611–620 of 681 posts
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Getting rich and making the world better are not incompatible, or even unaligned in general. You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
Drug lords are making the world better?
> It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies. People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one o…
Genuinely curious to understand your line of reasoning. - Concretly what's the late-stage capitalism nightmare? How do you define it and what do you compare it against? - What do you define what PG is concretely telling kids and how that's related to what you describe as capitalism nightmare. Finally, would you care to share some examples of better scenarios that could inspire advice for 14-year olds?
* Inequality in societies is as large as ever, and inequality is one of the main predcitors how happy a society is
* Influence of people and corporations with money on politics and society is unprecedented (i.e. lobbyism)
* In the US, but also in many Western European "developed" countries, basic human rights like education, health, housing and food are fucked by capitalism
PG is putting a big emphasis on getting rich and building your own company. Better advice for 14-year-olds would be, just off the top of my head:
* Money is important, but it's not the most important thing
* You are not your job or your company. Find something interesting to work for, but don't define yourself over it
* Participating democray is important: Fight for a more equal society and help make your community better
* Don't focus your education on one hard skill like computer science. Learn about arts, literature, philosophy and all other things that interest you
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You absolutely can just use HTML. You're writing this on HN that just uses HTML and is one of the more responsive websites on mobile connections. You can't make as rich an interavtive experience as you can with JS, but you never could.
Just because a site is responsive doesn't mean it's HTML. The fact that a lot of people assume that you can't have a responsive site with JS is all the indictment of $current_year front end development you need. These are some of the JS functions HN runs in the background, on top of the CSS: function $ (id) { return document.getElementById(id); } function byClass (el, cl) { return el ? el.getElementsByClassName(cl) :…
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Exactly. >In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich through business is a lottery. I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. But him writing this…
> The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that > pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at > Wall Street, law or Congress I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor wages than they do today. I…
There's another comment here that links to staticstics regarding this topic here somewhere
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Counterpoint: Rudolph Hass, creator of the original hass avocado, barely made anything from it. I’m not gonna say that the Hass Avocado had more impact than Apple or Google, but it’s definitely more impactful than any $1-10 billion company I can think of.
Isn’t the story that some crazy old seed man gave him a Hass seed and we don’t really know where it came from?
I'd had never seen an avocado in any grocery story growing up, never tasted it until I visited California.
Is this "changing the world"?
Well I suppose it could be, after all myriads of people have never used or even heard of slack.
What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
It's interesting that this piece mentions "to get really rich" as one of the primary motivators. Especially to high school students. I wonder if that's good advice or if society is better served by motivating students to start companies that make the world better.
Getting rich and making the world better are not incompatible, or even unaligned in general. You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
Before I get to the complaints though - am I the only one with the feeling there would be a huge market niche for a search engine that gave as useful results as Google did in its earlier days? It sometimes feels like half the results for non-tech-related searches these days lead to low-quality AI-generated SEO-optimised fake content.
> If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming.
We tried this with unemployed former coal miners in Appalachia. It turns out, the real secret sauce here is "be the kind of person who can get good at programming". I'm with Freddie deBoer here, as he says in his book The Cult of Smart: we need to accept that not everyone has the same intellectual abilities. Once we do that, we can start thinking about how we make a world that works for the half of the population below the median on this dimension.
> ... facebook ...
The other story I heard about Zuckerberg is that he got his first 1000 users by scraping everyone's profile picture off the university "facebooks", then making a page where you could rate the women as "hot" or "not". I feel like missing this part out gives a rather one-sided picture of the story - especially if there were any young women in the class that PG originally gave this talk to. That's a shame because PG makes a very different point in "Why it's safe for founders to be nice" [1].
> (US uni admissions are done badly)
I agree with footnote 3 that determination and resourcefulness are important, but you also need to be able to program and reason mathematically if you want to start the next google. There are a lot of incredibly determined and resourceful students on liberal-arts or law degrees who might go far in the world, but they're not the person you want as a _technical_ co-founder.
I don't see any mention of being ready to completely pivot from your original, lofty mission ("best search with no ads") to exactly the opposite ("ads are money"). Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business. Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business. Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
In a way, it became a pivot from "organize the world's information" to "organize the world's ads".
Anything that gets eyeballs will be paid for by ad placement. I think that's the "dirty" (open) "secret". Many industries are paid for by ads, not just tech companies. Though, tech companies have taken a huge chunk out of the entertainment industry as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers (etc.) are now creating that entertaining content for the tech companies. All in an effort to capture eye balls.
And Hacker News is no different. Everyone who's on here long enough will slowly learn about Y Combinator. HN is an ad placement site for YC and YC affiliates. HN is much more than that of course, and that is why the ad placement works so well. Personally, I find the way HN is doing it tasteful. Moreover, it's not the only reason why HN exists, it's a synergy thing. With that said, there's still the same dynamic in there.
It's because ads pay, one way or another.
What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…
There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies. It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s…
There might be others, but this one is clear and to the point:
The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...