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Re: Questions

#31

Post by bpizzi » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile and web apps.

I'll pick this one: end users back then (emacs/vba/smalltalk era) are the power users of today. Today's end users are a new kind of users.

Re: Questions

#32

Post by joshschreuder » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

panic wrote: post #8

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…

Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.

Re: Questions

#33

Post by closeparen » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

tobr wrote: post #27

rahimnathwani wrote: post #5

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics. Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trend…

This is very interesting and implies a kind of paradox. As some things become radically cheaper, it should leave us with more resources to spend on things that are difficult to make more efficient. But instead, it makes it appear as if they have become so expensive we can barely afford them anymore! Does this fallacy have a name?

Yes, it's called Baumol's Cost Disease [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Re: Questions

#34

Post by barrkel » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

dvdhsu wrote: post #21

(I work at Retool, and Patrick is an investor.) > Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of those APIs seems like a simpler problem. Retool ( https://tryretool.com )…

Total cost of ownership for malleable software is higher than for something you pay someone else to specialize in modifying, and businesses have gradually learned this. They increasingly realize that software shouldn't be their core business, especially if it's applicable to more than just their own industry. So this is just the normal tinkering -> specialization dynamic seen in most new technologies.

Re: Questions

#35

Post by chucky » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?

Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously.

With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so called Hem-PC-reformen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen). This was extremely popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in 1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet revolution.

Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas.

Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies. That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and generally use English as their business language.

Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive, but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as an example of a trend.

Re: Questions

#36

Post by _wzsf » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

Not to be critical, but I pose this question in response:

Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested heirs?

e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Steve Jobs, Richard DeVos, Bill Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin.

Re: Questions

#37

Post by panic » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

joshschreuder wrote: post #32

panic wrote: post #8

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…

Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.

Those downsides only apply to the book or software itself. My point was about the stuff you need to have apart from the book/software in order to read it. You need a computer to run software; all you need to read a book is an understanding of the language. It does get harder and harder to understand books over time, but not at the same rate that computers are changing (and language tends to stay relatively simple, anyway, because people have to be able to learn it).

Re: Questions

#38

Post by jaggederest » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

pliny wrote: post #30

jaggederest wrote: post #14

The easy answer for the "Two Sigma" problem is that you... don't try to reproduce it on a large scale by finding some other method. You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard presse…

>You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student So, at a modest 2 hours of instruction per day, and assuming people spend on average 12 years in education and 48 years in the workforce, you need at minimum for 1/16th of your adults to be teachers. Not 1/16th to be employed in education but just teachers and just for this education scheme. Today it's about 1/40th (in the us) and that includes po…

Closer to 1/3rd of the working population as teachers, actually, by my numbers. Current spending is $13k/yr per student, I'd bump that comfortably up 4x to $52k per year. That's about one full time teacher per student.

As for marginal ROI, if the effects are as dramatic as the stated research implies, it'd be more than worth it. It would be a larger increase than the entire implementation of formal secondary and tertiary education system combined, which cost a lot more than K-8. I don't think you can overstate how large the demonstrated effect size was. Think "industrial revolution" or "invention of the printing press".

Essentially you'd be spending an extra 3x the amount we currently spend to get... 5x? 10x? better outcomes. Results from those studies were equivalent to making the current best students in the country suddenly the very lowest tier of educational attainment - top 1% suddenly becomes the minimum standard. Think Rhodes scholars being "the new special ed kids", or the new "functionally illiterate must-pass graduates".

(This is all assuming that the research was accurate, and the magnitude of difference is really that large. I'd want to see a lot of follow up.)

Re: Questions

#39

Post by sgillen » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

thenewewb wrote: post #28

In order: Inflation, regulation/globalism, corrupt system, wait, don’t, up to us all, good question, good question, remove politics, no, books, papers, don’t try, no, false laziness.

Things are not this simple. I think these questions have more complicated answers than you think.

Re: Questions

#40

Post by drakonka » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:57 AM UTC

chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

I previously read someone's take on this in relation to people feeling secure enough to take risks here (not just in Stockholm but Sweden as a whole I guess). While notch's success may be an outlier, the process of trying to do your own thing isn't here. I'm not sure when in his development Notch left King, but in general there are quite a few people here who just try to go their own way (sometimes completely outside of their previous industry even). It helps when you don't have to live in fear of being completely penniless should you fail, I think.

Purely anecdotally, I am not part of a startup, but do a lot of hobby work in coffee shops around Stockholm. I'm always seeing/hearing people in local cafes discussing some new startup or project they are getting off the ground. I've also seen first hand many people get maybe a year or two of funding and start up their own game studios, for example. Of course not all of them end up being successful, but many people feel secure/comfortable enough to try. I think the volume of these attempts and people trying to do something new also helps drive up the number of "hits" overall, to be added to these kinds of lists.