantee about..." It says "So you think you know C." C is a cross-platform assembly language. I use it when I need to code to the metal. I know exactly how it will behave in most of those scenarios.

I understand, in abstract, I might be on an EBCDIC system, and things will be different. But that's not the reality of C. C isn't just a formal specification.

I spent a while on 1, thinking about how my compiler would handle that. 2 I was 90% confident about. 3 and 4 I was 100% confident about.

Make the work meaningful, impactful, and rewarding, so the kid will want to do it.

It depends on where the pressure is places. If the pressure is placed on kids, sure. If it's placed on schools, that's not toxic. The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.

The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart. There were plenty of smart kids I knew -- some smarter than me -- who got horrible grades going through one of these school. Many of them did not, in any real sense, succeed.

Imagine being placed in a room, today, and forced to listen to lectures on what you already know, and be given menial make-work tasks, like adding big numbers and copying letters, and doing that for hours each day. Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.

Boston is one of the original Uber markets. The market is as saturated as it gets. I talk to drivers. They're much better off. It's like night and day. Driving for medallion owners was sub-minimum wage, they'd sometimes lose money, and the shifts were insanely long. A driver on their 14th hour driving a given day wasn't a safe driver.

At least in Boston, a medallion loan or an individual medallion owner driving a cab are a complete myth and fabrication. A medallion costs $700,000. No one with three quarters of a million dollars is driving a cab. Investors buy medallions and lease them out. Poor immigrants lease medallions and cabs, and scrape by. Medallion owners, calling themselves small business owners, aren't even required to provide minimum wage or basic health care. It's a horribly exploitative business, and I'm glad to see it go under.

Subsidies or bailouts for medallion owners seem like a horrible idea to me, at least in a town like Boston. In a city where lower-class individuals owned medallions, it would be another story.

I live in Boston. Taxi drivers are jumping to Uber and Lyft wholesale. They make more, and perhaps more importantly, the income is steady. With the taxi system, medallions cost about $600,000 to buy, and were owned by rich investors.

Cab drivers rent those medallions for around $200 per day, and after paying off the investor, kept any profit on top of that. On a bad day, they'd lose money. On a decent day, they'd work a 16 hour shift and make minimum wage. On a great day, they'd make a few hundred bucks.

In Massachusetts, the law is designed to protect those investors (who lobbied for it) -- not cab drivers. There is nothing in the law which is not corrupt.

Self-driving cars will cost jobs. This just costs the very rich their investments in medallions, which prior to Uber were a full-proof investment.

In Boston, Uber drivers make much more than taxi drivers. Taxi drivers pay around $200 per day to rent a medallion from an investor (medallions were $600k investments at the time Uber came in). They had to work insane hours to make a profit on top of that.

Most Uber drivers are former taxi drivers, charging less, but making much more in the end, both by virtue of spending less time waiting, and by not paying rent.