Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advice

patrickcollison.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: Advice

#121

Post by dkrich »

imgabe wrote: post #114
gfodor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the OP limit his claim to be about a specific thing like technology? And why did you interpret my comment as having universal applicability? There are categories of things which if you firmly believe that you are right and the other person is wrong in ascribing importance to them (following the OP's heuristic) you'd necessarily assume that person is a moral failure. For example, if I highly regard the ideas…

Context. Patrick Collison is famous around here for building a SaaS business and writing a lot about helping others to do so. This is Hacker News which focuses heavily on business and tech. > My point was that a heuristic that urges one to have confidence that they have "correct" value judgements simply due to their age is a bad rule to have in your mental model of how to navigate differences with others, even if it'…

> In 2006, there were a bunch of college students who thought Facebook was a pretty big deal. Most 50 year olds in 2006 probably would have disagreed and didn't see why it would be important to post pictures of your friends drinking online. The older people were wrong.

This example falls apart for lots of reasons. First, the assertion that someone wouldn't find value in Facebook simply because of their age is demonstrably false. There are millions of 50 year olds who use Facebook today and because Facebook is 14 years old, that adoption happened very quickly. 50 year olds in 2006 wouldn't have found Facebook useful at that time and for a very good reason- it wasn't a community for them, it was a community specifically for college students. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg envisioned Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram when he first created the site in his dorm room. The use case (and usefulness) expanded over time.

> It's not a value judgement. They weren't bad people because they were wrong about a technology trend. But they were still wrong.

Wrong about what? This seems like a straw man to me. Nobody other than college students at very elite colleges were able to use Facebook in its early days. Did that mean that students at community colleges didn't understand the value of sharing photos with their friends or was it just old people? I think it's a mistake to try and explain the complicated in such simple terms.

Re: Advice

#122

Post by pkaler »

So, funny story. I was in YVR waiting for a flight when I decided to get my shoes shined.

The shoe shine had been reading a manga take on the bible. Just a regular guy that in another life could be a computer programmer if the circumstances were different.

He asked me what I do: mobile apps. And he went on and on about how his favourite iPhone app downloaded all of Wikipedia but it didn't work on the latest version of iOS anymore.

That app was Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia app:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/oscon-preview-how-patrick-c...

Re: Advice

#123

Post by sp527 »

sudhirj wrote: post #18
pc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advice is to visit, not to move!

I was in SF for the last WWDC, mostly to see and visit these people I keep hearing about. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where they were or how to talk to them. I went to WWDC, a couple of meetups, the Computer History Museum, walked through Stanford, ate hummus in Palo Alto, took only public transport or shared Lyft rides. But other than a chance meeting with the CEO of Mode Analytics in one can ride t…

Yes. The secret is to find a few well-networked people and then get invited to gatherings/parties in the homes of said people. You'd be shocked at both how connected all of the important and wealthy people in SF are and how much business gets conducted at intimate gatherings.

What's nice is it's somewhat less insular than other status-oriented hierarchies in that you can break into these circles by being reasonably good at generating value (particularly as an engineer/technologist) and even vaguely charismatic.

That said, in my opinion the primary focus should always be on figuring out how to create value. These days the upper echelons of the Bay Area are alarmingly saturated with talkers and bloviators, as opposed to doers.

Re: Advice

#124

Post by imgabe »

dkrich wrote: post #121
imgabe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context. Patrick Collison is famous around here for building a SaaS business and writing a lot about helping others to do so. This is Hacker News which focuses heavily on business and tech. > My point was that a heuristic that urges one to have confidence that they have "correct" value judgements simply due to their age is a bad rule to have in your mental model of how to navigate differences with others, even if it'…

> In 2006, there were a bunch of college students who thought Facebook was a pretty big deal. Most 50 year olds in 2006 probably would have disagreed and didn't see why it would be important to post pictures of your friends drinking online. The older people were wrong. This example falls apart for lots of reasons. First, the assertion that someone wouldn't find value in Facebook simply because of their age is demonst…

> This example falls apart for lots of reasons. First, the assertion that someone wouldn't find value in Facebook simply because of their age is demonstrably false.

This assumption would be false, but it's not the one I was making. The first people to recognize the potential of a new technology are usually young. Yes, Facebook is popular with older people now. It wasn't in the beginning, even when it opened up to everyone and not just college students.

