myth_buster

My previous company, in true disruptive fashion, was setup as an autonomous entity outside of Fortune 100 mothership with the sole goal to crack a certain market.

3 years in, as we were passing through the trough of disillusionment, I picked up _The Innovator's Dilemma_. Boy did it predict everything we went through. It was like happening upon the script for your life. It was a transcendental experience. And I've recommended the book to anyone there who would listen to me! At one point I was considering buying copies of it and giving it to the executives but I refrained. One thing I took away from the whole experience is knowledge will only take you so far, execution is everything. When someone like Clay comes along and imparts profound wisdom, capitalize on it.

World lost a great mind.

Past/related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19975862

It's a great read.

Web archive link as the blog faced hug of death this weekend.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190609094448/http://mckellen.c...

Ian post on 20th anniversary.

https://twitter.com/IanMcKellen/status/1215709543272812544

I would say Naval Ravikant in Joe Rogan Experience [0]. A bit preachy (similar to Osho whom he quotes) but there is some things that are actionable and is an interesting point of view.

I'm catching up on Knowledge Project (which is quite a listen) so these are not from 2019, I just happened to listen to them last year. The ones that had the most impact are:

- Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us? My Conversation with Gary Taubes [1]. I got interested in this subject following the NYT expose on how sugar lobby shifted blame onto fat [2]. This builds up on that for me.

- Survival of the Kindest: Dacher Keltner Reveals the New Rules of Power [3] This may be a selection bias as I had a feeling "survival of the fittest" is perhaps productive in short run but would end with species of one. Imho, the way to succeed is to collaborate and share knowledge else we may never have survived hunter gathering phase. So this episode resonated with me.

A16Z's Incenting Innovation Inside Loonshots to Moonshots [4]. Having been through a significant cultural shift at my organization, the analogy of water freezing at 32F and hysteresis to explain how company culture could change dynamically or how in the same organization there are pockets that could be at two extremes on a spectrum, was quite spot on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44

[1] https://fs.blog/2017/11/gary-taubes-sugar/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...

[3] https://fs.blog/2018/03/dacher-keltner-power/

[4] https://a16z.com/2019/03/24/loonshots-moonshots-incentives-o...

Well, one can say that about the current 2 day weekend too. And there are people who do 80 hr / 7 day weeks but that surely gets you burned out.

My bad!

It's a tradition for me as well to stare at it and fiddle with it for a while. Coming from ecommerce, the scale staggers me! This and what Alibaba does on singles day. Kudos.

I (full stack self taught engineer) recently accepted an offer. Here's my biggest takeaways which you may already be aware of:

- It's an imperfect system but a closest thing to a functioning one.

- Referral is the best way in.

- Apply early, within 24-48h of job posting. I setup a Tuesday/Thursday morning schedule to check and apply for new jobs. Ignored stale job postings (> 14 days).

- Apply to jobs that fit your profile. If you want to switch to a different stack, work on a project/course and add that to resume. That should get you through recruiter's filter.

- Spaced repetition is the real deal. The more interviews I gave the better I became, primarily because I got more comfortable. It also helps internalize all the concepts and bring it to your system A. Also experiment during your interviews to see feedback and engagement. Most results are canned responses so you have find signals elsewhere.

- It's a search problem (numbers game). It's akin to finding a partner. Wider the search the better. When it clicks it makes a world of difference.

The way I rationalized rejects, which is defeatist, was by thinking they know what they are doing and it's better to be rejected than to be hired and be miserable from being a bad fit. If nothing works, I for one know my worth and will build something I value.

I'm surprised by the lack of focus on mobile in that post.

Most of the third world leaped the desktop stage and are coming online using mobile. Primarily due to cost factor but also the additional infrastructure (telephone line, router, dongle etc) and maintenance (dirt/dust on keyboards) you need for a desktop. And imho, this trend will catch up in the first world countries specially with newer generations.

Hence I would think focusing on mobile would be the best strategy for FF to gain market share. Additionally mobile users are more sensitive to data usage. A lot of data is consumed by downloading tracking scripts and serving rich content ads. Currently there are no viable alternatives as we can't install uBlock or other extension for Mobile browser. If these features ships out of the box, I'm pretty sure it would increase adoption purely by word-of-mouth. The case I can think of when this strategy would not work is if users on mobile are spending most of their time on individual apps (Google assistant, Siri, Fb/Instagram/Twitter mobile app) and not on browser.

