611–620 of 808 posts
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This is one of the major problems with PG's essays---he frequently assigns the worst possible motives to the people he disagrees with.
gman83 did the same: "This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism."
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…
Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down crazy new ideas. I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to ver…
Because most people following HN knew about what SPECIFICALLY he was talking about.
This was a reaction, not something that happened out of nowhere.
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I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
Pornography for women works completely differently than pornography for men.
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 think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . .
> Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be.
By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are not, when you are not a domain expert.
> If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world.
And I love viewing everything as a mental model, because, well, it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.
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I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
The other replies to your comment don't seem to address your fundamental point that the Kardashians and their kind are in a different category than other celebrities. Their skills are not acting or singing or sports, but rather generating news to keep themselves in the headlines. I don't really recall this being a category until the start of reality TV, and even then it was short-lived after the shows ended. It wasn'…
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I don't really buy this. A lot of complaints are about the privacy of the whole ordeal. That's kind of moot considering Google has access to all of my banking emails, Dropbox has access to all of my invoices, Apple has access to all of my photos, and Equifax already leaked my SSN years ago. Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.
Fwiw, unlike the examples above, we have permission to your data (if you give it to us) but we don't own or control any of it. We don't store it elsewhere. We don't sell it to the highest bidder. We don't mine it for some other purpose. Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model. I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instanc…
Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple.
The rest feels like classic SV/startup window dressing to get the job done.
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That conflates different cases in a way that strikes me as misleading.
The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography for Vogue. T…
That's inaccurate. No doubt some responses were like that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration.
The internet hivemind (which is all of us) leaps from a few data points to anyone, always, everytime, etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous sentence without too much loss of fidelity—but perhaps it's cynical to insist on it.
This is largely just how human memory works, but I pay close attention to it because it deeply affects this community's perception of itself, and that is a big problem because such false feelings of generality skew sharply negative.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
p.s. I completely agree that we need to have substantive discussion about these things.
Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay that is essentially asking to not being critical right away. In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the…
Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in spaceflight.