Re: Advice

#125

Post by bradfa »

smithmayowa wrote: post #6

What I will like to really know is people thoughts on what they think people 20-30 & 30-40 should do

20-40: Get married and/or have kids. Both will change your outlook on many topics way more than you expect.

Re: Advice

#126

Post by mcguire »

dkrich wrote: post #68
gfodor wrote: post #59

> If you think something is important but people older than you hold don't hold it in high regard, there's a decent chance that you're right and they're wrong. Status lags by a generation or more. I winced a little bit at this one, though it's worded strangely so I may be misinterpreting it. The way I took it is poor advice -- when there is a mismatch between yourself and another in terms of "what's important" or wha…

Agreed. The older I get the more I’ve learned to listen to other people and to question my own ideas. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually view people who listen to others and are open to changing their opinions when confronted with good advice as being much more intelligent than those who are sure they are right about everything all the time. As the Bob Dylan song goes, “I was so much older then, I’m younger th…

Are you the co-founder and CEO of Stripe? Were you a millionaire at 19 and now, at 29, worth north of a billion dollars?

Why would anyone want to listen to your advice?

(/s Be careful about listening to people who are obviously statistical outliers, who are young and apparently have succeeded at everything they've touched.)

Re: Advice

#127

Post by shanev »

wolco wrote: post #24
sudhirj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in SF for the last WWDC, mostly to see and visit these people I keep hearing about. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where they were or how to talk to them. I went to WWDC, a couple of meetups, the Computer History Museum, walked through Stanford, ate hummus in Palo Alto, took only public transport or shared Lyft rides. But other than a chance meeting with the CEO of Mode Analytics in one can ride t…

Hang out in front of google or attend the local 2600 meeting. Best way to meet CEOs is to become one yourself.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without 2600. Hacking (real hacking, not pg’s definition) is what lead me to learn to code when I was a teenager back in the 90s. Many of the folks I met via 2600 may not be CEOs but are extremely successful. Sage advice.

Re: Advice

#129

Post by sincerely »

voidmain wrote: post #5

I'm a bit amused by the advice to move to SF because that's what all the other nonconformists are doing.

I suspect that even though SF at one point may have been a gathering point for people who didnt want to do things the normal way it has been filled with people who want to make money off the previous group, which makes it less interesting for future trailblazers. i wonder where they will go in the future

Re: Advice

#130

Post by kyledrake »

seathrowaway wrote: post #105
mugsie wrote: post #44

> Why San Francisco? San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ. This could describe Seattle, Portland, Austin, Denver (from my experience) in the US, and a myriad of other places worldwide.

Seattle is (or was) great at many things but as someone who has lived here all my life, I disagree with this categorization. From what I know of Portland, it describes that city even less well. We're politically liberal (sometimes to a fault), not any more optimistic than average (and quite possibly less), and definitely not what I'd call "energetic". It'd be more accurate to say the PNW has positioned itself as the…

Having spent a year in the Bay Area after living in Portland for 10, I really do feel there is much more creative energy in places like Portland, and also that it's a far better place to start most companies.

The problem is that the Bay Area might be full of more creative, interesting people, but the quality and cost of life down there is terrible (and nobody's fixing it), and the problems associated with that more than mitigates the benefits.

You meet smart people, but in order to pay their exorbitant rent they need to work long hours for companies that can pay them an enormous salary, and that's usually the big ones you know about already. That financial burdon, combined with chronic transportation issues, prevents the congealing of people and free time required to form the really creative new ideas and companies, and you just end up with whatever the VCs want to throw a pile of money onto.

So naturally, the thing I do find the area useful for is companies that could be considered VC/10x plays. But I feel like most companies, even very successful ones, don't fall under that criteria. And it only works for companies VCs are willing to fund, limiting your ability to get creative and outside the box.

My advice would be to go there for 1-2 years after college, then decide if all the problems with the area are worth it. Anecdotally, most people I've known eventually get sick of it and leave. And infact the problems are so bad now that the area has started losing population.

I think in order for the Bay Area (and California in general) to really become good for creatives, they need to take a deep existential look at themselves and really decide that they're willing to solve the problems. That means making radical, Marshall Plan levels of reform to zoning and property tax laws, establishment of strong regional metropolitan governments, and significant investments in better transportation. I have zero confidence in the idea that the region will continue to be successful unless they aggressively tackle these problems.

Post reply on HN