Which brings me to the state of Firefox mobile app. Firefox's mobile market share [0] is non -existent compared to desktop [1], which was at 32% at one point in time. I may be a minority here (HN/US), as I do most of my browsing on the phone. (I use desktop only for searching of technical implementation/issues. Primarily because this way I'm aware of the cost and duration that I've been browsing as I would have to reach for my phone and divert my attention away from desktop.) I tried to switch to Firefox mobile app on android but it felt like a desktop app jammed into a mobile viewport. A lot of space is devoted to the tab and address bar. A lot of sites that I navigate to, renders a desktop page instead of triggering a mobile layout as they do if I were to access it through Chrome. All of this results in a bad UX.

IMHO, focusing on Firefox mobile app's performance, privacy and usability will help grow adoption of Firefox overall, specially in the environment where discussion on privacy are becoming increasingly mainstream.

0: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world... 1: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

> With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism.

This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the theory of disruption.

This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...

Imagine yourself in their shoes. You have been trying to bring to attention the adverse effects of fossil fuels to the planet. And you are doing this using scientific methods and getting them peer reviewed. And you have built models that, in hindsight, are as accurate as possible.

And what reception you get for this? A large apparatus is deployed to label your work as pseudo-science. Your credibility is questioned.

In that light, those 4 words, "We are excellent scientists!" is profound. It contains within it the struggle, suffering, pain, integrity and pride of the experience they have gone through for many decades.

This reminded me of Clair Cameron Patterson [0] and his struggle to bring to light the effect of lead in gasoline. Cosmos' "The Clean Room" [1] is an accessible view on this subject.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson

[1] https://imdb.com/title/tt3410940/

This was my thought regarding Google's Soli chip[0] when I saw comments talking about it's usability limited to cooking or other fringe cases.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269877

I believe it's a documented fact that most of breakthrough technology feels like dabbling in triviality.

I read somewhere (will look for source when I get time), that when Thomas Edison invented phonograph, he believed there wouldn't be no other use for it than to listen to sermons at home.

I believe this __could__ over time revolutionize HCI and perhaps gaming.

If I'm not mistaken, the lockout period expires Nov 10th.

Also give how aggressively they were hiring in the run up to IPO, a lot of people are probably nearing the 1yr cliff.

Detailed discussion from September when the decision was made.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20920753

He is bullish on AirBnB[0] and Shopify[1].

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/10/26/18029008/pivot-kara-swisher-s...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58YkxEjzT4

____

Edit

Linked to a better resource.

I'm just impressed by how well the fallout has been predicted by Scott Galloway[0] and Matt Levine.

Has been an incredible learning experience for me on the unicorn class in general. Looking forward to unicorn report for 2019 [1].

[0] https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part-deux

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/03/20/the-unicorn-ipo-r...

Not sure whether trolling.

There has been some very good investigative journalism done in the tech sector. Theranos/Uber/Tumblr comes to mind. Specially from media outlets outside of the SV echo chamber.

Scott Galloway victory lap incoming 3... 2...

Thanks for clarifying. Looking forward to the digging into codebase.

I may be wrong in thinking that given two researchers are working at Adobe, the plan probably is to keep it proprietary and put it in one of their software.

@proberts could you share some resources on visa/immigration (and related gotchas) that would be helpful for folks on H1B planning to start their own startup.

The only way we us a society can make progress is by critically analyzing our beliefs and biases and correcting them.

> used as reasons to limit constitutional freedoms

The implicit assumption in your statement appears to be that constitutional amendments are invalid/ineffective. But that's far from the truth as its a man made artifact and reflects the beliefs and biases of its times which may or may not hold true in the present.

Kubernetes for Golang. This has been brought up as an example of fine documentation: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/ec2e767e593953...

Requests for Python https://github.com/psf/requests

> It’s important to note that the FDA doesn’t yet know how certain diets may be associated with DCM in some dogs.

From my read, it's an ongoing research and no results/conclusions have been reached yet. They are posting names of brands as an effort to "being transparent with their investigation".

[Nit] Show me 4 embedded ads but not a single chart when talking about trends. Also 2018.

Essentially...

> Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission

Mantra/MO that they have been following since inception.

> Consider whether you can reframe the problem.

This to me has been perhaps one of the most useful tool when I'm struggling with something. The fable of NASA's space pen [0] is good marker to invoke this.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

I'm surprised by the reception this is getting.

I may be wrong here, but my approach to this would be completely counter to the one taken. Instead of overhauling POS systems (which are painful/tedious to do), I would try to build an OCR app that reads the items and does all that viz in the app, saving some paper and ink in the process.

In addition to above constraint with POS systems, I don't have one stop shop for getting all items in one category (say groceries).