montrose

If you have to be able to review any decision manually that people complain about, that is significantly limiting. It means you can only write software to do things humans can do.

I don't think it's alarmist to worry about the GDPR. It's an extremely far-reaching law covering types of technology that are changing very rapidly. Our default reaction should be skepticism, because the default outcome of that combination is disaster.

"Although it might seem a sane and reasonable business, the world’s great engineers, she believes, were "very eccentric characters, all very tenacious, the sort who were cheeky at school and didn’t do what their parents wanted them to do"."

This seems a very important point, if it's correct. It affects so many of the big stories we see in the news, from SV's housing shortage to the widening gap between Republicans and Democrats. It would also mean that Y Combinator making founders move to SV (at least temporarily) turns out to be perfectly aligned with the times.

"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process. To succeed, cities need a critical mass of highly educated workers engaged in the regular, often informal, exchange of ideas. Once this critical mass comes into being, it feeds on itself: Innovation hubs attract new innovators in a self-reinforcing process, while areas lacking this critical mass fall further behind.

In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger.

This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."

"Management at Lockheed’s Skunk Works soon learned of the DARPA competition. Lockheed had not been invited to participate because they had not produced a fighter in nearly 20 years and DARPA was unaware of their work on the A-12/SR-71 aircraft."

Having fewer people. The task may only be 1/100 as hard for a startup as for Google, but there are 1/10,000 as many people to perform it. If so, the burden on the startup is 100x greater than on Google.

Or you are an early-stage startup with just a couple founders trying to do everything.

It seems to me that this letter is similar to a denial of service attack in the way that, although a valid request, it places an impossible burden on the recipient.

If so, the GDPR is similar to a broken protocol.

Maybe the people who designed it assume that it will never be misused. Anyone with experience designing protocols could tell them how dangerously naive that is.

This is novel, as far as I know:

"And some of the genetic variants that are linked with an increase in intelligence are also linked with an increase in life expectancy."

Even though we've all been thinking about self-driving cars for a long time, seeing videos of that steering wheel turning in the empty front seat is surprising. I upvoted this article just for those few seconds of video.

There's a whole class of things that are surprising when you see them for the first time, even if you think you're used to them. I wonder what properties this class of ideas have. Are they more exciting ideas? Do startups working on such things make more money? Or is the surprise merely an artifact of the degree and/or type of brokenness in our own mental models?

I don't know why people flagged that link, but I'll tell you why I'm flagging this one: because you have to have flagging or crap takes over the site, and if you also allow protest posts from people upset about things that got flagged, then those take over the site.

I don't complain in Ask HN posts when stuff I upvoted is flagged off the frontpage. If you have a problem with moderation, email the moderators, like everyone else.

This article demonstrates an important point: it has always been possible to portray Silicon Valley as a self-parody. Or at least that is has for 20 years.

It's always possible to portray a domain where people have very ambitious plans in this way. I'm sure you could write a similar article about people coming to LA hoping to become famous actors, or people coming to NYC hoping to become famous artists.

Learning new things. Making things. Making the world better in some way. Doing something I wasn't able to before. Exercise. Seeing things I've always wanted to see.

I felt bad about upvoting this, because the writer is so nasty about it. His style of writing feels like long-form Twitter trolling. But I upvoted it because the information in it is important. It shows how addictive Twitter is. It also shows how plugged in you can be and still feel yourself to be unplugged.

Farhad ends up seeming like an alcoholic talking about how he's on the wagon, and then you look down and there's a bottle in his hand. The important point though is not that he's some sort of hypocrite, but that it could be any of us.

Or maybe the reason he writes so much is that to write briefly is to leave yourself open to misinterpretation, and anyone who says heterodox things about this topic will be eagerly misinterpreted, if they've left any room to be.

