21–30 of 53 posts
Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps. Edit: before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.
Has anyone discovered a way to bring the content into a form that is halfway bearable to read? Neither zoom nor reader mode of Firefox helps. Edit: before you spend time trying this: it does not have a proper printing stylesheet either.
I tried putting it through Archive, which can be useful for some sites, but I agree it doesn't fix the CSS. https://archive.is/8qeJD
If the concept of ergodicity introduced here intrigues you, I highly recommend reading the Nature paper "The Ergodicity Problem In Economics": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0
The basic premise of this article seems to be that, yes, entrepreneurship is not physics, mainly because human behavior is harder to model than things like motion and forces. So the TLDR (according to the author) is: "The point is not to ‘not fail’, the point is to fail quickly and fail often in non-lethal ways so you have pragmatic, real-world knowledge to help you guide your decisions." I liked the part where they…
As for who came up with asymmetrical risk, great question. I'm not sure where I heard it first? I think it might have been Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.
This reminds me of a CNN video I saw today [1]. Maybe this is what makes the difference between statisticians trying to predict the election and the method used by "Trafalgar Group" who try to understand each states regulations and specifics to make rule based predictions, instead of extrapolating from a big pool of data. In two days we will know who was right. [1] Pollster who predicted Trump's 2016 win makes 2020 p…
Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable. > I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model. It's accurate-enough, but not accurate accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it's a really bad one. > In highly complex systems such as business, things…
> lay out.
I've been told that in this thread. I'll try to improve. Thank you for letting me know.
> Not accurate accurate
True. But it would be overkill to use complex equations for 1 dimensional motion. The degree of error is negligible in that context.
> markets tend to be lenient of initial conditions post PMF
That's a very fascinating point, you bring up. But I'm not sure how one can separate initial conditions from PMF. PMF takes initial market conditions into account by definition. At least, if we're going by Don Valentine or Andy Rachleff's definition.
> shallow, inaccurate analogy
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
> not sure why this is "out of whack"
Perhaps I didn't express myself well enough. I was referring to fully negating any utility data might have and solely relying on intuition. My point was that there's a middle ground but it's further toward intuition than most people think in our data driven world.
I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the essay. I do appreciate you reading it as well as the time you took to give me feedback. I'll try to use it in order to improve future work.
Thank you.
Now that said some thing can work to insure success or make it more likely.
Take the author here. His firm has 'feynman' in their name. On HN who from what I can tell worships Feynman (I didn't even know who he was prior to HN) that will work. In another place it would have the same impact of using 'warby' in 'warby' parker. Meaning good but not stop the presses. (It's clever but some might also say it's annoying to use a cheap trick like that not the same either (it's all nuance) as calling your bagel place 'einstein bagels' (there is one or was one).
I have been 'studying' (you could say) both successful and failed companies for probably longer than most HN readers have been around. Best I will say it's hard work, luck, and of course timing as the major factors. Separately they don't teach any of that when I was in of those really good business schools that people would die to go to.
Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable. > I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model. It's accurate-enough, but not accurate accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it's a really bad one. > In highly complex systems such as business, things…
Thanks for your comment. > lay out. I've been told that in this thread. I'll try to improve. Thank you for letting me know. > Not accurate accurate True. But it would be overkill to use complex equations for 1 dimensional motion. The degree of error is negligible in that context. > markets tend to be lenient of initial conditions post PMF That's a very fascinating point, you bring up. But I'm not sure how one can sep…
I don't agree. Initial conditions are minutiae that, on the surface, don't seem to matter -- hence the canonical example of a butterfly flapping its wings cascading into a hurricane a few weeks later. Product market fit is not that. If "Facebook" would've been called "Smilebook" (which is an initial condition), do you really think it would've failed?
In fact, worrying about your domain name, and what your LLC is going to be called, and what you logo should look like are all rookie mistakes when founding a business.
The OP 'studies what makes companies successful'. The issue is you are only studying the lucky sperm ones (if we take that sentence at face value; maybe 'they' do) as opposed to the complete set of companies. And also you'd never be sure anyway since people are connected to people and you'd never know how a connection resulted in success (vs. some other factor). It's an art and luck it's not (as a point was made) 'sc…
> To validate your hypotheses as quickly as possible with as little money as possible and the try and create experiments with asymmetrical risk. > Because the world is so complex, you’ll often have an answer faster by just building some prototype of the hypothesis you want to test. > If it catches on, you can always scale later. I think one of the coolest real-world examples of this in practice is how Facebook runs t…