montrose

This must have been what it was like in the late Roman Empire, when successive emperors tried to stave off decline by decreeing how the economy would work.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, this startup may be doing things right. If user growth is causing load issues, that means users like the product, and that the company is growing fast, which is the high bit of predicting whether a startup will succeed.

A startup with a product users love but creaking infrastructure is better off than one with excellent infrastructure and a product that's a dog.

Startups with both a product users love and excellent infrastructure? A lot rarer than you might think, especially at this stage.

This is copied from another site. The original is at: https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/03/02/adam-riess-cosmic-ladder-univ...

I don't ordinarily upvote articles about politics, but I upvoted this one because (a) it's a fairly dispassionate, thoughtful analysis (b) of what it claims is a turning point (rather than just the everyday back and forth of politics).

It's still a valid question though. And I would in fact pay far more for food with less toxins. Whereas I would pay little or nothing for e.g. a GDPR-compliant Twitter.

So, interestingly, it's not only a valid question, but one that shows how overdone a comparison to toxic food is.

Indeed, if you invested 50k at 5% interest at 38 years ago, it would be 319k now. And that is the baseline if you spent zero on taxes and maintenance.

Being slow to regulate something you don't yet understand is arguably a laudable thing.

I don't know how successful they were at confiscating existing fortunes, but the point is that they were extremely successful at preventing new fortunes from being accumulated.

It depends what you mean by successful. The Soviet Union and China were both very successful at taxing the rich. The consequences of doing so were disastrous, however.

Luck is a big factor in the success of startups, but it is not the only factor. E.g. Jeff Bezos is lucky, but he's not merely lucky.

I believe only about a third of big fortunes are inherited.

I agree with you: I don't think it's a problem either. But people who start from the axiom that inequality is bad have the choice of either claiming it's bad that people can start companies that grow fast, or not seeing this source of inequality. Most seem to choose the latter.

Of the ten causes of inequality he lists, zero of them explain why Jeff Bezos or Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg are so much richer than the rest of us. So here's another cause of inequality: that computers and the internet have made it easier to start a company that gets really big.

You might think someone proposing x as a cause of inequality would check it against lists of rich people to see if it explained why they were rich. But few people who write about inequality ever seem to do this.

I'm not sure why. Is it because they're far removed from the world of startups and don't understand how it works? Is it because they have pet theories they don't want to risk falsifying? In most cases I would guess a bit of both.

Most people who write about increasing inequality seem to assume as an axiom that it's due to changes in policy, rather than changes in the world. But if you work your way down the Forbes 400, changes in the world are clearly a big factor. You could tax away 90% of Zuck's wealth, and he'd still be a billionaire.

Why this pressing need for productivity? Ambition. If you have ambitious things you want to achieve, they're probably going to take more than just ambling along.

An athlete who wants to win races is going to run at a faster pace than he'd find comfortable if he were just going for a run.

This pattern holds true when your only opponent is the difficulty of the problem.

If this result is surprising to HN readers, it is probably because this list of the last 100 IPOs is also surprising:

https://www.iposcoop.com/last-100-ipos/

Only 19 of the 100 most recent IPOs are classified as "technology" companies. The rest are in categories like "health care" and "oil and gas."

There are a lot of high-growth companies that are not startups in the classic sense of starting from nothing and winning by building a better mousetrap. E.g. pharmaceutical companies commercializing research, where the founder is a PI and probably a tenured professor who's at least 40.

It certainly was.

Sapiens. Someone gave it to me as a gift. I opened it at random and the first thing I read was the old chestnut about agriculture being a bad deal, because hunter-gatherers have an easy life.

The deal always takes way more work than the startup expected, and ends up delivering way less benefit. The best solution, when possible, is not to do custom deals at all, but for one of the parties to have an API that the other uses.

E.g. the App Store, vs the custom deals startups used to have to make to get their applications on phones.

In some cowboy movies, the bad guy wore a black hat and the good guy wore a white hat.

I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.

That is a very interesting point that I hadn't considered before: that authoritarianism could leak from country A from country B via lobbying by companies in B controlled by entities in A.

It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)

I wonder if the author even realizes that this article is an example of the phenomenon he's complaining about — that he's preaching a caricature of SV to the Guardian's choir, who are eager to believe it.

This is an interesting point:

"To do these short and surprising proofs, you need a lot of confidence. And one way to get the confidence is if you know the thing is true. If you know that something is true because so-and-so proved it, then you might also dare to say, "What would be the really nice and short and elegant way to establish this?" So, I think, in that sense, the ugly proofs have their role."

My yoga teacher always says this is the most important part of yoga. She says it's why she rarely gets sick. She was delighted to hear it was one of the top stories on HN.

I was trying to guess what this article might be about (since the server seems to be melting and I can't see it), and Wodehouse was my first guess. I think he would like that.

The Economist has a novel approach: look at what's actually happening.

"The would-be world-changers are applying innovative and evidence-based approaches in clinics and classrooms, where elected politicians are often too timid to risk failure, captured by entrenched interests or unwilling to spend public money on experimentation."

I just ordered a copy of this book. Thank you!

Anticompetitive behavior is only illegal when practiced by a company with a monopoly.

It's too bad your comment is buried so far down in the conversation, because this is probably the most insightful point I've seen on the internet today.

And not only do we do this, we have to.