montrose

I wonder if there will ever come a time when the biggest danger to SV from Europe is competitors, rather than regulators.

It may be that competitors can't become more of a threat till regulators become less of one. It's hard for a society to focus simultaneously on multiple things, and regulation and startups seem not merely orthogonal, but opposed.

Noprocrast comes to YouTube!

Occam's Razor suggests the reason "entrepreneurship programs" for engineers fail is not because engineers are too timid, but because all such programs fail.

The way to learn how to start a startup is by doing it. So the right way to teach "entrepreneurship," to the extent it can be taught, is something like Y Combinator, not a college class.

What strikes me is that nearly all of them show signs of not having been made by native English speakers. E.g. dropping of definite article. I would have expected the Russians to have been sophisticated enough not to do that. On the other hand, maybe they were sophisticated enough to know that their intended audience wouldn't notice.

The short version is that many "design patterns" are de facto macroexpansions. So if you write the corresponding macro, you don't need the pattern any more.

Because far fewer (eventually big) companies were started in 1950 than in 1998. In 1950 "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations." (Michael Lind, Land of Promise)

The innovation that happened in 1950 consisted of General Electric getting into a new line of business, not a grad student starting his own company.

His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that made this possible. It was the rise of microcomputers and networks that made this possible. And Larry Page's case is the rule, not the exception.

This is an interesting article, but I found I was able to read it, for the most part, by reading the first sentence of every paragraph. That shows how much fat there is in the typical magazine article.

The big mistake he makes (and that many other SV haters make) is that he has failed to consider the null hypothesis. There are fakers and wannabees at the fringes of every ambitious undertaking. If you go looking for them, you'll find them. But it proves nothing.

Whether you should quit or not depends on (a) whether your idea has any potential and (b) whether you're suited to starting a startup. It's hard to tell either of those from your question.

The question I'd ask is, why did you start working on this idea? Was it something you yourselves needed? Or was it a made-up idea, meaning something you assumed other people wanted (but that perhaps they don't actually)?

If the answer is the former, focus on the problem you know exists from your own experience, and find the people who desperately need it. If you did, there must be others.

If the answer is the latter – that you're making something you hoped and predicted other people would want – then you're basically casting about at random. And though I resist ever advising people to quit, if there's a time to, that's it.

I don't think this matters much, because the number of scholarly papers published in any field is determined by the number of people who need to publish papers to advance their careers, not the value of new ideas that need to be expressed.

A country's share of the top n papers matters, but not their share of the total number of papers.

One of the scariest examples of this phenomenon is the lobbying that police and prison guard unions do:

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-measure/

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-pri...

It's actually quite impressive that NPR will retract a story over what would be standard practice among the bottom half of the media.

An employee can get diversification in the sense that they can work for multiple companies. It's not at all unusual for someone in SV to get equity in 5 different companies in their career. E.g. one friend of mine first got equity in General Magic, but didn't really hit it big till Nest, decades later. (He did ultimately hit it quite big though.)

There is even a kind of natural balancing mechanism here, in the sense that the earlier you join a company, the more likely it will die quickly and free you to take another shot. So the riskier the equity you opt for, the more rolls of the dice you'll get.

It is from the introduction to On Lisp, and there is a great deal of explicit source code in that. A lot of which is in fact about domain-specific languages.

http://paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

I find it's a valuable heuristic simply to try to make your code short (in tokens, of course, not characters).

That rule means that it's worth defining a new operator if you use it enough to save more than the amount of code you need to define it.

There are exceptions, of course. I have a higher standard for macros. But overall the principle of optimizing for brevity has held up through decades of programming of various types.

This is a non-paywalled version of the Washington Post article.

Surely there are still applications in 2018 that require speed at the expense of all else. Perhaps not as many, but there are bound to be some.

Not very false. They're not continuing the trial past the end of this year. Which is exactly what it said in the article I read about it.

Frankly, this article seems more misleading than the ones it is complaining about.

You can read it via archive.is.

Antitrust enforcement is not sufficient to protect against market consolidation caused by burdensome regulations.

A company that can afford to comply with the regulations can squash competitors who can't without being a monopoly.

And even companies that are declared monopolies benefit from burdensome regulations in the sense that people thinking of starting startups that might compete with them decide not to.

“It is paradoxical,” said Bill Simmons, co-founder and chief technology officer of Dataxu , Boston-based company that helps buy targeted ads. “The GDPR is actually consolidating the control of consumer data onto these tech giants.”

I upvoted this despite the rewritten title, which I hope the mods will fix.

How fast are they growing? The best thing, if you can get it, is a graph of revenue per month for the past year or two. Then you can see whether the trend is hyperlinear.

If they balk at telling you their numbers, tell them you'll take a graph with the y-axis cropped off. The shape of the graph matters more than the numbers.

It depends how promising your company is. That's the high bit of whether you can get funding, not your immigration status.

On the other hand, when investors think your company is unpromising, it's easier to say that the problem is your immigration status.

But don't kid yourselves that being in your home country will help your company either. Look at the startups that have succeeded so far. The empirical evidence says there's no advantage to being in a cheap labor market.

"I was used to coming back to the lab at Apple after dinner, to see if anything interesting was going on and working on various extra-curricular projects."

Try archive.is.

Thank you, rbanffy, for submitting such consistently interesting stories. When I see your name, it's a recommendation.

Historically, most people have built as much of their houses out of wood as they could, because it was easier to work with. Where wood was rare, only roofs were made out of it. Where wood was exceptionally rare, even roofs were vaulted.

Wood didn't last long, but until surprisingly recently, houses weren't meant to last. In Northern Europe, for example, even as late as the Iron Age, houses were rebuilt every few decades.

Exception: rich builders, like the church in Europe, and later on (roughly the thirteenth century) rich individuals, built out of stone.

What Venezuela has in common with the late Empire is that economic controls are pervasive, without the sort of punitive completeness you'd find in the USSR, or China under Mao. While few controls works, and being a police state sort of works (if there are free-market economies whose products you can copy), this middle strategy doesn't work well at all.