81–90 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you engineering right now?
My work is a bit meta at the moment. I'm making software that can take part designs and optimize their physical shape for better performance. So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.
That doesn't mean anything. So we can infer that you're not doing shit.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and don't entirely disagree with it... but it oversimplifies our community massively. If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options. Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency withi…
The Financial Solutions Lab has tons of startups interested in tackling large financial problems. Even works on income smoothing to make hourly and seasonal workers have steady paychecks. Digit helps with automated saving. Tala uses machine learning to create credit scores for people in Kenya, Tanzania, and other developing countries. Nova Credit helps immigrant gain better credit. There are dozens more that are all helping people get access to better/fairer financial products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular, expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem. But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the pro…
" any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented." This is empirically false. For example, voluntary contributions to a public good are not a Nash equilibrium, but we observe substantial contributions in experiments with real humans. It's also weird to argue this and then argue against govt intervention. If you don't think non-Nash solutions to public goods problems such as global warm…
Only if they win would it actually mean something. Call me when donations (or government policy) end poverty, for instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Going to Mars is easy, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream. I can't tell you how much I appreciate hearing this position from someone on this site. I've tried to make that argument here and elsewhere, and it's met with an almost religious fury. I really appreciate that I'm not alone in my intense skepticism of this "colonies on Mars: coming soon!" nonsense. I'll believe it when we've solved, or at least even begun to ad…
The oceans are orders of magnitude more hospitable to mankind & human life than is Mars, and yet we have, to my knowledge, absolutely no undersea colonies. The idea that we'll colonise Mars before we colonise the oceans (a full three-quarters of the globe) is, simply, insane .
> And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change... Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they're not happy with public ones, they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The oceans are orders of magnitude more hospitable to mankind & human life than is Mars, and yet we have, to my knowledge, absolutely no undersea colonies. The idea that we'll colonise Mars before we colonise the oceans (a full three-quarters of the globe) is, simply, insane .
Supply & demand. There's just more people who want to colonize mars. if you're going to make the argument of living underwater, then you might as well live in the desert where it's probably even easier. Just because something is easier doesn't mean you should do it.
Completing the circle of comments, this is exactly what this SV adage warns against: Don't trust customers promising to buy something once it is built, because they may not.
The "demand" on Mars colonization is essentially unproven.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and don't entirely disagree with it... but it oversimplifies our community massively. If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options. Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency withi…
I've been at Clover since January. Cannot recommend enough.
If you want to learn why, I'm always open and willing to chat about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
> It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth. A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected va…
An important point that I think is missing is that solving small, "useless" problems is a good way to get enough money to start solving big, "impactful" problems. Elon Musk didn't just start SpaceX out of the blue; he used his profits from Zip2 and PayPal to fund his more grandiose ideas.
I think the problem is this guy is the only person I've met who describes his current venture as a stepping stone towards a grander vision. Most people just see the dollar signs right in front of them.
This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem? Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything. I'm just not sure you…
Some of that is the rethoric of startups, which usually inflates the importance of their product. Some people believe it and believe SV can solve anything.