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

996

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 561 posts

Re: 996

#531

Post by citizenpaul »

graemep wrote: post #505
citizenpaul wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves? The majority of rich people do not work for their money. They inherit or "soft inherit" the money. They do investment stuff because it makes them feel big and powerful and important. You can tell by their speech patterns. Meet some rich people in real life and pay attention to just how slow their patterns of speech and movement are on average. M…

That is true, but the majority of rich people pay other people to manage their investments. They might manage the family business or similar but there are who industries and careers built around managing rich people's money (private banking, family offices, etc.). I have met quite a lot of rich people in real life and I do not recognise your description. It is true hustle is for plebs, because hustle is born of despe…

I worked at a large bank HQ office. I was young and the wealth management departments "darling" of tech because I would enthusiastically help them with their odd issues. Even though it was really not my job. (Free food and drinks there!)

I assure you that banks do not have huge luxury lounges with expensive drinks(like 1k+ bottle)and such for the employees of rich people. True rich people have lots of time and they do occasionally drop in to make face appearance and "Show face" as I've heard it described. As well as the very rich bank c-suite that would regularly drop into the department. Though they had their own private area on the top three floors. (which I also scavenged from lol)

That said due to my helping them I often got to see private info about the people that came to visit specifically to exactly how much money they had with us(and they would always say umm you are really not supposed to see this ok?). Anyway my point is I've probably met more verified rich people than most people so for what my opinions are worth thats how I got them. Even a couple of billionaires whom's name would not show up on any list because its private wealth.

Re: 996

#532

Post by Aerbil313 »

qcnguy wrote: post #508
godelski wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit. Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claim…

It’s weird to believe that US and China are ahead of Europe simply because they work harder. If anything I’d be more inclined to believe they are ahead despite these unhealthy work cultures. Not to mention that US vs. China is not comparable in much any metric. The real reason is the work (and life!) mentality of US where individualism and materialism triumphs, which combined with the dollar hegemony, gives rise to its tech industry. For China it’s posbably the people advantage, combined with a highly focused and determined state massively supporting key areas of technology domestically. Both are unified language, single countries whereas Europe has communication and political barriers internally. And so on…

IMHO your view demonstrates the human bias to attribute simple and easy causes to complex phenomena.

Re: 996

#533

Post by godelski »

qcnguy wrote: post #508
godelski wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit. Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claim…

  > But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do
Okay, by your logic we should also see: Mexico, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Israel to be ahead because they all work more hours.

I think we can all agree that there's more to this problem than hours. Now the question is if it is just money. Probably not considering that list, but hey, that money doesn't hurt either.

No one is arguing that hours aren't needed. People are arguing that output is not linearly correlated to number of hours worked. Personally, I think it tends to look more S-curved. Imprecise because sometimes 30 minutes of work can be very useful and sometimes it can be even detrimental. But it can take some time to get into the zone and be very productive. At the same time, too much and you are less effective.

The only situations where more working hours directly equates to more output is when you have a very clear widget machine. We've already automated a lot of tasks because of this, but hey there are still hard problems like fruit picking. Though I think it isn't hard to understand how the human becomes less productive as they get tired... I'm not sure why you think that isn't true about coding. I'm really not sure why you think that is true when it comes to doing research. Some of the most famous scientists in history famously worked tldr: I think you vastly oversimplified the problem.

Re: 996

#534

Post by [deleted] »

qcnguy wrote: post #508
godelski wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit. Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claim…

[deleted]

Re: 996

#535

Post by komali2 »

scubbo wrote: post #527
komali2 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most startups fail. So, where's the risk? You still just were working anyway, pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years. And now you have "Founder" or "Founding Engineer" or "CEO" or "CTO" on your resume. So you didn't have a good exit. So what?

> pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working". If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my ment…

Ah well we must just know different folks. Every startup I've been aware of in my personal life was a weekend project amongst people who kept their day job, until they could get into yc or something, and then get to a seed round. The only self funded quit your day job startup I know of in my personal life is the restaurant I opened and closed within a span of a year. Learned my lesson!

Re: 996

#536

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

graemep wrote: post #504
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, if you trade a dollar back and forth 1000 times with a friend, you are adding $1000 to the GDP.

If you pay someone a dollar, that is because they supplied you with something worth a dollar - i.e. a dollar's worth of value added to the economy.

right, but if an item goes through 10 different factories to be assembled the price each pays from the previous gets added to GDP.

Re: 996

#537

Post by throwawaymaths »

petralithic wrote: post #520
godelski wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you answered the question. I'm pretty sure everyone knows this. But I think most people also know that it can be very difficult to pitch investors and that this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.

> this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree. This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.

Its not so much that.

Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky

With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.

Re: 996

#538

Post by smugma »

godelski wrote: post #533
qcnguy wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit. Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claim…

> But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do Okay, by your logic we should also see: Mexico, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Israel to be ahead because they all work more hours. I think we can all agree that there's more to this problem than hours. Now the question is if it is just money. Probably not considering that list, but hey, that money doesn't hurt either. No on…

Israel probably is “ahead” by most startup evaluation metrics, both in HW and SW.

Re: 996

#539

Post by godelski »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #537
petralithic wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree. This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.

Its not so much that. Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.

Yeah, this is the big problem I see. There's some startups I see that in their pitches have some big red flag like needing to violate the laws of physics. Yet, I see these funded.

It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.

Re: 996

#540

Post by whstl »

abustamam wrote: post #428
citizenpaul wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves? The majority of rich people do not work for their money. They inherit or "soft inherit" the money. They do investment stuff because it makes them feel big and powerful and important. You can tell by their speech patterns. Meet some rich people in real life and pay attention to just how slow their patterns of speech and movement are on average. M…

I went to a seminar a lot of years back. The grifter on stage was hawking a product on how to invest in venture capital or something. The pitch was "got no money? Use other people's money! Pay $300 to learn how" I don't know how true it is, as I am not about to take this grifters sales pitch at face value, but given that the grifter exhibited a lot of traits that I see in some of these rich investor people, I suspect…

> "got no money? Use other people's money! Pay $300 to learn how"

Commendable that a grifter is actually following their own advice!

Post reply on HN