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

It’s Time to Build

a16z.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 1001 posts

Re: It’s Time to Build

#101

Post by viraptor »

kick wrote: post #27

I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. It's interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon? Rew…

> Is there a word for this phenomenon?

Taunting?

If you stand in a room full of people and say "the sky is blue", you'll get a weird look at most.

If you say instead "Most of you will think it's controversial and criticise me, but I think the sky is blue - you're free to voice your opinion though", you'll get lots of people commenting (as you did) that this is not controversial and the sky is indeed blue. You can get people to spread and talk about your idea this way.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#102

Post by timhigins »

covidacct wrote: post #46

> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks. For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't…

Sure, govts. should tax the FAANGs of the world more, but having a "stake" in them means govt. interests suddenly align with corporate interests, meaning regulation for the public good gets sidelined. Net neutrality anyone?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#103

Post by throwaway1777 »

WoahNoun wrote: post #19
MattGaiser wrote: post #8

You are a billionare Marc. You are probably one of the top 1000 people with the capacity to build in North America. So, how many of the things you list are you building?

The entire article is about top down resource allocation to build society. That can't be accomplished by any single person, organization or state. Yours is a hopelessly cynical response that I hope you will reflect a little deeper on.

Billionaires can literally direct huge amounts of capital top down. They can’t do everything but they can raise the money to do almost everything.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#105

Post by ajross »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #76
covidacct wrote: post #46

> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks. For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't…

Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

Aren't the last 30 years sort of the problem though? How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal, the rapid cleanup of acid emissions which were wrecking forests all up and down the east coast... Seems like, starting in the 80's, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it's doing, we should let it do more stuff.

Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.

So I'd sort of flip this around: what was it we did in the last 30 years that destroyed our confidence in our own government? Because it used to work.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#106

Post by pm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #63

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest. It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas tod…

Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use. I don't think he means desire in terms of willpower or motivation, but in terms of ambition. I do think the world has lost some of of its ambition over the last 50 years.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#107

Post by vikramkr »

MattGaiser wrote: post #37
vikramkr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have a rapid, flexible platform and a great enough need, those 3 months could be enough. But the solution isn't just with the vaccine platform. If, in 10 years, we get lab on a chip working and replace mice with chip based experiments that better reflect human physiology, and/or see a moores law type spike in quantum computation, and/or see breakthroughs in ai, and/or some other set of breakthroughs I cant even…

We already skipped the mice and went right to human trials.

Who skipped animal studies? J&Js vaccine, one of the most promising ones, went through preclinical trials before human trials started[0]. So did novovax[1]. Even moderna, who was particularly light on animal testing, worked with the naiad to run a trial in lab mice[2]. The industry has been working on covid vaccines since january[0], there has been less time than usual, sure, but nothing to the best of my knowledge has gone into humans without preclinical work.

[0]https://www.jnj.com/johnson-johnson-announces-a-lead-vaccine...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

[2]https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/researchers-rush-to-star...

Re: It’s Time to Build

#108

Post by pmarca »

chrisco255 wrote: post #85

I don't know why soaring skyscrapers should be viewed as some sort of penultimate view for the future. With remote work tech, we can rid ourselves of the need for dense urban cores, and we can decentralize our population centers more appropriately.

Let's build what we need to make remote work fully practical and available to many more people!

Re: It’s Time to Build

#109

Post by quickthrower2 »

wbl wrote: post #51
quickthrower2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments need to lead on this. I am not sure how corporations can do this without just donating their infrastructure or profits (which would be a great thing to do!). But even then their profits pale in comparison with the money the governments have at hand to spend on these things. An investor can only invest in building things for which there are demand, and for things that benefit society at large that demand u…

You think people don't ordinarily need PPE or ventilators? Or any other thing that we used to make?

I’m talking in context of preparedness for a pandemic, rather than healthcare BAU.

This is the mood of the article which begins:

> Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

If you want to be prepared for a pandemic you need stuff built with orders from the government.

Of course startups can help with innovation and may create things that make it easier to be prepared such as a low cost ventilator, but government needs to take care of preparing whatever the tech happens to be.

Post reply on HN