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Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#211

Post by eevilspock »

If YC is serious about fixing "online media [that] rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That results in a system that prizes virality over truth," it should open up Hacker News itself for Hacking. What better way to stimulate experimentation and facilitate the testing of ideas for better collaborative news filtering?

I believe many potentially world-changing ideas in this area never see the light of day because the barriers to entry are too high. Innovation is hindered by a chicken-n-egg barrier to entry: you need a successful site like HN to be able to run useful tests and experiments. Imagine there were only four chemistry labs in the world. Only a fraction out of the world's chemists could run experiments. The only labs we have are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and HN.

Hackable Hacker News. Doesn't that just make sense?

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#212

Post by gizmo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #125
baursak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company that expends great amount of money and resources on constant political shifting and backstabbing, and that can't present an unified vision on the market will soon get outcompeted by one that has its shit together. That already happens anyway. You don't need to have a democratically governed workplace for constant political shifting and backstabbing to occur. > If you want to leave or they fire you, you ca…

>> because too much efficiency in a country will make many, many people very miserable. > Can't you make the same argument at organization level? I'm sure many Amazon warehouse workers would agree. Honestly, I think you could. Actually, this is something I was thinking about a lot in context of employee rights. Making workers happy - good office conditions, paid leaves, healthcare benefits, regular schedule, etc. - i…

Interestingly, Thiel (of all people), has argued that companies in a monopoly position tend to treat their employees well, focus on fundamental research, and focus on delivering the best products for their customers. He argues that businesses with a thin profit margin can't afford to do any of that and so are more brutal and authoritarian and they can't afford the long term investments necessary for real innovation to take place.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#213

Post by stcredzero »

anigbrowl wrote: post #177
adamnemecek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While nice, neither of these strikes me as truly disruptive. The downside is that to achieve the best educational environment, you'd have to open a school which doesn't scale nicely unless you plug into existing "world APIs". I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other). There would be teachers…

For sure, but the point is that YC is welcoming to educational disruption even if the submissions so far haven't been very impactful. I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-lear…

I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read.

Poor people's children self-teach. They definitely learn. They don't necessarily learn the culture and values that would allow them to function gracefully in the modern economy.

A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.

People's subculture/tribe and actual community are a tremendous part of who people are and how well they can access resources and knowledge in the world. Religious and various civic organizations understand this. Often governments only understand this as a source of strength for their "opposition." Opposition movements and rebellions understand this.

Most significantly, school reform programs like Harlem Children's Zone understand this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Children's_Zone To fight poverty, you have to involve the whole community on your side. If your initiative is fighting the community, it cannot fight poverty.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#214

Post by whistlerbrk »

I have a startup idea I've been working on for quite a while, that I stopped when I realized I needed to reexamine the technology from the ground up. I've since learned a lot which will allow me to proceed -- this election and mainly the political climate has me wishing I could work on it full time and I would absolutely love to apply. Should I apply late or wait for the next funding cycle?

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#215

Post by linkregister »

conanbatt wrote: post #194
DougN7 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've rewritten my comment three times so far ... My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky. So from my perspective, having both parents working is the roo…

Babysitting a single child is economically very inefficient. Its something teenage girls can do while they watch tv. A full grown adult with skills is worth considerably more to society working than babysitting. Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.

This perspective ignores the drastic difference in the quality between one caretaker and another. Among middle-class parents, the cost of an engaged preschool provider or nanny with a good teacher:child ratio that can match the quality of care of an invested parent meets or exceeds the median salary.

Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.

Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.

Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#216

Post by eevilspock »

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #150
maxxxxx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably of Graham's worst essays. Nobody is talking about removing all rewards. The question is how much reward is needed. Did CEOs do a worse job when they made 20 times the average worker income or would Zuckerberg do anything differently if he had made $500 million instead of 20 billion? What was his risk? Wasting a few years of his life? Plenty of small business owners go under after years of work and hav…

the question is how much reward is needed Who decides that?

Society. It was society that decided to have the current reward system. It is society that can change its mind.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#217

Post by sixdimensional »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #53

The thing that is needed most is a laboratory of ideas for what will replace the neoliberal order. A corporate democracy that increases inequality and only panders to justice by gestures towards identity politics is seemingly over. What we're faced with now is either devolving into an Ethnic Nationalist state on par with Russia, or something entirely new that has yet to be described. What needs to be recaptured is a…

Kind of sounds like the hypothetical "technocracy" [1]. I'd be wary of too much science at the same time - needs some balance. What stirs the beating hearts of people on HN likely does not do so for everyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#218

Post by sillysaurus3 »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #209
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is a great example of growing inequality. Most of the rewards go disproportionally to a select few at the top. That's a good thing: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html "Decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. Since risk and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically decreases people's appetite for risk. Startups are intrinsically risky. Without the…

This actual analysis from The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which uses long running public (easily accessible) data from the Census Bureau, the BDS report[1], suggests that income inequality hurts startup creation rather than helping it. Note: The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middl…

The specific relationship that they find is that startup creation is associated with home prices. This makes sense in the US, as home prices are a good proxy for middle class wealth. Here's a quick not fully vetted interpretation of this finding: When the middle class is relatively rich, they start businesses. When it is relatively poor, they don't. The aspirational income inequality that Graham posits doesn't immediately jump out when looking at year by year new startup numbers on a graph. I'm currently analyzing these numbers, but it's pretty clear that they don't support Graham's assumptions.

He addresses this line of logic in a separate essay: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy."

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#219

Post by xienze »

ScottBurson wrote: post #173
protomyth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"uneducated heartlanders"?

I'm going to pass along something my wife told me about, that happened when she was living in Idaho with her first husband. It was seriously suggested by some of the locals that she should undergo an exorcism. The evil spirit allegedly possessing her, that was to be the target of this procedure: her university education. There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but…

> There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it.

When a farmer's interaction with "educated folk" are people such as yourself who look down their nose at him because _he's a farmer_ and you have a degree in _gender studies_ ("I mean gawd, that poor hick doesn't know anything!"), can you blame them?

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#220

Post by eevilspock »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #166
RangerScience wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetary rewards are far from the only rewards. Ability to effect change is a broader version of that reward: Elon Musk doesn't have as much money as Zuckerburg, but there's an argument to made that he's wealthier, since he's able to enact more/different change in the world. (Of course, Facebook has had such a ridiculously large effect on the world that argument is probably hard to win , but it illustrates what I'm t…

The way Elon was able to get into a position to affect the world was by acquiring a pile of money. It was a necessary first step. If you imagine a scenario where society enforces a cap on how rich someone is allowed to get, it's possible that Musk might not have passed the threshold of money needed to get into his current position. More broadly, when a society won't let people become as rich as the market will let th…

You mean like Galt's Gulch? That would be great. We'll be better off without people who only doing things for personal gain, to amass the greatest share of the world's wealth and power that they can.
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