Founder of IndexTank (acquired by LinkedIn), as well as Flaptor (a consulting company that spawned IndexTank). You can follow me on Twitter: @dbasch. My email is the same as my Twitter handle, at gmail.
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dbasch; my proof: https://keybase.io/dbasch/sigs/IzO64_np6HgSMCxjwdY9EqLq0knH9Uc8JNDgF2mhe7I ]
As an investor, all I can say is that having gone through YC is not the signal of quality it was 7 or 8 years ago. This doesn't mean YC is doing anything wrong regarding their investment strategy. It simply means they are expecting a very skewed power law of returns.
"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died"
The keyword here is reported. We don't know how many unreported cases there are, it could be 10x the reported ones. In the US it's much more than that, given that almost nobody has been tested. We have 9 deaths so far and probably thousands of infected people.
If having a user-removable battery makes my phone not water resistant, then I don't want that. I have never had an issue with an iPhone battery. As things are, the battery is replaceable by any skilled technician so the cost of having it done is low. Perhaps they could enforce a standard battery form factor, if that.
I get his point, but it’s not expressed well. It’s not “easier to succeed.” The chart effort/time has a different shape. Upfront effort is tremendous, and if you can get past that then it gets easier.
That is a non sequitur. Not being able or willing to invest dozens of hours of effort spread over weeks (maybe months) into having relatively good odds of being offered a job by Google doesn't make you a prima donna.
Google wants people who are desperate to work at Google. The plus (for them) of getting someone to invest so much effort into getting in means that they will be committed for a while because of the sunk costs / defeated ultimate boss effect.
Luckily there is a large supply of those people for now. They won't change their interview process until this stops being the case.
Edit: I guess someone at Google didn't like this comment :)
If you want a "toy" example of this type of code, look at flight control software for drones such as Betaflight. You can modify this code and test it in real life. I did this, as I contributed the GPS Rescue feature. I have a blooper reel of failures during testing.
You may want to check out the Starbucks timeline. They did not raise an astronomical amount of money right off the bat. Blue Bottle is a closer comparison. They also grew organically for many years before raising a serious round. There must be an example of a successful food chain that raised a ton of money in their first few years but I can't think of it off the top of my head.
What makes you think that people aren’t moving? Population isn’t decreasing if that’s what you mean, but the Bay Area is a revolving door. I own a condo in San Francisco, and I’ve had five different tenants in eight years.
The 22x figure is dubious. I had seen articles citing a more believable 2.85x number. What is not clear to me is what is considered a "scientist" and why is the Nobel Prize used as a metric. For example, what happens if you compare Nobel Prize winners from top universities with the rest of the scientists at those top universities?
The world is full of haters accomplishing impressive things, particularly in politics.
Edit: if you define "impressive" as "something a hater could not do" and "not impressive" as notorious things haters do, then I understand downvoting this comment. But that's begging the question.
Well, I have a hard time thinking of a field that I believe is fully explored. History has shown time and again that it's really easy to be fooled in that respect.
That assumes everyone picks their job as a rational economic actor. This is clearly not the case. Even if it were, if you believe you have a decent change then you might as well give it one shot, and if it doesn't work then you can fall back on something else while you're young.
Note that this is the same rational for starting a startup. Would you argue that all successful startup founders are the best of a bad lot?
Did you get to the part where they explain that they are strapped for resources and in need of donations? They have plenty of expertise, money is what they need.
Cancer doesn't play a significant role in evolution because most people get cancer long after reproducing. In a way, cancer means that you succeeded at living long enough.
After reading the article, I realized that if a site like HN or Reddit wanted to mitigate groupthink, they would want to limit how much an item can be upvoted or downvoted (e.g. max 5 like Slashdot did).
Apparently people really like groupthink, it increases engagement.
What does it matter what we think of him? He is being accused of a crime, and presumed innocent. If it goes to trial, then the jury will have access to all the evidence. You and I don't.
They might as well drop NYT, WSJ, The Economist. Whenever I see those sites at the top of the results I don't bother clicking because they are just paywalls. This month somehow I was "out of free articles" for all of them since the beginning of the month.
The same argument would make you not want to drink water from a public fountain, or eating at a restaurant as opposed to cooking your own food. It's a matter of implicit risk analysis. You need to charge your phone, you see a USB port. What are the odds that it's going to be wired to something other than 5V? If that were the case, what's the worst that can happen? It works out for the vast majority of people.
The weakest part about the conclusions in this study is the assumption that regulation does not change. If the limitation of driving disappears and the roads become a tragedy of the commons, then regulation will have to step in to limit how much people drive. We already do this with tolls, car pool lanes, taxes, etc.
You can't take it as a given that our society will not seek to reorganize itself around the new paradigm. It's like someone in 1990 saying "once content is on the internet piracy will be out control and nobody will make money with content ever again, check out this experiment we did."
Clearly pure centralization doesn't work, and pure decentralization is chaos. The sweet spot is in between. Right now China seems to be in a better position than the US in that sense. They promote the same type of startups we have in Silicon Valley, and yet have an overarching centralized policy for the long term. In a way, the Chinese government acts as a sort of Facebook or Google.
This article lost me at "printing money does not cause inflation." How would that be possible? The only answer would be that money is increasing in value for some reason, and the government must print more to keep prices stable (otherwise they would fall). Even then, it would be a technicality.
No, I'm talking about companies that didn't even get to take VC funding in some cases. Building a stable business doesn't mean you get rich. The world is filled with middle class folk running stable businesses.