I know a fair number of people who've done important new things, and this seems right on the mark:

"There is also an introversion in the innovator that keeps him from team sports and social events. He dislikes authority, or at least being told what to do. He is not a leader in high school or college, nor is he likely to be pledged by social clubs. From an early age he is a dreamer, not a doer. His attention wanders easily. He likes to probe, to collect, to tinker. He is prone to fantasize. He is not inclined to focus. He will not be voted by his classmates most likely to succeed."

An interesting conflict arises when these people become startup founders. If their companies succeed, they're forced to become leaders, whether they want to or not. But they rarely learn to relish it.

And yet these founders are usually the best leaders for their companies, if they can make themselves do it. It's one of the only examples I know where the people who are best at something don't like doing it much.

Yes, probably, but the question is whether things would also go badly for the other 9.

I suspect the validity of this theory could be tested by imagining what would happen in a society of 10 people.

The size of national governments makes them seem capable of anything. But unless this theory includes a rule that it only applies in societies beyond a certain size (and I didn't see one), it has to work in a society of 10 too, and that scenario we can imagine fairly easily.

There's a whole genre of articles based on conflating two senses of "your," belonging to you, and about you. If I observe that you have blue eyes, that's a fact about you, but it doesn't belong to you, at least not without redefining what "belong" means.

It would be helpful if, instead of deliberately conflating these two senses of "your," articles on this subject went in the other direction and explicitly discussed the distinction.

We have from time to time redefined what "belong" means, but these redefinitions tend to be very complicated and have all sorts of unforeseen consequences. My guess is that a redefinition on the scale of facts about you = your property would be a disaster.

I had been optimistic about Krakow becoming a big tech hub, but the Polish government's shift toward authoritarianism makes that less likely.

I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately sends them away.

There's fairly good data about life expectancy, which is surely the high bit of lifestyle.

Yes. And the wildly varying returns achieved by these retail investors surely increased rather than decreased economic inequality.

This headline is valuable in being so precisely mistaken.

I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. What has changed is the amount of attention you can get by attacking it.

When Google was little, it seemed cute and inconsequential. To attack it would have seemed mean (and inconsequential). Now that Google is big, attacking it reads instead as "speaking truth to power." But Google is no more evil now than it was in the past. Which is not to say that Google was ever perfect, just that the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives – whether the reporters realize it or not – from nothing more than its increased size.

If you try as hard as you can, it will breed a good sort of fatalism about being successful. You can't try harder than as hard as you can, and once you're doing everything you can, what's the point of worrying how well you'll do?

The look you're seeing is fatigue, not misery. There's a class of things that make you tired but happy, and small children are one of them.

When I need to smile because I'm having my picture taken, I just think of my kids.

The article makes exactly that point:

"I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can "live a good life" while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, "However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there...""

"But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided—a finding that confirms several previous studies.

If boys chose careers based on their own strengths—the approach usually suggested by parents and guidance counselors—they would be most likely to land in a STEM discipline or another field drawing on the same sorts of skills. Girls could choose more widely, based on their own strengths."

This quote from the TechCrunch article was to me the most striking element of this story. They already yield double the rate of good candidates:

""The metric that companies care most about is what percentage of on-site interviews convert into hires, and the industry standard is 20 percent. Triplebyte’s placement rate is 40 percent," says Taggar."

Wow, I wondered if that was what happened. Someone should crawl the site to collect other examples of this at Quartz. It would be a fascinating study of linkbait being formed.

This makes some interesting points, but it seems ridiculous to say that Dropbox's IPO is "make-or-break" for Y Combinator. Make or break in what sense? That Dropbox's IPO will influence the opinions of retail investors about other YC companies? That seems very unlikely; retail investors are unlikely even to know Airbnb and Dropbox share that in common. Or does she mean make or break in the sense that if Dropbox does badly, it will affect the opinions of potential YC applicants? Even if it did, which seems unlikely, it wouldn't "break" YC, because as she herself points out in the article, there is already a big pipeline of successful alumni. Nowadays the path to IPO is on the order of a decade (11 years in Dropbox's case), and while that means a long wait till liquidity, it also makes the ecosystem pretty robust.