421–430 of 808 posts
HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't…
This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progressi…
For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?
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They simply didn't reveal the business model yet. The $50 subscription is to avoid flooding their servers while testing the software. This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.
> they'll probably give it for free or very cheap. They wont give away this for free: > Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz. People would mine bitcoins with it. Not to mention they'd be footing more than all of youtubes bandwidth costs if this gets popular.
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…
I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for the user. edited by me for content
It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no?
We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit any rough patches?
Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now. Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and people when they talk a little too different from you. That's why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males of the same demographics.
In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…
First of all: it makes one very large assumption from the beginning that is never mentioned: "I, pg, can confidently identify a reasonable domain expert".
That's basically a fallacy: this is the hardest thing to be sure of and Dunning Kruger applies heavily here (both for the apparent domain expert, and also for the person listening to their idea, who considers themselves such an excellent judge of the speaker's expertise).
Beyond that, there's nothing profound here: any "average" person, when listening to a person they trust (and "trust" here means they believe that this person is competent, i.e. is a "reasonable domain expert"), will heed their ideas, and be more likely to consider the "crazy" ones. Paul is not unique nor advanced in this regard.
The unstated problem is knowing whether you're good at identifying experts.
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…
This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.
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No it's not regardless of the rest. It implies actual risk. Some rich dude losing a dime is not skin in the game, unless the phrase is meant as completely meaningless masturbation. "Skin" implies an actual impact, otherwise it's just "in the game".
You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".
1. PG is selling us something. 2. PG just open-sourced a part that seems like a component of the YC admissions logic.
I personally don't care if it's just 2) or if it's 1) and 2) - in each case I get to learn something new and for that I am grateful. Basically, they must have established that whenever they can't tell if you're right or wrong, they ask themselves how likely are you to know something that they don't. This seems obvious enough, but only after you've heard it explained. Also, it might be obvious to each individual to a different degree, so when you consider that YC applications are reviewed by a large group of people, it's almost certain that this is all codified in such a way that the reviewers are not just judging the startup alone, but likely also the founder independently of their startup. As you can tell, I clearly don't have any inside knowledge here and this is all just speculation. But if I were to submit a YC application, I would certainly ask myself now more than ever before how to make people believe that I am an expert in the field of my startup.