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

We Have Learned Nothing

colossus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 65 posts

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#41

Post by aboardRat4 »

gzread wrote: post #34
RGamma wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solving for product" is VC pidgin speak. Much contemporary software hardly solves anything anymore; it's getting shittier every iteration without fundamental progress in the field as everything turns into yet another dumbed down web-based abomination that robs us of more of our sanity (exceptions excepted!). There are good explanations for this, but I still don't like it.

The better product is the one customers choose to buy. If products are getting shitty it's because customers want shitty.

>The better product is the one customers choose to buy.

Heroin addicts want to buy heroin.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#43

Post by liotier »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #40
dminik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be defeatist, but it is correct. Seriously, how do you even realistically approach taking on ASML. They spent decades and billions of (investment) dollars to do insane moonshot research and it paid off. But it also closed off the door behind them. Entire countries (Russia, China, ...) have been trying to reproduce it. They have not succeeded yet.

>They have not succeeded yet. Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

> Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

... An argument that may not convince China and Russia, who have a track record of ignoring it - I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#44

Post by ruraljuror »

spacecadet wrote: post #35
tlb wrote: post #26

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

Racing competition is flattened through regulation(oversimplified). All drivers have the same car. Drivers skill and fearlessness is the deciding factor. I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point. As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im ab…

Hm, no, in F1 they don’t have the same car. Each season, each team builds their own (adhering to the Formula) and put massive amounts of efforts to gaining efficiency through engineering.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#45

Post by OhMeadhbh »

I'm just delighted that someone else read Feyerabend, Popper and Kuhn. I would add Giddens and even Graeber to that list, both are disruptive in their own way. About 25 years ago I adopted anthropology as a lens to investigate behaviour of tech companies and teams. It's not let me down.

The most important thing I got from Feyerabend, Graeber and Sylvia Ashton-Warner was the invitation to colour outside the lines (though few but my mother would suspect Ashton-Warner of anarchic thought...)

I just finished reading Lowey's autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone." A ripping yarn if you're hip to mid-century descriptions of design, martinis and trains. Lowey's most famous slogan (repeated in design schools everywhere) is MAYA : Most Advanced Yet Accessible. In other words... as a designer, you have to make something the client can recognize as a solution to their problems but advanced enough to justify the expense of upgrading.

I bring it up because I fear we have confused the two... being accessible and being advanced. While I'm happy to point out some of the advantages of AI, I should also mention we're letting the tail wag the dog. We've spent fourty-fifty years with a model of technology growth requiring increasingly greater returns on falling marginal real returns.

The difference between the benefit of technology between 1940 and 1950 was immense. Similar for the increased benefit brought about by the increase from 1950 through 1960. But the benefits between 2016 and 2026 are less about productivity improvements and more about finding more people to borrow money from.

What if we have eaten all the low-hanging worker-productivity fruit?

What if every increase in worker productivity requires increasingly greater capital investment and that investment yields increasingly smaller margins?

Is it time to reconsider Schumacher's argument in "Small is Beautiful" ? Is it time to work smarter rather than invest bigger?

All these thoughts are offered without evidence, but also without a foregone conclusion of their outcome.

I will be at the library, BLS website and local startup office collecting data.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#46

Post by spacecadet »

ruraljuror wrote: post #44
spacecadet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racing competition is flattened through regulation(oversimplified). All drivers have the same car. Drivers skill and fearlessness is the deciding factor. I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point. As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im ab…

Hm, no, in F1 they don’t have the same car. Each season, each team builds their own (adhering to the Formula) and put massive amounts of efforts to gaining efficiency through engineering.

Oh really?! I said my statement was oversimplified. Not all groups have the same requirements. NASA Spec is very regulated for instance... But I knew a comment like this was coming, so as someone who grew up with a family race team, has a race car, and builds a motorsports app. Shut up.

My eyes being rolling faster than my crank...

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#47

Post by psalaun »

tlb wrote: post #26

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

A car race is a zero-sum game, which is not the case of economics (according to orthodox economists at least), so if there was a magic recipe for startups success, more of them would generate wealth, the pie would grow, therefore less should die?

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#48

Post by kingstnap »

psalaun wrote: post #47
tlb wrote: post #26

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

A car race is a zero-sum game, which is not the case of economics (according to orthodox economists at least), so if there was a magic recipe for startups success, more of them would generate wealth, the pie would grow, therefore less should die?

You can have locally zero sum effects.

Either you fight over a saturated market. (Zero sum)

Or you try to grow the market. (Non zero sum)

Or you try to diversify into new markets. (Mixed, non zero sum if its greenfield research into new technologies, zero sum if old).

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#49

Post by Jensson »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #40
dminik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be defeatist, but it is correct. Seriously, how do you even realistically approach taking on ASML. They spent decades and billions of (investment) dollars to do insane moonshot research and it paid off. But it also closed off the door behind them. Entire countries (Russia, China, ...) have been trying to reproduce it. They have not succeeded yet.

>They have not succeeded yet. Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

> Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake

No its not, you have to be extremely precise when making the machine, and only ASML knows how to do that. China already have a big government funded project to reproduce ASML machines and they have failed so far.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#50

Post by q-base »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #45

I'm just delighted that someone else read Feyerabend, Popper and Kuhn. I would add Giddens and even Graeber to that list, both are disruptive in their own way. About 25 years ago I adopted anthropology as a lens to investigate behaviour of tech companies and teams. It's not let me down. The most important thing I got from Feyerabend, Graeber and Sylvia Ashton-Warner was the invitation to colour outside the lines (tho…

I have added the two works mentioned in the post by Kuhn and Fayerabend to my reading list. I have read some of Greabers work and while idealistic/unrealistic in some parts I really like the antidote to "popular" thoughts/theory. Can you recommend other books/works? I have "Small is Beautiful" on my reading list already. I wanted to read it after Conviviality, but never got to it after I abandoned Conviviality - but your mention of it moved it up my list.
Post reply on HN