The fact that the notion that "we need to go to space" is a foregone conclusion at the dinner parties this person goes to is exactly the reason I avoid San Francisco.
Value is created by doing
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Value is created by doing
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
A while ago I met an older friend for lunch. I used to work with him years ago in my first job (failed startup). He was out on his own again building out an innovative idea he had in Smalltalk, (which is what he knew). I was talking to him about FP and type theory about all the debates that were going on about it. He just said that its a waste of time listening to most of the people on these kinds of sites because yo…
FP? floating-point? functional programming? firepower?
On this site, in this context? Functional programming.
Re: Value is created by doing
#63All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…
> what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? technical debt
I believe the best solution right now may be to get an MVP without worrying about technical debt too much while not purposely doing things to step on your own feet while acknowledging you'll need to do a full rewrite before 1.0.
Re: Value is created by doing
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Groupon has a market capitalization of 7.3 billion USD.
For more on that: http://investor.groupon.com/financials.cfm Groupon had (in q3 2013, the latest I could find) 595M in revenue and 14M in operating income, an EPS of 0.02 excluding "excluding stock-based compensation and acquisition-related benefit", and 1.1B in the bank. Not a smashing success, but is it a failure? The jury is still out on this, imho.
> Not a smashing success, but is it a failure? The jury is still out on this, imho.
Given that success and failure are both relative terms, I would say Groupon is only a "failure" if you're measuring it by the perceived success it would have. So I would say that if you expected Groupon to be a $10bil company, they are a failure...but if you expected Groupon to be a normal company of a few million in revenue, then they are an amazing success.
Although Groupon may not have had the most lucrative business model in the world, I still feel like they've done a great job at "sticking to their guns" and not trying to enter all kinds of other markets (and failing miserably).
Re: Value is created by doing
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Groupon (and everybody else looking at it) never stoped to think if their business model was good. They were so good executing it that no one thought it wouldn't. But the bill came.
Groupon has a market capitalization of 7.3 billion USD.
Brazilian Eike Batista once had 34.5 billion USD. His main company had a market capitalization of 45 billion USD once. Now, bankrupted:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/30/us-brazil-batista-...
In less than one year
Re: Value is created by doing
#66All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…
This morning I talked about working as a dishwasher in a restaurant with a coworker. I last did that when I was 18, more than 25 years ago, but I remember how hard it was (busy Chili's on University Drive in Fort Worth TX, next to TCU). There was a lot of working, but not a lot of thinking. And you get wet too.
Did you find a better job by just thinking?
Re: Value is created by doing
#67All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…
About every hacker starts by doing too much. We work very hard to learn to think before doing, so if you want to know how it feels to do too much, just remember the times before you learned to think.
Re: Value is created by doing
#68Seriously, this _is_ the labor theory of value. Don't know why the other comment to point this out is dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value It's completely inadequate. See, for example http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
Not so. Here, a quote from the beggining of the wikipedia article:
> the value of a commodity is only related to the labor
The problem is that "only" word. Saying that labor is essential to create value is different from saying that labor is the only component of value.
And to take it further, the article claims neither of those, it only says that if you want to turn labor into value, you must apply the labor in some activity that creates value. Yep, quite tautological once you remove all the interesting parts.
Re: Value is created by doing
#69Seriously, this _is_ the labor theory of value. Don't know why the other comment to point this out is dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value It's completely inadequate. See, for example http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
Not so. Here, a quote from the beggining of the wikipedia article: > the value of a commodity is only related to the labor The problem is that "only" word. Saying that labor is essential to create value is different from saying that labor is the only component of value. And to take it further, the article claims neither of those, it only says that if you want to turn labor into value, you must apply the labor in some…
Not to mention that there are multiple, significantly different labor theory of values...
Re: Value is created by doing
#70Seriously, this _is_ the labor theory of value. Don't know why the other comment to point this out is dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value It's completely inadequate. See, for example http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...
At least in Marx's formulation of the labor theory of value, the TED talk doesn't poke any holes. Exchange value is obviously influenced by a wide variety of things, especially marketing.